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2348Phenomenal Abilities: Incompatibilism and the Experience of AgencyIn David Shoemaker (ed.), Oxford studies in agency and responsibility, Oxford University Press. 2013.Incompatibilists often claim that we experience our agency as incompatible with determinism, while compatibilists challenge this claim. We report a series of experiments that focus on whether the experience of having an ability to do otherwise is taken to be at odds with determinism. We found that participants in our studies described their experience as incompatibilist whether the decision was (i) present-focused or retrospective, (ii) imagined or actual, (iii) morally salient or morally neutra…Read more
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97Second thoughts on simulationIn Martin Davies & Tony Stone (eds.), Mental Simulation, Blackwell. 1995.The essays in this volume make it abundantly clear that there is no shortage of disagreement about the plausibility of the simulation theory. As we see it, there are at least three factors contributing to this disagreement. In some instances the issues in dispute are broadly empirical. Different people have different views on which theory is favored by experiments reported in the literature, and different hunches about how future experiments are likely to turn out. In 3.1 and 3.3 we will conside…Read more
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29018 The baby in the lab-coat: why child development is not an adequate model for understanding the development of scienceIn Peter Carruthers, Stephen 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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71Bayesian Occam's Razor Is a Razor of the PeopleCognitive Science 42 (4): 1345-1359. 2018.Occam's razor—the idea that all else being equal, we should pick the simpler hypothesis—plays a prominent role in ordinary and scientific inference. But why are simpler hypotheses better? One attractive hypothesis known as Bayesian Occam's razor is that more complex hypotheses tend to be more flexible—they can accommodate a wider range of possible data—and that flexibility is automatically penalized by Bayesian inference. In two experiments, we provide evidence that people's intuitive probabilis…Read more
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4Selections fromBeyond Good and Evil and Twilight of the IdolsIn Thomas Nadelhoffer, Eddy Nahmias & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Moral Psychology: Historical and Contemporary Readings, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 251. 2010.
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5An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and VirtueIn Thomas Nadelhoffer, Eddy Nahmias & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Moral Psychology: Historical and Contemporary Readings, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 111. 2010.
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34Although linguistic nativism has received the bulk of attention in contemporaryIn Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence & Stephen P. Stich (eds.), The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents, Oxford University Press Usa. pp. 1--353. 2005.
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43Reading one's own mind: A cognitive theory of self-awarenessIn Aleksandar Jokic & Quentin Smith (eds.), Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives, Oxford University Press. 2002.
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20Experimental EthicsIn Hugh LaFollette (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, Blackwell. 2013.
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11Timothy Schroeder, Adina L. Roskies, andIn John M. Doris (ed.), Moral Psychology Handbook, Oxford University Press. pp. 72. 2010.
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1. Moral Rules and Moral ReasoningIn John M. Doris (ed.), Moral Psychology Handbook, Oxford University Press. pp. 297. 2010.
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57RulesIn 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
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3Moral emotionsIn John M. Doris (ed.), Moral Psychology Handbook, Oxford University Press. pp. 111. 2010.
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48Exploring the Illusion of Free Will and Moral ResponsibilityLexington Books. 2013.Exploring the Illusion of Free Will and Moral Responsibility is an edited collection of new essays by an internationally recognized line-up of contributors. It is aimed at readers who wish to explore the philosophical and scientific arguments for free will skepticism and their implications
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26Vows without a selfPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 108 (1): 42-61. 2024.Vows play a central role in Buddhist thought and practice. Monastics are obliged to know and conform to hundreds of vows. Although it is widely recognized that vows are important for guiding practitioners on the path to enlightenment, we argue that they have another overlooked but equally crucial role to play. A second function of the vows, we argue, is to facilitate group harmony and cohesion to ensure the perpetuation of the dhamma and the saṅgha. However, the prominence of vows in the Buddhis…Read more
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1Moral learningIn Aaron Zimmerman, Karen Jones & Mark Timmons (eds.), Routledge Handbook on Moral Epistemology, Routledge. 2018.
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What does labor mixing get you?In Matthew Lindauer, James R. Beebe & Justin Sytsma (eds.), Advances in Experimental Political Philosophy, Bloomsbury. 2023.
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190Awareness of Unawareness Folk Psychology and Introspective TransparencyJournal of Consciousness Studies 18 (11-12): 11-12. 2011.A tradition of work in cognitive science indicates that much of our mental lives is not available to introspection . Though the researchers often present these results as surprising, little has been done to explore the degree to which people presume introspective access to their mental events. In this paper, we distinguish two dimensions of introspective access: the power of access, i.e. whether people believe they can unfailingly or only typically introspect mental events; and the domain of acc…Read more
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23Bound: Essays on Free Will and ResponsibilityOxford University Press. 2015.Shaun Nichols offers a naturalistic, psychological account of the origins of the problem of free will. He argues that our belief in indeterminist choice is grounded in faulty inference and therefore unjustified, goes on to suggest that there is no single answer to whether free will exists, and promotes a pragmatic approach to prescriptive issues.
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41Philosophy: 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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58La Philosophie Expérimentale (edited book)Vuibert. 2012.La philosophie expérimentale est un mouvement récent qui tente de faire progresser certains débats philosophiques grâce à l'utilisation de méthodes expérimentales. À la différence de la philosophie conventionnelle qui privilégie l'analyse conceptuelle ou la spéculation, la philosophie expérimentale préconise le recours aux études empiriques pour mieux comprendre les concepts philosophiques. Apparue il y a une dizaine d'années dans les pays anglo-saxons, cette approche constitue actuellement l'un…Read more
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17Experimental Philosophy: Volume 2 (edited book)Oxford University Press USA. 2013.Experimental Philosophy: Volume 2 contains fourteen articles -- thirteen previously published and one new -- that reflect the fast-moving changes in the field over the last five years. The field of experimental philosophy is one of the most innovative and exciting parts of the current philosophical landscape; it has also engendered controversy. Proponents argue that philosophers should employ empirical research, including the methods of experimental psychology, to buttress their philosophical cl…Read more
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2Great Philosophical DebatesTeaching Co.. 2008.Part 1. lecture 1. Free will and determinism-- the basic debate -- lecture 2. Fate and karma -- lecture 3. Divine predestination and foreknowledge -- lecture 4. Causal determinism -- lecture 5. Ancient and medieval indeterminism -- lecture 6. Agent causation -- lecture 7. Ancient and classical compatibilism -- lecture 8. Contemporary compatibilism -- lecture 9. Hard determinism -- lecture 10. Free will impossibilism -- lecture 11. The belief in free will -- lecture 12. Physics and free will --.
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Semantics, Cross-Cultural StyleIn Joshua Michael Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Experimental Philosophy, Oup Usa. 2008.
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2Moral Responsibility and Determinism: The Cognitive Science of Folk IntuitionsIn Joshua Michael Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Experimental Philosophy, Oup Usa. 2008.
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784An experimental philosophy manifestoIn Joshua Michael Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Experimental Philosophy, Oxford University Press. pp. 3--14. 2007.It used to be a commonplace that the discipline of philosophy was deeply concerned with questions about the human condition. Philosophers thought about human beings and how their minds worked. They took an interest in reason and passion, culture and innate ideas, the origins of people’s moral and religious beliefs. On this traditional conception, it wasn’t particularly important to keep philosophy clearly distinct from psychology, history, or political science. Philosophers were concerned, in a …Read more
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234Moral MotivationIn John M. Doris (ed.), Moral Psychology Handbook, Oxford University Press. 2010.In this chapter, we begin with a discussion of motivation itself, and use that discussion to sketch four possible theories of distinctively moral motivation: caricature versions of familiar instrumentalist, cognitivist, sentimentalist, and personalist theories about morally worthy motivation. To test these theories, we turn to a wealth of scientific, particularly neuroscientific, evidence. Our conclusions are that (1) although the scientific evidence does not at present mandate a unique philosop…Read more
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79Rational Learners and Moral RulesMind and Language 31 (5): 530-554. 2016.People draw subtle distinctions in the normative domain. But it remains unclear exactly what gives rise to such distinctions. On one prominent approach, emotion systems trigger non-utilitarian judgments. The main alternative, inspired by Chomskyan linguistics, suggests that moral distinctions derive from an innate moral grammar. In this article, we draw on Bayesian learning theory to develop a rational learning account. We argue that the ‘size principle’, which is implicated in word learning, ca…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Moral Psychology |
Experimental Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Moral Psychology |
Experimental Philosophy |