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22How Does Human Agency Actually Work? On Bratman's ‘Core Capacity Thesis’ and the Relation between Philosophy of Action and the Empirical SciencesJournal of Applied Philosophy (1): 16-29. 2024.Throughout his career, Michael Bratman has developed a detailed model of individual ‘planning agency’, and, more recently, models of joint action and aspects of social life that he argues such planning agency helps support. How might we empirically investigate whether these models capture what is going on in actual human lives? In this article, we critically engage with this broad question by focusing on what Bratman calls the ‘core capacity thesis’, which is at the center of his most recent dis…Read more
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50Are there really any dual‐character concepts?Philosophical Perspectives 37 (1): 340-369. 2023.There has been growing excitement in recent years about “dual‐character” concepts. Philosophers have argued that such concepts can help us make progress on a range of philosophical issues, from aesthetics to law to metaphysics. Dual‐character concepts are thought to have a distinctive internal structure, which relates a set of descriptive features to an abstract value, and which allows people to use either the descriptive features or the abstract value for determining the extension of the concep…Read more
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26Locating what comes to mind in empirically derived representational spacesCognition 240 (C): 105549. 2023.Real-world judgements and decisions often require choosing from an open-ended set of options which cannot be exhaustively considered before a choice is made. Recent work has found that the options people do consider tend to have particular features, such as high historical value. Here, we pursue the idea that option generation during decision making may reflect a more general mechanism for calling things to mind, by which relevant features in a context-appropriate representational space guide wh…Read more
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15Random effects won't solve the problem of generalizabilityBehavioral and Brain Sciences 45. 2022.Yarkoni argues that researchers making broad inferences often use impoverished statistical models that fail to include important sources of variation as random effects. We argue, however, that for many common study designs, random effects are inappropriate and insufficient to draw general inferences, as the source of variation is not random, but systematic.
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15Not so rational: A more natural way to understand the ANSBehavioral and Brain Sciences 44. 2021.In contrast to Clarke and Beck's claim that that the approximate number system represents rational numbers, we argue for a more modest alternative: The ANS represents natural numbers, and there are separate, non-numeric processes that can be used to represent ratios across a wide range of domains, including natural numbers.
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1130Knowledge before beliefBehavioral and Brain Sciences 44. 2021.Research on the capacity to understand others' minds has tended to focus on representations ofbeliefs,which are widely taken to be among the most central and basic theory of mind representations. Representations ofknowledge, by contrast, have received comparatively little attention and have often been understood as depending on prior representations of belief. After all, how could one represent someone as knowing something if one does not even represent them as believing it? Drawing on a wide ra…Read more
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13Manipulating Morality: Third-Party Intentions Alter Moral Judgments by Changing Causal ReasoningCognitive Science 39 (6): 1320-1347. 2015.
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633Eavesdropping: What is it good for?Semantics and Pragmatics. forthcoming.Eavesdropping judgments (judgments about truth, retraction, and consistency across contexts) about epistemic modals have been used in recent years to argue for a radical thesis: that truth is assessment-relative. We argue that judgments for 'I think that p' pattern in strikingly similar ways to judgments for 'Might p' and 'Probably p'. We argue for this by replicating three major experiments involving the latter and adding a condition with the form 'I think that p', showing that subjects respond…Read more
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108Factive theory of mindMind and Language 36 (1): 3-26. 2021.Research on theory of mind has primarily focused on demonstrating and understanding the ability to represent others' non‐factive mental states, for example, others' beliefs in the false‐belief task. This requirement confuses the ability to represent a particular kind of non‐factive content (e.g., a false belief) with the more general capacity to represent others' understanding of the world even when it differs from one's own. We provide a way of correcting this. We first offer a simple and theor…Read more
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32Causal judgments are widely known to be sensitive to violations of both prescriptive norms (e.g., immoral events) and statistical norms (e.g., improbable events). There is ongoing discussion as to whether both effects are best explained in a unified way through changes in the relevance of counterfactual possibilities, or whether these two effects arise from unrelated cognitive mechanisms. Recent work has shown that moral norm violations affect causal judgments of agents, but not inanimate artifa…Read more
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207Correction to: Estimating the Reproducibility of Experimental PhilosophyReview of Philosophy and Psychology 12 (1): 45-48. 2018.Appendix 1 was incomplete in the initial online publication. The original article has been corrected.
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289Estimating the Reproducibility of Experimental PhilosophyReview of Philosophy and Psychology (1): 1-36. 2018.Responding to recent concerns about the reliability of the published literature in psychology and other disciplines, we formed the X-Phi Replicability Project to estimate the reproducibility of experimental philosophy. Drawing on a representative sample of 40 x-phi studies published between 2003 and 2015, we enlisted 20 research teams across 8 countries to conduct a high-quality replication of each study in order to compare the results to the original published findings. We found that x-phi stud…Read more
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477Sticky situations: 'Force' and quantifier domainsSemantics and Linguistic Theory 28. forthcoming.When do we judge that someone was forced to do what they did? One relatively well-established finding is that subjects tend to judge that agents were not forced to do actions when those actions violate norms. A surprising discovery of Young & Phillips 2011 is that this effect seems to disappear when we frame the relevant ‘force’-claim in the active rather than passive voice ('X forced Y to φ ' vs. 'Y was forced to φ by X'). Young and Phillips found a similar contrast when the scenario itself shi…Read more
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835New Horizons for a Theory of Epistemic ModalsAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (2): 309-324. 2019.ABSTRACTRecent debate over the semantics and pragmatics of epistemic modals has focused on intuitions about cross-contextual truth-value assessments. In this paper, we advocate a different approach to evaluating theories of epistemic modals. Our strategy focuses on judgments of the incompatibility of two different epistemic possibility claims, or two different truth value assessments of a single epistemic possibility claim. We subject the predictions of existing theories to empirical scrutiny, a…Read more
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899The psychological representation of modalityMind and Language 33 (1): 65-94. 2018.A series of recent studies have explored the impact of people's judgments regarding physical law, morality, and probability. Surprisingly, such studies indicate that these three apparently unrelated types of judgments often have precisely the same impact. We argue that these findings provide evidence for a more general hypothesis about the kind of cognition people use to think about possibilities. Specifically, we suggest that this aspect of people's cognition is best understood using an idea de…Read more
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51Morality constrains the default representation of what is possibleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 114 (18): 4649-4654. 2017.The capacity for representing and reasoning over sets of possibilities, or modal cognition, supports diverse kinds of high-level judgments: causal reasoning, moral judgment, language comprehension, and more. Prior research on modal cognition asks how humans explicitly and deliberatively reason about what is possible but has not investigated whether or how people have a default, implicit representation of which events are possible. We present three studies that characterize the role of implicit r…Read more
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1242Unifying morality’s influence on non-moral judgments: The relevance of alternative possibilitiesCognition 145 (C): 30-42. 2015.Past work has demonstrated that people’s moral judgments can influence their judgments in a number of domains that might seem to involve straightforward matters of fact, including judgments about freedom, causation, the doing/allowing distinction, and intentional action. The present studies explore whether the effect of morality in these four domains can be explained by changes in the relevance of alternative possibilities. More precisely, we propose that moral judgment influences the degree to …Read more
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720Causal supersedingCognition 137 (C): 196-209. 2015.When agents violate norms, they are typically judged to be more of a cause of resulting outcomes. In this paper, we suggest that norm violations also affect the causality attributed to other agents, a phenomenon we refer to as "causal superseding." We propose and test a counterfactual reasoning model of this phenomenon in four experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 provide an initial demonstration of the causal superseding effect and distinguish it from previously studied effects. Experiment 3 shows t…Read more
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1926The Good in HappinessIn Tania Lombrozo, Shaun Nichols & Joshua Knobe (eds.), Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, Volume 1, Oxford University Press. 2014.There has been a long history of arguments over whether happiness is anything more than a particular set of psychological states. On one side, some philosophers have argued that there is not, endorsing a descriptive view of happiness. Affective scientists have also embraced this view and are reaching a near consensus on a definition of happiness as some combination of affect and life-satisfaction. On the other side, some philosophers have maintained an evaluative view of happiness, on which bein…Read more
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494The Paradox of Moral FocusCognition 119 (2): 166-178. 2011.When we evaluate moral agents, we consider many factors, including whether the agent acted freely, or under duress or coercion. In turn, moral evaluations have been shown to influence our (non-moral) evaluations of these same factors. For example, when we judge an agent to have acted immorally, we are subsequently more likely to judge the agent to have acted freely, not under force. Here, we investigate the cognitive signatures of this effect in interpersonal situations, in which one agent …Read more
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482Apparent Paradoxes in Moral Reasoning; Or how you forced him to do it, even though he wasn’t forced to do it.Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society 138-143. 2011.The importance of situational constraint for moral evaluations is widely accepted in philosophy, psychology, and the law. However, recent work suggests that this relationship is actually bidirectional: moral evaluations can also influence our judgments of situational constraint. For example, if an agent is thought to have acted immorally rather than morally, that agent is often judged to have acted with greater freedom and under less situational constraint. Moreover, when cons…Read more
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2320True happiness: The role of morality in the folk concept of happinessJournal of Experimental Psychology: General 146 (2): 165-181. 2017.Recent scientific research has settled on a purely descriptive definition of happiness that is focused solely on agents’ psychological states (high positive affect, low negative affect, high life satisfaction). In contrast to this understanding, recent research has suggested that the ordinary concept of happiness is also sensitive to the moral value of agents’ lives. Five studies systematically investigate and explain the impact of morality on ordinary assessments of happiness. Study 1 demonstra…Read more
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575Moral judgments and intuitions about freedomPsychological Inquiry 20 (1): 30-36. 2009.Reeder’s article offers a new and intriguing approach to the study of people’s ordinary understanding of freedom and constraint. On this approach, people use information about freedom and constraint as part of a quasi-scientific effort to make accurate inferences about an agent’s motives. Their beliefs about the agent’s motives then affect a wide variety of further psychological processes, including the process whereby they arrive at moral judgments. In illustrating this new approach, Reeder cit…Read more
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239The Ordinary Concept of Happiness (and Others Like It)Emotion Review 3 (3): 929-937. 2011.Consider people’s ordinary concept of belief. This concept seems to pick out a particular psychological state. Indeed, one natural view would be that the concept of belief works much like the concepts one finds in cognitive science – not quite as rigorous or precise, perhaps, but still the same basic type of notion. But now suppose we turn to other concepts that people ordinarily use to understand the mind. Suppose we consider the concept happiness. Or the concept love. How are these concepts to…Read more
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1527Manipulating Morality: Third‐Party Intentions Alter Moral Judgments by Changing Causal ReasoningCognitive Science 38 (8): 1320-1347. 2014.The present studies investigate how the intentions of third parties influence judgments of moral responsibility for other agents who commit immoral acts. Using cases in which an agent acts under some situational constraint brought about by a third party, we ask whether the agent is blamed less for the immoral act when the third party intended for that act to occur. Study 1 demonstrates that third-party intentions do influence judgments of blame. Study 2 finds that third-party intentions only inf…Read more
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Dartmouth CollegeDepartment of Philosophy
Cognitive Science
Psychological and Brain SciencesAssistant Professor
Hanover, New Hampshire, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |