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16The Function of Scientific ConceptsFoundations of Science 1-15. forthcoming.The function of concepts must be taken seriously to understand the scientific practices of developing and working with concepts. Despite its significance, little philosophical attention has been paid to the function of concepts. A notable exception is Brigandt (2010), who suggests incorporating the epistemic goal pursued with the concept’s use as an additional semantic property along with the reference and inferential role. The suggestion, however, has at least two limitations. First, his propos…Read more
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59Is Identity Essentialism a Fundamental Feature of Human Cognition?Cognitive Science 47 (5). 2023.The present research examines whether identity essentialism, an important component of psychological essentialism, is a fundamental feature of human cognition. Across three studies (Ntotal = 1723), we report evidence that essentialist intuitions about the identity of kinds are culturally dependent, demographically variable, and easily malleable. The first study considered essentialist intuitions in 10 different countries spread across four continents. Participants were presented with two scenari…Read more
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20Massive Modularity and the Flexibility of Mind: A Criticism on the Language-As-Content-Integrator HypothesisJournal of the Society of Philosophical Studies 61 307-331. 2020.
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17Social Epistemology of Wikipedia: A Philosophical Treatment of Networked KnowledgeJournal of the Society of Philosophical Studies 58 87-115. 2018.
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177For Whom Does Determinism Undermine Moral Responsibility? Surveying the Conditions for Free Will Across CulturesFrontiers in Psychology 10. 2019.Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ordinarily reason about the conditions for free will, we conducted a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic survey (N = 5,268) spanning twenty countries and…Read more
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125Creating Scientific Concepts, by Nancy J. NersessianMind 119 (475): 838-844. 2010.(No abstract is available for this citation)
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3759The Ship of Theseus PuzzleIn Tania Lombrozo, Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, Volume 1, Oxford University Press. pp. 158-174. 2020.Does the Ship of Theseus present a genuine puzzle about persistence due to conflicting intuitions based on “continuity of form” and “continuity of matter” pulling in opposite directions? Philosophers are divided. Some claim that it presents a genuine puzzle but disagree over whether there is a solution. Others claim that there is no puzzle at all since the case has an obvious solution. To assess these proposals, we conducted a cross-cultural study involving nearly 3,000 people across twenty-t…Read more
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1940Nothing at Stake in KnowledgeNoûs 53 (1): 224-247. 2019.In the remainder of this article, we will disarm an important motivation for epistemic contextualism and interest-relative invariantism. We will accomplish this by presenting a stringent test of whether there is a stakes effect on ordinary knowledge ascription. Having shown that, even on a stringent way of testing, stakes fail to impact ordinary knowledge ascription, we will conclude that we should take another look at classical invariantism. Here is how we will proceed. Section 1 lays out some …Read more
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300De Pulchritudine non est Disputandum? A cross‐cultural investigation of the alleged intersubjective validity of aesthetic judgmentMind and Language 34 (3): 317-338. 2019.Since at least Hume and Kant, philosophers working on the nature of aesthetic judgment have generally agreed that common sense does not treat aesthetic judgments in the same way as typical expressions of subjective preferences—rather, it endows them with intersubjective validity, the property of being right or wrong regardless of disagreement. Moreover, this apparent intersubjective validity has been taken to constitute one of the main explananda for philosophical accounts of aesthetic judgment.…Read more
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178The Gettier Intuition from South America to AsiaJournal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research 34 (3): 517-541. 2017.This article examines whether people share the Gettier intuition (viz. that someone who has a true justified belief that p may nonetheless fail to know that p) in 24 sites, located in 23 countries (counting Hong Kong as a distinct country) and across 17 languages. We also consider the possible influence of gender and personality on this intuition with a very large sample size. Finally, we examine whether the Gettier intuition varies across people as a function of their disposition to engage in “…Read more
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36Meta-incommensurability RevisitedTheoria 29 (2): 243-259. 2014.A popular rejoinder to the potential threat that incommensurability might pose to scientific realism has been the referential response: despite meaning variance, there can be referential continuity, which is sufficient for rational theory choice. This response has been charged with meta-incommensurability, according to which it begs the question by assuming realist metaphysics. However, realists take it to be a rhetorical device that hinders productive discussion. By reconstructing the debate, t…Read more
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91Behavioral Circumscription and the Folk Psychology of Belief: A Study in Ethno-MentalizingThought: A Journal of Philosophy 6 (3): 193-203. 2017.Is behavioral integration a necessary feature of belief in folk psychology? Our data from over 5,000 people across 26 samples, spanning 22 countries suggests that it is not. Given the surprising cross-cultural robustness of our findings, we argue that the types of evidence for the ascription of a belief are, at least in some circumstances, lexicographically ordered: assertions are first taken into account, and when an agent sincerely asserts that p, nonlinguistic behavioral evidence is disregard…Read more
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1149The Gettier Intuition from South America to AsiaJournal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research 34 (3): 517-541. 2017.This article examines whether people share the Gettier intuition (viz. that someone who has a true justified belief that p may nonetheless fail to know that p) in 24 sites, located in 23 countries (counting Hong-Kong as a distinct country) and across 17 languages. We also consider the possible influence of gender and personality on this intuition with a very large sample size. Finally, we examine whether the Gettier intuition varies across people as a function of their disposition to engage in “…Read more
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870Behavioral Circumscription and the Folk Psychology of Belief: A Study in Ethno-MentalizingThought: A Journal of Philosophy 6 (3): 193-203. 2017.Is behavioral integration (i.e., which occurs when a subjects assertion that p matches her non-verbal behavior) a necessary feature of belief in folk psychology? Our data from nearly 6,000 people across twenty-six samples, spanning twenty-two countries suggests that it is not. Given the surprising cross-cultural robustness of our findings, we suggest that the types of evidence for the ascription of a belief are, at least in some circumstances, lexicographically ordered: assertions are first ta…Read more
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209In What Sense Is Scientific Knowledge Collective Knowledge?Philosophy of the Social Sciences 44 (4): 407-423. 2014.By taking the collective character of scientific research seriously, some philosophers have claimed that scientific knowledge is indeed collective knowledge. However, there is little clarity on what exactly is meant by collective knowledge. In this article, I argue that there are two notions of collective knowledge that have not been well distinguished: irreducibly collective knowledge (ICK) and jointly committed knowledge (JCK). The two notions provide different conditions under which it is jus…Read more
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101Distributed Cognition in Scientific ContextsJournal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 45 (1): 23-33. 2014.Even though it has been argued that scientific cognition is distributed, there is no consensus on the exact nature of distributed cognition. This paper aims to characterize distributed cognition as appropriate for philosophical studies of science. I first classify competing characterizations into three types: the property approach, the task approach, and the system approach. It turns out that the property approach and the task approach are subject to criticism. I then argue that the most prefera…Read more
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Seoul National UniversityDepartment of Philosophy
Program in History & Philosophy of ScienceAssociate Professor
Gwanak-gu, Seoul, Korea (Republic of)
Areas of Specialization
General Philosophy of Science |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Mind |
Experimental Philosophy |
Science and Values |
Philosophy of Medicine |