• The Oxford Handbook of the Cognitive Science of Belief (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
  • The Oxford Handbook of the Cognitive Science of Belief (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
  •  143
    This essay discusses Peter Langland-Hassan's approach to "explaining imagination" as it plays out in his recent book of that title. Langland-Hassan offers a theory of “attitude imagining” that avoids positing what he calls a “sui generis cognitive attitude.” This theory attempts to explain things like pretend play, hypothetical reasoning, and cognition of fiction; to explain them using only (what he calls) more “basic” mental states like beliefs and desires; and thus to explain them without posi…Read more
  •  484
    The Trinity and the Light Switch: Two Faces of Belief
    In Eric Schwitzgebel & Jonathan Jong (eds.), The Nature of Belief, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
    Sometimes people posit "beliefs" to explain mundane instrumental actions (e.g., Neil believes the switch is connected to the light, so he flipped the switch to illuminate the room). Sometimes people posit "beliefs" to explain group affiliation or identity (e.g., in order to belong to the Christian Reformed Church Neil must believe that God is triune). If we set aside the commonality of the word "belief," we can pose a crucial question: Is the cognitive attitude typically involved in the first "l…Read more
  •  183
    We often assume that religious beliefs are no different in kind from ordinary factual beliefs—that believing in the existence of God or of supernatural entities that hear our prayers is akin to believing that May comes before June. Neil Van Leeuwen shows that, in fact, these two forms of belief are strikingly different. Our brains do not process religious beliefs like they do beliefs concerning mundane reality; instead, empirical findings show that religious beliefs function like the imaginings …Read more
  •  406
    What does it mean to have “strong beliefs”? My thesis is that it can mean two very different things. That is, there are two distinct psychological features to which “strong belief” can refer, and these often come apart. I call the first feature epistemic confidence and the second identity centrality. They are conceptually distinct and, if we take ethnographies of religion seriously, distinct in fact as well. If that’s true, it’s methodologically important for the psychological sciences to have m…Read more
  •  422
    To Believe is Not to Think: A Cross-Cultural Finding
    with Kara Weisman and Tanya Luhrmann
    Open Mind 5 91-99. 2021.
    Are religious beliefs psychologically different from matter-of-fact beliefs? Many scholars say no: that religious people, in a matter-of-fact way, simply think their deities exist. Others say yes: that religious beliefs are more compartmentalized, less certain, and less responsive to evidence. Little research to date has explored whether lay people themselves recognize such a difference. We addressed this question in a series of sentence completion tasks, conducted in five settings that differed…Read more
  •  779
    Imagining stories: attitudes and operators
    Philosophical Studies 178 (2): 639-664. 2021.
    This essay argues that there are theoretical benefits to keeping distinct—more pervasively than the literature has done so far—the psychological states of imagining that p versus believing that in-the-story p, when it comes to cognition of fiction and other forms of narrative. Positing both in the minds of a story’s audience helps explain the full range of reactions characteristic of story consumption. This distinction also has interesting conceptual and explanatory dimensions that haven’t been …Read more
  •  722
    The Factual Belief Fallacy
    Contemporary Pragmatism (eds. T. Coleman & J. Jong): 319-343. 2018.
    This paper explains a fallacy that often arises in theorizing about human minds. I call it the Factual Belief Fallacy. The Fallacy, roughly, involves drawing conclusions about human psychology that improperly ignore the large backgrounds of mostly accurate factual beliefs people have. The Factual Belief Fallacy has led to significant mistakes in both philosophy of mind and cognitive science of religion. Avoiding it helps us better see the difference between factual belief and religious credence;…Read more
  •  1115
    Seeking the Supernatural: The Interactive Religious Experience Model
    with Michiel van Elk
    Religion, Brain and Behavior 9 (3): 221-275. 2019.
    [OPEN ACCESS TARGET ARTICLE WITH COMMENTARIES AND RESPONSE] We develop a new model of how human agency-detection capacities and other socio-cognitive biases are involved in forming religious beliefs. Crucially, we distinguish general religious beliefs (such as *God exists*) from personal religious beliefs that directly refer to the agent holding the belief or to her peripersonal time and space (such as *God appeared to _me_ last night*). On our model, people acquire general religious beliefs mos…Read more
  •  458
    Review of Kristin Andrews' Do Apes Read Minds? Toward a New Folk Psychology (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 4. 2013.
    Kristin Andrews proposes a new framework for thinking about folk psychology, which she calls Pluralistic Folk Psychology. Her approach emphasizes kinds of psychological prediction and explanation that don't rest on propositional attitude attribution. Here I review some elements of her theory and find that, although the approach is very promising, there's still work to be done before we can conclude that the manners of prediction and explanation she identifies don't involve implicit propositional…Read more
  •  2824
    Self-Deception Won't Make You Happy
    Social Theory and Practice 35 (1): 107-132. 2009.
    I argue here that self-deception is not conducive to happiness. There is a long train of thought in social psychology that seems to say that it is, but proper understanding of the data does not yield this conclusion. Illusion must be distinguished from mere imagining. Self-deception must be distinguished from self-inflation bias and from self-fulfilling belief. Once these distinctions are in place, the case for self-deception falls apart. Furthermore, by yielding false beliefs, self-deception un…Read more
  •  778
    Finite rational self-deceivers
    Philosophical Studies 139 (2). 2008.
    I raise three puzzles concerning self-deception: (i) a conceptual paradox, (ii) a dilemma about how to understand human cognitive evolution, and (iii) a tension between the fact of self-deception and Davidson’s interpretive view. I advance solutions to the first two and lay a groundwork for addressing the third. The capacity for self-deception, I argue, is a spandrel, in Gould’s and Lewontin’s sense, of other mental traits, i.e., a structural byproduct. The irony is that the mental traits of whi…Read more
  •  799
    Beyond Fakers and Fanatics: a Reply to Maarten Boudry and Jerry Coyne
    Philosophical Psychology 29 (4): 1-6. 2016.
    Maarten Boudry and Jerry Coyne have written a piece, forthcoming in Philosophical Psychology, called “Disbelief in Belief,” in which they criticize my recent paper “Religious credence is not factual belief” (2014, Cognition 133). Here I respond to their criticisms, the thrust of which is that we shouldn’t distinguish religious credence from factual belief, contrary to what I say. I respond that their picture of religious psychology undermines our ability to distinguish common religious people fr…Read more
  •  809
    Here I review Robert Trivers' 2011 book _The Folly of Fools_, in which he advocates the evolutionary theory of deceit and self-deception that he pioneered in his famous preface to Richard Dawkins' _Selfish Gene_. Although the book contains a wealth of interesting discussion on topics ranging from warfare to immunology, I find it lacking on two major fronts. First, it fails to give a proper argument for its central thesis--namely, that self-deception evolved to facilitate deception of others. Sec…Read more
  •  872
    The Imaginative Agent
    In Amy Kind & Peter Kung (ed.), Knowledge through Imagination, Oxford University Press. pp. 85-109. 2016.
    Imagination contributes to human agency in ways that haven't been well understood. I argue here that pathways from imagistic imagining to emotional engagement support three important agential capacities: 1. bodily preparedness for potential events in one's nearby environment; 2. evaluation of potential future action; and 3. empathy-based moral appraisal. Importantly, however, the kind of pathway in question (I-C-E-C: imagining-categorization-emotion-conceptualization) also enables engagement wit…Read more
  •  1952
    The Meanings of "Imagine" Part I: Constructive Imagination
    Philosophy Compass 8 (3): 220-230. 2013.
    In this article , I first engage in some conceptual clarification of what the words "imagine," "imagining," and "imagination" can mean. Each has a constructive sense, an attitudinal sense, and an imagistic sense. Keeping the senses straight in the course of cognitive theorizing is important for both psychology and philosophy. I then discuss the roles that perceptual memories, beliefs, and genre truth attitudes play in constructive imagination, or the capacity to generate novel representations th…Read more
  •  2396
    Imagination is where the Action is
    Journal of Philosophy 108 (2): 55-77. 2011.
    Imaginative representations are crucial to the generation of action--both pretense and plain action. But well-known theories of imagination on offer in the literature [1] fail to describe how perceptually-formatted imaginings (mental images) and motor imaginings function in the generation of action and [2] fail to recognize the important fact that spatially rich imagining can be integrated into one's perceptual manifold. In this paper, I present a theory of imagining that shows how spatially ric…Read more
  •  644
    Do religious “beliefs” respond to evidence?
    Philosophical Explorations 20 (sup1): 52-72. 2017.
    Some examples suggest that religious credences respond to evidence. Other examples suggest they are wildly unresponsive. So the examples taken together suggest there is a puzzle about whether descriptive religious attitudes respond to evidence or not. I argue for a solution to this puzzle according to which religious credences are characteristically not responsive to evidence; that is, they do not tend to be extinguished by contrary evidence. And when they appear to be responsive, it is because …Read more
  •  831
    Review of Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Brains (review)
    Cognitive Neuropsychiatry 16 (5): 473-478. 2011.
    The book I review, _Sleights of Mind_, aims to illuminate properties of perceptual systems by discussing human susceptibility to magical illusions. I describe how the authors use psychological principles to explain two tricks, spoon bending and the Miser's Dream. I also argue that the book is congenial to the following view of illusions: susceptibility to illusion is the result of evolutionary trade-offs; perceptual systems must make assumptions in order to function at all, but susceptibility to…Read more
  •  1174
    The Meanings of “Imagine” Part II: Attitude and Action
    Philosophy Compass 9 (11): 791-802. 2014.
    In this Part II, I investigate different approaches to the question of what makes imagining different from belief. I find that the sentiment-based approach of David Hume falls short, as does the teleological approach, once advocated by David Velleman. I then consider whether the inferential properties of beliefs and imaginings may differ. Beliefs, I claim, exhibit an anti-symmetric inferential governance over imaginings: they are the background that makes inference from one imagining to the othe…Read more
  •  734
    Interpreting Intuitions
    with Marcus McGahhey
    In Julie Kirsch Patrizia Pedrini (ed.), Third-Person Self-Knowledge, Self-Interpretation, and Narrative, Springer Verlag. pp. 73-98. 2018.
    We argue that many intuitions do not have conscious propositional contents. In particular, many of the intuitions had in response to philosophical thought experiments, like Gettier cases, do not have such contents. They are more like hunches, urgings, murky feelings, and twinges. Our view thus goes against the received view of intuitions in philosophy, which we call Mainstream Propositionalism. Our positive view is that many thought-experimental intuitions are conscious, spontaneous, non-theoret…Read more
  •  1155
    The Motivational Role of Belief
    Philosophical Papers 38 (2). 2009.
    This paper claims that the standard characterization of the motivational role of belief should be supplemented. Beliefs do not only, jointly with desires, cause and rationalize actions that will satisfy the desires, if the beliefs are true; beliefs are also the practical ground of other cognitive attitudes, like imagining, which means beliefs determine whether and when one acts with those other attitudes as the cognitive inputs into choices and practical reasoning. In addition to arguing for thi…Read more
  •  666
    Perry on Self-Knowledge
    In Albert Newen Raphael van Riel (ed.), Identity, Language, and Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of John Perry, Csli Publications. 2012.
    The self-notion is an essential constituent of any self-belief or self-knowledge. But what is the self-notion? In this paper, I tie together several themes from the philosophy of John Perry to explain how he answers this question. The self-notion is not just any notion that happens to be about the person in whose mind that notion appears, because it's possible to have ways of thinking about oneself that one doesn't realize are about oneself. Characterizing the self-notion properly (and hence sel…Read more
  •  907
    Imagination and Action
    In Amy Kind (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Imagination, Routledge. pp. 286-299. 2016.
    Abstract: This entry elucidates causal and constitutive roles that various forms of imagining play in human action. Imagination influences more kinds of action than just pretend play. I distinguish different senses of the terms “imagining” and “imagination”: imagistic imagining, propositional imagining, and constructive imagining. Each variety of imagining makes its own characteristic contributions to action. Imagistic imagining can structure bodily movement. Propositional imagining interacts wi…Read more
  •  1786
    Self-Deception
    In Hugh LaFollette (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Ethics, Wiley. 2022.
    In this entry, I seek to show the interdependence of questions about self-deception in philosophy of mind, psychology, and ethics. I taxonomize solutions to the paradoxes of self-deception, present possible psychological mechanisms behind it, and highlight how different approaches to the philosophy of mind and psychology will affect how we answer important ethical questions. Is self-deception conducive to happiness? How does self-deception affect responsibility? Is there something intrinsically …Read more
  •  761
    The product of self-deception
    Erkenntnis 67 (3). 2007.
    I raise the question of what cognitive attitude self-deception brings about. That is: what is the product of self-deception? Robert Audi and Georges Rey have argued that self-deception does not bring about belief in the usual sense, but rather “avowal” or “avowed belief.” That means a tendency to affirm verbally (both privately and publicly) that lacks normal belief-like connections to non-verbal actions. I contest their view by discussing cases in which the product of self-deception is implicat…Read more