All of the articles below are penultimate(ish) drafts, made available out of professional courtesy. Please cite the published versions, not these. (And here's a short and intermittently up-to-date CV). Articles with asterisks after them are ones that I think are more central or representatives of my work/core interests.
Review of Ned Block’s The Border Between Thinking & Seeing (in Mind). In which I review Ned’s seminal book and take some time to reflect on broader questions such as where the field of perception is going, what it takes to do top flight work in it, and why in god's name anyone bothers to write a book in cognitive science at all.
“Dumb, Cold, & Cynical” (with Nic Porot). In which we try to explain how three seemingly inconsistent properties of belief can co-exist (the three properties are how we care inclined to believe everything that’s presented to us, yet can rationally update and are often downright cynical.) It’s also a negative paper and directly addresses the work of the ‘social signaling/social marketplace crowd of those influenced by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber.
“The Case Against Implicit Bias Fatalism” (with Benedek Kurdi) in Nature Reviews Psychology. A short commentary that tries to be hopeful about the future of research and attitude change for implicit attitudes. In a delicious irony, it is written by two extremely cynical pessimists.
“Best Game in Town: The Reemergence of the Language of Thought Hypothesis Across the Cognitive Sciences” (with Jake Quilty-Dunn and Nic Porot) in Behavioral and Brain Science. Characterizes an LoT by having 6 canonical properties. Argues for the LoT in areas of cognition you wouldn’t expect it, such as automatic (e.g., “system 1”) cognition, high-level vision, reasoning from infants to insects, and computational cognitive science. Target article, w/ commentaries and responses (coming soon for the latter).*
“Problems and Mysteries in the Many Languages of Thought” many coauthored letter to Cognitive Science about the future of cognitive science. Everyone should be so lucky to coauthor with so many people they like and admire. Coauthored with Yarrow Dunham, Roman Feiman, Chaz Firestone, E. J. Green, Daniel Harris, Melissa M. Kibbe, Benedek Kurdi, Myrto Mylopoulos, Joshua Shepherd, Alexis Wellwood, Nicolas Porot & Jake Quilty-Dunn
Abstract: “What is the structure of thought?” is as central a question as any in cognitive science. A classic answer to this question has appealed to a Language of Thought (LoT). We point to emerging research from disparate branches of the field that supports the LoT hypothesis, but also uncovers diversity in LoTs across cognitive systems, stages of development, and species. Our letter formulates open research questions for cognitive science concerning the varieties of rules and representations that underwrite various LoT-based systems and how these variations can help researchers taxonomize cognitive systems.
“Everything & More: The Prospects of Whole Brain Emulation” in The Journal of Philosophy
This paper begins by assessing the prospects of whole brain emulation, which has been posited as the most likely path to achieving human-level intelligence, superintelligence, and immortality. The somewhat technical issues it turns on suggests some positions on a host of core issues in philosophy and cognitive science: consciousness, the limits of computationalism, and the likelihood of immortality, the singularity, and superintelligence.
“How the Cognitive Science of Belief Can Transform the Study of Mental Health” in JAMA Psychiatry (with Nic Porot)
What exactly has gone wrong in monothematic delusions? We argue that here—as in many psychiatric illnesses—patients epistemic faculties (their belief forming, storing, and changing mechanisms) are still well-functioning. If neurotypicals had the same perceptual experiences as those suffering delusions we’d often end up with similar beliefs. Similar morals are gestured at for a broader range of psychiatric illnesses. To put the point another way, psychosis can be seen as a problem of premises or of inferences from those premises. My broader bet is that very few people suffer from the latter condition and almost all of the issue is in having false premises, not in reasoning more poorly than neurotypicals from them.
Here’s a link to the published paper, and here’s one to a penultimate version (that’s quite different as its longer and contains a reference to Q which was bizarrely censored in the published version (the back and forth with the editor trying to twist themselves into knots to explain why we couldn’t mention the conspiracy theory was truly a sight to behold. The editor said things like mentioning “followers of Q” would violate their “aims for inclusivity.” Well then!
“The Sound of Slurs” (with Steven Young & Jennifer Ware) in Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy (forthcoming).
This paper starts with a strange puzzle: why are words that rhyme with slurs less liked than their synonyms? The answer turns out to be much more interesting than the bizarre question. It is because certain sounds are overrepresented in slurs a fact which suggests that we map disliked sounds to disliked referents, a topic that makes some sense for evolutionary and pragmatic reasons. The paper is short but split between looking at iconic language (through phoneme/valence pairings), the evolution of the lexicon (how practical communicative concerns get embedded in the lexicon), and on theories of slurs (what we want from them, what psycholinguistics can help supply).
“Disfluency Attenuates the Reception of Pseudoprofound and Postmodernist Bullshit” (with Ryan Tracey, Nic Porot, & Steven Young). Looks at how message characteristics—particularly disfluency—affects judgments of profundity for totally vacuous statements like “The goal of meridians is to plant seeds of knowledge rather than discontinuity.”)
“The Outlier Paradox” (with Michael Epstein, Jake Quilty-Dunn & Tatiana Emmanouil) in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance (2020)
This paper is about a paradox in visual processing. Ensemble perception generates statistical summary representations of scenes by, in part, excluding outliers from the the summary calculation. The question is: how are outliers calculated? Are they first processed and then somehow sequestered or is there a heuristic to allow the visual system to ignore the outliers altogether before processing begins.
“The Science of Belief: A Progress Report” (with Nic Porot) in WIRE’s Cognitive Science (2020)
(Please use/cite this version, the expanded one reprinted in the anthology) “The Science of Belief: Expanded Reprint” in The Cognitive Science of Beliefs volume with Cambridge University Press (w/ Nic Porot) ed Julien Mussolino, Joseph Sommer, and Pernille Hammer, (forthcoming). *
This paper answers the question: wait, there is a science of belief? It doubles as a primer on my work on belief, giving short summaries of my preferred models of belief acquisition, storage, and change, as well as what questions I think are the next big ones on belief to be broached. It also makes belief cool.
“The Fragmentation of Belief” (with Joseph Bendana) in The Fragmented Mind (eds. D. Kinderman, A. Onofri C. Borgoni) Oxford University Press (2021, though this is a draft as it hasn’t been copy-edited yet…). *
How are beliefs stored? Is there a single web of belief (a la Quine, Duhem, Fodor) and if not, then what is there instead? Come find out!
“Assimilation and Control: Belief at the Lowest Levels.” Philosophical Studies. (2020).
Can unconscious belief be rational? And should we spend anytime thinking about a pragmatic theory of belief? Answers: yes, no.
“Can Resources Save Rationality? ‘Anti-Bayesian’ Updating in Cognition and Perception” (with Won, I., Gross, S., & Firestone, C.) Behavioral & Brain Sciences, (2020).
Anti-Bayesianism in both perception (via haptic illusions) and cognition (via perverse updating).
“Modularist Explanations of Experience and other Illusions.” Consciousness & Cognition. (2019)
What use is the Muller-Lyre illusion for understanding modularity? Answer: it should be very little. There are two types of modularity, the modularity of processing (what most of our data is on, and what matters for epistemology and philosophy of science) and the modularity of experience (which matters for very little but is the focus of most expositions of modularity).
“Non-Inferential Transitions: Imagery and Association” (with Jake Quilty-Dunn) in Inference and Consciousness, (eds. Anders Nes and Timothy Chan). Routledge (2020).
When combined with our earlier paper “inferential transitions”, you get all the transitions the mind makes.
"Troubles with Bayesianism: An Introduction to the Psychological Immune System" Mind & Language (2019) 34 (2), 141-157 *
This paper does a few things: 1) it introduces you to the idea of giving laws for a theory of belief change (I offer some), 2) it gives a description of the Bayesian deadlock (almost anything can be redescribed as a Bayesian process if we interpret the constraints in certain ways) and offers a way out of it, 3) it argues that “imperial bayesianism” cannot be true of the mind as a whole because of the data discussed and 4) defends a version of the Psychological Immune System. It’s like the regular immune system, but for your ego.
"Against Dispositionalism: Belief in Cognitive Science", (with Jake Quilty-Dunn) Philosophical Studies 175.9 (2018): 2353-2372. *
In which we give a contemporary defense of representationalism and realism about belief, and offer up challenges to the most well-worked out theory of dispositionalism (Schwitzgebel’s).
"Inferential Transitions", (with Jake Quilty-Dunn) Australasian Journal of Philosophy (2018) 96 (3), 532-547
This paper tackles the question “What is inference?” from a ruthlessly cognitive science perspective. Inference is characterized in opposition to other transitions, mostly association (for transitions that aren’t either see the companion paper above). The concept of a rule being built into the architecture—and a test for it—is introduced too.
"Seeing and Conceptualizing: Modularity and the Shallow Contents Of Perception," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2017) 94:3 *
If you are modular conceptualism curious, this is the paper for you. It argues visual categorization happens at the speed of theoretical limits of what is possible. To account for the absurd data offered here we need a theory where a) visual processing is closed off from cognition (because it happens too fast for recurrent feedback loops), b) the outputs of vision are conceptualized (for a bunch of reasons such as: the second you can detect any stimulus, you know eactly what it is—i.e., you have conceptualized the stimulus for a theoretically interesting range of stims (basic level categories).
“Attitude, Inference, Association: On the Propositional Structure of Implicit Bias”, Nous 50:3 (2016) 629–658 *
Are implicit attitudes associative? And what is it to be associative anyway? This paper delineates a few different things one might mean by ‘associations’ then argues that implicit attitudes aren’t like any of them. In fact, they seem to just be mental representations—specifically beliefs— with logic-like form. It ends by introducing a realist notion of how beliefs are fragmented from one another.
“Associationist Theories of Thought”, Stanford Encyclopedia Entry, (2015).
Intended as a historical overview/introduction to the idea of associationist theories in the mind. In particular it’s a walk through 4 different ways of understanding associative theories (associative learning, associative structures, associative transitions, and associative implementation bases). It attempts to explain what they are, what we want them for, and what their canonical shortcomings are.
"Believing without Reason: Or Why Liberals Shouldn't Watch Fox News", (with Jake Quilty-Dunn) Harvard Review of Philosophy 22 (2015):42-52
Some H-bomb undergrads asked me for a paper on my work on belief that would be accessible to undergrads. I looked at the journal and the last issue had (was?) a paper by Fred Dretske. So I thought sure why not (I loved Fred and still miss him dearly). A fun weekend of writing w/ JQD and a lighthearted piece of publicly accessible cognitive science was produced. We’ve been told that it’s often taught in prisons and to first years. But, ummm, it also lead to 2 of the dumbest months of my life, after I a) won an NEH award and b) the right wing blogosphere found it (on Christmas Eve no less). The paper taught me how to say no to things such as doing interviews for the Washington Free Beacon on how a moron can get an NEH or agreeing to go on Tucker Carlson for some fair and balanced debate. (The paper is about how exposure can lead to belief even if you don’t believe the source. It has nothing to do with right vs left wing politics.)
“Poetic Opacity: How to Paint Things with Words” in The Philosophy of Poetry, ed. John Gibson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, (2015).
“The Automatic and the Ballistic: Modularity Beyond Perceptual Processes”, Philosophical Psychology 28:8 (2014):1147-1156
“The Powers That Bind: Doxastic Voluntarism and Epistemic Obligation” (with Neil Levy) in The Ethics of Belief, ed. Jon Matheson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, (2014): 12-33.
“Thinking is Believing”, Inquiry 57, no. 1 (2014): 55-96. *
How does belief acquisition work? What are the nuts and bolts of it? I offer a pretty in-depth and…unintuitive model here working off the ‘Spinozan theory of belief.’
“Against Alief”, Philosophical Studies 165, no. 1 (2013): 197-211.
Although the focus of paper does argue against the existence for positing aliefs, it’s of interest outside of it. In particular, it tries to establish that beliefs are—in many respects—not as epistemologically respectable as one might want. On the other hand, seemingly dumb, ballistic reasoning (e.g., associative or emotional reasoning) isn’t as obstinate and reason unresponsive as you might think (as they are often governed by beliefs). So fancy reasoning is less fancy than you might’ve thought and what seems like processes that ignore reasons are fancier than you might’ve thought. As above, so below. Belief is everywhere.
“Numerical Architecture”, Topics in Cognitive Science 5, no. 2 (2013): 367-86.
In which it is argued that the is a number module.
“Explaining the Abstract/Concrete Paradoxes in Moral Psychology: NBAR Theory” (with David Ripley), Review of Philosophy and Psychology 3 no. 3 (2012): 351-68.
“A Potted History of Mental States” (with Mark Phelan), in Philosophy: Traditional and Experimental Readings, ed. Fritz Allhoff, Ron Mallon, and Shaun Nichols. New York: Oxford University Press, (2012): 193-202.
“What is the Narrow Content of FENCE (and Other Definitionally and Interpretationally Primitive Concepts)?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 34 no. 3 (2011): 138.
“Locke’s Answer to Molyneux’s Thought Experiment” (with Mike Bruno). History of Philosophy Quarterly 27, no.2 (2010): 165–80.
“Expectations and Morality: A Dilemma” (with David Ripley). Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33, no. 4 (2010): 346.
“Responsibility and the Brain Sciences”, (with Felipe De Brigard and David Ripley). Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 12, no. 5 (2009): 511–24.
Dissertation
The Architecture of Belief: An Essay on the Unbearable Automaticity of Believing
Dissertations are funny things. I wouldn't suggest reading them for a good time. That said, a few times a year I'll be asked to send someone a copy. In case you're one of these odd folks who want to read a dissertation, a version of mine is linked above. I highly recommend reading something more fun (I was compelled to excise the jokes, so it is brutally unfunny. Belated apologies to Fred Dretske. He appreciated the jokes in an earlier version and would be horrified at the thought of posting this without humor. He really was the best. May he rest in peace).
Awards
Also, I've won some awards, which is nice. Here are a few of the most august of them (I list them knowing how distasteful this may be. Alas.) In late December 2017 I received an NEH Fellowship, which is generous and excellent of them. Earlier in 2017 I received the Baruch College Presidential Excellence in Scholarship Prize. Earlier than that I was lucky enough to be selected for other things, like the ACLS New Faculty Fellowship, the Cognitive Science Society's inaugural Glushko Dissertation Prize, the Roger Shepard Prize (for best dissertation in the cognitive sciences--yes it was that Roger Shepard, which is very cool), the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, the UNC Society of Fellows Fellowship.
All these papers were written in a single sitting on this Patagonian glacier. And yes this is totally indicative of how I spend my time, on random glaciers.