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23Is incompatibilism intuitive?In Joshua Michael Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Experimental Philosophy, Oxford University Press. pp. 28-53. 2008.Incompatibilists believe free will is impossible if determinism is true, and they often claim that this view is supported by ordinary intuitions. We challenge the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive to most laypersons and discuss the significance of this challenge to the free will debate. After explaining why incompatibilists should want their view to accord with pretheoretical intuitions, we suggest that determining whether incompatibilism is in fact intuitive calls for empirical testing. W…Read more
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54Experimental Philosophy of Action: Free Will and Moral ResponsibilityIn Alexander Max Bauer & Stephan Kornmesser (eds.), The Compact Compendium of Experimental Philosophy, De Gruyter. pp. 327-352. 2023.
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231Not what I expected: Feeling of surprise differentially mediates effect of personal control on attributions of free will and responsibilityReview of Philosophy and Psychology 1-25. forthcoming.Some have argued that advances in the science of human decision-making, particularly research on automaticity and unconscious priming, would ultimately thwart our commonsense understanding of free will and moral responsibility. Do people interpret this research as a threat to their self-understanding as free and responsible agents? We approached this question by seeing how feelings of surprise mediate the relationship between personal sense of control and third-personal attributions of free will…Read more
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40Chronic Pain, Mere-Differences, and Disability VariantismJournal of Philosophy of Disability 2 6-27. 2022.While some philosophers believe disabilities constitute a “bad-difference,” others think they constitute a “mere-difference” (Barnes 2016). On this latter view, while disabilities may create certain hardships, having a disability is not bad in itself. I argue that chronic pain problematizes this disability-neutral view. In doing so, I first survey the literature on chronic pain (§1). Then, I argue that Barnes’s mere-difference view cannot adequately accommodate the lived experiences of many peop…Read more
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13Chronic Pain, Mere-Differences, and Disability VariantismJournal of Philosophy of Disability 2 6-27. 2022.While some philosophers believe disabilities constitute a “bad-difference,” others think they constitute a “mere-difference” (Barnes 2016). On this latter view, while disabilities may create certain hardships, having a disability is not bad in itself. I argue that chronic pain problematizes this disability-neutral view. In doing so, I first survey the literature on chronic pain (§1). Then, I argue that Barnes’s mere-difference view cannot adequately accommodate the lived experiences of many peop…Read more
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19Piercing the Smoke Screen: Dualism, Free Will, and ChristianityJournal of Cognition and Culture 21 (1-2): 94-111. 2021.Research on the folk psychology of free will suggests that people believe free will is incompatible with determinism and that human decision-making cannot be exhaustively characterized by physical processes. Some suggest that certain elements of Western cultural history, especially Christianity, have helped to entrench these beliefs in the folk conceptual economy. Thus, on the basis of this explanation, one should expect to find three things: a significant correlation between belief in dualism a…Read more
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384Do people understand determinism? The tracking problem for measuring free will beliefsOxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy. forthcoming.Experimental work on free will typically relies on deterministic stimuli to elicit judgments of free will. We call this the Vignette-Judgment model. We outline a problem with research based on this model. It seems that people either fail to respond to the deterministic aspects of vignettes when making judgments or that their understanding of determinism differs from researcher expectations. We provide some empirical evidence for this claim. In the end, we argue that people seem to lack facility …Read more
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509Intuitions About Free Will and the Failure to Comprehend DeterminismErkenntnis 88 (6): 2515-2536. 2023.Theories of free will are often measured against how well they capture everyday intuitions about free will. But what are these everyday intuitions, and what theoretical commitments do they express? Empirical methods have delivered mixed messages. In response, some free will theorists have developed error theories to undermine the credentials of countervailing intuitions. These efforts are predicated on the idea that people might misunderstand determinism in any of several ways. This paper sheds …Read more
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937Mental control and attributions of blame for negligent wrongdoingJournal of Experimental Psychology: General. forthcoming.Judgments of blame for others are typically sensitive to what an agent knows and desires. However, when people act negligently, they do not know what they are doing and do not desire the outcomes of their negligence. How, then, do people attribute blame for negligent wrongdoing? We propose that people attribute blame for negligent wrongdoing based on perceived mental control, or the degree to which an agent guides their thoughts and attention over time. To acquire information about others’ menta…Read more
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57Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Free Will and Responsibility (edited book)Advances in Experimental Philo. 2022.Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Free Will and Responsibility brings together leading researchers from psychology and philosophy to present new findings and ideas about human agency and moral responsibility. Their contributions reflect the growth of research in these areas over the past decade and highlight both the ways that philosophy can be relevant to empirical research and how empirical work can be relevant to philosophical investigations. Mixing new empirical work with the meta-philo…Read more
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Criminal Law, Philosophy, and Psychology: Working At the Cross-roadsIn Leslie Green & Brian Leiter (eds.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Law: Volume 1, Oxford University Press Uk. 2011.
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60Folk psychology and proximal intentionsPhilosophical Psychology 1-23. forthcoming.There is a longstanding debate in philosophy concerning the relationship between intention and intentional action. According to the Single Phenomenon View, while one need not intend to A in order to A intentionally, one nevertheless needs to have an A-relevant intention. This view has recently come under criticism by those who think that one can A intentionally without any relevant intention at all. On this view, neither distal nor proximal intentions are necessary for intentional action. In thi…Read more
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586Does encouraging a belief in determinism increase cheating? Reconsidering the value of believing in free willCognition 203 (C): 104342. 2020.A key source of support for the view that challenging people’s beliefs about free will may undermine moral behavior is two classic studies by Vohs and Schooler (2008). These authors reported that exposure to certain prompts suggesting that free will is an illusion increased cheating behavior. In the present paper, we report several attempts to replicate this influential and widely cited work. Over a series of five studies (sample sizes of N = 162, N = 283, N = 268, N = 804, N = 982) (four prereg…Read more
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921Piercing the smoke screen: Dualism, free will, and ChristianityJournal of Cognition and Culture. forthcoming.Research on the folk psychology of free will suggests that people believe free will is incompatible with determinism and that human decision-making cannot be exhaustively characterized by physical processes. Some suggest that certain elements of Western cultural history, especially Christianity, have helped to entrench these beliefs in the folk conceptual economy. Thus, on the basis of this explanation, one should expect to find three things: (1) a significant correlation between belief in duali…Read more
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56Neurointerventions and the Law: Regulating Human Mental Capacity (edited book)Oxford University Press, Usa. 2020."The development of modern diagnostic neuroimaging techniques led to discoveries about the human brain and mind that helped give rise to the field of neurolaw. This new interdisciplinary field has led to novel directions in analytic jurisprudence and philosophy of law by providing an empirically-informed platform from which scholars have reassessed topics such as mental privacy and self-determination, responsibility and its relationship to mental disorders, and the proper aims of the criminal la…Read more
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308Partisanship, Humility, and Epistemic PolarizationIn Alessandra Tanesini & Michael P. Lynch (eds.), Polarisation, Arrogance, and Dogmatism: Philosophical Perspectives, Routledge. pp. 175-192. 2021.Much of the literature from political psychology has focused on the negative traits that are positively associated with affective polarization—e.g., animus, arrogance, distrust, hostility, and outrage. Not as much attention has been focused on the positive traits that might be negatively associated with polarization. For instance, given that people who are intellectually humble display greater openness and less hostility towards conflicting viewpoints (Krumrei-Mancuso & Rouse, 2016; Hopkin et al…Read more
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542Folk intuitions and the conditional ability to do otherwisePhilosophical Psychology 33 (7): 968-996. 2020.In a series of pre-registered studies, we explored (a) the difference between people’s intuitions about indeterministic scenarios and their intuitions about deterministic scenarios, (b) the difference between people’s intuitions about indeterministic scenarios and their intuitions about neurodeterministic scenarios (that is, scenarios where the determinism is described at the neurological level), (c) the difference between people’s intuitions about neutral scenarios (e.g., walking a dog in the p…Read more
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641Natural Compatibilism, Indeterminism, and Intrusive MetaphysicsCognitive Science 44 (8). 2020.The claim that common sense regards free will and moral responsibility as compatible with determinism has played a central role in both analytic and experimental philosophy. In this paper, we show that evidence in favor of this “natural compatibilism” is undermined by the role that indeterministic metaphysical views play in how people construe deterministic scenarios. To demonstrate this, we re-examine two classic studies that have been used to support natural compatibilism. We find that althoug…Read more
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27Three Points of Disagreement with Gideon Yaffe on Attempts (review)Jurisprudence 3 (2): 465-503. 2012.
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1709Is Incompatibilism Intuitive?Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73 (1): 28-53. 2007.Incompatibilists believe free will is impossible if determinism is true, and they often claim that this view is supported by ordinary intuitions. We challenge the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive to most laypersons and discuss the significance of this challenge to the free will debate. After explaining why incompatibilists should want their view to accord with pretheoretical intuitions, we suggest that determining whether incompatibilism is in fact intuitive calls for empirical testing. W…Read more
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4Intentions and Intentional Actions in Ordinary Language and the Criminal LawDissertation, . 2005.While most philosophers agree that the concept of intentional action plays an important role in our folk psychology, there is still wide-scale disagreement about the precise nature of this role. Unfortunately, there has traditionally been a dearth of empirical data about folk ascriptions of intentional action. Lately, however, philosophers and psychologists have begun making a concerted effort to fill in this empirical lacuna. In this dissertation, I discuss how this research sheds new light on …Read more
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234Neuroprediction, violence, and the law: setting the stageNeuroethics 5 (1): 67-99. 2010.In this paper, our goal is to survey some of the legal contexts within which violence risk assessment already plays a prominent role, explore whether developments in neuroscience could potentially be used to improve our ability to predict violence, and discuss whether neuropredictive models of violence create any unique legal or moral problems above and beyond the well worn problems already associated with prediction more generally. In Violence Risk Assessment and the Law, we briefly examine the…Read more
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150Folk intuitions, slippery slopes, and necessary fictions : an essay on Saul Smilansky's free will illusionismIn Peter A. French & Howard K. Wettstein (eds.), Philosophy and the Empirical, Blackwell. 2007.During the past two decades, an interest among philosophers in fictitious and illusory beliefs has sprung up in fields ranging anywhere from mathematics and modality to morality.1 In this paper, we focus primarily on the view that Saul Smilansky has dubbed “free will illusionism”—i.e., the purportedly descriptive claim that most people have illusory beliefs concerning the existence of libertarian free will, coupled with the normative claim that because dispelling these illusory beliefs would pro…Read more
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109Temperament and intuition: A commentary on Feltz and CokelyConsciousness and Cognition 18 (1): 351-355. 2009.In this paper, we examine Adam Feltz and Edward Cokely’s recent claim that “the personality trait extraversion predicts people’s intuitions about the relationship of determinism to free will and moral responsibility”. We will first present some criticisms of their work before briefly examining the results of a recent study of our own. We argue that while Feltz and Cokely have their finger on the pulse of an interesting and important issue, they have not established a robust and stable connection…Read more
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166Bad acts, blameworthy agents, and intentional actions: Some problems for juror impartialityPhilosophical Explorations 9 (2). 2006.In this paper, I first review some of the recent empirical work on the biasing effect that moral considerations have on folk ascriptions of intentional action. Then, I use Mark Alicke's affective model of blame attribution to explain this biasing effect. Finally, I discuss the relevance of this research - both philosophical and psychological - to the problem of the partiality of jury deliberation. After all, if the immorality of an action does affect folk ascriptions of intentionality, and all s…Read more
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59The Butler problem revisitedAnalysis 64 (3): 277-284. 2004.On the surface, it seems plausible that the goodness or badness of an agent’s actions should be completely irrelevant to the question of whether she performed them intentionally, but there is growing evidence that ascriptions of intentional actions are affected by moral considerations. Joshua Knobe, for instance, has recently published a series of groundbreaking papers (2003a, 2003b, 2004) in which he suggests that people’s judgments concerning the intentionality of an action may sometimes depen…Read more
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48On Trying to Save the Simple ViewMind and Language 21 (5): 565-586. 2006.According to the analysis of intentional action that Michael Bratman has dubbed the ‘Simple View’, intending toxis necessary for intentionallyx‐ing. Despite the plausibility of this view, there is gathering empirical evidence that when people are presented with cases involving moral considerations, they are much more likely to judge that the action (or side effect) in question was brought about intentionally than they are to judge that the agent intended to do it. This suggests that at least as …Read more
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186Moral Psychology: Historical and Contemporary Readings (edited book)Wiley-Blackwell. 2010._Moral Psychology: Historical and Contemporary Readings_ is the first book to bring together the most significant contemporary and historical works on the topic from both philosophy and psychology. Provides a comprehensive introduction to moral psychology, which is the study of psychological mechanisms and processes underlying ethics and morality Unique in bringing together contemporary texts by philosophers, psychologists and other cognitive scientists with foundational works from both philosop…Read more
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241Desire, foresight, intentions, and intentional actions: Probing folk intuitionsJournal of Cognition and Culture 6 (1-2): 133-157. 2006.A number of philosophers working under the rubric of “experimental philosophy” have recently begun focusing on analyzing the concepts of ordinary language and investigating the intuitions of laypersons in an empirically informed way.1 In a series of papers these philosophers—who often work in collaboration with psychologists—have presented the results of empirical studies aimed at proving folk intuitions in areas as diverse as ethics, epistemology, free will, and the philosophy of action. In thi…Read more
FSU
Department Of Philosophy
Alumnus
Areas of Interest
Empathy and Sympathy |
The Concept of Disability |
Psychopathology |