All Drafts Available Only Upon Request
Cognitive Science of Personal Ideologies
I am interested in studying the influence of genetic factors on the development of individuals' preferences, and the influence of those same genetic factors on the individual's conscious deliberations.
Much of the recent research suggests that an individual's genetic make-up is much more closely tied to her idiosyncratic structure of beliefs and values, as well as to her processes for acquiring those beliefs and values, than has traditionally been recognized.
My interest in these belief- and value-formation processes was initially motivated by an interest in the cognitive functions related to the formation of personal political ideologies.
The question of how an individual comes to identify with a particular political stance (or party, or platform) has long thought to be answered by appealing to conscious processes of rational deliberation.
However, this explanation struggles for acceptance in the face of persistent (even increasing) political polarization, as it implies that one end or the other of the political spectrum simply is either irrational or fundamentally flawed.
I'm interested in investigating ways in which we can explain the widespread polarization of populations while preserving the rationality and understanding of individuals within them.
Dispositional Intentionality (work in progress)
In this paper I consider the possibility of States of Pure Intentionality--intentional states that entirely lack phenomenology and phenomenal character--and suggest that such intentionality could only exist dispositionally
(i.e., as dispositional states or as dispositions to be in certain states).
The Folk v. Acme Corp: De-Regulating Corporate Consciousness (work in progress)
Do ordinary individuals (i.e., people who have not been trained in Philosophy, Cognitive Science, or any other related field) possess a working concept of consciousness that approximates the philosophical notion 'phenomenal consciousness'?
And if they do, do they attribute such states as equally to group agents as to other individuals?
Joshua Knobe and Jesse Prinz (2008) have argued that ordinary people do, in fact, have a concept of phenomenal consciousness (albeit a largely tacit concept) and that they judge attributions of conscious states in such a way as to suggest a group-specific restriction mechanism.
There are, however, some reasons for thinking the Knobe and Prinz theses are insufficiently supported by the evidence. In this paper, I raise two methodological worries about the Knobe and Prinz experiments: first, the failure to utilize minimal-pair attributions,and second,
the failure to do the crucial comparison between mental state attributions to groups and mental state attributions to individuals.
After critiquing the Knobe and Prinz studies, I present my data from my own experiments, which strongly undermines the claim that the folk possess a concept (even tacitly) of phenomenal consciousness. I then point to an interesting feature of the data,
which I take to suggest an alternative avenue for future research. Namely, the data point to an interesting effect that the presence or absence of sentential context has on judgments of mental state attributions to groups.
Folk Psychology of Consciousness with Brian Fiala, Robert Goldberg, & Shaun Nichols (in prep)
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.
My interest in these belief- and value-formation processes was initially motivated by an interest in the cognitive functions related to the formation of personal political ideologies. The question of how an individual comes to identify with a particular political stance (or party, or platform) has long thought to be answered by appealing to conscious processes of rational deliberation. However, this explanation struggles for acceptance in the face of persistent (even increasing) political polarization, as it implies that one end or the other of the political spectrum simply is either irrational or fundamentally flawed. I'm interested in investigating ways in which we can explain the widespread polarization of populations while preserving the rationality and understanding of individuals within them.
Joshua Knobe and Jesse Prinz (2008) have argued that ordinary people do, in fact, have a concept of phenomenal consciousness (albeit a largely tacit concept) and that they judge attributions of conscious states in such a way as to suggest a group-specific restriction mechanism. There are, however, some reasons for thinking the Knobe and Prinz theses are insufficiently supported by the evidence. In this paper, I raise two methodological worries about the Knobe and Prinz experiments: first, the failure to utilize minimal-pair attributions,and second, the failure to do the crucial comparison between mental state attributions to groups and mental state attributions to individuals.
After critiquing the Knobe and Prinz studies, I present my data from my own experiments, which strongly undermines the claim that the folk possess a concept (even tacitly) of phenomenal consciousness. I then point to an interesting feature of the data, which I take to suggest an alternative avenue for future research. Namely, the data point to an interesting effect that the presence or absence of sentential context has on judgments of mental state attributions to groups.
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.