•  41
    Beyond Deep Disagreement: A Path Towards Achieving Understanding Across a Cultural Divide
    with Jay Evans
    Social Epistemology 37 (5): 656-665. 2023.
    Achieving genuine engagement and understanding between communities with radically divergent worldviews is challenging. If there is no common ground on which to stand and have a discussion, the likely outcomes of an apparent intercultural disagreement are a stalemate, or the (sometimes colonialist) imposition of a single worldview, or a kind of relativistic tolerance that falls short of genuine engagement. In this paper, we suggest a way forward that takes as its starting point the philosophical …Read more
  •  27
    There are some beliefs that are difficult to think critically about, even for those who have critical thinking skills and are committed to applying them to their own beliefs. These resistant beliefs are not all of a kind, and so a range of different strategies may be needed to get ourselves and others to think critically about them. In this paper we suggest some such strategies.
  •  27
    Measuring Critical Thinking About Deeply Held Beliefs: Can the California Critical Thinking Dispositions Inventory Help?
    with Ilan Goldberg, Tracy Bowell, and Howard Darelle
    Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines 30 (1): 40-50. 2015.
    The California Critical Thinking Dispositions Inventory is a commonly used tool for measuring critical thinking dispositions. However, research on the efficacy of the CCTDI in predicting good thinking about students’ own deeply held beliefs is scant. In this paper we report on our study that was designed to gauge the usefulness of the CCTDI in this context, and take some first steps towards designing a better method for measuring strong sense critical thinking.
  •  27
    The Philosophical Use and Misuse of Science
    with Tim Dare
    Metaphilosophy 48 (4): 449-466. 2017.
    Science is our best way of finding out about the natural world, and philosophers who write about that world ought to be sensitive to the claims of our best science. There are obstacles, however, to outsiders using science well. We think philosophers are prone to misuse science: to give undue weight to results that are untested; to highlight favorable and ignore unfavorable data; to give illegitimate weight to the authority of science; to leap from scientific premises to philosophical conclusions…Read more
  •  16
    Arts and Minds
    Philosophical Quarterly 57 (228): 508-510. 2007.
  •  13
    Finding a naturalistic account of biological function is important both for making sense of the way functions are talked about in biology and medicine and for the project in the philosophy of mind of naturalising mental content via teleosemantics. The selected effects theory accounts for the proper functions of traits in terms of their selectional history, and is widely considered to be the most promising approach to naturalising biological functions. However, new challenges to the selected effe…Read more
  •  10
    Taking taniwha seriously
    Asian Journal of Philosophy 1 (2): 1-15. 2022.
    Taniwha are powerful water creatures in te ao Māori (the Māori world/worldview). Taniwha sometimes affect public works in Aotearoa New Zealand: for example, consultation between government agencies and tangata whenua (the people of the land) about proposed roading developments sometimes results in the route being moved to avoid the dwelling place of a taniwha. Mainstream media responses have tended to be hostile or mocking, as you might expect, since on the face of it the dominant western scient…Read more
  •  7
    Dewey defines open-mindedness as “freedom from prejudice, partisanship, and other such habits as close the mind and make it unwilling to consider new problems and entertain new ideas". It is commonly included in lists of epistemic and argumentative virtues. We begin this paper with brief discussion of various accounts of open-mindedness. Our principle interest is in what it is to behave as an open-minded enquirer. Drawing on two cases, we consider whether open-minded behaviour varies between the…Read more
  •  3
    Introduction
    In Dan Ryder, Justine Kingsbury & Kenneth Williford (eds.), Millikan and Her Critics, Wiley. 2012.
    This chapter contains section titles: Proper Functions Representations: The Basic Teleosemantic Framework Concepts Externalism, Language, and Meaning Rationalism.
  •  1
    Content and Function: A Defense of Millikanian Teleosemantics
    Dissertation, Rutgers the State University of New Jersey - New Brunswick. 1999.
    A theory of content is a theory of why it is that our mental states are about what they actually are about: why, for example, my belief that snow is white is about the whiteness of snow rather than, as it might be, the greenness of grass. A teleological theory of content is one which accounts for the content of mental states in terms of the functions of either the mental states themselves or the mechanisms which produce them. In this dissertation I defend a particular teleological theory of cont…Read more