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266Belief: Dumb, Cold, & CynicalIn Eric Schwitzgebel & Jonathan Jong (eds.), What is Belief?, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.We aim to do two things in this article. On the positive end, our goal is to explain how some seemingly incompatible aspects of belief live together, by presenting distinct mechanistic explanations of each of them: in particular we want to show how belief can be discerning, credulous, rational, and irrational. After clarifying our positive view, we take aim at some competitor views in the second half of the paper, particularly offering critiques of epistemic vigilance and social marketplace acco…Read more
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288Disfluency attenuates the reception of pseudoprofound and postmodernist bullshitThinking and Reasoning 1. 2023.Four studies explore the role of perceptual fluency in attenuating bullshit receptivity, or the tendency for individuals to rate otherwise meaningless statements as “profound”. Across four studies, we presented participants with a sample of pseudoprofound bullshit statements in either a fluent or disfluent font and found that overall, disfluency attenuated bullshit receptivity while also finding little evidence that this effect was moderated by cognitive thinking style. In all studies, we measur…Read more
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286The case against implicit bias fatalismNature Reviews Psychology 1. 2023.The standard associative account of implicit bias posits that the mind unavoidably mirrors the biased co-occurrences that are present in the environment. The resulting fatalistic view of implicit bias as inevitable and immutable is both scientifically unwarranted and societally counterproductive.
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618The Science of Belief: A Progress Report (Expanded Reprint)In and Pernille Hemmer Joseph Summer Julien Musolino (ed.), The Science of Beliefs: A Multidisciplinary Approach. Cambridge University Press.. forthcoming.Expanded reprint of the WIREs Science of Belief paper for Julien Musolino, Joseph Sommer, and Pernille Hemmer's The Science of Beliefs: A Multidisciplinary Approach. Cambridge University Press.
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400The language-of-thought hypothesis as a working hypothesis in cognitive scienceBehavioral and Brain Sciences 46. 2023.The target article attempted to draw connections between broad swaths of evidence by noticing a common thread: Abstract, symbolic, compositional codes, that is, language-of-thoughts (LoTs). Commentators raised concerns about the evidence and offered fascinating extensions to areas we overlooked. Here we respond and highlight the many specific empirical questions to be answered in the next decade and beyond.
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332What is the narrow content of fence (and other definitionally and interpretationally primitive concepts)?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 34 (3): 138-138. 2011.It's unclear what narrow content is interpersonally shared for concepts that don't originate from core cognition yet are still definitionally and interpretationally primitive. A primary concern is that for these concepts, one cannot draw a principled distinction between inferences that are content determining and those that aren't. The lack of a principled distinction imperils an account of interpersonally shared concepts
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1063Problems and mysteries of the many languages of thoughtCognitive Science 46 (12). 2022.“What is the structure of thought?” is as central a question as any in cognitive science. A classic answer to this question has appealed to a Language of Thought (LoT). We point to emerging research from disparate branches of the field that supports the LoT hypothesis, but also uncovers diversity in LoTs across cognitive systems, stages of development, and species. Our letter formulates open research questions for cognitive science concerning the varieties of rules and representations that under…Read more
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2648The best game in town: The reemergence of the language-of-thought hypothesis across the cognitive sciencesBehavioral and Brain Sciences 46. 2023.Mental representations remain the central posits of psychology after many decades of scrutiny. However, there is no consensus about the representational format(s) of biological cognition. This paper provides a survey of evidence from computational cognitive psychology, perceptual psychology, developmental psychology, comparative psychology, and social psychology, and concludes that one type of format that routinely crops up is the language-of-thought (LoT). We outline six core properties of LoTs…Read more
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766How the Cognitive Science of Belief Can Transform the Study of Mental HealthJAMA Psychiatry. forthcoming.The cognitive science of belief is a burgeoning field, with insights ranging from detailing the fundamental structure of the mind, to explaining the spread of fake news. Here we highlight how new insights into belief acquisition, storage, and change can transform our understanding of psychiatric disorders. Although we focus on monothematic delusions, the conclusions apply more broadly.
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596The Sound of Slurs: Bad Sounds for Bad WordsOxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy. forthcoming.An analysis of a valenced corpus of English words revealed that words that rhyme with slurs are rated more poorly than their synonyms. What at first might seem like a bizarre coincidence turns out to be a robust feature of slurs, one arising from their phonetic structure. We report novel data on phonaesthetic preferences, showing that a particular class of phonemes are both particularly disliked, and overrepresented in slurs. We argue that phonaesthetic associations have been an overlooked sourc…Read more
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1967Everything and More: The Prospects of Whole Brain EmulationJournal of Philosophy 119 (8): 444-459. 2022.Whole Brain Emulation has been championed as the most promising, well-defined route to achieving both human-level artificial intelligence and superintelligence. It has even been touted as a viable route to achieving immortality through brain uploading. WBE is not a fringe theory: the doctrine of Computationalism in philosophy of mind lends credence to the in-principle feasibility of the idea, and the standing of the Human Connectome Project makes it appear to be feasible in practice. Computation…Read more
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1238The Fragmentation of BeliefIn Cristina Borgoni, Dirk Kindermann & Andrea Onofri (eds.), The Fragmented Mind, Oxford University Press. 2021.Belief storage is often modeled as having the structure of a single, unified web. This model of belief storage is attractive and widely assumed because it appears to provide an explanation of the flexibility of cognition and the complicated dynamics of belief revision. However, when one scrutinizes human cognition, one finds strong evidence against a unified web of belief and for a fragmented model of belief storage. Using the best available evidence from cognitive science, we develop this fragm…Read more
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873The outlier paradox: The role of iterative ensemble coding in discounting outliersJournal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 1. forthcoming.Ensemble perception—the encoding of objects by their group properties—is known to be resistant to outlier noise. However, this resistance is somewhat paradoxical: how can the visual system determine which stimuli are outliers without already having derived statistical properties of the ensemble? A simple solution would be that ensemble perception is not a simple, one-step process; instead, outliers are detected through iterative computations that identify items with high deviance from the mean a…Read more
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2412The science of belief: A progress reportWIREs Cognitive Science 1. forthcoming.The empirical study of belief is emerging at a rapid clip, uniting work from all corners of cognitive science. Reliance on belief in understanding and predicting behavior is widespread. Examples can be found, inter alia, in the placebo, attribution theory, theory of mind, and comparative psychological literatures. Research on belief also provides evidence for robust generalizations, including about how we fix, store, and change our beliefs. Evidence supports the existence of a Spinozan system of…Read more
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588Assimilation and control: belief at the lowest levelsPhilosophical Studies 177 (2): 441-447. 2020.The core of Zimmerman’s picture posits an inverse correlation between an action’s automaticity and belief’s role in the action’s execution. This proposal faces serious problems. First, high-attention, high-control actions don’t seem to heighten awareness of one’s beliefs. Second, low-attention, low-control actions are caused by the same states at play when executing high-attention, high-control actions, in which case there is no ontological difference in the states involved in these behaviors. T…Read more
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978Modularist explanations of experience and other illusionsConsciousness and Cognition 76 (76): 102828. 2019.Debates about modularity invariably involve a crucial premise about how visual illusions are experienced. This paper argues that these debates are wrongheaded, and that experience of illusions is orthogonal to the core issue of the modularity hypothesis: informational encapsulation.
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1254Can resources save rationality? ‘Anti-Bayesian’ updating in cognition and perceptionBehavioral and Brain Sciences 143. 2020.Resource rationality may explain suboptimal patterns of reasoning; but what of “anti-Bayesian” effects where the mind updates in a direction opposite the one it should? We present two phenomena — belief polarization and the size-weight illusion — that are not obviously explained by performance- or resource-based constraints, nor by the authors’ brief discussion of reference repulsion. Can resource rationality accommodate them?
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676Non-Inferential Transitions: Imagery and AssociationIn Anders Nes & Timothy Hoo Wai Chan (eds.), Inference and Consciousness, Routledge. 2019.Unconscious logical inference seems to rely on the syntactic structures of mental representations (Quilty-Dunn & Mandelbaum 2018). Other transitions, such as transitions using iconic representations and associative transitions, are harder to assimilate to syntax-based theories. Here we tackle these difficulties head on in the interest of a fuller taxonomy of mental transitions. Along the way we discuss how icons can be compositional without having constituent structure, and expand and defend the…Read more
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3331Troubles with Bayesianism: An introduction to the psychological immune systemMind and Language 34 (2): 141-157. 2018.A Bayesian mind is, at its core, a rational mind. Bayesianism is thus well-suited to predict and explain mental processes that best exemplify our ability to be rational. However, evidence from belief acquisition and change appears to show that we do not acquire and update information in a Bayesian way. Instead, the principles of belief acquisition and updating seem grounded in maintaining a psychological immune system rather than in approximating a Bayesian processor.
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1095The Architecture of Belief: An Essay on the Unbearable Automaticity of BelievingDissertation, UNC-Chapel Hill. 2010.People cannot contemplate a proposition without believing that proposition. A model of belief fixation is sketched and used to explain hitherto disparate, recalcitrant, and somewhat mysterious psychological phenomena and philosophical paradoxes. Toward this end I also contend that our intuitive understanding of the workings of introspection is mistaken. In particular, I argue that propositional attitudes are beyond the grasp of our introspective capacities. We learn about our beliefs from observ…Read more
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1014Poetic Opacity: How to Paint Things with WordsIn John Gibson (ed.), The Philosophy of Poetry, Oxford University Press. pp. 63-87. 2015.
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373The Powers that bind : doxastic voluntarism and epistemic obligationIn Rico Vitz & Jonathan Matheson (eds.), The Ethics of Belief: Individual and Social, Oxford University Press. pp. 12-33. 2014.In this chapter, we argue for three theses: (1) we lack the power to form beliefs at will (i.e., directly); at very least, we lack the power to form at will beliefs of the kind that proponents of doxastic voluntarism have in mind; but (2) we possess a propensity to form beliefs for non-epistemic reasons; and (3) these propensities—once we come to know we have them—entail that we have obligations similar to those we would have were doxastic voluntarism true. Specifically, we will argue that w…Read more
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649Against dispositionalism: belief in cognitive sciencePhilosophical Studies 175 (9): 2353-2372. 2018.Dispositionalism about belief has had a recent resurgence. In this paper we critically evaluate a popular dispositionalist program pursued by Eric Schwitzgebel. Then we present an alternative: a psychofunctional, representational theory of belief. This theory of belief has two main pillars: that beliefs are relations to structured mental representations, and that the relations are determined by the generalizations under which beliefs are acquired, stored, and changed. We end by describing some o…Read more
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1323Inferential TransitionsAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 96 (3): 532-547. 2018.ABSTRACTThis paper provides a naturalistic account of inference. We posit that the core of inference is constituted by bare inferential transitions, transitions between discursive mental representations guided by rules built into the architecture of cognitive systems. In further developing the concept of BITs, we provide an account of what Boghossian [2014] calls ‘taking’—that is, the appreciation of the rule that guides an inferential transition. We argue that BITs are sufficient for implicit t…Read more
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1414Seeing and Conceptualizing: Modularity and the Shallow Contents of PerceptionPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 97 (2): 267-283. 2017.After presenting evidence about categorization behavior, this paper argues for the following theses: 1) that there is a border between perception and cognition; 2) that the border is to be characterized by perception being modular (and cognition not being so); 3) that perception outputs conceptualized representations, so views that posit that the output of perception is solely non-conceptual are false; and 4) that perceptual content consists of basic-level categories and not richer contents.
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503Locke's Answer to Molyneux's Thought ExperimentHistory of Philosophy Quarterly 27 (2): 165-80. 2010.Philosophical discussions of Molyneux's problem within contemporary philosophy of mind tend to characterize the problem as primarily concerned with the role innately known principles, amodal spatial concepts, and rational cognitive faculties play in our perceptual lives. Indeed, for broadly similar reasons, rationalists have generally advocated an affirmative answer, while empiricists have generally advocated a negative one, to the question Molyneux posed after presenting his famous thought expe…Read more
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291Expectations and morality: A dilemmaBehavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (4): 346-346. 2010.We propose Knobe's explanation of his cases encounters a dilemma: Either his explanation works and, counterintuitively, morality is not at the heart of these effects; or morality is at the heart of the effects and Knobe's explanation does not succeed. This dilemma is then used to temper the use of the Knobe paradigm for discovering moral norms
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900The automatic and the ballistic: Modularity beyond perceptual processesPhilosophical Psychology 28 (8): 1147-1156. 2015.Perceptual processes, in particular modular processes, have long been understood as being mandatory. But exactly what mandatoriness amounts to is left to intuition. This paper identifies a crucial ambiguity in the notion of mandatoriness. Discussions of mandatory processes have run together notions of automaticity and ballisticity. Teasing apart these notions creates an important tool for the modularist's toolbox. Different putatively modular processes appear to differ in their kinds of mandator…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Philosophy of Mind |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |