•  575
    Intuitions about personal identity: An empirical study
    Philosophical Psychology 23 (3): 293-312. 2010.
    Williams (1970) argues that our intuitions about personal identity vary depending on how a given thought experiment is framed. Some frames lead us to think that persistence of self requires persistence of one's psychological characteristics; other frames lead us to think that the self persists even after the loss of one's distinctive psychological characteristics. The current paper takes an empirical approach to these issues. We find that framing does affect whether or not people judge that pers…Read more
  •  51
    Collective Belief Defended
    Social Epistemology 35 (1): 48-66. 2020.
    We evaluate several significant objections to the possibility of group belief. These incredulity objections urge that the very concept of group belief is suspect or incoherent. Although many other...
  •  294
    What Does the Nation of China Think About Phenomenal States?
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (2): 225-243. 2010.
    Critics of functionalism about the mind often rely on the intuition that collectivities cannot be conscious in motivating their positions. In this paper, we consider the merits of appealing to the intuition that there is nothing that it’s like to be a collectivity. We demonstrate that collective mentality is not an affront to commonsense, and we report evidence that demonstrates that the intuition that there is nothing that it’s like to be a collectivity is, to some extent, culturally specific r…Read more
  •  16
    A Review Of Rocco J. Gennaro, Higher-order Theories Of Consciousness: An Anthology (review)
    PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 11. 2005.
    Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness: An Anthology, edited by Rocco J. Gennaro, brings together fourteen new essays exploring the relative merits of and problems with higher-order representation theories of consciousness. The anthology is divided into two parts. Part I contains articles by proponents of HOR theories arguing for their favorite version of the theory, responding to well-known objections, and exploring potentially vindicating empirical results. Part II contains critical articles w…Read more
  •  429
    Locke's Answer to Molyneux's Thought Experiment
    History of Philosophy Quarterly 27 (2): 165-80. 2010.
    Philosophical discussions of Molyneux's problem within contemporary philosophy of mind tend to characterize the problem as primarily concerned with the role innately known principles, amodal spatial concepts, and rational cognitive faculties play in our perceptual lives. Indeed, for broadly similar reasons, rationalists have generally advocated an affirmative answer, while empiricists have generally advocated a negative one, to the question Molyneux posed after presenting his famous thought expe…Read more