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2760Knowing That P without Believing That PNoûs 47 (2): 371-384. 2013.Most epistemologists hold that knowledge entails belief. However, proponents of this claim rarely offer a positive argument in support of it. Rather, they tend to treat the view as obvious and assert that there are no convincing counterexamples. We find this strategy to be problematic. We do not find the standard view obvious, and moreover, we think there are cases in which it is intuitively plausible that a subject knows some proposition P without—or at least without determinately—believing tha…Read more
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1021We propose four policies of ethical design of human-grade Artificial Intelligence. Two of our policies are precautionary. Given substantial uncertainty both about ethical theory and about the conditions under which AI would have conscious experiences, we should be cautious in our handling of cases where different moral theories or different theories of consciousness would produce very different ethical recommendations. Two of our policies concern respect and freedom. If we design AI that des…Read more
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1006Introspective Training Apprehensively Defended: Reflections on Titchener's Lab ManualJournal of Consciousness Studies 11 (7-8): 58-76. 2004.To study conscious experience we must, to some extent, trust introspective reports; yet introspective reports often do not merit our trust. A century ago, E.B. Titchener advocated extensive introspective training as a means of resolving this difficulty. He describes many of his training techniques in his four-volume laboratory manual of 1901- 1905. This paper explores Titchener's laboratory manual with an eye to general questions about the prospects of introspective training for contemporary con…Read more
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693The unreliability of naive introspectionPhilosophical Review 117 (2): 245-273. 2006.We are prone to gross error, even in favorable circumstances of extended reflection, about our own ongoing conscious experience, our current phenomenology. Even in this apparently privileged domain, our self-knowledge is faulty and untrustworthy. We are not simply fallible at the margins but broadly inept. Examples highlighted in this essay include: emotional experience (for example, is it entirely bodily; does joy have a common, distinctive phenomenological core?), peripheral vision (how broad …Read more
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677Do ethics classes influence student behavior? Case study: Teaching the ethics of eating meatCognition 203 (C): 104397. 2020.Do university ethics classes influence students’ real-world moral choices? We aimed to conduct the first controlled study of the effects of ordinary philosophical ethics classes on real-world moral choices, using non-self-report, non-laboratory behavior as the dependent measure. We assigned 1332 students in four large philosophy classes to either an experimental group on the ethics of eating meat or a control group on the ethics of charitable giving. Students in each group read a philosophy a…Read more
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617Susan Schneider's Proposed Tests for AI Consciousness: Promising but FlawedJournal of Consciousness Studies 28 (5-6): 121-144. 2021.Susan Schneider (2019) has proposed two new tests for consciousness in AI (artificial intelligence) systems, the AI Consciousness Test and the Chip Test. On their face, the two tests seem to have the virtue of proving satisfactory to a wide range of consciousness theorists holding divergent theoretical positions, rather than narrowly relying on the truth of any particular theory of consciousness. Unfortunately, both tests are undermined in having an ‘audience problem’: Those theorists with the…Read more
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574The Unskilled Zhuangzi: Big and Useless and Not So Good at Catching RatsIn Karyn Lai & Wai Wai Chiu (eds.), Skill and Mastery Philosophical Stories from the Zhuangzi, Rowman and Littlefield International. pp. 101-110. 2019.The mainstream tradition in recent Anglophone Zhuangzi interpretation treats spontaneous skillful responsiveness – similar to the spontaneous responsiveness of a skilled artisan, athlete, or musician – as a, or the, Zhuangzian ideal. However, this interpretation is poorly grounded in the Inner Chapters. On the contrary, in the Inner Chapters, this sort of skillfulness is at least as commonly criticized as celebrated. Even the famous passage about the ox-carving cook might be interpreted more …Read more
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562Acting contrary to our professed beliefs or the gulf between occurrent judgment and dispositional beliefPacific Philosophical Quarterly 91 (4): 531-553. 2010.People often sincerely assert or judge one thing (for example, that all the races are intellectually equal) while at the same time being disposed to act in a way evidently quite contrary to the espoused attitude (for example, in a way that seems to suggest an implicit assumption of the intellectual superiority of their own race). Such cases should be regarded as ‘in-between’ cases of believing, in which it's neither quite right to ascribe the belief in question nor quite right to say that the pe…Read more
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560A Phenomenal, Dispositional Account of BeliefNoûs 36 (2): 249-275. 2002.This paper describes and defends in detail a novel account of belief, an account inspired by Ryle's dispositional characterization of belief, but emphasizing irreducibly phenomenal and cognitive dispositions as well as behavioral dispositions. Potential externalist and functionalist objections are considered, as well as concerns motivated by the inevitably ceteris paribus nature of the relevant dispositional attributions. It is argued that a dispositional account of belief is particularly well-s…Read more
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522The Pragmatic Metaphysics of BeliefIn Cristina Borgoni, Dirk Kindermann & Andrea Onofri (eds.), The Fragmented Mind, Oxford University Press. pp. 350-375. 2021.On an intellectualist approach to belief, the intellectual endorsement of a proposition (such as “The working poor deserve as much respect as the handsomely paid”) is sufficient or nearly sufficient for believing it. On a pragmatic approach to belief, intellectual endorsement is not enough. Belief is behaviorally demanding. To really, fully believe, you must also “walk the walk.” This chapter argues that the pragmatic approach is preferable on pragmatic grounds: It rightly directs our attention …Read more
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463How far can we get in creating a digital replica of a philosopher?In Raul Hakli, Pekka Mäkelä & Johanna Seibt (eds.), Social Robots in Social Institutions. Proceedings of Robophilosophy 2022, Ios Press. pp. 371-380. 2023.Can we build machines with which we can have interesting conversations? Observing the new optimism of AI regarding deep learning and new language models, we set ourselves an ambitious goal: We want to find out how far we can get in creating a digital replica of a philosopher. This project has two aims; one more technical, investigating of how the best model can be built. The other one, more philosophical, explores the limits and risks which are accompanied by the creation of digital replicas. In…Read more
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461The Crazyist Metaphysics of MindAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 92 (4): 665-682. 2014.The Crazyist Metaphysics of Mind. . ???aop.label???
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419A Defense of the Rights of Artificial IntelligencesMidwest Studies in Philosophy 39 (1): 98-119. 2015.There are possible artificially intelligent beings who do not differ in any morally relevant respect from human beings. Such possible beings would deserve moral consideration similar to that of human beings. Our duties to them would not be appreciably reduced by the fact that they are non-human, nor by the fact that they owe their existence to us. Indeed, if they owe their existence to us, we would likely have additional moral obligations to them that we don’t ordinarily owe to human stranger…Read more
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409Empirical Relationships Among Five Types of Well-BeingIn William Lauinger (ed.), Measuring Well-Being: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from the Social Sciences and Humanities, . pp. 339-376. 2021.Philosophers, psychologists, economists and other social scientists continue to debate the nature of human well-being. We argue that this debate centers around five main conceptualizations of well-being: hedonic well-being, life satisfaction, desire fulfillment, eudaimonia, and non-eudaimonic objective-list well-being. Each type of well-being is conceptually different, but are they empirically distinguishable? To address this question, we first developed and validated a measure of desire fulfill…Read more
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3911% SkepticismNoûs 51 (2): 271-290. 2017.A 1% skeptic is someone who has about a 99% credence in non-skeptical realism and about a 1% credence in the disjunction of all radically skeptical scenarios combined. The first half of this essay defends the epistemic rationality of 1% skepticism, appealing to dream skepticism, simulation skepticism, cosmological skepticism, and wildcard skepticism. The second half of the essay explores the practical behavioral consequences of 1% skepticism, arguing that 1% skepticism need not be behaviorally i…Read more
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376If materialism is true, the United States is probably consciousPhilosophical Studies 172 (7): 1697-1721. 2015.If you’re a materialist, you probably think that rabbits are conscious. And you ought to think that. After all, rabbits are a lot like us, biologically and neurophysiologically. If you’re a materialist, you probably also think that conscious experience would be present in a wide range of naturally-evolved alien beings behaviorally very similar to us even if they are physiologically very different. And you ought to think that. After all, to deny it seems insupportable Earthly chauvinism. But a ma…Read more
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350Expertise in Moral Reasoning? Order Effects on Moral Judgment in Professional Philosophers and Non-PhilosophersMind and Language 27 (2): 135-153. 2012.We examined the effects of order of presentation on the moral judgments of professional philosophers and two comparison groups. All groups showed similar-sized order effects on their judgments about hypothetical moral scenarios targeting the doctrine of the double effect, the action-omission distinction, and the principle of moral luck. Philosophers' endorsements of related general moral principles were also substantially influenced by the order in which the hypothetical scenarios had previously…Read more
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341Rationalization in Philosophical and Moral ThoughtIn Jean-François Bonnefon & Bastien Trémolière (eds.), Moral Inferences, Routledge. 2017.Rationalization, in our intended sense of the term, occurs when a person favors a particular conclusion as a result of some factor (such as self-interest) that is of little justificatory epistemic relevance, if that factor then biases the person’s subsequent search for, and assessment of, potential justifications for the conclusion. Empirical evidence suggests that rationalization is common in people’s moral and philosophical thought. We argue that it is likely that the moral and philosophical t…Read more
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316Why did we think we dreamed in black and white?Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 33 (4): 649-660. 2002.In the 1950s, dream researchers commonly thought that dreams were predominantly a black and white phenomenon, although both earlier and later treatments of dreaming assume or assert that dreams have color. The first half of the twentieth century saw the rise of black and white film media, and it is likely that the emergence of the view that dreams are black and white was connected to this change in film technology. If our opinions about basic features of our dreams can change with changes in tec…Read more
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252Philosophers’ biased judgments persist despite training, expertise and reflectionCognition 141 (C): 127-137. 2015.We examined the effects of framing and order of presentation on professional philosophers’ judgments about a moral puzzle case (the “trolley problem”) and a version of the Tversky & Kahneman “Asian disease” scenario. Professional philosophers exhibited substantial framing effects and order effects, and were no less subject to such effects than was a comparison group of non-philosopher academic participants. Framing and order effects were not reduced by a forced delay during which participants …Read more
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245In-between believingPhilosophical Quarterly 51 (202): 76-82. 2001.For any proposition P, it may sometimes occur that a person is not quite accurately describable as believing that P, nor quite accurately describable as failing to believe that P. Such a person, I will say, is in an "in-between state of belief." This paper argues for the prevalence of in-between states of believing and asserts the need for an account of belief that allows us intelligibly to talk about in-between believing. It is suggested that Bayesian and representationalist approaches are inad…Read more
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244Human Nature and Moral Education in Mencius, Xunzi, Hobbes, and RousseauHistory of Philosophy Quarterly 24 (2). 2007.(2007) History of Philosophy Quarterly. 24, 147-168.
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230How well do we know our own conscious experience? The case of visual imageryJournal of Consciousness Studies 9 (5-6): 35-53. 2002.Philosophers tend to assume that we have excellent knowledge of our own current conscious experience or 'phenomenology'. I argue that our knowledge of one aspect of our experience, the experience of visual imagery, is actually rather poor. Precedent for this position is found among the introspective psychologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Two main arguments are advanced toward the conclusion that our knowledge of our own imagery is poor. First, the reader is asked to …Read more
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219Whose concepts are they, anyway? The role of philosophical intuition in empirical psychologyIn M. R. DePaul & William Ramsey (eds.), Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and its Role in Philosophical Inquiry, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. pp. 75--91. 1998.This chapter examines several ways in which philosophical attention to intuition can contribute to empirical scientific psychology. The authors then discuss one prevalent misuse of intuition. An unspoken assumption of much argumentation in the philosophy of mind has been that to articulate our folk psychological intuitions, our ordinary concepts of belief, truth, meaning, and so forth, is itself sufficient to give a theoretical account of what belief, truth, meaning, and so forth, actually are. …Read more
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201The moral behavior of ethics professors: Relationships among self-reported behavior, expressed normative attitude, and directly observed behaviorPhilosophical Psychology 27 (3): 293-327. 2014.Do philosophy professors specializing in ethics behave, on average, any morally better than do other professors? If not, do they at least behave more consistently with their expressed values? These questions have never been systematically studied. We examine the self-reported moral attitudes and moral behavior of 198 ethics professors, 208 non-ethicist philosophers, and 167 professors in departments other than philosophy on eight moral issues: academic society membership, voting, staying in touc…Read more
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197How well do we know our own conscious experience? The case of human echolocationPhilosophical Topics 28 (5-6): 235-46. 2000.Researchers from the 1940's through the present have found that normal, sighted people can echolocate - that is, detect properties of silent objects by attending to sound reflected from them. We argue that echolocation is a normal part of our conscious, perceptual experience. Despite this, we argue that people are often grossly mistaken about their experience of echolocation. If so, echolocation provides a counterexample to the view that we cannot be seriously mistaken about our own current cons…Read more
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168Ethicists' courtesy at philosophy conferencesPhilosophical Psychology 25 (3). 2012.If philosophical moral reflection tends to promote moral behavior, one might think that professional ethicists would behave morally better than do socially comparable non-ethicists. We examined three types of courteous and discourteous behavior at American Philosophical Association conferences: talking audibly while the speaker is talking (versus remaining silent), allowing the door to slam shut while entering or exiting mid-session (versus attempting to close the door quietly), and leaving behi…Read more
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165Words About Young Minds: The Concepts of Theory, Representation, and Belief in Philosophy and Developmental PsychologyDissertation, University of California Berkeley. 1997.In this dissertation, I examine three philosophically important concepts that play a foundational role in developmental psychology: theory, representation, and belief. I describe different ways in which the concepts have been understood and present reasons why a developmental psychologist, or a philosopher attuned to cognitive development, should prefer one understanding of these concepts over another.
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165How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience?Philosophical Topics 28 (2): 235-246. 2000.Researchers from the 1940's through the present have found that normal, sighted people can echolocate - that is, detect properties of silent objects by attending to sound reflected from them. We argue that echolocation is a normal part of our perceptual experience and that there is something 'it is like' to echolocate. Furthermore, we argue that people are often grossly mistaken about their experience of echolocation. If so, echolocation provides a counterexample to the view that we cannot be mi…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Metaphilosophy |