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48The baby in the lab-coat: Why child development is not an adequate model for understanding the development of scienceIn Peter Carruthers, Stephen P. Stich & Michael Siegal (eds.), The Cognitive Basis of Science, Cambridge University Press. 2002.Alison Gopnik and her collaborators have recently proposed a bold and intriguing hypothesis about the relationship between scientific cognition and cognitive development in childhood. According to this view, the processes underlying cognitive development in infants and children and the processes underlying scientific cognition are _identical_. We argue that Gopnik’s bold hypothesis is untenable because it, along with much of cognitive science, neglects the many important ways in which human mind…Read more
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6Experimental PhilosophyIn Herman Cappelen, Tamar Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology, Oxford University Press. 2016.Experimental philosophy is an extension of the Naturalists’ Challenge to the use of intuitions in philosophy. This chapter explores this challenge and traditional or “armchair” responses to it, focusing especially on the case of reference. It first considers the role and nature of intuitions, along with two kinds of experimental philosophical challenges to their use: the challenge from irrelevant determination and the challenge from diversity. It then explores using the challenge from diversity …Read more
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614Transgressors, victims, and cry babies: Is basic moral judgment spared in autism?Social Neuroscience 1 270283. 2006.Human social intelligence comprises a wide range of complex cognitive and affective processes that appear to be selectively impaired in autistic spectrum disorders. The study of these neuro- developmental disorders and the study of canonical social intelligence have advanced rapidly over the last twenty years by investigating the two together. Specifically, studies of autism have provided important insights into the nature of ‘theory of mind’ abilities, their normal development and underlying ne…Read more
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292Racial cognition and normative racial theoryIn John Doris (ed.), Moral Psychology Handbook, Oxford University Press. pp. 432--471. 2010.
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56The role of psychology in the study of cultureBehavioral and Brain Sciences 29 (4): 355-355. 2006.Although we are enthusiastic about a Darwinian approach to culture, we argue that the overview presented in the target article does not sufficiently emphasize the crucial explanatory role that psychology plays in the study of culture. We use a number of examples to illustrate the variety of ways by which appeal to psychological factors can help explain cultural phenomena. (Published Online November 9 2006).
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90Semantics, Cross-Cultural StyleO Gnition 92. 2004.Theories of reference have been central to analytic philosophy, and two views, the descriptivist view of reference and the causal-historical view of reference, have dominated the field. In this research tradition, theories of reference are assessed by consulting one's intuitions about the reference of terms in hypothetical situations. However, recent work in cultural psychology has shown systematic differences between East Asians and Westerners, and some work indicates that this extends to intui…Read more
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6118 The baby in the lab-coat: why child development is not an adequate model for understanding the development of scienceIn Peter Carruthers, Stephen P. Stich & Michael Siegal (eds.), The Cognitive Basis of Science, Cambridge University Press. 2002.Alison Gopnik and her collaborators have recently proposed a bold and intriguing hypothesis about the relationship between scientific cognition and cognitive development in childhood. According to this view, the processes underlying cognitive development in infants and children and the processes underlying scientific cognition are _identical_. We argue that Gopnik’s bold hypothesis is untenable because it, along with much of cognitive science, neglects the many important ways in which human mind…Read more
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57RulesIn John Doris (ed.), Moral Psychology Handbook, Oxford University Press. 2010.Is it wrong to torture prisoners of war for fun? Is it wrong to yank on someone’s hair with no provocation? Is it wrong to push an innocent person in front of a train in order to save five innocent people tied to the tracks? If you are like most people, you answered "yes" to each of these questions. A venerable account of human moral judgment, influential in both philosophy and psychology, holds that these judgments are underpinned by internally represented principles or rules and reasoning abou…Read more
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1. Moral Rules and Moral ReasoningIn John Doris (ed.), Moral Psychology Handbook, Oxford University Press. pp. 297. 2010.
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2The Science of EthicsIn Hugh LaFollette - (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theory, Blackwell. pp. 169-196. 2000.Perhaps the most visible trend in philosophical ethics over the first years of the twenty‐first century has been the remarkable number of moral philosophers referencing, and producing, empirical work. In moral psychology and experimental philosophy, the fields where this “empirical turn” is most evident, papers, anthologies, and monographs are appearing at a dizzying clip. Among the philosophers and scientists involved, the tone is often exuberant, with partisans claiming progress in debates tha…Read more
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119Socializing Metaphysics: The Nature of Social RealityRowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2003.Socializing Metaphysics supplies diverse answers to the basic questions of social metaphysics, from a broad array of voices. It will interest all philosophers and social scientists concerned with mind, action, or the foundations of social theory.
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48Philosophy: Traditional and Experimental ReadingsOup Usa. 2012.Recently, the fields of empirical and experimental philosophy have generated tremendous excitement, due to unexpected results that have challenged philosophical dogma. Responding to this trend, Philosophy: Traditional and Experimental Readings is the first introductory philosophy reader to integrate cutting-edge work in empirical and experimental philosophy with traditional philosophy. Featuring coverage that is equal parts historical, contemporary, and empirical/experimental, this topically org…Read more
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Semantics, Cross-Cultural StyleIn Joshua Michael Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Experimental Philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2008.
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12ReferenceIn Wesley Buckwalter & Justin Sytsma (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy, Blackwell. 2016.This chapter summarizes much of the recent work in experimental philosophy. It begins with some background, introducing the philosophical dispute between descriptivists and causal‐historical accounts of reference that has served as the primary focus of experimental work. The chapter also reviews some reasons to think that understanding reference may have very general philosophical implications. It introduces preliminary experimental work on reference by Edouard Machery, Ron Mallon, Shaun Nichols…Read more
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11Applied Philosophy of Social ScienceIn Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Kimberley Brownlee & David Coady (eds.), A Companion to Applied Philosophy, Wiley. 2016.A traditional social scientific divide concerns the centrality of the interpretation of local understandings as opposed to attending to relatively general factors in understanding human individual and group differences. We consider one of the most common social scientific variables, race, and ask how to conceive of its causal power. We suggest that any plausible attempt to model the causal effects of such constructed social roles will involve close interplay between interpretationist and more ge…Read more
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59Transgressors, victims, and cry babies: Is basic moral judgment spared in autism?Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophyof (from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) forthcoming in Social Neuroscience. [nearly final draft in .pdf] An empirical investigation of moral judgment in autism.
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164Moral dilemmas and moral rulesCognition 100 (3): 530-542. 2006.Recent work shows an important asymmetry in lay intuitions about moral dilemmas. Most people think it is permissible to divert a train so that it will kill one innocent person instead of five, but most people think that it is not permissible to push a stranger in front of a train to save five innocents. We argue that recent emotion-based explanations of this asymmetry have neglected the contribution that rules make to reasoning about moral dilemmas. In two experiments, we find that participants sho…Read more
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99Dual Processes and Moral RulesEmotion Review 3 (3): 284-285. 2011.Recent work proclaims a dominant role for automatic, intuitive, and emotional processes in producing ordinary moral judgment, despite the fact that we have little direct evidence about moral judgment “in the wild.” Indirect support comes via an assumption of dual-process theory: that conscious, reasoning processes are resource intensive. We argue that reasoning that employs consciously available moral rules undermines this assumption, but this has not been appreciated because of a failure to dis…Read more
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522Against Arguments from ReferencePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 79 (2). 2009.It is common in various quarters of philosophy to derive philosophically significant conclusions from theories of reference. In this paper, we argue that philosophers should give up on such 'arguments from reference.' Intuitions play a central role in establishing theories of reference, and recent cross-cultural work suggests that intuitions about reference vary across cultures and between individuals within a culture (Machery et al. 2004). We argue that accommodating this variation within a the…Read more
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263If Folk Intuitions Vary, Then What?Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 86 (3): 618-635. 2012.We have recently presented evidence for cross-cultural variation in semantic intuitions and explored the implications of such variation for philosophical arguments that appeal to some theory of reference as a premise. Devitt (2011) and Ichikawa and colleagues (forthcoming) offer critical discussions of the experiment and the conclusions that can be drawn from it. In this response, we reiterate and clarify what we are really arguing for, and we show that most of Devitt’s and Ichikawa and colleagu…Read more
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930Semantics, cross-cultural styleCognition 92 (3): 1-12. 2004.Theories of reference have been central to analytic philosophy, and two views, the descriptivist view of reference and the causal-historical view of reference, have dominated the field. In this research tradition, theories of reference are assessed by consulting one’s intuitions about the reference of terms in hypothetical situations. However, recent work in cultural psychology (e.g., Nisbett et al. 2001) has shown systematic cognitive differences between East Asians and Westerners, and some wor…Read more
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460Accentuate the NegativeReview of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (2): 297-314. 2010.Our interest in this paper is to drive a wedge of contention between two different programs that fall under the umbrella of “experimental philosophy”. In particular, we argue that experimental philosophy’s “negative program” presents almost as significant a challenge to its “positive program” as it does to more traditional analytic philosophy.
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82What's at Stake in the Race Debate?Southern Journal of Philosophy 60 (S1): 54-72. 2022.How can there be so much apparent disagreement about what race is, when there is so much agreement on the facts surrounding race? In this paper, I develop this puzzle and consider several interpretations of work in the philosophy of race to try to answer it, several ways of understanding what the metaphysics of race is doing. I consider and reject the possibility that apparent disagreement is metaphysically substantive, and I also consider and reject the view that apparent disagreement primarily…Read more
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19Review of Elizabeth Hannon and Tim Lewens’s Why We Disagree About Human Nature - Elizabeth Hannon, and Tim Lewens (eds.), Why We Disagree About Human Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2018), 240 pp., $44.95 (hardcover; also available as an e-book) (review)Philosophy of Science 89 (2): 405-407. 2022.
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80Racial Attitudes, Accumulation Mechanisms, and DisparitiesReview of Philosophy and Psychology 12 (4): 953-975. 2021.Some psychologists aim to secure a role for psychological explanations in understanding contemporary social disparities, a concern that plays out in debates over the relevance of the Implicit Association Test. Meta-analysts disagree about the predictive validity of the IAT and about the importance of implicit attitudes in explaining racial disparities. Here, I use the IAT to articulate and explore one route to establishing the relevance of psychological attitudes with small effects: an appeal to…Read more
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104What Is Race? Four Philosophical ViewsAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 98 (4): 835-835. 2020.Philosophy of race has experienced a vibrant period of development over the last three decades, and the fruits of this development, as well as its continuation, are fully on display in this book of...
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2Accentuate the NegativeIn Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Experimental Philosophy: Volume 2, Oxford University Press Usa. 2013.There are two ways of understanding experimental philosophy's process of appealing to intuitions as evidence for or against philosophical claims: the positive and negative programs. This chapter deals with how the positivist method of conceptual analysis is affected by the results of the negative program. It begins by describing direct extramentalism, semantic mentalism, conceptual mentalism, and mechanist mentalism, all of which argue that intuitions are credible sources of evidence and will th…Read more
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189Ambiguous ReferenceMind 125 (497): 145-175. 2016.One of the central debates in the philosophy of language is that between defenders of the causal-historical and descriptivist theories of reference. Most philosophers involved in the debate support one or the other of the theories. Building on recent experimental work in semantics, we argue that there is a sense in which both theories are correct. In particular, we defend the view that natural kind terms can sometimes take on a causal-historical reading and at other times take on a descriptivist…Read more
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709Applied Philosophy of Social Science: The Social Construction of RaceIn Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Kimberley Brownlee & David Coady (eds.), A Companion to Applied Philosophy, Wiley. pp. 441-454. 2016.A traditional social scientific divide concerns the centrality of the interpretation of local understandings as opposed to attending to relatively general factors in understanding human individual and group differences. We consider one of the most common social scientific variables, race, and ask how to conceive of its causal power. We suggest that any plausible attempt to model the causal effects of such constructed social roles will involve close interplay between interpretationist and more …Read more
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