| Philosophy
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CURRENT
COURSES
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Honors Colloquium: Mind, Brain, and Body |
Syllabus
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OLDER
COURSE MATERIALS
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Philosophy
of Psychology
Modern Philosophy
Honors Colloquium: Evolution and its Implications
Theory of Knowledge
Cognitive
Science (team taught)
Graduate Seminar: Mental Representation
Graduate Seminar: Epistemology: Basic
Beliefs
Graduate Seminar: Perceptual
Experience
Graduate
Seminar: Empiricism, Mirror Neurons, and the Representational
Theory of Mind
Basic tips for writing a
philosophy paper
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Some
recent papers of mine
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Representational
Analyticity (2005)
in Mind and Language |
The
traditional understanding of analyticity in terms of concept containment
is revisited, but with a concept explicitly understood as a certain
kind of mental representation and containment being read correspondingly
literally. The account provided here illustrates some interesting
features of representations and explains, at least in part, the
special epistemic status of analytic judgments. |
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Lesion
Studies, Spared Performance, and Cognitive Systems (2003)
in Cortex
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A
short discussion piece in a behavioral neuroscience journal on the
logic of double dissociation research in cognitive neuroscience. |
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Perceptual
Belief and Nonexperiential Looks (2005) in Philosophical
Perspectives
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I
argue that there is a sense of perceptual appearance verbs (like
'looks', as in 'the table looks brown from here') that does not
purport to characterize the agent's experiential state. This sense
is connected instead to the cognitive scientific conception of perceptual
systems. This nonexperiential sense of looks allows us to solve
certain longstanding problems in epistemology, particularly that
concerning the distinction between perception and inference. |
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In
Defense of Epiphenomenalism
(2006) in Philosophical Psychology
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A
version of functionalism really does imply that mental properties
are causally irrelevant, but this is a virtue of the theory,
rather than a vice. |
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Clades,
Capgras, and Perceptual Kinds
(2007) in Philosophical Topics
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I
develop a notion of perceptual kinds---similarity clusters of distal
stimuli---to try to provide a (partial) principled answer to questions
about the contents of perceptual states. The resulting view allows
for fairly high level contents in perception (e.g., cat,
table, etc.,) and not just low level properties of objects
(e.g., shiny, presenting-elliptically-from-this-angle,
etc.), while avoiding what I take to be certain liberal excesses
(e.g., causal relations, semantic properties, etc.) |
Experience,
Evidence, and Externalism
--forthcoming-- |
The
famous Sellarsian Dilemma, or something like it, actually provides
an argument for a strongly externalist epistemology. (I had
originally called this "Externalism and the Sellarsian Dilemma",
but this seemed to make readers expect a paper on Sellars. They
were disappointed.) |
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Book
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Perception and Basic Beliefs:
Zombies, Modules, and the Problem of the External World
(2009) on Oxford University Press
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I
try to answer two central questions in epistemology: which beliefs
are epistemologically basic (i.e., noninferentially justified)?
and where does perception end and inferential cognition begin?
I offer a highly externalist theory, arguing that it is not introspectible
features of the beliefs that determine their basic or perceptual
status; instead, this is determined by the nature of the cognitive
system, or module, that produced them. On my view, the sensory
experiences that typically accompany perceptual beliefs play no
indispensible role in the justification of these beliefs. Thus
even "zombies" --- who in the philosophical parlance
have no conscious experiences --- can have (justified) perceptual
beliefs.
I
hold that perceptual beliefs are a species of basic beliefs, although
there are other basic beliefs, and some beliefs are nonbasic,
thus requiring inferential support from other beliefs for their
justification. This last point is used to defend a reliabilist
epistemology against an important class of traditional objections
(where the agent uses a reliable process that she doesn't know
to be reliable). The overall view I defend is a type of reliabilism,
and I use the basic/nonbasic distinction developed here to offer
a version of reliabilism that takes inference seriously yet remains
staunchly externalist.
Get
it at Amazon
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| Non-Philosophy
Stuff |