•  315
    Science and Philosophy of Color in the Modern Age
    In Anders Steinvall & Sarah Streets (eds.), Cultural History of Color in the Modern Age, Bloomsbury. pp. 21-38. 2021.
    The study of color expanded rapidly in the 20th century. With this expansion came fragmentation, as philosophers, physicists, physiologists, psychologists, and others explored the subject in vastly different ways. There are at least two ways in which the study of color became contentious. The first was with regard to the definitional question: what is color? The second was with the location question: are colors inside the head or out in the world? In this chapter, we summarize the most prominent…Read more
  •  57
    In his work, the philosopher John Haugeland (1945–2010) proposed a radical expansion of philosophy's conceptual toolkit, calling for a wider range of resources for understanding the mind, the world, and how they relate. Haugeland argued that “giving a damn” is essential for having a mind—suggesting that traditional approaches to cognitive science mistakenly overlook the relevance of caring to the understanding of mindedness. Haugeland's determination to expand philosophy's array of concepts led …Read more
  •  59
    Why Twitter does not gamify communication
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    1. Social media is an utterly transformative technology. In 1960, A. J. Liebling could truthfully quip, ‘Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one’ (1960, 105). In 2023, this is...
  •  377
    Stanley Cavell’s account of aesthetic judgment has two components. The first is a feeling: the judge has to see, hear, ‘dig’ something in the object being judged, there has to be an ‘emotion’ that the judge feels and expresses. The second is the ‘discipline of accounting for [the judgment]’, a readiness to argue for one’s aesthetic judgment in the face of disagreement. The discipline of accounting for one’s aesthetic judgments involves what Nick Riggle has called a norm of convergence: the judge…Read more
  •  16
    Varieties of perceptual improvement
    Philosophy and the Mind Sciences 4. 2023.
    In this short comment on Dustin Stokes's Thinking and Perceiving, I attempt to clarify what is at stake in the debate between Fodorian modularists and Stokean anti-modularists.
  •  777
    Cognitive Spread: Under What Conditions Does the Mind Extend Beyond the Body?
    European Journal of Philosophy 20 (4): 420-438. 2012.
    The extended mind hypothesis (EMH) is the claim that the mind can and does extend beyond the human body. Adams and Aizawa (A&A) contend that arguments for EMH commit a ‘coupling constitution fallacy’. We deny that the master argument for EMH commits such a fallacy. But we think that there is an important question lurking behind A&A's allegation: under what conditions is cognition spread across a tightly coupled system? Building on some suggestions from Haugeland, we contend that the system must …Read more
  •  158
  •  488
    The Myth of the Common Sense Conception of Color
    with Nat Hansen
    In Teresa Marques & Åsa Wikforss (eds.), Shifting Concepts: The Philosophy and Psychology of Conceptual Variability, Oxford University Press. pp. 106-127. 2020.
    Some philosophical theories of the nature of color aim to respect a "common sense" conception of color: aligning with the common sense conception is supposed to speak in favor of a theory and conflicting with it is supposed to speak against a theory. In this paper, we argue that the idea of a "common sense" conception of color that philosophers of color have relied upon is overly simplistic. By drawing on experimental and historical evidence, we show how conceptions of color vary along several d…Read more
  •  17
    Cognitive Spread: Under What Conditions Does the Mind Extend Beyond the Body?
    European Journal of Philosophy 23 (3): 420-438. 2012.
    The extended mind hypothesis (EMH) is the claim that the mind can and does extend beyond the human body. Adams and Aizawa (A&A) contend that arguments for EMH commit a ‘coupling constitution fallacy’. We deny that the master argument for EMH commits such a fallacy. But we think that there is an important question lurking behind A&A's allegation: under what conditions is cognition spread across a tightly coupled system? Building on some suggestions from Haugeland, we contend that the system must …Read more
  •  29
    Surface Noise
    British Journal of Aesthetics 58 (3): 255-270. 2018.
    In this paper, I argue that the dominant view of musical sampling embodies an impoverished conception of the expressive capabilities of sampling. There are two respects in which it goes wrong. First, it overlooks the possibility of samples representing their sample sources. Second, it overlooks the possibility of samples that are not instances of their sample sources. En route to bringing out why the dominant view is impoverished, I introduce a theoretical framework that illuminates some of the …Read more
  •  78
    On Images: Their Structure and Content (review)
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67 (3): 336-339. 2009.
  •  14
    In On the Genealogy of Color , Zed Adams challenges widely held philosophical views about the nature of color, exploring the relevance of the history of color science for contemporary debates in color realism/anti-realism and philosophy of mind. Adams argues that the two sides of the contemporary debate on the problem of color realism, Cartesian anti-realism and Oxford realism, are both predicated on an assumption that the concept of color perception is ahistorical and unrevisable. Adams takes i…Read more
  •  70
    Seeing is Knowing
    Review of Metaphysics 66 (1): 61-88. 2012.
    There is a well-known tradition of thinkers who have argued that philosophical reflection on the lived character of everyday experience can reveal significant and sometimes surprising insights into the nature of things. Philosophers as diverse as William James, Edmund Husserl, and Ludwig Wittgenstein have all suggested that first-person experience can play an important, if not definitive, role in structuring our philosophical accounts of the world. One deep source of opposition to this tradition…Read more
  •  82
    Photography and Philosophy: Essays on the Pencil of Nature edited by walden, scott
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68 (3): 319-320. 2010.
  •  34
    On the Hardness of the Ethical Must
    Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 30 (2): 409-420. 2009.
  •  135
    Against Moral Intellectualism
    Philosophical Investigations 37 (1): 37-56. 2013.
    This paper argues that non-cognitivism about moral judgements is compatible with moral realism. In order to reveal the possibility, and plausibility, of this hitherto under-explored position in metaethics, it surveys a series of four increasingly fine-grained formulations of the distinction between cognitivism and non-cognitivism. It argues that all but the last of these distinctions should be rejected, on the grounds that they lead advocates of non-cognitivism away from what initially motivated…Read more
  •  225
    Moral Mistakes
    Philosophical Investigations 34 (1): 1-21. 2010.
    Is it possible to show that a moral claim is mistaken without taking a moral stand with regard to it? A striking number of contemporary metaethicists suppose that it is. In this paper, I argue against a prominent line of support for this supposition. My goal is to cast suspicion on a general tendency to think that the epistemic standing of moral claims is something that can be assessed from outside the practices of making and critically evaluating moral judgements. I do this by focusing on a wid…Read more
  •  131
    Richard Joyce, The Evolution of Morality (review)
    Ethics 117 (2): 363-369. 2007.
  • Ethics Without Ontology (review)
    Ethics 116 (2). 2006.
  •  32
  •  2
    Review of Kalderon (2005) (review)
    Ethics 117 131-35. 2006.
  •  19
    Genealogies of Ethics
    Analyse & Kritik 34 (1): 157-165. 2012.
    There have been many genealogies of ethics. Philip Kitcher’s The Ethical Project stands apart in its ability to incorporate the insights of earlier genealogies while avoiding their oversights and mistakes. In this essay, I compare and contrast Kitcher’s genealogy of ethics with two contemporary alternatives, those offered by Frans de Waal and Richard Joyce. Comparing Kitcher’s genealogy with these alternatives makes it easy to highlight his most useful contribution to our understanding of the or…Read more