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.

Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence What is the difference between a simulation of X and simply another instance of X? Is there a point at which the ‘‘virtual reality’’ of a model becomes the real thing? This paper examines these questions using cases taken from recent developments in evolutionary engineering and artificial life research. By implementing the Darwinian mechanism and setting it to work on a design problem, scientists and engineers find that evolution not only can improve prior (...) designs, but also produce novel technological solutions. Artificial life systems Tierra and Avida which operate at a higher level of abstraction than evolutionary engineering applications. I analyze simulation as a rational concept ‘‘S simulates R’’ and argue that it always includes some relevant property P, of R, that is captured but that there is always also some other that it omits, and that pragmatic factors fix what counts as relevant. The border between a simulation and an instance can change depending upon the context. I show that in one sense, evo-technology and artificial life simulate organic evolution, but in another relevant sense they are instances of evolution itself. Biologists can use such systems to experimentally test evolutionary hypotheses such as those involving the evolution of complex features and altruism. This analysis suggests lines for future research on broader questions about models classification and confirmation. (shrink)

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

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.

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)

essay on Robert Brandom, Making it Explicit.

To appear in Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory XVI. Ithaca, NY: CLC.

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.

Equational intensional ‘reconstruction’ relatives. Submitted.

J. Phys. A, to appear, quant-ph/0506173.

In April, 2007, 15 Royal Navy sailors and marines were taken prisoner and held hostage for nearly two weeks by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Their crime? Allegedly crossing over into Iranian waters. Within 48 hours a British sailor was plastered all over Iranian TV publicly confessing that the Britons were entirely at fault in the matter. Another sailor wrote a letter—no doubt under some duress— calling for the UK to withdraw all of its troops from Iraq. Then to cap things off, (...) the British soldiers were paraded in front of the Iranian President, where they gave him a big “thumbs up” before being allowed to go home. If you were one of the captives, what would you have done? Would you have cooperated with your captors? Or would you have resisted them, possibly putting your own life at risk? Not surprisingly, the British people recoiled in shame. As one commentator put it, “The honorable thing would have been to renounce their coerced behavior, denounce the Iranians’ use of them for propaganda, and acknowledge that anything they endured was nothing.. (shrink)

In H. Cohen and C. Lefebvre (eds.), Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science, Elsevier (pp. 1009-1033).

paper, abstract, revised handout, original handoutto appear in the Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 12 (Oslo, 2007). The paper argues that the variability of the uniqueness effects exhibited by Hindi and Romanian correlatives is due to their mixed referential and quantificational nature. The account involves an articulated notion of quantification, independently motivated by donkey anaphora and quantificational subordination and consisting of both (discourse) referential components and non-referential components (dynamic operators over plural info states). The variable uniqueness effects emerge out of (...) the interaction between: (i) the semantics of wh-indefinites, singular anaphors and habitual morphology and (ii) the pragmatics of quantification, which allows for the selection of different levels of ‘zoom-in’ on the quantified-over objects. (shrink)

New York Times Book Review, June 24, 2007.

Science Times cover story, August 21, 2007.

Philippa Foot’s Natural Goodness is among the most beautiful and moving works of moral philosophy yet produced in the analytic tradition. It is so much an integral whole that it will seem barbaric to do as I propose briefly to do, and put it to the scalpel. But Natural Goodness propounds a complex theory with many levels or strata, some of which even the author fails completely to distinguish. I will distinguish three strata, each depending logically on the one that (...) comes before. I will call them respectively logical Footianism, local Footianism and substantive Footianism. My purpose in making these distinctions is simply to advance discussion: I believe that objections to Natural Goodness generally confuse these different dimensions of the doctrine, and that the author to some extent aids this confusion. (shrink)

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 J. Prinz (ed.) The Oxford Handbook on Philosophy of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press.

To appear in a volume in honor of Grice edited by Klaus Petrus.

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)

We address the general problem of determining the validity of boolean combinations of equalities and inequalities between real-valued expressions. In particular, we consider methods of establishing such assertions using only restricted forms of distributivity. At the same time, we explore ways in which “local'’ decision or heuristic procedures for fragments of the theory of the reals can be amalgamated into global ones. Let $Tadd[QQ]$ be the first-order theory of the real numbers in the language with symbols $0, 1, +, -.

What are the relations between preattentive feature-placing and states of perceptual awareness? For the purposes of this paper, states of "perceptual awareness" are confined to the simplest possible exemplars: states in which one is aware of some aspect of the appearance of something one perceives. Subjective contours are used as an example. Early visual processing seems to employ independent, high-bandwidth, preattentive feature "channels", followed by a selective process that directs selective attention. The mechanisms that yield subjective contours are found very (...) early in this processing. An experiment by Greg Davis and Jon Driver is described; it seems to show that multiple subjective figures can be coded in these preattentive, parallel stages of visual processing. I propose that some of these preattentive states might register the very same differences that, were one aware of them, would be phenomenal differences. Some arguments pro and con on this possibility are assessed. (shrink)

in How Many Questions?, ed. Leigh S. Cauman, Isaac Levi, Charles Parsons, and Robert Schwartz, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1983, pp. 276-300.

A consideration of the benefits of taking physicalism to be necessarily true if true, against the standard view that physicalism is at best contingently true. Presented at the 2006 Central Division meeting of the APA, in the session Themes from Jaegwon Kim, sponsored by the Society for Asian and Asian-American Philosophy.

in Stochastic Processes, Physics and Geometry II, edited by S. Albeverio, U. Cattaneo, D. Merlini (World Scientific, Singapore, 1995) pp. 221-232.