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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.

• If you like piña coladas. Presented at the Pacific APA, Spring 2007


• In this 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:

• Commonsense concepts of phenomenal consciousness.

• 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.
  

• A brief write-up of the data on the attribution of mental states to humans and robots

• What does the Nation of China think about mental states? (With M.Bruno and H.Sarkissian)

• 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.

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

• abstract
  

• 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