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16Causation attributions and corpus analysisIn Advances in Experimental Philosophy, . pp. 209-238. 2019.
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6Through Pictures to Problems: Cognitive Epistemology and Therapeutic PhilosophyIn Christoph Jäger & Winfried Löffler (eds.), Epistemology: Contexts, Values, Disagreement. Papers of the 34th International Ludwig Wittgenstein-Symposium in Kirchberg, 2011, The Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society. pp. 475-492. 2007.
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282Fragmented and conflicted: folk beliefs about visionSynthese 201 (3): 1-33. 2023.Many philosophical debates take for granted that there is such a thing as ‘the’ common-sense conception of the phenomenon of interest. Debates about the nature of perception tend to take for granted that there is a single, coherent common-sense conception of vision, consistent with Direct Realism. This conception is often accorded an epistemic default status. We draw on philosophical and psychological literature on naïve theories and belief fragmentation to motivate the hypothesis that untutored…Read more
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82What is it like to be colour‐blind? A case study in experimental philosophy of experienceMind and Language 37 (5): 814-839. 2021.What is the experience of someone who is “colour‐blind” like? This paper presents the results of a study that uses qualitative research methods to better understand the lived experience of colour blindness. Participants were asked to describe their experiences of a variety of coloured stimuli, both with and without EnChroma glasses—glasses which, the manufacturers claim, enhance the experience of people with common forms of colour blindness. More generally, the paper provides a case study in the…Read more
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29How Understanding Shapes Reasoning: Experimental Argument Analysis with Methods from Psycholinguistics and Computational LinguisticsIn David Bordonaba-Plou (ed.), Experimental Philosophy of Language: Perspectives, Methods, and Prospects, Springer Verlag. pp. 241-262. 2023.Empirical insights into language processing have a philosophical relevance that extends well beyond philosophical questions about language. This chapter will discuss this wider relevance: We will consider how experimental philosophers can examine language processing in order to address questions in several different areas of philosophy. To do so, we will present the emerging research program of experimental argument analysis (EAA) that examines how automatic language processing shapes verbal rea…Read more
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22‘Experience’, ordinary and philosophical: a corpus studySynthese 201 (6): 1-30. 2023.Common arguments for realism about phenomenal consciousness contend that this is a folk concept, with proponents expecting it to be lexicalised in ordinary language. In English, the word ‘experience’ is typically regarded as the best candidate. This predicts that ‘experience’ will be used to refer to mental states and episodes, not only in philosophical but also in ordinary discourse. We conduct a corpus study in order to assess this claim and to understand the actual use of the word in non-acad…Read more
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49Dissolving' the 'problem of linguistic creativityPhilosophical Investigations 20 (4). 1997.In this article, I develop the so‐called ‘problem of linguistic creativity’ for two object‐languages, one finite, the other infinite. I then employ an approach first outlined by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s collaborator Friedrich Waismann, to ‘dissolve’ that problem, in a sense made precise by working through the example. This is to unsettle the computational picture of linguistic understanding as turning on the generation of semantic information about sentences on the basis of semantic information abo…Read more
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58Derivation of a Floquet Formalism within a Natural FrameworkActa Biotheoretica 60 (3): 303-317. 2012.Many biological systems experience a periodic environment. Floquet theory is a mathematical tool to deal with such time periodic systems. It is not often applied in biology, because linkage between the mathematics and the biology is not available. To create this linkage, we derive the Floquet theory for natural systems. We construct a framework, where the rotation of the Earth is causing the periodicity. Within this framework the angular momentum operator is introduced to describe the Earth’s ro…Read more
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385Critical ordinary language philosophy: A new project in experimental philosophySynthese 201 (3): 1-34. 2023.Several important philosophical problems (including the problems of perception, free will, and scepticism) arise from antinomies that are developed through philosophical paradoxes. The critical strand of ordinary language philosophy (OLP), as practiced by J.L. Austin, provides an approach to such ‘antinomic problems’ that proceeds from an examination of ‘ordinary language’ (how people ordinarily talk about the phenomenon of interest) and ‘common sense’ (what they commonly think about it), and de…Read more
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Austin on Sense-Data: Ordinary Language Analysis as `Therapy'Grazer Philosophische Studien 70 (1): 67. 2006.
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421Projects and Methods of Experimental PhilosophyIn Alexander Max Bauer & Stephan Kornmesser (eds.), The Compact Compendium of Experimental Philosophy, De Gruyter. pp. 39-70. 2023.How does experimental philosophy address philosophical questions and problems? That is: What projects does experimental philosophy pursue? What is their philosophical relevance? And what empirical methods do they employ? Answers to these questions will reveal how experimental philosophy can contribute to the longstanding ambition of placing philosophy on the ‘secure path of a science’, as Kant put it. We argue that experimental philosophy has introduced a new methodological perspective – a ‘meta…Read more
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590Philosophers are often credited with particularly well-developed conceptual skills. The ‘expertise objection’ to experimental philosophy builds on this assumption to challenge inferences from findings about laypeople to conclusions about philosophers. We draw on psycholinguistics to develop and assess this objection. We examine whether philosophers are less or differently susceptible than laypersons to cognitive biases that affect how people understand verbal case descriptions and judge the case…Read more
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827Zombie intuitionsCognition 215 (C): 104807. 2021.In philosophical thought experiments, as in ordinary discourse, our understanding of verbal case descriptions is enriched by automatic comprehension inferences. Such inferences have us routinely infer what else is also true of the cases described. We consider how such routine inferences from polysemous words can generate zombie intuitions: intuitions that are ‘killed’ (defeated) by contextual information but kept cognitively alive by the psycholinguistic phenomenon of linguistic salience bias. E…Read more
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473Conceptual control: On the feasibility of conceptual engineeringInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 1-29. 2020.This paper empirically raises and examines the question of ‘conceptual control’: To what extent are competent thinkers able to reason properly with new senses of words? This question is crucial for conceptual engineering. This prominently discussed philosophical project seeks to improve our representational devices to help us reason better. It frequently involves giving new senses to familiar words, through normative explanations. Such efforts enhance, rather than reduce, our ability to reason p…Read more
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85Inappropriate stereotypical inferences? An adversarial collaboration in experimental ordinary language philosophySynthese 198 (11): 10127-10168. 2020.This paper trials new experimental methods for the analysis of natural language reasoning and the development of critical ordinary language philosophy in the wake of J.L. Austin. Philosophical arguments and thought experiments are strongly shaped by default pragmatic inferences, including stereotypical inferences. Austin suggested that contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences are at the root of some philosophical paradoxes and problems, and that these can be resolved by exposing those…Read more
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936Lingering stereotypes: Salience bias in philosophical argumentMind and Language 35 (4): 415-439. 2019.Many philosophical thought experiments and arguments involve unusual cases. We present empirical reasons to doubt the reliability of intuitive judgments and conclusions about such cases. Inferences and intuitions prompted by verbal case descriptions are influenced by routine comprehension processes which invoke stereotypes. We build on psycholinguistic findings to determine conditions under which the stereotype associated with the most salient sense of a word predictably supports inappropriate i…Read more
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60Linguistic Legislation and Psycholinguistic Experiments: Redeveloping Waismann’s ApproachIn Dejan Makovec & Stewart Shapiro (eds.), Friedrich Waismann: The Open Texture of Analytic Philosophy, Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 211-241. 2019.This paper presents a neglected philosophical approach, redevelops it on fresh empirical foundations, and seeks to bring out that it is of not merely historical interest. Building on ideas Ludwig Wittgenstein mooted in the early 1930s, Friedrich Waismann developed a distinctive metaphilosophy: Through case studies on particular philosophical problems, he identified a characteristic structure and genesis displayed by several philosophical problems and presented a distinctive dialogical method for…Read more
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802Experimental ordinary language philosophy: a cross-linguistic study of defeasible default inferencesSynthese 198 (2): 1029-1070. 2019.This paper provides new tools for philosophical argument analysis and fresh empirical foundations for ‘critical’ ordinary language philosophy. Language comprehension routinely involves stereotypical inferences with contextual defeaters. J.L. Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia first mooted the idea that contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences from verbal case-descriptions drive some philosophical paradoxes; these engender philosophical problems that can be resolved by exposing the underlyi…Read more
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56The Myth of the Intuitive: Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical MethodPhilosophical Review 127 (3): 413-418. 2018.
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587Eyes as windows to minds: Psycholinguistics for experimental philosophyIn Eugen Fischer & Mark Curtis (eds.), Methodological Advances in Experimental Philosophy, Bloomsbury Press. pp. 43-100. 2019.Psycholinguistic methods hold great promise for experimental philosophy. Many philosophical thought experiments and arguments proceed from verbal descriptions of possible cases. Many relevant intuitions and conclusions are driven by spontaneous inferences about what else must also be true in the cases described. Such inferences are continually made in language comprehension and production. This chapter explains how methods from psycholinguistics can be employed to study such routine automatic in…Read more
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573Methodological Advances in Experimental Philosophy (edited book)Bloomsbury Press. 2019.Until recently, experimental philosophy has been associated with the questionnaire-based study of intuitions; however, experimental philosophers now adapt a wide range of empirical methods for new philosophical purposes. New methods include paradigms for behavioural experiments from across the social sciences as well as computational methods from the digital humanities that can process large bodies of text and evidence. This book offers an accessible overview of these exciting innovations. The …Read more
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287Unfair to physiologyActa Analytica 16 (26): 135-155. 2001.The paper seeks to refute the idea that physiology can explain at best an organism’s behaviour, outward and inner, but not the conscious experiences that accompany that behaviour. To do so, the paper clarifies the idea by confrontation with an actual example of psychophysical explanation of perceptual experience. This reveals that the idea relies on a prejudice about physiological practice. Then the paper explores some peculiar ways in which this prejudice may survive its refutation. This is to …Read more
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Platos Untersuchung der Formen der Tugend. Eine Fallstudie zur Frage: Was ist und was soll Metaphysik?Philosophisches Jahrbuch 107 (1): 95-115. 2000.
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762Wittgensteinian 'Therapy', Experimental Philosophy, and Metaphilosophical NaturalismIn Kevin M. Cahill & Thomas Raleigh (eds.), Wittgenstein and Naturalism, Routledge. pp. 260-286. 2017.An important strand of current experimental philosophy promotes a new kind of methodological naturalism. This chapter argues that this new ‘metaphilosophical naturalism’ is fundamentally consistent with key tenets of Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophy, and can provide empirical foundations for therapeutic conceptions of philosophy. Metaphilosophical naturalism invites us to contribute to the resolution of philosophical problems about X by turning to scientific findings about the way we think about X …Read more
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528Two analogy strategies: the cases of mind metaphors and introspectionConnection Science 30 (2): 211-243. 2018.Analogical reasoning is often employed in problem-solving and metaphor interpretation. This paper submits that, as a default, analogical reasoning addressing these different tasks employs different mapping strategies: In problem-solving, it employs analogy-maximising strategies (like structure mapping, Gentner & Markman 1997); in metaphor interpretation, analogy-minimising strategies (like ATT-Meta, Barnden 2015). The two strategies interact in analogical reasoning with conceptual metaphors. Thi…Read more
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50Messing Up the Mind? Analogical Reasoning with MetaphorsIn Henrique Jales Ribeiro (ed.), Systematic Approaches to Argument by Analogy, Springer. pp. 129-148. 2014.One major facilitator of analogical reasoning is conceptual metaphor: cross-domain mappings that preserve relations and thereby motivate the extension of linguistic terms from the source to the target domain. Their conscious and explicit use in analogical reasoning has been helpful and productive in disciplines ranging from physics to psychology, and philosophy. At the same time, students of metaphor have suggested that partially unwitting use of conceptual metaphors led to unsound but intuitive…Read more
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162Philosophical pictures and secondary qualitiesSynthese 171 (1). 2009.The paper presents a novel account of nature and genesis of some philosophical problems, which vindicates a new approach to an arguably central and extensive class of such problems: The paper develops the Wittgensteinian notion of ‘philosophical pictures’ with the help of some notions adapted from metaphor research in cognitive linguistics and from work on unintentional analogical reasoning in cognitive psychology. The paper shows that adherence to such pictures systematically leads to the formu…Read more
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University of East AngliaSchool of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication StudiesRegular Faculty
Areas of Specialization
1 more
Epistemology |
Metaphilosophy |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
20th Century Philosophy |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |