-
Visual adaptation and the purpose of perceptionAnalysis 83 (3): 555-575. 2023.
-
Mental StructuresNoûs (3): 649-677. 2020.An ongoing philosophical discussion concerns how various types of mental states fall within broad representational genera—for example, whether perceptual states are “iconic” or “sentential,” “analog” or “digital,” and so on. Here, I examine the grounds for making much more specific claims about how mental states are structured from constituent parts. For example, the state I am in when I perceive the shape of a mountain ridge may have as constituent parts my representations of the shapes of each…Read more
-
The Perspectival Character of PerceptionJournal of Philosophy 115 (4): 187-214. 2018.You can perceive things, in many respects, as they really are. For example, you can correctly see a coin as circular from most angles. Nonetheless, your perception of the world is perspectival. The coin looks different when slanted than when head-on, and there is some respect in which the slanted coin looks similar to a head-on ellipse. Many hold that perception is perspectival because you perceive certain properties that correspond to the “looks” of things. I argue that this view is misguided. …Read more
-
The outlier paradox: The role of iterative ensemble coding in discounting outliersJournal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 1. forthcoming.Ensemble perception—the encoding of objects by their group properties—is known to be resistant to outlier noise. However, this resistance is somewhat paradoxical: how can the visual system determine which stimuli are outliers without already having derived statistical properties of the ensemble? A simple solution would be that ensemble perception is not a simple, one-step process; instead, outliers are detected through iterative computations that identify items with high deviance from the mean a…Read more
-
Fodor on cognition, modularity, and adaptationismPhilosophy of Science 70 (1): 68-88. 2003.This paper critically examines Jerry Fodor's latest attacks on evolutionary psychology. Contra Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, Fodor argues (i) there is no reason to think that human cognition is a Darwinian adaptation in the first place, and (ii) there is no valid inference from adaptationism about the mind to massive modularity. However, Fodor maintains (iii) that there is a valid inference in the converse direction, from modularity to adaptationism, but (iv) that the language module is an excep…Read more
Los Angeles, California, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |