Explanation-Aware Computing: Papers from the 2007 AAAI Workshop, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, Technical Report WS-07-06, Menlo Park California, AAAI Press, 2007, 1-9.

Studies in Communication Sciences, 6, 2006, 3-26 . [link to online version posted].

with Thomas F. Gordon and Henry Prakken. Artificial Intelligence, forthcoming. [Preprint posted.].

University Abstract Philosophers have sought to improve upon the logical empiricists’ model of scientific reduction. While opportunities for integration between the cognitive and the neural sciences have increased, most philosophers, appealing to the multiple realizability of mental states and the irreducibility of consciousness, object to psychoneural reduction. New Wave reductionists offer a continuum of comparative goodness of intertheoretic mapping for assessing reductions. Their insistence on a unified view of intertheoretic relations obscures epistemically significant crossscientific relations and engenders dismissive conclusions about (...) psychology. Richer, more sensitive accounts of explanatory pluralism and mechanistic explanation in science advocate multi-level approaches in cross-scientific settings and criticize the distance of the standard philosophical objections from working scientists’ practices and discoveries. The Heuristic Identity Theory, a new, scientifically informed version of the psycho-physical identity theory, incorporates these insights, showing how multiple realizability is an argument for (not against) identities in science and why, therefore, consciousness is not irreducible. (shrink)

1. The Naturalistic Turn in Philosophy of Science 2. The Framework of Mechanistic Explanation: Parts, Operations, and Organization 3. Representing and Reasoning About Mechanisms 4. Mental Mechanisms: Mechanisms that Process Information 5. Discovering Mental Mechanisms 6 . Summary.

In Moran, D. (ed.): Routledge Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophy. Routledge, 2008.

FD-Diss., Uppsala: University Printers, 2000 (ix+225 pages).

It is commonly held that objects in the world form natural kinds. Rabbits form a natural kind and so do all pieces of gold. The traditional account of natural kinds asserts that the members of a kind share a common essence. The essence of gold, for example, is its unique atomic structure. That structure occurs in all and only pieces of gold, and it is a property that all pieces of gold must have.

in: Henk ten Have (ed.), Nanotechnology: Science, Ethics and Policy Issues, Paris (UNESCO Series in Ethics of Science and Technology), 2006 (forthcoming).

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44, 2-9.

The defining insight of evolutionary psychology consists of bringing considerations drawn from evolutionary biology to bear on the study of human psychology. So characterized, evolutionary psychology encompasses a large range of views about the nature and evolution of human psychology as well as diverging opinions about the proper method for studying them.¹ In this article, I propose to clarify and evaluate various aspects of evolutionary psychologists’ methodology, with a special focus on their heuristics of discovery—i.e., their methods for developing plausible (...) hypotheses—and their strategies of confirmation—i.e., their methods for providing empirical support for these hypotheses.² I will also evaluate several well-known objections raised against evolutionary psychology. Note that because views about psychology and evolution differ among evolutionary psychologists, I do not pretend to cover every method used in evolutionary psychology.³. (shrink)

PLoS ONE 3(3): e1897. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.

Journal of Philosophical Logic 34, 97-119, 2005.

Cognitive enhancements in the context of converging technologies. [Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 1093, pp. 201-207] [with Anders Sandberg] [pdf].

In: M. Carrier, D. Howard & J. Kourany (eds), Science and the Social: Knowledge, Epistemic Demands, and Social Values, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press (im Erscheinen).

in Encyclopedia of Consciousness, ed. William P. Banks, Amsterdam: Elsevier, forthcoming in 2009.

The Linguistic Review 24, 347-401 (2007).

essay on Robert Brandom, Making it Explicit.

of (from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) forthcoming in Social Neuroscience. [nearly final draft in .pdf] An empirical investigation of moral judgment in autism.

Though the “internal point of view” is perhaps H.L.A. Hart’s greatestcontribution to legal theory, this concept is also often and easily misunderstood. This is unfortunate, not only because these misreadings distort Hart’s theory, but, more importantly, because they prevent us from appreciating the infirmities of sanction-centered theories of law and the compelling reasons why they ought to be rejected. In this paper, I try to address some of these confusions. What, exactly, is the internal point of view? What role (or (...) roles) does it play in Hart’s theory? And how does an adequate appreciation for the centrality of the internal point of view lead to the rejection of sanction-centered theories? (shrink)

In this paper, we study the parameters that come into play when assessing the truth conditions of say reports and contrast them with belief attributions. We argue that these conditions are sensitive in intricate ways to the connection between the interpretation of the complement of say and the properties of the reported speech act. There are three general areas this exercise is relevant to, besides the immediate issue of understanding the meaning of say: (i) the discussion shows the need to (...) go beyond the simplest view of propositional attitudes, which treats them as restricted quantifiers over worlds; (ii) the complex connections that must exist between the say report and its source speech act show that one has to be able to differentiate between various layers of meaning for the antecedent sentences; (iii) finally, this paper is a small step towards a typology of propositional attitudes that allows us to uncover the complex web of relationships that grammatical mood is sensitive to. (shrink)

Routledge (New Media and Cyberculture Series), July 2007.

Contemporary literature in philosophy of science has begun to emphasize the practice of modeling, which differs in important respects from other forms of representation and analysis central to standard philosophical accounts. This literature has stressed the constructed nature of models, their autonomy, and the utility of their high degrees of idealization. What this new literature about modeling lacks, however, is a comprehensive account of the models that figure in to the practice of modeling. This paper offers a new account of (...) both concrete and mathematical models, with special emphasis on the intentions of theorists, which are necessary for evaluating the model-world relationship during the practice of modeling. Although mathematical models form the basis of most of contemporary modeling, my discussion begins with more traditional, concrete models such as the San Francisco Bay model. (shrink)

In Jacobsen, M.H. (ed.): Sociologies of the Unnoticed. Palgrave/Macmillan, 2008.

in Evolution and Culture eds.Stephen C. Levinson and Pierre Jaisson, published by The MIT Press, 2006.

Libertarianism in all its varieties is widely taken to be vulnerable to a serious problem of present luck, inasmuch as it requires indeterminism somewhere in the causal chain leading to action. Genuine indeterminism entails luck, and lack of control over the ensuing action. Compatibilism, by contrast, is generally taken to be free of the problem of present luck, inasmuch as it does not require indeterminism in the causal chain. I argue that this view is false: compatibilism is subject to a (...) problem of present luck. Taken by itself, the compatibilist problem with present luck is less serious than the analogous problem confronting libertarianism. However, its effects are just as devastating for the entire account of freedom: the present luck confronting compatibilism is sufficient to undermine the compatibilist response to distant – constitutive – luck. (shrink)

Equational intensional ‘reconstruction’ relatives. Submitted.