• Cambridge University
    Department of History and Philosophy of Science
    University Lecturer In Philosophy Of Psychology And Cognitive Science
University of California, San Diego
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 2013
St. Louis, Missouri, United States of America
  •  20
    Artificial Intelligence is making rapid and remarkable progress in the development of more sophisticated and powerful systems. However, the acknowledgement of several problems with modern machine learning approaches has prompted a shift in AI benchmarking away from task-oriented testing towards ability-oriented testing, in which AI systems are tested on their capacity to solve certain kinds of novel problems. The Animal-AI Environment is one such benchmark which aims to apply the ability-oriente…Read more
  •  23
    Unlimited Associative Learning as a Null Hypothesis
    Philosophy of Science 89 (5): 1186-1195. 2022.
    A common strategy in comparative cognition is to require that one reject associative learning as an explanation for behavior before concluding that an organism is capable of causal reasoning. In this paper, I argue that standard causal-reasoning tasks can be explained by a powerful form of associative learning: unlimited associative learning (UAL). The lesson, however, is not that researchers should conduct more studies to reject UAL, but that they should instead focus on 1) enriching the cognit…Read more
  •  45
    Minds, Machines, and Molecules
    Philosophical Topics 48 (1): 221-241. 2020.
    Recent debates about the biological and evolutionary conditions for sentience have generated a renewed interest in fine-grained functionalism. According to one such account advanced by Peter Godfrey-Smith, sentience depends on the fine-grained activities characteristic of living organisms. Specifically, the scale, context and stochasticity of these fine-grained activities. One implication of this view is that contemporary artificial intelligence is a poor candidate for sentience. Insofar as curr…Read more
  •  61
    Insightful artificial intelligence
    Mind and Language 36 (2): 315-329. 2021.
    In March 2016, DeepMind's computer programme AlphaGo surprised the world by defeating the world‐champion Go player, Lee Sedol. AlphaGo exhibits a novel, surprising and valuable style of play and has been recognised as “creative” by the artificial intelligence (AI) and Go communities. This article examines whether AlphaGo engages in creative problem solving according to the standards of comparative psychology. I argue that AlphaGo displays one important aspect of creative problem solving (namely …Read more
  •  82
    We evaluate a common reasoning strategy used in community ecology and comparative psychology for selecting between competing hypotheses. This strategy labels one hypothesis as a “null” on the grounds of its simplicity and epistemically privileges it as accepted until rejected. We argue that this strategy is unjustified. The asymmetrical treatment of statistical null hypotheses is justified through the experimental and mathematical contexts in which they are used, but these contexts are missing i…Read more
  •  183
    Domains of generality
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 40. 2017.
    We argue that general intelligence, as presented in the target article, generates multiple distinct and non-equivalent characterisations. Clarifying this central concept is necessary for assessing Burkart et al.’s proposal that the cultural intelligence hypothesis is the best explanation for the evolution of general intelligence. We assess this claim by considering two characterisations of general intelligence presented in the article.
  •  43
    Octopuses as conscious exotica
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 67 28-31. 2018.
  •  53
    (2013). Mindreading Animals: The Debate over What Animals Know about Other Minds. Philosophical Psychology. ???aop.label???. doi: 10.1080/09515089.2012.746630
  •  82
    There Is No Special Problem of Mindreading in Nonhuman Animals
    Philosophy of Science 82 (3): 473-490. 2015.
    There is currently a consensus among comparative psychologists that nonhuman animals are capable of some forms of mindreading. Several philosophers and psychologists have criticized this consensus, however, arguing that there is a “logical problem” with the experimental approach used to test for mindreading in nonhuman animals. I argue that the logical problem is no more than a version of the general skeptical problem known as the theoretician’s dilemma. As such, it is not a problem that compara…Read more
  •  31
    The professionalization of science is a recent phenomenon. Before the mid-1800s, investigations of the natural world were largely performed by those hobbyists who had the leisure time to do so. Things are very different today. Open one of the over twenty thousand scientific journals currently in circulation, and you would be hard pressed to decipher the technical prose, much less the methodological and conceptual strategies being employed. This is changing, however. People are not only taking gr…Read more