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13Symposium on P. Koralus, "The Erotetic Theory of Attention"Mind and Language Symposia at the Brains Blog. 2014.
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119Reasons-based moral judgment and the erotetic theoryIn Jean-François Bonnefon & Bastien Trémolière (eds.), Moral Inference, Psychology Press. 2017.We argue that moral decision making is reasons-based, focusing on the idea that people encounter decisions as questions to be answered and that they process reasons to the extent that they can see them as putative answers to those questions. After introducing our topic, we sketch the erotetic reasons-based framework for decision making. We then describe three experiments that extend this framework to moral decision making in different question frames, cast doubt on theories of moral decision mak…Read more
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12The erotetic theory of reasoning: Bridges between formal semantics and the psychology of deductive inferencePhilosophical Perspectives 27 (1): 312-365. 2013.
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17Illusory inferences with quantifiersThinking and Reasoning 23 (1): 33-48. 2017.The psychological study of reasoning with quantifiers has predominantly focused on inference patterns studied by Aristotle about two millennia ago. Modern logic has shown a wealth of inference patterns involving quantifiers that are far beyond the expressive power of Aristotelian syllogisms, and whose psychology should be explored. We bring to light a novel class of fallacious inference patterns, some of which are so attractive that they are tantamount to cognitive illusions. In tandem with rece…Read more
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4Reason and Inquiry: The Erotetic TheoryOxford University Press. 2022.This book presents a unified theory of the human capacity for reasoning and decision-making. The erotetic theory accounts for a diverse range of empirically documented fallacies and framing effects and shows how the same mental processes that yield fallacies can yield what logicians call first-order validity and probabilistic coherence in reasoning, as well as rational decision-making as conceived by economists. The central idea is that our minds naturally aim at resolving issues, and if we are …Read more
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A commitment-theoretic account of Moore's ParadoxIn Ken Turner & Laurence R. Horn (eds.), Pragmatics, truth and underspecification: towards an atlas of meaning, Brill. 2018.
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2Illusory inferences in a question-based theory of reasoningIn Ken Turner & Laurence R. Horn (eds.), Pragmatics, truth and underspecification: towards an atlas of meaning, Brill. 2018.
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26Is Morality Unified? Evidence that Distinct Neural Systems Underlie Moral Judgments of Harm, Dishonesty, and DisgustJournal of Cognitive Neuroscience 23 (10): 3162-3180. 2011.Much recent research has sought to uncover the neural basis of moral judgment. However, it has remained unclear whether "moral judgments" are sufficiently homogenous to be studied scientifically as a unified category. We tested this assumption by using fMRI to examine the neural correlates of moral judgments within three moral areas: (physical) harm, dishonesty, and (sexual) disgust. We found that the judgment ofmoral wrongness was subserved by distinct neural systems for each of the different m…Read more
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10Attention, consciousness, and the semantics of questionsSynthese 191 (2): 187-211. 2014.Attention influences the character of conscious perceptual experience in intricate and surprising ways, including our experience of contrast, space, and time. These patterns of influence have been argued to cause trouble for the attractive thesis that differences in the character of conscious experience flow from differences in what we represent. I present a novel theory of the functional role of attention that has the resources for a systematic representationalist account of these phenomena. On…Read more
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1The Open Instruction Theory of Attitude Reports and the Pragmatics of AnswersPhilosophers' Imprint 12 1-29. 2012.Reports on beliefs, desires, and other attitudes continue to raise foundational questions about linguistic meaning and the pragmatics of utterance interpretation. There is a strong intuition that an attitude report like ‘John believes that Mary smokes’ can simply convey the singular proposition that the individual Mary is believed by John to have the property of smoking. Yet, there is also a strong intuition that ‘Lois believes that Superman can fly’ can additionally convey how an individual is …Read more
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7The Necker cube and the productive class of related stimuli involving multiple depth interpretations driven by corner-like line junctions are often taken to be ambiguous. This idea is normally taken to be as little in need of defense as the claim that the Necker cube gives rise to multiple distinct percepts. In the philosophy of language, it is taken to be a substantive question whether a stimulus that affords multiple interpretations is a case of ambiguity. If we take into account what have bee…Read more
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8Descriptions, ambiguity, and representationalist theories of interpretationPhilosophical Studies 162 (2): 275-290. 2013.Abstract Theories of descriptions tend to involve commitments about the ambiguity of descriptions. For example, sentences containing descriptions are widely taken to be ambiguous between de re , de dicto , and intermediate interpretations and are sometimes thought to be ambiguous between the former and directly referential interpretations. I provide arguments to suggest that none of these interpretations are due to ambiguities (or indexicality). On the other hand, I argue that descriptions are…Read more
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25The Erotetic Theory of Attention: Questions, Focus and DistractionMind and Language 29 (1): 26-50. 2014.Attention has a role in much of perception, thought, and action. On the erotetic theory, the functional role of attention is a matter of the relationship between questions and what counts as answers to those questions. Questions encode the completion conditions of tasks for cognitive control purposes, and degrees of attention are degrees of sensitivity to the occurrence of answers. Questions and answers are representational contents given precise characterizations using tools from formal semanti…Read more
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