Department of PhilosophyAny theory of mind needs to explain mental causation. Kim’s (upward) exclusion argument concludes that non-reductive physicalism cannot meet this challenge. One classic reply is that mental properties capture the causally relevant level of generality, because they are insensitive to physical… read more about this publication »
In the 1870 s and 1880 s, the scientist, logician, and pragmatist philosopher Charles S. Peirce possessed an advanced knowledge of mathematical economics, having mastered and criticised Cournot as early as 1871. In 1884 he engaged in a multi-round debate with the editors of The Nation over the… read more about this publication »
Although there is considerable evidence that at least some helping behavior is motivated by genuine concern for others' well-being, sometimes we also help solely out of a sense of obligation to the persons in need. Our sense of obligation to help may be particularly strong when there is common… read more about this publication »
AI systems are often used to make or contribute to important decisions in a growing range of applications, including criminal justice, hiring, and medicine. Since these decisions impact human lives, it is important that the AI systems act in ways which align with human values. Techniques for… read more about this publication »
Mackenzie Graham has made an important contribution to the literature on decisionmaking for patients with disorders of consciousness. He argues, and I agree, that decisions for unresponsive patients who are known to retain some degree of covert awareness ought to focus on current interests, since… read more about this publication »
Moral judgments can vary depending on the social relationship between agents. We presented 4- and 6-year-old peer dyads (N = 128) with stories, in which a parent (parent condition) or a peer protagonist (peer condition) faced a child in need of help (e.g., the child is thirsty). The dyads had to… read more about this publication »
A key skill in collaborative problem-solving is to communicate and evaluate reasons for proposals to arrive at the decision benefiting all group members. Although it is well-documented that collaborative contexts facilitate young children's reasoning, less is known about whether competition with… read more about this publication »
People more frequently select norm-violating factors, relative to norm-conforming ones, as the cause of some outcome. Until recently, this abnormal-selection effect has been studied using retrospective vignette-based paradigms. We use a novel set of video stimuli to investigate this effect for… read more about this publication »
Adults under time pressure share with others generously, but with more time they act more selfishly. In the current study, we investigated whether young children already operate in this same way, and, if so, whether this changes over the preschool and early school age years. We tested 144 children… read more about this publication »
The Zhuangzi text deploys two epistemic themes to accomplish its ends of combatting human pretensions to know the world and to prompting us to rediscover the world through fresh eyes. To get us to shed our arrogant dispositions it applies a constructive skepticism to whatever it is that human… read more about this publication »
Several philosophers and psychologists have argued that evidence of moral framing effects shows that many of our moral judgments are unreliable. However, all previous empirical work on moral framing effects has used between-subject experimental designs. We argue that between-subject designs alone… read more about this publication »
As members of cultural groups, humans continually adhere to social norms and conventions. Researchers have hypothesized that even young children are motivated to act conventionally, but support for this hypothesis has been indirect and open to other interpretations. To further test this hypothesis… read more about this publication »