-
343Princess Elisabeth and the problem of mind-body interactionHypatia 14 (3): 59-77. 1999.: This paper focuses on Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia's philosophical views as exhibited in her early correspondence with René Descartes. Elisabeth's criticisms of Descartes's interactionism as well as her solution to the problem of mind-body interaction are examined in detail. The aim here is to develop a richer picture of Elisabeth as a philosophical thinker and to dispel the myth that she is simply a Cartesian muse
-
299Group testimonySocial Epistemology 21 (3). 2007.The fact that much of our knowledge is gained through the testimony of others challenges a certain form of epistemic individualism. We are clearly not autonomous knowers. But the discussion surrounding testimony has maintained a commitment to what I have elsewhere called epistemic agent individualism. Both the reductionist and the anti-reductionist have focused their attention on the testimony of individuals. But groups, too, are sources of testimony - or so I shall argue. If groups can be testi…Read more
-
228WIKIPEDIA and the Epistemology of TestimonyEpisteme 6 (1): 8-24. 2009.In “Group Testimony” (2007) I argued that the testimony of a group cannot be understood (or at least cannot always be understood) in a summative fashion; as the testimony of some or all of the group members. In some cases, it is the group itself that testifies. I also argued that one could extend standard reductionist accounts of the justification of testimonial belief to the case of testimonial belief formed on the basis of group testimony. In this paper, I explore the issue of group testimony …Read more
-
215Let’s pretend!: Children and joint actionPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 35 (1): 75-97. 2005.According to many, joint intentional action must be understood in terms of joint intentions. Most accounts of joint intention appeal to a set of sophisticated individual intentional states. The author argues that standard accounts of joint intention exclude the possibility of joint action in young children because they presuppose that the participants have a robust theory of mind, something young children lack. But young children do engage in joint action. The author offers a revision of Michael…Read more
-
179Participant Reactive Attitudes and Collective ResponsibilityPhilosophical Explorations 6 (3): 218-234. 2003.The debate surrounding the issue of collective moral responsibility is often steeped in metaphysical issues of agency and personhood. I suggest that we can approach the metaphysical problems surrounding the issue of collective responsibility in a roundabout manner. My approach is reminiscent of that taken by P.F. Strawson in "Freedom and Resentment" (1968). Strawson argues that the participant reactive attitudes - attitudes like resentment, gratitude, forgiveness and so on - provide the justific…Read more
-
179Learning to listen: Epistemic injustice and the childEpisteme 13 (3): 359-377. 2016.In Epistemic Injustice Miranda Fricker argues that there is a distinctively epistemic type of injustice in which someone is wronged specifically in his or her capacity as a knower. Fricker's examples of identity-prejudicial credibility deficit primarily involve gender, race, and class, in which individuals are given less credibility due to prejudicial stereotypes. We argue that children, as a class, are also subject to testimonial injustice and receive less epistemic credibility than they deserv…Read more
-
168Collective intentionality and the social sciencesPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 32 (1): 25-50. 2002.In everyday discourse and in the context of social scientific research we often attribute intentional states to groups. Contemporary approaches to group intentionality have either dismissed these attributions as metaphorical or provided an analysis of our attributions in terms of the intentional states of individuals in the group.Insection1, the author argues that these approaches are problematic. In sections 2 and 3, the author defends the view that certain groups are literally intentional agen…Read more
-
159Naturalizing joint action: A process-based approachPhilosophical Psychology 25 (3): 385-407. 2012.Numerous philosophical theories of joint agency and its intentional structure have been developed in the past few decades. These theories have offered accounts of joint agency that appeal to higher-level states that are?shared? in some way. These accounts have enhanced our understanding of joint agency, yet there are a number of lower-level cognitive phenomena involved in joint action that philosophers rarely acknowledge. In particular, empirical research in cognitive science has revealed that w…Read more
-
150Epistemic Reactive AttitudesAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 54 (4): 353-366. 2017.Although there have been a number of recent discussions about the emotions that we bring with us to our epistemic endeavors, there has been little, if any, discussion of the emotions we bring with us to epistemic appraisal. This paper focuses on a particular set of emotions, the reactive attitudes. As Peter F. Strawson and others have argued, our reactive attitudes reveal something deep about our moral commitments. A similar argument can be made within the domain of epistemology. Our "epistemic …Read more
-
147Alignment, Transactive Memory, and Collective Cognitive SystemsReview of Philosophy and Psychology 4 (1): 49-64. 2013.Research on linguistic interaction suggests that two or more individuals can sometimes form adaptive and cohesive systems. We describe an “alignment system” as a loosely interconnected set of cognitive processes that facilitate social interactions. As a dynamic, multi-component system, it is responsive to higher-level cognitive states such as shared beliefs and intentions (those involving collective intentionality) but can also give rise to such shared cognitive states via bottom-up processes. A…Read more
-
133Group deliberation, social cohesion, and scientific teamwork: Is there room for dissent?Episteme 3 (1-2): 37-51. 2006.Recent discussions of rational deliberation in science present us with two extremes: unbounded optimism and sober pessimism. Helen Longino (1990) sees rational deliberation as the foundation of scientific objectivity. Miriam Solomon (1991) thinks it is overrated. Indeed, she has recently argued (2006) that group deliberation is detrimental to empirical success because it often involves groupthink and the suppression of dissent. But we need not embrace either extreme. To determine the value of ra…Read more
-
123Challenging Epistemic IndividualismProtoSociology 16 86-117. 2002.Contemporary analytic epistemology exhibits an individualistic bias. The standard analyses of knowledge found in current epistemological discussions assume that the only epistemic agents worthy of philosophical consideration are individual cognizers. The idea that collectives could be genuine knowers has received little, if any, serious consideration. This individualistic bias seems to be motivated by the view that epistemology is about things that go on inside the head. In this paper I challeng…Read more
-
115We Did It: From Mere Contributors to CoauthorsJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68 (1): 23-32. 2010.
-
91Advancing the ‘We’ Through NarrativeTopoi 38 (1): 211-219. 2019.Narrative is rarely mentioned in philosophical discussions of collective intentionality and group identity despite the fact that narratives are often thought important for the formation of action intentions and self-identity in individuals. We argue that the concept of the ‘we-narrative’ can solve several problems in regard to defining the status of the we. It provides the typical format for the attribution of joint agency; it contributes to the formation of group identity; and it generates grou…Read more
-
85We-Narratives and the Stability and Depth of Shared AgencyPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 47 (2): 95-110. 2017.The basic approach to understanding shared agency has been to identify individual intentional states that are somehow “shared” by participants and that contribute to guiding and informing the actions of individual participants. But, as Michael Bratman suggests, there is a problem of stability and depth that any theory of shared agency needs to solve. Given that participants in a joint action might form shared intentions for different reasons, what binds them to one another such that they have so…Read more
-
70Participant Reactive Attitudes and Collective ResponsibilityPhilosophical Explorations 6 (3): 218-234. 2003.The debate surrounding the issue of collective moral responsibility is often steeped in metaphysical issues of agency and personhood. I suggest that we can approach the metaphysical problems surrounding the issue of collective responsibility in a roundabout manner. My approach is reminiscent of that taken by P.F. Strawson in “Freedom and Resentment” (1968). Strawson argues that the participant reactive attitudes – attitudes like resentment, gratitude, forgiveness and so on – provide the justific…Read more
-
69Groups as AgentsPolity. 2015.In the social sciences and in everyday speech we often talk about groups as if they behaved in the same way as individuals, thinking and acting as a singular being. We say for example that "Google intends to develop an automated car", "the U.S. Government believes that Syria has used chemical weapons on its people", or that "the NRA wants to protect the rights of gun owners". We also often ascribe legal and moral responsibility to groups. But could groups literally intend things? Is there such a…Read more
-
64We Did It Again: A Reply to LivingstonJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 69 (2): 225-230. 2011.
-
62Groups as Rational SourcesIn Hans Bernhard Schmid, Daniel Sirtes & Marcel Weber (eds.), Collective Epistemology, Ontos. pp. 11-22. 2011.
-
46An integrative pluralistic approach to phenomenal consciousnessIn Shimon Edelman, Tomer Fekete & Neta Zach (eds.), Being in Time: Dynamical Models of Phenomenal Experience, John Benjamins. pp. 88--231. 2012.
-
45You Complete Me: Posthumous Works and Secondary AgencyJournal of Aesthetic Education 49 (4): 71-86. 2015.Many works are attributed to artists after their death, even when someone else has contributed substantively to the content of the work or when the work left by the artist is deemed incomplete by any standard of completion. Call these works posthumous works.1 Consider, for instance, Garden of Eden, Mysterious Stranger, Silmarillion, Symphony No. 10, Symphony No. 7, Sagrada Familia, the film A.I., Woyzeck, to name just a few. These are examples where..
-
43Co‐Authorship, Multiple Authorship, and Posthumous Authorship: A Reply to HickJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 73 (3): 331-334. 2015.
-
42Rejecting RejectionismProtoSociology 18 389-405. 2003.There is a small, but growing, number of philosophers who acknowledge the existence of plural subjects – collective agents that act in the world and are the appropriate subject of intentional state ascriptions. Among those who believe in collective agency, there are some who wish to limit the types of intentional state ascriptions that can be made to collectives. According to rejectionists, although groups can accept propositions, they cannot believe them. In this paper I argue that, given the c…Read more
-
42Review of Daniel D. Hutto, Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding Reasons (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (3). 2008.
-
36Collective rationality and collective reasoning, Christopher McMahon. Cambridge university press 2001, VII + 251 pages (review)Economics and Philosophy 20 (2): 409-416. 2004.
Memphis, Tennessee, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |