Works in Progress

Papers:
Comments are welcome

Do you see what we see? An investigation of collective representation. Philosophical psychology 21 (1): 91-112.

In this paper I address the most promising objection to the possibility of collective mental representation, the claim that there is no explanatory value to positing collective representational states above and beyond the representational states of the individuals that compose a particular collectivity. I argue this argument either proves too much, forcing us to adopt eliminativism about individual mentality and abandon person-level representations, or it proves too little, demonstrating precisely the sort of continuity between individual and collective representations that would warrant the positing of genuine collective representations. pdf here

Troubles with stereotypes for Spinozan minds. Philosophy of the Social Sciences (forthcoming)

Spinoza (Ethics II 48) argues that the various stimuli with which we are confronted immediately modify our psychology, producing ideas that have substantial effects without any cognitive assent. According to this view of the mind, it is only by way of an active process of resistance to a belief that ‘unbelieving’ can occur. I argue that we have a Spinozan psychology (cf., Gilbert 1993). I argue that our Spinozan psychology brings with it serious worries about the capacity for resisting and modifying our behaviors. In particular, I argue that merely resisting patriarchal and racist stereotypes will, ironically, often contribute to the resilience of these stereotypes.

The role of emotion in moral psychology (with Susan Dwyer and Marc Hauser) Trends in Cognitive Science (forthcoming)

Recent work in the cognitive and neurobiological sciences suggests a significant relationship between emotion and moral judgment. Based on this evidence, several researchers have argued that emotions are the source of our intuitive moral judgments. However, despite the richness of the correlational data between emotion and morality, we argue that the current neurological, behavioral, developmental and evolutionary evidence is insufficient to demonstrate that emotion is necessary for making moral judgments. We suggest instead that the source of moral judgments lies in our causal-intentional psychology; emotion often follows from these judgments, serving a primary role in motivating morally relevant action.

Critics of functionalism about the mind often rely on the intuition that collectivities cannot be conscious in motivating their positions. In this paper, we consider the merits of appealing to the intuition that there is nothing that it’s like to be a collectivity. We demonstrate that collective mentality is not an affront to commonsense, and we report evidence that demonstrates that the intuition that there is nothing that it’s like to be a collectivity is culturally specific rather than universally held. This being the case, we argue that mere appeal to the intuitive implausibility of collective consciousness does not offer any genuine insight into the nature of mentality in general, nor the nature of consciousness in particular.

In this short paper, I argue that the explanatory gap can be dissolved by way of a strategy of divide and conquer. I claim that there are actually two gaps—neither of which is problematic for the materialist.

Work in Progress:

It is received wisdom in philosophy and the cognitive sciences that individuals can be in emotional states but groups cannot. But why should we accept this view? In this paper, I argue that there is substantial philosophical and empirical support for the existence of collective emotions. Thus, while there is good reason to be skeptical about many ascriptions of collective emotion, I argue that some groups exhibit the computational complexity and informational integration required for being in genuinely emotional states.

It would be a mistake to deny commonsense intuitions a role in developing a theory of consciousness. However, philosophers have traditionally failed to probe commonsense in a way that allows commonsense intuitions to make a robust contribution to a theory of consciousness. In this paper, I report the results of two experiments on purportedly phenomenal states and I argue that disputes over the philosophical notion of ‘phenomenal consciousness’ are misguided--they all fail to capture the interesting and subtle differences between commonsense ascriptions of pain and emotion.

The Magic number +1 and the simplicity of utilitarian calculations (with Nicholas Miller, Hamid Sayamadost, & Marc Hauser, submitted)

In this paper, we examine the contribution of numerical computations to moral judgments involving utilitarian calculations. We manipulated the number of lives at stake in a moral dilemma. In three experiments, participants judged it permissible to sacrifice a smaller number of lives for the greater good when the contrast was a small ratio (1 vs 5), a large ratio (100 vs 500), or a small difference with large numbers (501 vs 505). Two additional experiments revealed a modal judgment that only 2 lives must be saved for it to be morally required to take a single life. Together, these data suggest that utilitarian calculations operating over harms are rather insensitive to quantity: it is minimally permissible, and in some cases morally required, to kill one person to save just +1 more.

When are intentional, means-based harms morally permissible? Folk psychological intuitions confirm philosophical intuitions (with Marc Hauser and Philip Pettit, submitted).

In this paper, we examine the role of Pareto considerations in folk judgments about the moral status of using someone as a means to some greater good. In a series of 5 experiments, including one re-analysis of existing data, we demonstrate that people consistently judge Pareto-efficient actions (i.e., actions that can make at least one individual better off without making any other individuals worse off) to be more permissible than actions in which some individual is made worse off by being used as a means to a greater good. Together, these data suggest that folk-moral judgments are highly sensitive to the inevitability of a harm and, thereby, to the constraints of Pareto efficiency.

Recent theoretical and empirical work suggests that our intuitive sense of right and wrong may be implemented in a relatively encapsulated system that operates outside of conscious awareness and is immune to irrelevant effects of context. We provide the first direct examination of this possibility by testing whether moral judgments about harmful actions exhibit context effects when moral scenarios are presented in different orders. In Experiments 1 and 2, we presented unfamiliar moral dilemmas; these showed little to no effect of order of presentation. In Experiment 3, we presented familiar moral dilemmas; these showed a small but significant effect of order of presentation. These results license two conclusions: 1) moral judgments for unfamiliar moral dilemmas are impenetrable by context and contrast effects, but 2) familiar moral dilemmas can create a conflict between reflective and reflexive processes that will allow context and contrast effects to emerge.

Distributing cognition: A defense of collective mentality (available by request)

This is a draft of my PH. D. thesis in which I offer a defense of collective mentality, the claim that groups can possess cognitive states in the same way that individuals do. I am currently in the process of writing a book length manuscrip that is based on the arguments in this thesis