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Do experiences have contents?In Bence Nanay (ed.), Perceiving the world, Oxford University Press. 2010.
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1812Attention and Perceptual JustificationIn Adam Pautz & Daniel Stoljar (eds.), Blockheads! Essays on Ned Block’s Philosophy of Mind and Consciousness, Mit Press. 2019.
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240The Phenomenal PublicPolitical Philosophy 1 (1). 2024.With what modes of mentality can we build a visceral, subjective sense of being in some specific mass-political society? Theorists and political cultivators standardly call upon the imagination – the kind prompted by symbols and rituals, for example. Could perception ever play such a role? I argue that it can, but that perceptions of mass-political publics come with costs of cruelty and illusion that neither democratic theorists nor participants should be willing to pay. The clearest examples of…Read more
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43Comments on Ella Whiteley's "A Woman First and a Philosopher Second"Pea Soup Blog + Ethics Journal Discussion. 2023.
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290How do lines of inquiry unfold? Insights from journalismOxford Studies in Epistemology: Special Issue on Applied Epistemology. forthcoming.I analyze a type of practice related to inquiry: treating things as zetetically relevant to questions, and argue that this practice is a central normatively evaluable way to extend lines of inquiry. My strategy is to introduce the practice and its normative features by examining its relationship to something already well-understood: the ways that news stories produced by journalists frame events. I then argue that the same core zetetic practice can be found across domains, just not in journalis…Read more
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327Inquiry is guided, in the minimal sense that it is not haphazard. It is also often thought to have as a natural stopping point ceasing to inquire, once inquiry into a question yields knowledge of an answer. On this picture, inquiry is both telic and guided. By contrast, mind-wandering is unguided and atelic, according to the most extensively developed philosophical theory of it. This paper articulates a puzzle that arises from this combination of claims: there seem to be plenty of examples of in…Read more
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19The Visual Experience of CausationIn Fiona Macpherson (ed.), The Admissible Contents of Experience, Wiley-blackwell. 2011.The thesis that we can visually perceive causal relations is distinct from the thesis that visual experiences can represent causal relations. I defend the latter thesis about visual experience, and argue that although they are suggestive, the data provided by Albert Michotte's experiments on perceptual causality do not establish this thesis. Turning to the perception of causality, I defend the claim that we can perceive causation against the objection that its arcane features are unlikely to be …Read more
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1The epistemology of perceptionIn Mohan Matthen (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Perception, Oxford University Press Uk. 2015.
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Afterword : epistemic evaluability and perceptual farceIn John Zeimbekis & Athanassios Raftopoulos (eds.), The Cognitive Penetrability of Perception: New Philosophical Perspectives, Oxford University Press. 2015.
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139Attention and perceptual justificationIn Adam Pautz & Daniel Stoljar (eds.), Blockheads! Essays on Ned Block’s Philosophy of Mind and Consciousness, Mit Press. 2019.
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3Cognitive penetrability and perceptual justificationIn Jeremy Fantl, Matthew McGrath & Ernest Sosa (eds.), Contemporary epistemology: an anthology, Wiley. 2019.
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1129Vigilantism and Political VisionWashington University Review of Philosophy 2 1-42. 2022.Vigilantism, commonly glossed as “taking the law into one’s own hands,” has been analyzed differently in studies of comparative politics, ethnography, history, and legal theory, but has attracted little attention from philosophers. What can “taking the law into one’s hands” amount to? How does vigilantism relate to mobs, protests, and self-defense? I distinguish between several categories of vigilantism, identify the questions they are most useful for addressing, and offer an analysis on which v…Read more
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325Do we see more than we can access?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 5 (5-6): 501-502. 2007.Short commentary on a paper by Ned Block
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68How death shapes lifeHarvard Gazette. 2021.Q&A format, with Siegel answering questions posed by the magazine writer Colleen Walsh. The discussion features Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Rilke, Cotard's syndrome, and authoritarianism.
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259Form and Faith in Sheridan Hough's "Kierkegaard's Dancing Tax Collector" (review)Syndicate Philosophy. forthcoming.I argue that in Sheridan Hough's book Kierkegaard's Dancing Tax Collector, the distinctive and novelistic literary form is not a playful, whimsical, or otherwise contingent feature, but a structure that's needed to convey the account of Kierkegaardian faith as practical in nature.
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852Salience Principles for DemocracyIn Sophie Archer (ed.), Salience: A Philosophical Inquiry, Routledge. pp. 235-266. 2022.I discuss the roles of journalism in aspirational democracies, and argue that they generate set of pressures on attention that apply to people by virtue of the type of society they live in. These pressures, I argue, generate a problem of democratic attention: for journalism to play its roles in democracy, the attentional demands must be met, but there are numerous obstacles to meeting them. I propose a principle of salience to guide the selection and framing of news stories that I argue may help…Read more
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28'Warrior mindset' can get people killedTampa Bay Times Newspaper, December 18. 2020.Op-ed written with historian Caroline Light about some of the ways that ideas of democratic citizenship can become perverted by the idea that personal safety required armed defense against attacks by strangers.
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35Does relying on science strengthen authoritarianism or weaken it?Tampa Bay Times, May 29. 2020.Op-ed arguing that the reliance of the population on epidemiological expertise may weaken authoritarianism
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43Why we revel in opponents' adversityTampa Bay Times, July 31. 2020.Op-ed on the role of schadenfreude in political propaganda. Co-authored with Kelsey Ichikawa
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39Schadenfreude is the wrong reactionTampa Bay Times Newspaper, October 3. 2020.Op-ed on the reaction to the outbreak of covid-19 in the Trump White House
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43Here's how to hack hypocrisyTampa Bay Times, October 30. 2020.Op-ed about the role of anti-hypocrisy in political criticism
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43Precis of The Rationality of PerceptionPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 101 (3): 724-726. 2020.Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.
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358Preface to The Rationality of PerceptionOxford University Press. 2017.Preface to The Rationality of Perception
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1145How can perceptual experiences explain uncertainty?Mind and Language 37 (2): 134-158. 2020.Can perceptual experiences be states of uncertainty? We might expect them to be, if the perceptual processes from which they're generated, as well as the behaviors they help produce, take account of probabilistic information. Yet it has long been presumed that perceptual experiences purport to tell us about our environment, without hedging or qualifying. Against this long-standing view, I argue that perceptual experiences may well occasionally be states of uncertainty, but that they are never pr…Read more
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38The Rationality of PerceptionOxford University Press. 2017.There is an important division in the human mind between perception and reasoning. We reason from information that we have already, but perception is a means of taking in new information. Susanna Siegel argues that these two aspects of the mind become deeply intertwined when beliefs, fears, desires, or prejudice influence what we perceive.
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17Can Selection Effects on Experience Influence its Rational Role?Oxford Studies in Epistemology 4. 2013.This paper explores two kinds of selection effects on perception by the subject’s own psychological states, such as desires, fears, or beliefs. Such states can influence the selection of objects for perceptual experience, or they can influence the selection of perceptual experience for uptake in the process of belief-formation. It is argued that both kinds of selection effects are rationally assessable, even when the subject is not aware of their influence on the selection.
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4The Epistemic Conception of HallucinationIn Adrian Haddock & Fiona Macpherson (eds.), Disjunctivism: perception, action, knowledge, Oxford University Press. 2008.Since disjunctivists when talking about perception deny that hallucinations and veridical perceptions have a common fundamental nature, they need some other way to account for the fact that these kinds of experiences can ‘seem the same’ from the inside. A natural response is to give a purely epistemic account of hallucination, according to which there is nothing more to hallucinations than their indiscriminability from veridical perceptions. This chapter argues that the epistemic conception of h…Read more
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925What Does Philosophy Contribute to the Study of the Mind?The Philosophers' Magazine 88 52-63. 2020.Written for newcomers to philosophy, especally experimental scientists and people in the literary humanities. I focus on the role of fiction and fictional examples in the philosophy of mind, and highlight three roles for invented situations: posing a loaded question (think of Frank Jackson’s Mary), illustrating a philosphical problem, and testing normative and modal hypotheses.
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Philosophy of Mind |
Democracy |
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