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76The sound-board account of reasoning: A one-system alternative to dual-process theoryPhilosophical Psychology 31 (7): 1046-1073. 2018.ABSTRACTIn order to explain the effects found in the heuristics and biases literature, dual-process theories of reasoning claim that human reasoning is of two kinds: Type-1 processing is fast, automatic, and associative, while Type-2 reasoning is slow, controlled, and rule based. If human reasoning is so divided, it would have important consequences for morality, epistemology, and philosophy of mind. Although dual-process theorists have typically argued for their position by way of an inference …Read more
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176What are the cognitive costs of racism? A reply to GendlerPhilosophical Studies 166 (2): 217-229. 2013.Tamar Gendler argues that, for those living in a society in which race is a salient sociological feature, it is impossible to be fully rational: members of such a society must either fail to encode relevant information containing race, or suffer epistemic costs by being implicitly racist. However, I argue that, although Gendler calls attention to a pitfall worthy of study, she fails to conclusively demonstrate that there are epistemic (or cognitive) costs of being racist. Gendler offers three su…Read more
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50The Quietest Challenge to the Axiology of God: A Cognitive Approach to CounterpossiblesFaith and Philosophy 33 (4): 441-460. 2016.Guy Kahane asks an axiological question: what value would (or does) God’s existence bestow on the world? Supposing God’s existence is a matter of necessity, this axiological question faces a problem because answering it will require assessing the truth-value of counterpossibles. I argue that Kahane, Paul Moser, and Richard Davis and Paul Franks fail in their attempts to render the axiological question substantive. I then offer my own solution by bringing work in cognitive psychology and philosop…Read more
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140The dual-process turn: How recent defenses of dual-process theories of reasoning failPhilosophical Psychology 29 (2): 300-309. 2016.In response to the claim that the properties typically used to distinguish System 1 from System 2 crosscut one another, Carruthers, Evans, and Stanovich have abandoned the System 1/System 2 distinction. Evans and Stanovich both opt for a dual-process theory, according to which Type-1 processes are autonomous and Type-2 processes use working memory and involve cognitive decoupling. Carruthers maintains a two-system account, according to which there is an intuitive system and a reflective system. …Read more
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36How Not to Deal with the Tragic DilemmaSocial Epistemology 34 (3): 253-264. 2020.Race is often epistemically relevant, but encoding racial stereotypes can lead to implicitly biased behavior. Thus, given the way race structures society, it seems to be impossible to be both epist...
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45Can I survive without my body? Undercutting the Modal ArgumentInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 84 (1): 71-92. 2018.Modal Arguments in the philosophy of mind purport to show that the body is not necessary for a human person’s existence. The key premise in these arguments are generally supported with thought experiments. I argue that Christians endorsing the Doctrine of the Resurrection have good reason to deny this key premise. Traditional Christianity affirms that eschatological human existence is an embodied existence in the very bodies we inhabited while alive. The raises the Resurrection Question: why wou…Read more
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746Self-reflexive cognitive biasEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (3): 1-21. 2021.Cognitive scientists claim to have discovered a large number of cognitive biases, which have a tendency to mislead reasoners. Might cognitive scientists themselves be subject to the very biases they purport to discover? And how should this alter the way they evaluate their research as evidence for the existence of these biases? In this paper, we posit a new paradox (the ‘Self-Reflexive Bias Paradox’), which bears a striking resemblance to some classical logical paradoxes. Suppose that research R…Read more
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2699Why a Bodily Resurrection?: The Bodily Resurrection and the Mind/Body RelationJournal of Analytic Theology 5 121-144. 2017.The doctrine of the resurrection says that God will resurrect the body that lived and died on earth—that the post-mortem body will be numerically identical to the pre-mortem body. After exegetically supporting this claim, and defending it from a recent objection, we ask: supposing that the doctrine of the resurrection is true, what are the implications for the mind-body relation? Why would God resurrect the body that lived and died on earth? We compare three accounts of the mind-body relation th…Read more
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Two Minded Creatures and Dual-Process TheoryJournal of Cognition and Neuroethics (3). 2015.How many minds do you have? If you are a normal human, I think only one, but a number of dual-process theorists have disagreed. As an explanation of human irrationality, they divide human reasoning into two: Type-1 is fast, associative, and automatic, while Type-2 is slow, rule-based, and effortful. Some go further in arguing that these reasoning processes constitute (or are partly constitutive of) two minds. In this paper, I use the Star Trek ‘Trill’ species to illuminate the condition for the …Read more
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39Faith Entails Belief: Three Avenues of Defense Against the Argument from DoubtPacific Philosophical Quarterly 103 (4): 816-836. 2021.Doxasticism is the view that propositional faith entails belief. A common criticism of doxasticism is that faith seems compatible with doubt in a way that belief is not. Thus, it seems possible to have faith without belief, and several non-doxasticist accounts of faith are motivated inter alia by the need to account for this type of doubt. I provide three avenues of response: (1) favored cases of faith without belief beg the question by stipulating faith-that-p-without-belief-that-p, or if the n…Read more
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48Faith and Doubt at the Cry of Dereliction: a Defense of DoxasticismSophia 61 (2): 253-265. 2022.Doxasticism is the view that propositional faith that p entails belief that p. This view has recently come under fire within analytic philosophy of religion. One common objection is that faith is compatible with doubt in a way that belief is not. One version of this objection, recently employed by Beth Rath, is to use a particular story, in this case Jesus Christ’s cry of dereliction, to argue that someone had propositional faith while ceasing to believe. Thus, doxasticism is false. Rath’s appro…Read more
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496The inherent bias in positing an inherence heuristicBehavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (5): 493-494. 2014.There are two problems with Cimpian & Salomon’s (C&S’s) claim that an innate inherence heuristic is part of our cognitive makeup. First, some of their examples of inherent features do not seem to accord with the authors’ own definition of inherence. Second, rather than posit an inherence heuristic to explain why humans rely more heavily on inherent features, it may be more parsimonious to do so on the basis of aspects of the world itself and our relationship to it.
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46In Defence of the Belief-Plus Model of FaithEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 8 (2): 201--219. 2016.I defend the claim that propositional religious faith that p implies belief that p. While this claim might seem trivial, it has been criticized by Alston, Pojman, Audi, and McKaughan and Howard-Snyder. I begin by defending this view against four objections. In addition to criticizing the belief-plus model, each of the above philosophers have offered their own alternatives to the belief-plus model. I focus on McKaughan’s recent accounts of faith: ”trusting acceptance’ and ”hopeful affirmation’. I…Read more
Joshua Mugg
Park University
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Park UniversityAssistant Professor
York University
PhD, 2015
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Psychology |