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28What’s So Special About Reasoning? Rationality, Belief Updating, and InternalismErgo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10 (n/a). 2023.In updating our beliefs on the basis of our background attitudes and evidence we frequently employ objects in our environment to represent pertinent information. For example, we may write our premises and lemmas on a whiteboard to aid in a proof or move the beads of an abacus to assist in a calculation. In both cases, we generate extramental (that is, occurring outside of the mind) representational states, and, at least in the case of the abacus, we operate over these states in light of their co…Read more
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122Evidentialism as an account of theoretical rationality is a popular and well-defended position. However, recently, it's been argued that misleading higher-order evidence (HOE) – that is, evidence about one's evidence or about one's cognitive functioning – poses a problem for evidentialism. Roughly, the problem is that, in certain cases of misleading HOE, it appears evidentialism entails that it is rational to adopt a belief in an akratic conjunction – a proposition of the form “p, but my evidenc…Read more
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33Evidentialism and Occurrent Belief: You Aren’t Justified in Believing Everything Your Evidence Clearly SupportsErkenntnis 88 (7): 3059-3078. 2023.Evidentialism as an account of epistemic justification is the position that a doxastic attitude, D, towards a proposition, p, is justified for an intentional agent, S, at a time, t, iff having D towards p fits S’s evidence at t, where the fittingness of an attitude on one’s evidence is typically analyzed in terms of evidential support for the propositional contents of the attitude. Evidentialism is a popular and well-defended account of justification. In this paper, I raise a problem for evident…Read more
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80Echo chambers, polarization, and “Post-truth”: In search of a connectionPhilosophical Psychology. forthcoming.The US populace appears to be increasingly polarized on partisan lines. Political fissures bifurcate the country even on empirical matters like vaccine safety and anthropogenic climate change. There now exists an ever-expanding interdisciplinary research program in which theorists attempt to explain increases in political polarization and myriad other phenomena collected under the “post-truth” heading by appeal to social-epistemic structures, like echo chambers and epistemic bubbles, that affect…Read more
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38Semiotics in the head: Thinking about and thinking through symbolsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 107 (2): 413-438. 2023.Our conscious thought, at least at times, seems suffused with language. We may experience thinking as if we were “talking in our head”, thus using inner speech to verbalize, e.g., our premises, lemmas, and conclusions. I take inner speech to be part of a larger phenomenon I call inner semiotics, where inner semiotics involves the subjective experience of expressions in a semiotic (or symbol) system absent the overt articulation of the expressions. In this paper, I argue that inner semiotics allo…Read more
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37What it takes to make a wordSynthese 200 (4): 1-30. 2022.Consider the following object, where, depending on how you are viewing this paper, the object may be a series of ink markings, a portion of a matrix of pixels through or from which light is emitted, etc.,augeLet’s call the object ‘Shape’. Is Shape a word token? If so, what word type is it a token of? Given how words are traditionally individuated, the Spanish, “auge”—meaning, apogee or peak—the French, “auge”—meaning, basin or bowl—and the German, “auge”—meaning, eye, are different words. So, if…Read more
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85Thinking through talking to yourself: Inner speech as a vehicle of conscious reasoningPhilosophical Psychology 36 (2): 292-318. 2023.People frequently report that their thought has, at times, a vocal character. Thinking commonly appears to be accompanied or constituted by silently ‘talking’ to oneself in inner speech. In this paper, I argue that inner speech ‘utterances’ can constitute occurrent propositional attitudes, e.g., occurrent judgments, suppositions, etc., and, thereby, we can consciously reason through tokening a series of inner speech utterances in working memory. As I demonstrate, the functional role a mental sta…Read more
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103Why are you talking to yourself? The epistemic role of inner speech in reasoningNoûs 56 (4): 841-866. 2022.People frequently report that, at times, their thought has a vocal character. Thinking commonly appears to be accompanied or constituted by silently ‘talking’ to oneself in inner speech. In this paper, we explore the specifically epistemic role of inner speech in conscious reasoning. A plausible position—but one I argue is ultimately wrong—is that inner speech plays asolelyfacilitative role that is exhausted by (i) serving as the vehicle of representation for conscious reasoning, and/or (ii) all…Read more
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32The challenge of heritability: genetic determinants of beliefs and their implicationsInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63 (8): 831-874. 2020.ABSTRACT Ethical and political attitudes are not randomly distributed in a population. Attitudes of family members, for example, tend to be more similar than those of a random sample of the same size. In the fields of social psychology and political science, the historically standard explanation for these attitude distribution patterns was that social and political attitudes are a function of environmental factors like parental socialization and prevailing social norms. This received view is, ho…Read more
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802Unconscious Inference Theories of Cognitive AcheivementIn Anders Nes & Timothy Hoo Wai Chan (eds.), Inference and Consciousness, Routledge. pp. 15-39. 2019.This chapter argues that the only tenable unconscious inferences theories of cognitive achievement are ones that employ a theory internal technical notion of representation, but that once we give cash-value definitions of the relevant notions of representation and inference, there is little left of the ordinary notion of representation. We suggest that the real value of talk of unconscious inferences lies in (a) their heuristic utility in helping us to make fruitful predictions, such as about il…Read more
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73Reasoning, rationality, and representationSynthese 198 (9): 8323-8345. 2020.Recently, a cottage industry has formed with the goal of analyzing reasoning. The relevant notion of reasoning in which philosophers are expressly interested is fixed through an epistemic functional description: reasoning—whatever it is—is our personal-level, rationally evaluable means of meeting our rational requirements through managing and updating our attitudes. Roughly, the dominant view in the extant literature as developed by Paul Boghossian, John Broome, and others is that reasoning is a…Read more
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61Rationality, Reasoning Well, and Extramental PropsRes Philosophica 96 (2): 175-198. 2019.Recently, a cottage industry has formed with the expressed intent of analyzing the nature of personal-level reasoning and inference. The dominant position in the extant philosophical literature is that reasoning consists in rule-governed operations over propositional attitudes. In addition, it is widely assumed that our attitude updating procedures are purely cognitive. Any non-cognitive activity performed in service of updating our attitudes is external to the updating process—at least in terms…Read more
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118Words on PsycholinguisticsJournal of Philosophy 113 (12): 593-616. 2016.David Kaplan’s analysis of the factors that determine what words someone has used in a given utterance requires that a speaker can only use a word through producing an utterance performed with a particular, related intention directed at speaking that word. This account, or any that requires a speaker to have an intention to utter a specific word, proves inconsistent with models of speech planning in psycholinguistics as informed by data on slips-of-the-tongue. Kaplan explicitly aims to formulate…Read more
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173Testimonial injustice and prescriptive credibility deficitsCanadian Journal of Philosophy 46 (6): 924-947. 2016.In light of recent social psychological literature, I expand Miranda Fricker’s important notion of testimonial injustice. A fair portion of Fricker’s account rests on an older paradigm of stereotype and prejudice. Given recent empirical work, I argue for what I dub prescriptive credibility deficits in which a backlash effect leads to the assignment of a diminished level of credibility to persons who act in counter-stereotypic manners, thereby flouting prescriptive stereotypes. The notion of a pr…Read more
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University of Michigan, Ann ArborDepartment of Philosophy
Weinberg Institute for Cognitive SciencePost-doctoral Fellow
Lincoln, Nebraska, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Philosophy of Psychology |
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Language |