•  1734
    A short primer on situated cognition
    In Murat Aydede & P. Robbins (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition, Cambridge University Press. pp. 3--10. 2009.
    Introductory Chapter to the _Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition_ (CUP, 2009)
  •  1010
    Are Frege cases exceptions to intentional generalizations?
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 31 (1): 1-22. 2001.
    This piece criticizes Fodor's argument (in The Elm and the Expert, 1994) for the claim that Frege cases should be treated as exceptions to (broad) psychological generalizations rather than as counterexamples.
  •  431
    Experimental Philosophy
    Annual Review of Psychology 63 (1): 81-99. 2012.
    Experimental philosophy is a new interdisciplinary field that uses methods normally associated with psychology to investigate questions normally associated with philosophy. The present review focuses on research in experimental philosophy on four central questions. First, why is it that people's moral judgments appear to influence their intuitions about seemingly nonmoral questions? Second, do people think that moral questions have objective answers, or do they see morality as fundamentally rela…Read more
  •  385
    The phenomenal stance
    Philosophical Studies 127 (1): 59-85. 2006.
    Cognitive science is shamelessly materialistic. It maintains that human beings are nothing more than complex physical systems, ultimately and completely explicable in mechanistic terms. But this conception of humanity does not ?t well with common sense. To think of the creatures we spend much of our day loving, hating, admiring, resenting, comparing ourselves to, trying to understand, blaming, and thanking -- to think of them as mere mechanisms seems at best counterintuitive and unhelpful. More …Read more
  •  194
    Consciousness and the social mind
    Cognitive Systems Research 9 (1-2): 15-23. 2008.
    Phenomenal consciousness and social cognition are interlocking capacities, but the relations between them have yet to be systematically investigated. In this paper, I begin to develop a theoretical and empirical framework for such an investigation. I begin by describing the phenomenon known as social pain: the affect associated with the perception of actual or potential damage to one’s interpersonal relations. I then adduce a related phenomenon known as affective contagion: the tendency for emot…Read more
  •  179
    To structure, or not to structure?
    Synthese 139 (1): 55-80. 2004.
    Some accounts of mental content represent the objects of belief as structured, using entities that formally resemble the sentences used to express and report attitudes in natural language; others adopt a relatively unstructured approach, typically using sets or functions. Currently popular variants of the latter include classical and neo-classical propositionalism, which represent belief contents as sets of possible worlds and sets of centered possible worlds, respectively; and property self-asc…Read more
  •  133
    The Phenomenal Stance Revisited
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 3 (3): 383-403. 2012.
    In this article, we present evidence of a bidirectional coupling between moral concern and the attribution of properties and states that are associated with experience (e.g., conscious awareness, feelings). This coupling is also shown to be stronger with experience than for the attribution of properties and states more closely associated with agency (e.g., free will, thoughts). We report the results of four studies. In the first two studies, we vary the description of the mental capacities of a …Read more
  •  105
    Good deeds and hard knocks: The effect of past suffering on praise for moral behavior
    with Fernando Alvear and Paul Litton
    Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 97. 2021.
    Are judgments of praise for moral behavior modulated by knowledge of an agent's past suffering at the hands of others, and if so, in what direction? Drawing on multiple lines of research in experimental social psychology, we identify three hypotheses about the psychology of praise — typecasting, handicapping, and non-historicism — each of which supports a different answer to the question above. Typecasting predicts that information about past suffering will augment perceived patiency and thereby…Read more
  •  96
    Modularity of Mind
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2009.
    The concept of modularity has loomed large in philosophy of psychology since the early 1980s, following the publication of Fodor’s landmark book The Modularity of Mind (1983). In the decades since the term ‘module’ and its cognates first entered the lexicon of cognitive science, the conceptual and theoretical landscape in this area has changed dramatically. Especially noteworthy in this respect has been the development of evolutionary psychology, whose proponents adopt a less stringent conceptio…Read more
  •  90
    Knowing me, knowing you: Theory of mind and the machinery of introspection
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 11 (7-8): 129-143. 2004.
    Does the ability to know one's own mind depend on the ability to know the minds of others? According to the 'theory theory' of first-person mentalizing, the answer is yes. Recent alternative accounts of this ability, such as the 'monitoring theory', suggest otherwise. Focusing on the issue of introspective access to propositional attitudes , I argue that a better account of first-person mentalizing can be devised by combining these two theories. After sketching a hybrid account, I show how it ca…Read more
  •  90
    An unconstrained mind: Explaining belief in the afterlife
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29 (5): 484-484. 2006.
    Bering contends that belief in the afterlife is explained by the simulation constraint hypothesis: the claim that we cannot imagine what it is like to be dead. This explanation suffers from some difficulties. First, it implies the existence of a corresponding belief in the “beforelife.” Second, a simpler explanation will suffice. Rather than appeal to constraints on our thoughts about death, we suggest that belief in the afterlife can be better explained by the lack of such constraints.
  •  78
    Teaching & learning guide for: The ins and outs of introspection
    Philosophy Compass 3 (5): 1100-1102. 2008.
    Philosophical interest in introspection has a long and storied history, but only recently – with the 'scientific turn' in philosophy of mind – have philosophers sought to ground their accounts of introspection in psychological data. In particular, there is growing awareness of how evidence from clinical and developmental psychology might be brought to bear on long-standing debates about the architecture of introspection, especially in the form of apparent dissociations between introspection and …Read more
  •  75
    The Myth of Reverse Compositionality
    Philosophical Studies 125 (2): 251-275. 2005.
    In the context of debates about what form a theory of meaning should take, it is sometimes claimed that one cannot understand an intersective modifier-head construction (e.g., ‘pet fish’) without understanding its lexical parts. Neo-Russellians like Fodor and Lepore contend that non-denotationalist theories of meaning, such as prototype theory and theory theory, cannot explain why this is so, because they cannot provide for the ‘reverse compositional’ character of meaning. I argue that reverse c…Read more
  •  74
    The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition (edited book)
    Cambridge University Press. 2008.
    Since its inception some fifty years ago, cognitive science has seen a number of sea changes. Perhaps the best known is the development of connectionist models of cognition as an alternative to classical, symbol-based approaches. A more recent - and increasingly influential - trend is that of dynamical-systems-based, ecologically oriented models of the mind. Researchers suggest that a full understanding of the mind will require systematic study of the dynamics of interaction between mind, body, …Read more
  •  74
    Varieties of self-systems worth having
    with Pascal Boyer and Anthony I. Jack
    Consciousness and Cognition 14 (4): 647-660. 2005.
  •  71
    What compositionality still can do
    Philosophical Quarterly 51 (204): 328-336. 2001.
    Proponents of deflationism about meaning often claim that the principle of compositionality, when properly understood, places no constraint whatsoever on the nature of lexical meaning. This deflationary thesis admits of both strong and weak readings. On the strong reading, the principle does not rule out any theory of lexical meaning either alone or in conjunction with other independently plausible semantic assumptions. On the weak reading, the principle alone does not rule out any such theory. …Read more
  •  65
    The ins and outs of introspection
    Philosophy Compass 1 (6). 2006.
    Introspection admits of several varieties, depending on which types of mental events are introspected. I distinguish three kinds of introspection (primary, secondary, and tertiary) and three explanations of the general capacity: the inside access view, the outside access view, and the hybrid view. Drawing on recent evidence from clinical and developmental psychology, I argue that the inside view offers the most promising account of primary and secondary introspection.
  •  62
    Wegner's thesis that the experience of will is an illusion is not just wrong, it is an impediment to progress in psychology. We discuss two readings of Wegner's thesis and find that neither can motivate his larger conclusion. Wegner thinks science requires us to dismiss our experiences. Its real promise is to help us to make better sense of them.
  •  45
  •  34
    Guilt by dissociation: Why mindreading may not be prior to metacognition after all
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (2): 159-160. 2009.
    Carruthers argues that there is no developmental or clinical evidence that metacognition is dissociable from mindreading, and hence there is no reason to think that metacognition is prior to mindreading. A closer look at the evidence, however, reveals that these conclusions are premature at best
  •  24
    Will the Real Philosopher Behind the Last Logicist Please Stand Up?
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 36 (2): 265-287. 2010.
  •  17
    Recent research suggests that moral behavior attracts more praise, and immoral behavior less blame, when the agent has suffered in childhood. In this paper we report results from three studies in which a fictional character’s childhood was described in terms of either neglect and abuse (Adversity condition), love and care (Prosperity condition), or neutrally (Control condition). In Study 1 (N = 248), participants in the Adversity condition attributed more praise to a fictional character relative…Read more
  •  13
    Explaining ideology: Two factors are better than one
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (3): 326-328. 2014.
    Hibbing et al. (2014) contend that individual differences in political ideology can be substantially accounted for in terms of differences in a single psychological factor, namely, strength of negativity bias. We argue that, given the multidimensional structure of ideology, a better explanation of ideological variation will take into account both individual differences in negativity bias and differences in empathic concern.
  •  13
    What domain integration could not be
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25 (6): 696-697. 2002.
    Carruthers argues that natural language is the medium of non-domain-specific thought in humans. The general idea is that a certain type of thinking is conducted in natural language. It’ not exactly clear, however, what type of thinking this is. I suggest two different ways of interpreting Carruthers’ thesis on this point and argue that neither of them squares well with central-process modularism
  •  11
    Modularity and Mental Architecture
    WIREs Cognitive Science 4 (6): 641-648. 2013.
    Debates about the modularity of cognitive architecture have been ongoing for at least the past three decades, since the publication of Fodor’s landmark book The Modularity of Mind (1983). According to Fodor, modularity is essentially tied to informational encapsulation, and as such is only found in the relatively low-level cognitive systems responsible for perception and language. According to Fodor’s critics in the evolutionary psychology camp, modularity simply reflects the fine-grained functi…Read more
  •  8
    The Paradox of Self–Consciousness Revisited
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 83 (4): 424-443. 2002.
    The so–called paradox of self–consciousness suggests that self–consciousness, understood as the capacity to think about oneself in a first–person way, cannot be explained. The author of the paradox contends that the only way to avert this result is by invoking the notion of nonconceptual first–person thought. This contention is rooted in adherence to the Linguistic Priority Principle, which dictates that pre–and nonlinguistic creatures lack concepts. I argue that the latter claim is dubious, and…Read more