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The language-of-thought hypothesis as a working hypothesis in cognitive scienceBehavioral and Brain Sciences 46. 2023.
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Problems 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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The 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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Thinking is BelievingInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 57 (1): 55-96. 2014.
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The 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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The 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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Against aliefPhilosophical Studies 165 (1): 197-211. 2013.This essay attempts to clarify the nature and structure of aliefs. First I distinguish between a robust notion of aliefs and a deflated one. A robust notion of aliefs would introduce aliefs into our psychological ontology as a hitherto undiscovered kind, whereas a deflated notion of aliefs would identify aliefs as a set of pre-existing psychological states. I then propose the following dilemma: one the one hand, if aliefs have propositional content, then it is unclear exactly how aliefs differ f…Read more
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Numerical ArchitectureTopics in Cognitive Science 5 (1): 367-386. 2013.The idea that there is a “Number Sense” (Dehaene, 1997) or “Core Knowledge” of number ensconced in a modular processing system (Carey, 2009) has gained popularity as the study of numerical cognition has matured. However, these claims are generally made with little, if any, detailed examination of which modular properties are instantiated in numerical processing. In this article, I aim to rectify this situation by detailing the modular properties on display in numerical cognitive processing. In t…Read more
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The Powers that bind : doxastic voluntarism and epistemic obligationIn Jonathan Matheson (ed.), The Ethics of Belief, 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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Poetic 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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The 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
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Associationist Theories of ThoughtStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2015.
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Attitude, Inference, Association: On the Propositional Structure of Implicit BiasNoûs 50 (3): 629-658. 2015.The overwhelming majority of those who theorize about implicit biases posit that these biases are caused by some sort of association. However, what exactly this claim amounts to is rarely specified. In this paper, I distinguish between different understandings of association, and I argue that the crucial senses of association for elucidating implicit bias are the cognitive structure and mental process senses. A hypothesis is subsequently derived: if associations really underpin implicit biases, …Read more
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Believing without Reason, or: Why Liberals Shouldn’t Watch Fox NewsThe Harvard Review of Philosophy 22 42-52. 2015.
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Inferential 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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Troubles with Bayesianism: An introduction to the psychological immune systemMind and Language 34 (2): 141-157. 2018.
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The 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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Seeing and Conceptualizing: Modularity and the Shallow Contents of PerceptionPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 97 (2): 267-283. 2017.
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Non-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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Can resources save rationality? ‘Anti-Bayesian’ updating in cognition and perceptionBehavioral and Brain Sciences 143. 2020.
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Modularist explanations of experience and other illusionsConsciousness and Cognition 76 (76): 102828. 2019.
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Assimilation 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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Against 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
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Philosophy of Mind |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |