•  57
    Rules
    In John M. 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
  •  131
    Race and racial cognition
    with Daniel Kelly and Edouard Machery
    In John M. Doris (ed.), Moral Psychology Handbook, Oxford University Press. 2010.
    A core question of contemporary social morality concerns how we ought to handle racial categorization. By this we mean, for instance, classifying or thinking of a person as Black, Korean, Latino, White, etc.² While it is widely FN:2 agreed that racial categorization played a crucial role in past racial oppression, there remains disagreement among philosophers and social theorists about the ideal role for racial categorization in future endeavors. At one extreme of this disagreement are short-ter…Read more
  • 1. Moral Rules and Moral Reasoning
    In John M. Doris (ed.), Moral Psychology Handbook, Oxford University Press. pp. 297. 2010.
  •  568
    Racial cognition and normative racial theory
    with Daniel Kelly and Edouard Machery
    In John M. Doris (ed.), Moral Psychology Handbook, Oxford University Press. pp. 432--471. 2010.
  • The Science of Ethics
    In Hugh LaFollette & Ingmar Persson (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theory, Blackwell. pp. 169-196. 2013.
    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
  •  27
    Evolution of morality
    In John M. Doris (ed.), Moral Psychology Handbook, Oxford University Press. pp. 3. 2010.
  •  101
    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.
  •  31
    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
  • Semantics, Cross-Cultural Style
    with Edouard Macher, Shaun Nichols, and Stephen Stich
    In Joshua Michael Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Experimental Philosophy, Oup Usa. 2008.
  •  2
    Reference
    with Mike Dacey
    In Justin Sytsma & Wesley Buckwalter (eds.), A Companion to Experimental Philosophy, Wiley. 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
  •  2
    Applied Philosophy of Social Science
    In 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
  •  166
    Naturalistic approaches to social construction
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2009.
    Social “construction,” “constructionism” and “constructivism” are terms in wide use in the humanities and social sciences, and are applied to a diverse range of objects including the emotions, gender, race, sex, homo- and hetero-sexuality, mental illness, technology, quarks, facts, reality, and truth. This sort of terminology plays a number of different roles in different discourses, only some of which are philosophically interesting, and fewer of which admit of a “naturalistic” approach—an appr…Read more
  •  59
    Transgressors, victims, and cry babies: Is basic moral judgment spared in autism?
    with Alan M. Leslie and Jennifer DiCorcia
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
    of (from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) forthcoming in Social Neuroscience. [nearly final draft in .pdf] An empirical investigation of moral judgment in autism.
  •  34
    Griffiths and Machery contend that the concept of innateness should be dispensed with in the sciences. We contend that, once that concept is properly understood as what we have called 'closed process invariance', it is still of significant use in the sciences, especially cognitive science.
  •  536
    Evolutionary psychology and social constructionism are widely regarded as fundamentally irreconcilable approaches to the social sciences. Focusing on the study of the emotions, we argue that this appearance is mistaken. Much of what appears to be an empirical disagreement between evolutionary psychologists and social constructionists over the universality or locality of emotional phenomena is actually generated by an implicit philosophical dispute resulting from the adoption of different theorie…Read more
  •  133
    Intention, temporal order, and moral judgments
    with Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Tom Mccoy, and Jay G. Hull
    Mind and Language 23 (1). 2008.
    The traditional philosophical doctrine of double effect claims that agents’ intentions affect whether acts are morally wrong. Our behavioral study reveals that agents’ intentions do affect whether acts are judged morally wrong, whereas the temporal order of good and bad effects affects whether acts are classified as killings. This finding suggests that the moral judgments are not based on the classifications. Our results also undermine recent claims that prior moral judgments determine whether a…Read more
  •  110
    Innateness as Closed Process Invariance
    Philosophy of Science 73 (3): 323-344. 2006.
    Controversies over the innateness of cognitive processes, mechanisms, and structures play a persistent role in driving research in philosophy as well as the cognitive sciences, but the appropriate way to understand the category of the innate remains subject to dispute. One venerable approach in philosophy and cognitive science merely contrasts innate features with those that are learned. In fact, Jerry Fodor has recently suggested that this remains our best handle on innateness
  •  141
    Moral dilemmas and moral rules
    Cognition 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
  •  201
    Was Race thinking invented in the modern West?
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 44 (1): 77-88. 2013.
    The idea that genuinely racial thinking is a modern invention is widespread in the humanities and social sciences. However, it is not always clear exactly what the content of such a conceptual break is supposed to be. One suggestion is that with the scientific revolution emerged a conception of human groups that possessed essences that were thought to explain group-typical features of individuals as well the accumulated products of cultures or civilizations. However, recent work by cognitive and…Read more
  •  97
    What Is Race? Four Philosophical Views
    Australasian 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...
  •  127
    Sources of Racialism
    Journal of Social Philosophy 41 (3): 272-292. 2010.
  •  170
    Social Construction and Achieving Reference
    Noûs 51 (1): 113-131. 2017.
    One influential view is that at least some putatively natural human kinds are actually social constructions, understood as some real kind of thing that is produced or sustained by our social and conceptual practices. Category constructionists share two commitments: they hold that human category terms like “race” and “sex” and “homosexuality” and “perversion” actually refer to constructed categories, and they hold that these categories are widely but mistakenly taken to be natural kinds. But it i…Read more
  •  541
    ‘Race': Normative, Not Metaphysical or Semantic
    Ethics 116 (3): 525-551. 2006.
    In recent years, there has been a flurry of work on the metaphysics of race. While it is now widely accepted that races do not share robust, bio-behavioral essences, opinions differ over what, if anything, race is. Recent work has been divided between three apparently quite different answers. A variety of theorists argue for racial skepticism, the view that races do not exist at all.[iv] A second group defends racial constructionism, holding that races are in some way socially constructed.[v],[v…Read more
  •  2
    Knobe versus Machery: Testing the Trade‐Off Hypothesis
    Mind and Language 23 (2): 247-255. 2008.
    Recent work by Joshua Knobe has established that people are more likely to describe bad but foreseen side‐effects as intentionally performed than good but foreseen side‐effects (this is sometimes called the ‘Knobe effect’ or the ‘side‐effect effect’. Edouard Machery has proposed a novel explanation for this asymmetry: it results from construing the bad side‐effect as a cost that must be incurred to receive a benefit. In this paper, I argue that Machery’s ‘trade‐off hypothesis’ is wrong. I do thi…Read more
  •  239
    Human categories beyond non-essentialism
    Journal of Political Philosophy 15 (2). 2007.
    In recent years, numerous articles and books in the humanities and the social sciences have been devoted to understanding the ascription of race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, mental illness, and other ‘human kind’ concepts to persons. What may be more surprising given the enormous volume of this research and the diversity of its sources is that much of it shares a common commitment to understanding the categories picked out by these concepts in an non- essentialist way. For example, Ir…Read more
  •  76
    Dual Processes and Moral Rules
    Emotion 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
  •  115
    Constructing race: racialization, causal effects, or both?
    Philosophical Studies 175 (5): 1039-1056. 2018.
    Social constructionism about race is a common view, but there remain questions about what exactly constitutes constructed race. Some hold that our concepts and conceptual practices construct race, and some hold that the causal consequences of these concepts and conceptual practices also play a role. But there is a third option, which is that the causal effects of our concepts and conceptual practices constitute race, but not the concepts and conceptual practices themselves. This paper reconsider…Read more
  •  79
    Arguments from reference and the worry about dependence
    In Peter A. French & Howard K. Wettstein (eds.), Philosophy and the Empirical, Blackwell. pp. 160-183. 2007.
    This paper raises concern with the use of theories of reference in philosophical discourse and then to consider the possibility of empirically validating this concern by reference to a novel sort of “quantitative” empirical approach suggested recently by Shaun Nichols (forthcoming). The concern is whether the particular theories of reference or reference relations employed in particular philosophical discussions are actually chosen with a view to entailing or accommodating a desired philosophica…Read more
  •  369
    A field guide to social construction
    Philosophy Compass 2 (1). 2006.
    forthcoming in Philosophy Compass [penultimate draft .pdf file] A survey of the contemporary social constructionist landscape.