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87Number Concepts: An Interdisciplinary InquiryCambridge University Press. 2024.This Element, written for researchers and students in philosophy and the behavioral sciences, reviews and critically assesses extant work on number concepts in developmental psychology and cognitive science. It has four main aims. First, it characterizes the core commitments of mainstream number cognition research, including the commitment to representationalism, the hypothesis that there exist certain number-specific cognitive systems, and the key milestones in the development of number cogniti…Read more
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11The Concept of Innateness as an Object of Empirical EnquiryIn Justin Sytsma & Wesley Buckwalter (eds.), A Companion to Experimental Philosophy, Wiley. 2016.The concept of innateness has historically exerted an influence in many regions of biology and it continues to play a significant role in cognitive science especially, developmental psychology and linguistics. This chapter provides an overview of some recent efforts to empirically study the innateness concept, both as deployed in folk contexts and among scientists. It considers whether this research really bolsters the standard criticism. The chapter describes research by Paul Griffiths and his …Read more
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Massive modularityIn E. Margolis, R. Samuels & S. Stich (eds.), Oxford handbook of philosophy of cognitive science, Oxford University Press. 2012.
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Is the human mind massively modular?In Robert J. Stainton (ed.), Contemporary Debates in Cognitive Science, Wiley-blackwell. 2006.
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132Cognitive Science and Explanations of PsychopathologyIn K. W. M. Fulford (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry, Oxford University Press. pp. 413-433. 2013.This chapter examines the core explanatory strategies of cognitive science and their application to the study of psychopathology. In addition to providing a taxonomy of different strategies, we illustrate their application, with special attention to Autism Spectrum Disorder and Major Depressive Disorder. We conclude by considering two challenges to the prospects of a developed cognitive science of psychopathology.
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146Cardinals, Ordinals, and the Prospects for a Fregean FoundationIn Anthony O'Hear (ed.), Metaphysics, Cambridge University Press. 2018.There are multiple formal characterizations of the natural numbers available. Despite being inter-derivable, they plausibly codify different possible applications of the naturals – doing basic arithmetic, counting, and ordering – as well as different philosophical conceptions of those numbers: structuralist, cardinal, and ordinal. Nevertheless, some influential philosophers of mathematics have argued for a non-egalitarian attitude according to which one of those characterizations is more “legitm…Read more
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38Computability, Notation, and de re Knowledge of NumbersPhilosophies 7 (1): 20. 2022.Saul Kripke once noted that there is a tight connection between computation and de re knowledge of whatever the computation acts upon. For example, the Euclidean algorithm can produce knowledge of _which number_ is the greatest common divisor of two numbers. Arguably, algorithms operate directly on syntactic items, such as strings, and on numbers and the like only via how the numbers are represented. So we broach matters of _notation_. The purpose of this article is to explore the relationship b…Read more
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271Computability, Notation, and de re Knowledge of NumbersPhilosophies 1 (7). 2022.Saul Kripke once noted that there is a tight connection between computation and de re knowledge of whatever the computation acts upon. For example, the Euclidean algorithm can produce knowledge of which number is the greatest common divisor of two numbers. Arguably, algorithms operate directly on syntactic items, such as strings, and on numbers and the like only via how the numbers are represented. So we broach matters of notation. The purpose of this article is to explore the relationship betwe…Read more
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393Resolving Frege’s Other PuzzlePhilosophica Mathematica 30 (1): 59-87. 2022.Number words seemingly function both as adjectives attributing cardinality properties to collections, as in Frege’s ‘Jupiter has four moons’, and as names referring to numbers, as in Frege’s ‘The number of Jupiter’s moons is four’. This leads to what Thomas Hofweber calls Frege’s Other Puzzle: How can number words function as modifiers and as singular terms if neither adjectives nor names can serve multiple semantic functions? Whereas most philosophers deny that one of these uses is genuine, we …Read more
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203Hofweber’s Nominalist NaturalismIn Gianluigi Oliveri, Claudio Ternullo & Stefano Boscolo (eds.), Objects, Structures, and Logics. pp. 31-62. 2022.In this paper, we outline and critically evaluate Thomas Hofweber’s solution to a semantic puzzle he calls Frege’s Other Puzzle. After sketching the Puzzle and two traditional responses to it—the Substantival Strategy and the Adjectival Strategy—we outline Hofweber’s proposed version of Adjectivalism. We argue that two key components—the syntactic and semantic components—of Hofweber’s analysis both suffer from serious empirical difficulties. Ultimately, this suggests that an altogether different…Read more
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752Delusions and madmen: against rationality constraints on beliefSynthese 200 (3): 1-30. 2022.According to the Rationality Constraint, our concept of belief imposes limits on how much irrationality is compatible with having beliefs at all. We argue that empirical evidence of human irrationality from the psychology of reasoning and the psychopathology of delusion undermines only the most demanding versions of the Rationality Constraint, which require perfect rationality as a condition for having beliefs. The empirical evidence poses no threat to more relaxed versions of the Rationality Co…Read more
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23Unwarranted philosophical assumptions in research on ANSBehavioral and Brain Sciences 44. 2021.Clarke and Beck import certain assumptions about the nature of numbers. Although these are widespread within research on number cognition, they are highly contentious among philosophers of mathematics. In this commentary, we isolate and critically evaluate one core assumption: the identity thesis.
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404Reasoning, Rules and RepresentationIn Sorin Bangu (ed.), Naturalizing Logico-Mathematical Knowledge: Approaches From Psychology and Cognitive Science, Routledge. pp. 30-51. 2018.
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203Introduction: Advances in Experimental Philosophy of ScienceIn Richard Samuels & Daniel A. Wilkenfeld (eds.), Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Science, Bloomsbury. pp. 1-12. 2019.In this chapter we explain what experimental philosophy of science is, how it relates to the philosophy of science, and STS more broadly, and what sorts of contributions is can make to ongoing research in the philosophy of science.
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4Could Emotion Development Really Be the Acquisition of Emotion Concepts?Developmental Psychology 55 (9): 2015-2019. 2019.Emotion development research centrally concerns capacities to produce emotions and to think about them. We distinguish these enterprises and consider a novel account of how they might be related. On one recent account, the capacity to have emotions of various kinds comes by way of the acquisition of emotion concepts. This account relies on a constructionist theory of emotions and an embodied theory of emotion concepts. We explicate these elements, then raise a challenge for the approach. It appe…Read more
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36Hale’s argument from transitive countingSynthese 198 (3): 1905-1933. 2019.A core commitment of Bob Hale and Crispin Wright’s neologicism is their invocation of Frege’s Constraint—roughly, the requirement that the core empirical applications for a class of numbers be “built directly into” their formal characterization. According to these neologicists, if legitimate, Frege’s Constraint adjudicates in favor of their preferred foundation—Hume’s Principle—and against alternatives, such as the Dedekind–Peano axioms. In this paper, we consider a recent argument for legitimat…Read more
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22Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Science (edited book)Bloomsbury. 2019.This volume gathers together leading philosophers of science and cognitive scientists from around the world to provide one of the first book-length studies of this important and emerging field. Specific topics considered include learning and the nature of scientific knowledge, the cognitive consequences of exposure to explanations, climate change, and mechanistic reasoning and abstraction. Chapters explore how experimental methods can be applied to questions about the nature of science and show …Read more
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460The Concept of Innateness as an Object of Empirical EnquiryIn Justin Sytsma & Wesley Buckwalter (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy, Blackwell. pp. 504-519. 2016.
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460Classical Computational ModelsIn Mark Sprevak & Matteo Colombo (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Computational Mind, Routledge. pp. 103-119. 2018.
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87Neologicism, Frege's Constraint, and the Frege‐Heck ConditionNoûs 54 (1): 54-77. 2018.One of the more distinctive features of Bob Hale and Crispin Wright’s neologicism about arithmetic is their invocation of Frege’s Constraint – roughly, the requirement that the core empirical applications for a class of numbers be “built directly into” their formal characterization. In particular, they maintain that, if adopted, Frege’s Constraint adjudicates in favor of their preferred foundation – Hume’s Principle – and against alternatives, such as the Dedekind-Peano axioms. In what foll…Read more
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60Cardinals, Ordinals, and the Prospects for a Fregean FoundationRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 82 77-107. 2018.There are multiple formal characterizations of the natural numbers available. Despite being inter-derivable, they plausibly codify different possible applications of the naturals – doing basic arithmetic, counting, and ordering – as well as different philosophical conceptions of those numbers: structuralist, cardinal, and ordinal. Some influential philosophers of mathematics have argued for a non-egalitarian attitude according to which one of those characterizations is ‘more basic’ or ‘more fund…Read more
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1Massively Modular Minds: The Nature, Plausibility and Philosophical Implications of Evolutionary PsychologyDissertation, Rutgers the State University of New Jersey - New Brunswick. 1998.This dissertation focuses on the massive modularity hypothesis defended by evolutionary psychologists---the hypothesis that the human mind is composed largely or perhaps even entirely of special purpose information processing organs or "modulees" that have been shaped by natural selection to handle the sorts of recurrent information processing problems that confronted our hunter-gatherer forebears. ;In discussing MMH, I have three central goals. First, I aim to clarify the hypothesis and develop…Read more
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33Analytic Pragmatism and Universal LX VocabularyPhilosophia 45 (4): 1-25. 2017.In his recent John Locke Lectures – published as Between Saying and Doing – Brandom extends and refines his views on the nature of language and philosophy by developing a position that he calls Analytic Pragmatism. Although Brandom’s project bears on an extraordinarily rich array of different philosophical issues, we focus here on the contention that certain vocabularies have a privileged status within our linguistic practices, and that when adequately understood, the practices in which these vo…Read more
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163The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Cognitive Science (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2012.The philosophy of cognitive science is concerned with fundamental philosophical and theoretical questions connected to the sciences of the mind. How does the brain give rise to conscious experience? Does speaking a language change how we think? Is a genuinely intelligent computer possible? What features of the mind are innate? Advances in cognitive science have given philosophers important tools for addressing these sorts of questions; and cognitive scientists have, in turn, found themselves d…Read more
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54Is innateness a confused notion?In Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence & Stephen P. Stich (eds.), The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents, Oxford University Press On Demand. 2005.
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158Ending the Rationality Wars: How to Make Disputes about Human Rationality DisappearIn Renee Elio (ed.), Common Sense, Reasoning and Rationality, Oxford University Press. pp. 236-268. 2002.During the last 25 years, researchers studying human reasoning and judgment in what has become known as the “heuristics and biases” tradition have produced an impressive body of experimental work which many have seen as having “bleak implications” for the rationality of ordinary people (Nisbett and Borgida 1975). According to one proponent of this view, when we reason about probability we fall victim to “inevitable illusions” (Piattelli-Palmarini 1994). Other proponents maintain that the human m…Read more
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205Science and Human NatureRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 70 1-28. 2012.There is a puzzling tension in contemporary scientific attitudes towards human nature. On the one hand, evolutionary biologists correctly maintain that the traditional essentialist conception of human nature is untenable; and moreover that this is obviously so in the light of quite general and exceedingly well-known evolutionary considerations. On the other hand, talk of human nature abounds in certain regions of the sciences, especially in linguistics, psychology and cognitive science. In this …Read more
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130Massively modular minds: Evolutionary psychology and cognitive architectureIn Peter Carruthers (ed.), Evolution and the Human Mind: Modularity, Language and Meta-Cognition, Cambridge University Press. pp. 13--46. 2000.What are the elements from which the human mind is composed? What structures make up our _cognitive architecture?_ One of the most recent and intriguing answers to this question comes from the newly emerging interdisciplinary field of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychologists defend a _massively modular_ conception of mental architecture which views the mind –including those parts responsible for such ‘central processes’ as belief revision and reasoning— as composed largely or perhaps …Read more
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98Delusions as a Natural KindIn Matthew Broome & Lisa Bortolotti (eds.), Psychiatry as Cognitive Neuroscience: Philosophical Perspectives, Oxford University Press. pp. 49--79. 2009.
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1699Overselling the case against normativismBehavioral and Brain Sciences 34 (5): 255-255. 2011.Though we are in broad agreement with much of Elqayam & Evans' (E&E's) position, we criticize two aspects of their argument. First, rejecting normativism is unlikely to yield the benefits that E&E seek. Second, their conception of rational norms is overly restrictive and, as a consequence, their arguments at most challenge a relatively restrictive version of normativism
Columbus, Ohio, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |