Research:

Interests
Writing
Library

Interests:

• Cognitive architecture: classicism, connectionism & dynamicism; schema theory; modularity.
• Cognitive development: nativism; neural plasticity; causal learning; theory formation.
• Cognitive linguistics: semantics & pragmatics; metaphor; conceptual blending; domain integration.
• Consciousness: phenomenal concepts; perceptual binding; neural synchrony.
• Evolution of cognition: the evolution of language, laterality & tool-use; niche construction & the extended mind; altruism.
• Mental representation: conceptual & non-conceptual content; informational & teleological semantics; implicit vs. explicit representation.
• Metaphysics of mind: causation; intrinsic vs. extrinsic properties; emergence; functionalism; computationalism.
• Naturalized philosophy of science: the semantic view of theories; scientific realism; mechanistic & functional explanation; inter-theoretic reduction; parsimony.
• Philosophical methodology: conceptual analysis; naturalism; empiricism; pragmatism; meta-ontology.
• Social cognition: the perception of animacy; simulation theory vs. theory-theory; mirror neuron systems; imitation; natural pedagogy.
• The nature of information & computation: unconventional models of computation; biological computation; measures of information and complexity.

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Writing:

In progress: These are rough drafts; comments are welcome.

There Are More Things in Philosophy of Science Than Are Dream't of From Fodor's Armchair

Jerry Fodor has recently argued that "the theory of natural selection can't explain the distribution of phenotypic traits in biological populations". His argument is based on the premise that there are no laws of natural selection. This purportedly implies that there are no truthmakers for the counterfactuals upon which causal claims about natural selective processes depend ('selection-for counterfactuals'). In this paper I reply that Fodor's argument suffers from a critical tension. As it stands, it implies that selection-for counterfactuals are false. However, Fodor wants to allow that such counterfactuals are true, albeit true in virtue of laws other than laws of selection. Fodor can resolve this tension by reformulating his argument so that it doesn't directly impugn causal claims about natural selective process, but rather impugns explanatory claims about selective processes. In that case, I argue, Fodor's argument turns on issues concerning the kinds of generalizations that appear in genuine explanations. I argue that many explanatory generalizations are not laws as traditionally construed, but rather models. Fodor's central premise thus ought to be interpreted not as 'there are no laws of natural selection', but as 'there are no explanatory models of natural selection'. A glance at the biological literature suggests that this premise is transparently false.

What is a Theory of Scientific Representation?

I address the question of precisely what recent debates about scientific representation have been about. I respond to a recent paper by Callender & Cohen (2006), who argue that such debates have largely been concerned with non-issues, because (i) they have primarily addressed the question of what constitutes something's being a scientific representation, and (ii) this constitution question receives a trivial answer, for what constitutes something's being a scientific representation is the fact that it is stipulated to be a scientific representation. I argue that the stipulation proposal doesn't account well for the apparently non-arbitrary nature of much scientific representation, and that the constitution question presupposes problematic metaphysical and semantic theses. Contra Callender & Cohen, I propose that recent debates about scientific representation are best understood as provisional attempts to explain a certain empirical phenomenon: the use of representational artifacts for predictive and explanatory purposes.

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Library:

I maintain a virtual library of books related to my research interests as a public resource for those with similar interests. Here is a random selection of books from the library:

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