•  10
    Development links psychological causes to evolutionary explanations
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (2): 142-143. 2014.
    Our conscious abilities are learned in environments that have evolved to support them. This insight provides an alternative way of framing Huang & Bargh's provocative hypothesis. To understand the conflict between unconscious goals and consciousness, we can study the emergence of conscious thought and control in childhood. These developmental processes are also central to the best available current evolutionary theories.
  •  7
    How Philosophy of Science Can Unlock New Methods in Bioethics
    American Journal of Bioethics 22 (12): 51-53. 2022.
    Blumenthal-Barby and colleagues (2022) argue that philosophy continues to be relevant to bioethics. To support their argument, they offer several examples of how—not philosophy, exactly—but normati...
  •  12
    Creativity as potentially valuable improbable constructions
    with Fei Xu
    European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (1): 1-24. 2021.
    We argue that creative ideas are potentially valuable improbable constructions. We arrive at this formulation of creativity after considering several problems that arise for the theories that suggest that creativity is novelty, originality, or usefulness. Our theory avoids these problems. But since we also derive our theory of creativity from the scientific commitments of a more general theory of cognitive development, a theory called rational constructivism, our theory is unique insofar as it e…Read more
  •  13
    Bioethics Emergencies Can Be Used to Perform a Real-World Test of Utilitarian Policies
    with Hugh Black, Mark Yarborough, Nathan Fairman, and Neil S. Wenger
    American Journal of Bioethics 20 (7): 101-103. 2020.
    Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 101-103.
  •  25
    The productive mind: Creativity as a source of abstract mental representations
    with Fei Xu
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 43. 2020.
    Explanations of how the brain makes successful predictions should refer to abstracta. But, the mind/brain system is for more than prediction alone. Creativity also plays an important role in supply the mind/brain system with abstracta that serve a number of valuable ends over and above prediction.
  •  5
    Projectability, Disagreement, and Consensus: A Challenge to Clinical Equipoise
    with Michel Shamy
    Theoretical and Applied Ethics 3 (1): 17-34. 2014.
    Clinical equipoise links ethically appropriate medical research with medical research that has the reasonable chance of resolving debates. We argue against this principle on the ground that most debates in medicine cannot be resolved by the outcomes of any particular empirical study. In fact, a deep understanding of the methodology of scientific research leads to the conclusion that adopting clinical equipoise as an ethical standard for medical research would deprive medical researchers of the a…Read more
  •  21
    An argument that moral psychology can benefit from closer integration with the social sciences, offering a novel ethical theory bridging the two.
  •  38
    Philosophical Intuitions
    Studia Philosophica Estonica 2 (2): 54. 2009.
  •  21
    The Epistemology of Rational Constructivism
    with Fei Xu
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 9 (2): 343-362. 2018.
    Rational constructivism is one of the leading theories in developmental psychology. But it is not a purely psychological theory: rational constructivism also makes a number of substantial epistemological claims about both the nature of human rationality and several normative principles that fall squarely into the ambit of epistemology. The aim of this paper is to clarify and defend both theses and several other epistemological claims, as they represent the essential epistemological dimensions of…Read more
  •  668
    Intuition versus Reason: Strategies People Use to Think About Moral Problems
    with Barbara Koslowski
    Proceedings of the 35th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. 2013.
    We asked college students to make judgments about realistic moral situations presented as dilemmas (which asked for an either/or decision) vs. problems (which did not ask for such a decision) as well as when the situation explicitly included affectively salient language vs. non-affectively salient language. We report two main findings. The first is that there are four different types of cognitive strategy that subjects use in their responses: simple reasoning, intuitive judging, cautious …Read more
  •  645
    How (not) to bring psychology and biology together
    Philosophical Studies 172 (4): 949-967. 2015.
    Evolutionary psychologists often try to “bring together” biology and psychology by making predictions about what specific psychological mechanisms exist from theories about what patterns of behaviour would have been adaptive in the EEA for humans. This paper shows that one of the deepest methodological generalities in evolutionary biology—that proximate explanations and ultimate explanations stand in a many-to-many relation—entails that this inferential strategy is unsound. Ultimate explanations…Read more
  •  1089
    Philosophical Intuitions
    Studia Philosophica Estonica 2 (2): 54-80. 2009.
    What exactly is a philosophical intuition? And what makes such an intuition reliable, when it is reliable? This paper provides a terminological framework that is able answer to the first question, and then puts the framework to work developing an answer to the second question. More specifically, the paper argues that we can distinguish between two different "evidential roles" which intuitions can occupy: under certain conditions they can provide information about the representational structure o…Read more