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Modern moral psychology: An introduction to the terrainIn Bertram Malle & Philip Robbins (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Moral Psychology, Cambridge University Press. 2021.
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Moral categorization and mind perceptionIn Bertram Malle & Philip Robbins (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Moral Psychology, Cambridge University Press. 2021.In this chapter I discuss the role of mind perception in the categorization of individuals as moral agents and moral patients. Moral agents are defined as individuals that can commit morally wrong actions and deserve to be held accountable for those actions; moral patients are defined as individuals that can be morally wronged and whose interests are worthy of moral consideration. It is generally agreed that the attribution of moral agency and moral patiency is linked to the attribution of menta…Read more
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177Good deeds and hard knocks: The effect of past suffering on praise for moral behaviorJournal 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
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30Deformative experience: Explaining the effects of adversity on moral evaluationSocial Cognition 41 (5): 415-446. 2023.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
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23The Cambridge Handbook of Moral Psychology (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2021.Moral psychology—broadly speaking, the study of how people reason and act morally—has a long and productive history. Initially a subfield of philosophy, it posed groundbreaking questions about the nature of values and virtues, the balance of reason and emotion, and the gap between “is” and “ought.” In the twentieth century, the rise of psychology expanded the a priori philosophical enterprise into an empirical science. In psychology, perspectives of development, social interaction, cognition, an…Read more
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11Will the real philosopher behind the last logicist please stand up?Southern Journal of Philosophy 36 (2): 265-287. 1998.
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1075Are 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.
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18What domain integration could not beBehavioral 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
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Minimalism and ModularityIn Gerhard Preyer & Georg Peter (eds.), Context-sensitivity and semantic minimalism: new essays on semantics and pragmatics, Oxford University Press. 2007.
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31Will the Real Philosopher Behind the Last Logicist Please Stand Up?Southern Journal of Philosophy 36 (2): 265-287. 2010.
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64Review: Alvin I. Goldman: Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading (review)Mind 117 (468): 1076-1079. 2008.
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Crime, Punishment, and CausationPsychology, Public Policy, and Law 24 (1): 118-127. 2018.Moral judgments about a situation are profoundly shaped by the perception of individuals in that situation as either moral agents or moral patients (Gray & Wegner, 2009; Gray, Young, & Waytz, 2012), Specifically, the more we see someone as a moral agent, the less we see them as a moral patient, and vice versa. As a result, casting the perpetrator of a transgression as a victim tends to have the effect of making them seem less blameworthy (Gray & Wegner, 2011). Based on this theoretical framework…Read more
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Content and Self-ConsciousnessDissertation, The University of Chicago. 2000.A naturalistic account of self-consciousness is developed within a general framework in which thought contents are structured by concepts but conceptual content need not be exhausted at the level of reference. To motivate the first feature of this framework, possible-worlds- and property-based theories of thought content, which eschew structure, are criticized for overestimating and/or underestimating the attitude stock of ordinary agents. To motivate the second feature, it is argued that neo-Ru…Read more
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400The phenomenal stancePhilosophical 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
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Review of Peter Gardenfors' Conceptual spaces (review)Philosophical Psychology 15 (2): 200-202. 2002.
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23Explaining ideology: Two factors are better than oneBehavioral 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.
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73The illusory triumph of machine over mind: Wegner's eliminativism and the real promise of psychologyBehavioral and Brain Sciences 27 (5): 665-666. 2004.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.
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53The Myth of Reverse CompositionalityPhilosophical 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
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94Knowing me, knowing you: Theory of mind and the machinery of introspectionJournal 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
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106An unconstrained mind: Explaining belief in the afterlifeBehavioral 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.
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316Experimental PhilosophyOxford Bibliographies Online (1): 81-92. 2006.Bibliography of works in experimental philosophy.
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196To 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
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SystematicityIn Keith Brown (ed.), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Elsevier. pp. 12--440. 2005.
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39Guilt by dissociation: Why mindreading may not be prior to metacognition after allBehavioral 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
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146The Phenomenal Stance RevisitedReview 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
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22Modularity and Mental ArchitectureWIREs 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
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45The paradox of self-consciousness revisitedPacific Philosophical Quarterly 84 (4): 424-443. 2003.
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1Minimalism and modularityIn Gerhard Preyer & Georg Peter (eds.), Context-sensitivity and semantic minimalism: new essays on semantics and pragmatics, Oxford University Press. pp. 303--319. 2007.
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1More than a feeling: counterintuitive effects of compassion on moral judgmentIn Justin Sytsma (ed.), Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Mind, Bloomsbury. pp. 125-179. 2014.Seminal work in moral neuroscience by Joshua Greene and colleagues employed variants of the well-known trolley problems to identify two brain networks which compete with each other to determine moral judgments. Greene interprets the tension between these brain networks using a dual process account which pits deliberative reason against automatic emotion-driven intuitions: reason versus passion. Recent neuroscientific evidence suggests, however, that the critical tension that Greene identifies as…Read more
Columbia, Missouri, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Psychology |