University of Arizona
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 2006
Dallas, Texas, United States of America
  • Substantive Media Regulations in the Twenty-First Century: A Fair Look at the Fairness Doctrine
    Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics and Public Policy 25 (1): 305. 2011.
  •  8
    Review of Robert J. Stainton (ed.), Contemporary Debates in Cognitive Science (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2006 (11). 2006.
  •  245
    Why nothing mental is just in the head
    Noûs 41 (2): 318-334. 2007.
    Mental internalists hold that an individuals mental features at a given time supervene upon what is in that individuals head at that time. While many people reject mental internalism about content and justification, mental internalism is commonly accepted regarding such other mental features as rationality, emotion-types, propositional-attitude-types, moral character, and phenomenology. I construct a counter-example to mental internalism regarding all these features. My counter-example involves …Read more
  •  161
    Does simulation theory really involve simulation?
    Philosophical Psychology 19 (4). 2006.
    This paper contributes to an ongoing debate regarding the cognitive processes involved when one person predicts a target person's behavior and/or attributes a mental state to that target person. According to simulation theory, a person typically performs these tasks by employing some part of her brain as a simulation of what is going on in a corresponding part of the brain of the target person. I propose a general intuitive analysis of what 'simulation' means. Simulation is a particular way of u…Read more
  •  41
    I consider the question of whether success-linked theories of content – theories like those of Ramsey (1927), Millikan (1984) and Blackburn (2005) which take there to be a definitional link between representational content and behavioral success – are consistent with the plausible claim that we can use content-attributions to explain behavioral success. Peter Godfrey-Smith (1996) argues that success-linked theories of content are too closely linked to success to be able to explain it. Against th…Read more
  •  57
    The goal of this paper is to answer the following question: When we have mental states that represent certain things as being colored, what properties are our mental states representing these things as having?
  •  17
    You Bet Your Life
    The Philosophers' Magazine 74 45-49. 2016.
  • I. Introduction. II. Ratiocination vs. Cognition. III. Emotions as Modes of Cognition. IV. Four Competing Proposals. V. The Impact of Emotion on Cognition. VI. The Kinematics of Ratiocination. VII. Competing Cognitive Theories. VIII. Why think Emotions are Beliefs? IX. The Intentionality of Emotions. X. The Kinematics of Emotions. XI. A Unified Account of the Emotions. XII. The Rationality of Emotions
  •  109
    This paper defends Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis , a proposed empirical methodology for explicating philosophical concepts. This methodology attributes to our shared concepts whatever application conditions they would need to have in order best to continue delivering benefits in the ways they have regularly delivered benefits in the past. In the first stage of my argument I argue that Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis has what I call normative authority : we have practical and epistemic reason to ad…Read more
  •  146
    Dispositions, conditionals and auspicious circumstances
    Philosophical Studies 164 (2): 443-464. 2013.
    A number of authors have suggested that a conditional analysis of dispositions must take roughly the following form: Thing X is disposed to produce response R to stimulus S just in case, if X were exposed to S and surrounding circumstances were auspicious, then X would produce R. The great challenge is cashing out the relevant notion of ‘auspicious circumstances’. I give a general argument which entails that all existing conditional analyses fail, and that there is no satisfactory way to define …Read more
  •  233
    On higher-order and free-floating chances
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 57 (4): 691-707. 2006.
    considers what I call free-floating chances—objective chances that obtain at a given time despite the fact that their values are not determined by the laws of nature together with the full history of non-chancy facts up to that time. I offer an intuitive example of this phenomenon, and use it to argue that free-floating chances are indeed possible. Their possibility violates three quite widely held principles about chances: the lawful magnitude principle, the principle that chances evolve by con…Read more
  •  11
    The objective of the OSCAR Project is twofold. On the one hand, it is to construct a general theory of rational cognition. On the other hand, it is to construct an artificial rational agent (an "artilect") implementing that theory. This is a joint project in philosophy and AI
  •  66
    I develop and defend a version of what I call Disposition-Based Decision Theory (or DBDT). I point out important problems in David Gauthier’s (1985, 1986) formulation of DBDT, and carefully develop a more defensible formulation. I then compare my version of DBDT to the currently most widely accepted decision theory, Causal Decision Theory (CDT). Traditional intuition-based arguments fail to give us any strong reason to prefer either theory over the other, but I propose an alternative strategy fo…Read more
  •  213
    Pragmatic experimental philosophy
    Philosophical Psychology 28 (3): 412-433. 2015.
    This paper considers three package deals combining views in philosophy of mind, meta-philosophy, and experimental philosophy. The most familiar of these packages gives center-stage to pumping intuitions about fanciful cases, but that package involves problematic commitments both to a controversial descriptivist theory of reference and to intuitions that “negative” experimental philosophers have shown to be suspiciously variable and context-sensitive. In light of these difficulties, it would be g…Read more