Dissertation/Research Overview
For the past few decades, philosophers working on Folk Psychology have focused largely on questions involving everyday attributions of intentional states, like beliefs and desires. What I dub 'the New Folk Psychology' extends those questions to involve everyday attributions of consciousness
(i.e., experiences and feelings). This project focuses on three core topics.
The first component of the project is the task of identifying the process underlying everyday attributions of consciousness. This task is carried out with an eye towards addressing issues in the current folk psychology of consciousness debate. The most central of these issues revolves around
the question of whether ordinary psychology incorporates something like the philosopher's distinction between intentionality and phenomenology. My work (Arico 2010, Arico, et al. 2011) advocates a model of mind-attribution called the Agency Model. According to this model, whenever we represent
an entity as having certain properties (for example, facial features), we automatically categorize that thing as an AGENT. This AGENT-categorization then activates a cascade of behavioral dispositions, including the disposition to attribute both intentionality and phenomenology.
The second topic concerns ways that the process underlying everyday attributions of consciousness might be related to psychological process involved in moral perception. My work to date has focused largely on the question of how it is that we come to see an entity as a moral being, as something
that deserves moral consideration and/or is subject to moral evaluation. I argue that existing accounts of such moral perception are based on problematic experimental data (Arico, under review). I then propose an amended Agency Model, according to which seeing an entity as a moral being is a
consequence of categorizing that thing as an AGENT.
The third topic involves folk psychological attributions of mentality to groups. I argue that theorists who posit group mental states and group minds (above and beyond the minds and mental states of group members) are mistaken about the ordinary use and everyday understanding of group mental
state attributions. Contrary to many group mind "realists", the empirical evidence suggests that people overwhelmingly interpret sentences attributing group mental states as ascriptions of mental states to some relevant subset of group members (Phelan, Arico, and Nichols, under review). In
light of these data, I argue for a distributivist analysis of everyday group mental state attributions. I then consider how this understanding of folk psychology impacts the philosophical debate about group minds and mental states. In short, I argue against realism about (irreducible) group minds
and mental states and embrace a distributivist picture of group mind ontology.
In future work, I hope to continue studying the folk psychology of consciousness and exploring ways that it might relate to other philosophically interesting aspects of human cognition. For instance: how does the process of perceiving a thing as a moral being interact with the process of evaluating
group morality, and how might AGENT-categorization influence intuitions about the identity and persistence of persons? Additionally, I hope to develop the Agency Model of mind attribution in greater detail. For example, in its present form, the model claims that AGENT-categorization produces a
behavioral disposition to attribute both intentional and phenomenal kinds of mentality. But this allows for (at least) two possibilities. On the one hand, it may be that AGENT-categorization disposes us to attribute the capacity for the full range of intentionality and phenomenology; on the other
hand, AGENT-categorization might merely dispose us to attribute the capacity for some "core" set of intentional and phenomenal states. Because the model is relatively new, little work has been done to decide between these possibilities. I hope to do such work in the future.
Papers/Articles/Chapters
For the past few decades, philosophers working on Folk Psychology have focused largely on questions involving everyday attributions of intentional states, like beliefs and desires. What I dub 'the New Folk Psychology' extends those questions to involve everyday attributions of consciousness (i.e., experiences and feelings). This project focuses on three core topics.
The first component of the project is the task of identifying the process underlying everyday attributions of consciousness. This task is carried out with an eye towards addressing issues in the current folk psychology of consciousness debate. The most central of these issues revolves around the question of whether ordinary psychology incorporates something like the philosopher's distinction between intentionality and phenomenology. My work (Arico 2010, Arico, et al. 2011) advocates a model of mind-attribution called the Agency Model. According to this model, whenever we represent an entity as having certain properties (for example, facial features), we automatically categorize that thing as an AGENT. This AGENT-categorization then activates a cascade of behavioral dispositions, including the disposition to attribute both intentionality and phenomenology.
The second topic concerns ways that the process underlying everyday attributions of consciousness might be related to psychological process involved in moral perception. My work to date has focused largely on the question of how it is that we come to see an entity as a moral being, as something that deserves moral consideration and/or is subject to moral evaluation. I argue that existing accounts of such moral perception are based on problematic experimental data (Arico, under review). I then propose an amended Agency Model, according to which seeing an entity as a moral being is a consequence of categorizing that thing as an AGENT.
The third topic involves folk psychological attributions of mentality to groups. I argue that theorists who posit group mental states and group minds (above and beyond the minds and mental states of group members) are mistaken about the ordinary use and everyday understanding of group mental state attributions. Contrary to many group mind "realists", the empirical evidence suggests that people overwhelmingly interpret sentences attributing group mental states as ascriptions of mental states to some relevant subset of group members (Phelan, Arico, and Nichols, under review). In light of these data, I argue for a distributivist analysis of everyday group mental state attributions. I then consider how this understanding of folk psychology impacts the philosophical debate about group minds and mental states. In short, I argue against realism about (irreducible) group minds and mental states and embrace a distributivist picture of group mind ontology.
In future work, I hope to continue studying the folk psychology of consciousness and exploring ways that it might relate to other philosophically interesting aspects of human cognition. For instance: how does the process of perceiving a thing as a moral being interact with the process of evaluating group morality, and how might AGENT-categorization influence intuitions about the identity and persistence of persons? Additionally, I hope to develop the Agency Model of mind attribution in greater detail. For example, in its present form, the model claims that AGENT-categorization produces a behavioral disposition to attribute both intentional and phenomenal kinds of mentality. But this allows for (at least) two possibilities. On the one hand, it may be that AGENT-categorization disposes us to attribute the capacity for the full range of intentionality and phenomenology; on the other hand, AGENT-categorization might merely dispose us to attribute the capacity for some "core" set of intentional and phenomenal states. Because the model is relatively new, little work has been done to decide between these possibilities. I hope to do such work in the future.
Papers/Articles/Chapters
Folk Psychology, Consciousness, & Context Effects. 2010. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 1: 371-393. Final version available here.
Traditionally, the philosophical study of Folk Psychology has focused on how ordinary people (those without academic training in fields like Psychology, Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Mind, etc.) go about attributing mental states like beliefs and desires.
Philosophers call such states 'intentional states'. Recently, a body of work has emerged in the growing field of Experimental Philosophy that focuses on folk attributions of certain states not previously discussed in the Folk Psychological literature;
namely the discussion is concerned with figuring out how (and whether) ordinary people go about attributing mental states of qualitative experience, or what philosophers might call 'phenomenal states'. The present paper centers, largely, on two questions:
Do the folk distinguish, in some sense, between states of phenomenal consciousness and nonphenomenal states? And do the folk discriminate between different kinds of entities in their attributions of mental states? This paper hopes to advance the new Folk Psychological discussion,
first, by discerning two primary hypotheses presently competing in the existing experimental philosophy literature; and second, by presenting some new experimental data that weigh on those hypotheses. Finally, I'll offer a cognitive model of the processes underlying attributions of mental states that, I argue, fully explains the results of these (and other) studies.
Traditionally, the philosophical study of Folk Psychology has focused on how ordinary people (those without academic training in fields like Psychology, Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Mind, etc.) go about attributing mental states like beliefs and desires. Philosophers call such states 'intentional states'. Recently, a body of work has emerged in the growing field of Experimental Philosophy that focuses on folk attributions of certain states not previously discussed in the Folk Psychological literature; namely the discussion is concerned with figuring out how (and whether) ordinary people go about attributing mental states of qualitative experience, or what philosophers might call 'phenomenal states'. The present paper centers, largely, on two questions: Do the folk distinguish, in some sense, between states of phenomenal consciousness and nonphenomenal states? And do the folk discriminate between different kinds of entities in their attributions of mental states? This paper hopes to advance the new Folk Psychological discussion, first, by discerning two primary hypotheses presently competing in the existing experimental philosophy literature; and second, by presenting some new experimental data that weigh on those hypotheses. Finally, I'll offer a cognitive model of the processes underlying attributions of mental states that, I argue, fully explains the results of these (and other) studies.
Folk Psychology of Consciousness with Brian Fiala, Robert Goldberg, & Shaun Nichols. 2011. Mind & Language, 26(3): 327-352. Final version available here.
Part of the traditional problem of other minds focuses on the question: "What leads us to think that other individuals have minds?" This way of posing the problem emphasizes the psychological mechanisms by which attributions of mentality are produced, and brackets issues about the epistemic status of those attributions. Psychologists and philosophers of psychology have recently begun to investigate the more refined question, "What leads us to think that other individuals have conscious minds?" We might dub this question the problem of other conscious minds.
Here we develop a new model for understanding the problem of other conscious minds. Following Reid, we advance a version of the 'dedicated mechanism' approach that we dub "The Agency Model." According to The Agency Model, there are specific superficial cues that suffice to dispose a subject to attribute conscious mentality to a target; once a person identifies an object as an AGENT (e.g. by superficial cues), that will suffice to produce a prepotent tendency to attribute conscious states to the object.
In order to test the Agency Model, we ran a reaction-time study in which subjects were presented with a sequence of Object/Attribution pairs. Attributions specified properties such as Happy, Made of Metal, Pain, Living, and White. Objects were drawn from categories such as Artifacts, Birds, Insects, Mammals, and Plants. For each Objection/Attribution pair, subjects were asked to respond (Yes or No) as to whether the object in the pair could have the property in the pair. The Agency Model predicts (i) that subjects should be more willing to attribute mental states to entities that typically trigger our agent-detection mechanism than to entities that typically do not, and (ii) that subjects should take longer to respond negatively for phenomenal attributions to entities that typically trigger the agent-detection mechanism than for phenomenal attributions to non-agent entities.
The results confirm our basic predictions. However, we found an interesting anomaly: RT's did not differ between phenomenal attributions to Insects and phenomenal attributions (e.g., PAIN) to Plants. This result suggests that, although Plants do not display the cues that typically dispose us to attribute Agency, subjects are nonetheless disposed to attribute (some) phenomenal consciousness to Plants. We argue that this result does not undermine The Agency Model, but does suggest that the model is explanatorily incomplete. We conclude by considering some options for elaborating the model.
On the psychological origins of dualism: Dual-process cognition and the explanatory gap with Brian Fiala & Shaun Nichols. 2011, in Mark Collard & Edward Slingerland (Eds.), Creating consilience: Integrating science and the humanities. Oxford University Press.
Psychologist Paul Bloom (and others) has suggested that it is a pervasive feature of human psychology to find physicalist reductions of conscious experience counterintuitive. He calls this 'Folk Dualism.' Plausibly, we think, this intuition is the same as that which finds philosophical expression in arguments for an "explanatory gap." Philosophical arguments for an explanatory gap take there to be something missing from purely physical explanations of consciousness. Supposedly, such explanations will inevitably leave out the felt quality of 'what it's like' to experience the world.
We suspect that both Folk Dualism and Explanatory Gap intuitions arise from the same cognitive process, viz., the process by which we come to attribute conscious states to a thing. This paper presents a dual-process model of the cognitive architecture underlying conscious state attribution and argues that both of the intuitions discussed above are consequences of a disparity in the outputs of this dual-process system. In short, intuitions that something has been "left out" of physicalist explanations arises from the failure to activate the AGENT mechanism, a necessary step in the low-level path to conscious state attribution.
Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics with Don Fallis. forthcoming. Philosophical Psychology.
There are many philosophical questions surrounding the notion of lying. Is it ever morally acceptable to lie? Can we acquire knowledge from people who might be lying to us? In order to answer these questions, however, we must first answer the question of what, exactly, constitutes the concept of lying. This paper examines three predominate definitions, as well as some cases--bald-faced lies and lies told with warrant-defeating provisions tacked on--that, arguably, pose problems for some of these definitions. Importantly, theorists working on this topic fundamentally disagree about whether these cases are genuine instances of lying and, thus, serve as counter-examples to the definitions on offer. To settle these disputes, we elicited judgments about the proposed counter-examples from ordinary language users unfettered by theoretical bias. We discuss the results of these experiments and the relevance of the data on the philosophical debate about the definition of lying, as well as some implications for further research on the topic. We suggest that the definition offered by Don Fallis (2009) most closely captures the notion of lying utilized by everyday speakers of English. Finally, we offer some further considerations on the moral implications of our investigation into the concept of lying.
Breaking Out of Moral Typecasting. 2012. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 3(3): 425-438. Final version available here.
Philosophers have long associated moral considerability with mentality (of one kind or another), and the psychological association (between mind perception and moral consideration) has also recently been defended by philosophers and cognitive scientists like Joshua Knobe and Jesse Prinz (2008) and Philip Robbins and Anthony Jack (2006). In their recent paper, Kurt Gray and Daniel Wegner offer a model of moral cognition, the "Moral Typecasting" thesis, in which they claim, not only that moral perception is grounded in mind perception, but that perceptions of moral agency are inversely related to perceptions of moral patiency. Once we see someone as a moral agent, they claim, we cannot see them as a moral patient (and vice versa). In this paper, I argue that this conclusion is not sufficiently supported by Gray and Wegner's experimental results.
Here, I challenge the conception of morality on which the typecasting thesis is fundamentally based and raise some concerns with the data offered in favor of moral typecasting. I argue that the dyadic definition of morality is far too narrow to fully capture either the totality of morality or entirety of moral psychology. Even setting aside the problems with the dyadic notion of morality, I argue that the experimental data Gray and Wegner appeal to fail to demonstrate the sort of mutual exclusivity of and causal interaction between moral perceptions necessary to support the moral typecasting thesis.
Thinking Things and Feeling Things: On an Alleged Discontinuity in Folk Metaphysics of Mind with Mark Phelan and Shaun Nichols. 2013. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.
How do people ordinarily attribute mental states to other entities? Clearly, people take physical features into account when assessing whether an organism is likely to occupy particular mental states. An eyeless cave fish, for instance, will be thought unlikely to occupy visual states. However according to one recent theory, people use information about physical constitution not only in this piecemeal fashion to determine which mental states an organism is likely to occupy, but also to draw a fundamental distinction between entities that can merely think and entities that can also feel (Knobe & Prinz 2008). According to this view, people recognize a deep discontinuity between phenomenal and intentional states, such that they refrain from attributing feelings and experiences to entities that do not have the right kind of body, though they may attribute thoughts to entities that lack a biological body, like corporations, robots, and disembodied souls. Alternatively, some have denied that there is any deep discontinuity between the physical features that lead us to attribute the two varieties of mental states (Arico et al. 2011). In other words, the cognitive process that leads us to attribute mental states to various entities does not distinguish between the physical features necessary for intentional states and the physical features necessary for phenomenal states.
In this paper we examine some of the research that has been used to motivate the discontinuity view. Specifically, we focus on experiments that examine people's intuitions regarding the aptness of various mental state ascriptions to groups. These studies have been taken as evidence that people are more inclined to think of groups as having intentionality than as having phenomenology. This result, combined with the fact that groups obviously lack a single biological body, has been taken as evidence that people use information about physical constitution in fundamentally different ways when attributing the two kinds of states. However, as we explain, these studies support a discontinuous picture of folk metaphysics of mind only on the assumption that the experimental participants are interpreting the relevant group mental state ascriptions in a very specific way. Thus, we empirically investigate how people are interpreting group mental state ascriptions and present evidence that they are not interpreting these ascriptions in a way that supports the discontinuity view. Instead, we argue that people generally interpret group mental state ascriptions distributively, as attributions of mental states to group members, which supervene on, but are not equivalent to, persons.
Understanding Group Minds. forthcoming in Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Mind, London: Continuum.
Perceiving Minds and Moral Beings. under review.Do groups really have mental states? More to the point, do groups really have mental states distinct from (above and beyond, in addition to) the mental states of their composite members? This question is far from purely academic. For instance, given that certain groups are legally recognized as persons, if corporations genuinely possess beliefs, preferences, and desires of their very own, democratic justice may well require that they be allowed to express those attitudes in political discourse (as decided by the Supreme Court in Citizens United). If, on the other hand, such mental states can be reduced to the beliefs, preferences, and desires of group members, then the principles of democratic justice may well be satisfied without affording groups free speech rights above and beyond those of their composite members. That is, if the thoughts and beliefs typically attributed to such groups are best understood in terms of the thoughts and beliefs of group members, then there is no supervenient group thought to be expressed and, subsequently, no possibility for group speech in any strict sense.
In this chapter, I will consider some arguments in favor of irreducible group mentality (or what we might call realism), which, I think, rely on certain fundamentally-mistaken assumptions. The arguments discussed here come in two varieties: first, there are arguments that appeal to ordinary language to support a realist framework of group mentality (Gilbert 1996, 2004; Tollefsen 2002, 2006); second, there are arguments that rely on specific standards of rationality for thinking that groups really have minds of their own (Gilbert 2006; Pettit 2003). I think that those who argue for group minds based on attributions of group mental states in everyday, ordinary language, have been operating on a fatal misunderstanding of how group mental state attributions are used and understood in ordinary language. I will offer an alternative picture of folk psychology, which suggests that those studying the ontology of group minds should interpret everyday attributions of mental states to group in a distributive manner (i.e., as being used to ascribe mental states to some subset of group members). I also think that theorists who appeal to idealized standards of rationality to support irreducible group mental states may well be invoking standards of rationality that do not appropriately apply to group minds. Moreover, I think that some of these seeming puzzles of rationality dissolve once we acknowledge the distributivist picture of group mentality.
One aspect of ethics is the descriptive project of figuring out what's going on in everyday, "folk" morality: how mental terms are used and understood by everyday moral agents, and how those terms function in our ordinary psychology. This paper explores the descriptive question of how we identify an entity as a thing that deserves moral consideration. What, that is, makes us see some things, but not others, as specifically moral beings? I argue that the process by which we perceive something as a moral being is fundamentally associated with the process by which we come to see a thing as having mental states. Specifically, I suggest a cognitive model of moral perception that builds on an existing model of mind-attribution (known as the Agency Model): when we represent an entity as having certain relatively features (a face, distinctive motion, or contingent interaction), we are disposed not only to see that thing as having mentality but also to see it as an object of moral consideration.