A Guide to My Research

Given the heterogeneity of my research, different visitors to this site may be interested in distinct sectors of it. This page is intended to provide sign-posts to the assorted landscapes through which I have traveled during my academic life.

I work in several areas of philosophy, and portions of this work forge links between philosophy and empirical science, especially psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and the social sciences. My recent publications in cognitive science (especially Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology and Neuroscience of Mindreading, 2006) might best be characterized as theoretical science rather than philosophy of science. However, other aspects of my work, both early and late, are purely philosophical.

Individual Epistemology

My first major article developed the causal theory of knowing (“A Causal Theory of Knowing,” 1967), and subsequent epistemological work also pursues causalist themes. Other epistemological theories I have advocated include process reliabilism, epistemological naturalism, and social epistemology (see below). Justificational reliabilism was first articulated in “What Is Justified Belief?” (1979). Epistemology and Cognition (1986) offered a systematic treatment of reliabilism and the interface between epistemology and psychology. Slightly different versions of reliabilism were offered in “Strong and Weak Justification” (1988) and “Epistemic Folkways and Scientific Epistemology” (1992). Since reliabilism is a form of externalism, I have written critical pieces about internalism (“The Internalist Conception of Justification,” 1980; “Internalism Exposed,” 1999). Reliabilist and externalist themes have been applied to many special topics, including immediate justification (“Immediate Justification and Process Reliabilism,” 2008), a priori warrant (“A Priori Warrant and Naturalistic Epistemology,” 1999), and the value of knowledge (“Reliabilism and the Value of Knowledge,” 2008, with Erik Olsson). Projected future work on justification will emphasize a degree of compatibility between internalist and externalist themes in the theory of justification, plus a hybrid theory that fuses reliabilist and evidentialist elements. I am also working (with John Hawthorne) on a general epistemology textbook.

Social Epistemology

Starting in 1987 (“Foundations of Social Epistemics”), I developed a framework and set of applications to expand epistemology into the social arena. This was predicated on the idea that prospects for knowledge and justified belief often depend on social sources and institutional practices. Contrary to postmodernism and social constructionism, “social factors” need not totally corrupt the pursuit of truth and knowledge. It therefore makes sense to investigate the specific ways that assorted social and interpersonal practices influence, positively or negatively, the extent and accuracy of human knowledge. A systematic treatment of these topics appears in Knowledge in a Social World (1999). This book was the culmination of a series of papers addressing such topics as credit incentives in science (“An Economic Model of Scientific Inquiry and Truth Acquisition,” 1991, with Moshe Shaked); norms of argumentation (“Argumentation and Social Epistemology,” 1994); education and epistemology (“Education and Social Epistemology,” 1995); and the marketplace for ideas (“Speech, Truth, and the Free Market for Ideas,” 1996, with James Cox). Since publishing Knowledge in a Social World, I have devoted papers to showing how novices can choose among experts (“Experts: Which Ones Should You Trust?” 2001) and how epistemic relativism can co-exist with objectivism (“Epistemic Relativism and Reasonable Disagreement,” forthcoming). An anthology on social epistemology is under contract, in collaboration with Dennis Whitcomb.

I currently edit the journal Episteme, A Journal of Social Epistemology (see www.episteme.us.com). To see an overview of the journal’s recent and planned publication projects click here.

Cognitive Science

My research efforts in psychology, cognitive science, and (a small slice of) cognitive neuroscience are linked to several areas of philosophy: epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and ethics. In the 1970s and 1980s I proposed links between epistemology and cognitive science, motivated by process reliabilism. The second half of Epistemology and Cognition (1986) mined the cognitive sciences for relevant material on perception, memory, deductive reasoning, probability judgment, and so forth. In the 1980s and 1990s I wrote a sprinkling of pieces on metaphysics and cognitive science, and recently revived this interest with a new paper that advocates a naturalistic approach to metaphysics (“A Program for ‘Naturalizing’ Metaphysics with Application to Events,” 2007).

My present focus in cognitive science, however, is ‘theory of mind,’ or mindreading, where my principal work is Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading (2006). This had its roots in my earlier formulations and defenses of simulation theory and its possible place in moral theory (“Interpretation Psychologized,” 1989; “In Defense of Simulation Theory,” 1992; “Empathy, Mind, and Morals,” 1992; and “Ethics and Cognitive Science,” 1993).

New ground was broken in an article with Vittorio Gallese, in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, which first described a connection between mirroring processes and mindreading (“Mirror Neurons and the Simulation Theory of Mind-Reading,” 1998). Mirror neurons had been discovered in the early 1990s by a group of neuroscientists, including Gallese, in Parma, Italy. They are types of neurons (or neural systems) that are activated both when one undergoes a certain cognitive or mental event and when one observes someone else manifest the same event, either behaviorally or facially. Mirror processes generate automatic mental mimicry, or resonance, and are found in motor planning, sensation (e.g., touch and pain), and emotion (e.g., disgust and fear). In light of the huge impact of mirror neurons and mirror processes on current social neuroscience and the scientific understanding of mind, I continue to examine the role of mirroring and simulation in social cognition (“Simulationist Models of Face-Based Emotion Recognition,” 2005, with Chandra Sripada; “Imagination and Simulation in Audience Responses to Fiction,” 2006; and “Mirroring, Mindreading, and Simulation,” 2008). In future work I plan to explore the implications of mirror systems for an “embodied” approach to cognition.

Simulating Minds deals with first-person attribution of mental states in addition to third-person attribution. It defends a predominantly “detectivist” model of self-knowledge, which uses introspection, inner sense, or self-monitoring. It also presents a new theory of mental concepts that postulates an inner, introspection-based code that is used to represent concepts like desire, belief, pain, or fear.

Other contributions I have made at the mind/cognitive science interface include articles on consciousness and the epistemology of consciousness. The main papers here are “Consciousness, Folk Psychology and Cognitive Science” (1993); “Science, Publicity and Consciousness” (1997); “Can Science Know When You’re Conscious? Epistemological Foundations of Consciousness Research” (2000); and “Epistemology and the Evidential Status of Introspective Reports” (2004).

Other Topics: Metaphysics, Political Theory, and the Law

My first book, A Theory of Human Action (1970), was an essay in metaphysics and philosophy of mind. One metaphysical portion of the book concerned the structure of action, in which I defended a fine-grained approach to action individuation and proposed a relation, dubbed “level-generation,” to link basic with non-basic actions. A second metaphysical sector defended the possibility of determinism against the argument that people’s ability to falsify predictions of their actions refutes determinism. (For other research in metaphysics, see the “Cognitive Science” section.) The main thrust of the philosophy-of-mind sector of the book was a causalist account of the relation between desires, beliefs, and action, by no means a consensus view during that period.

Moving to very different terrain, I have enjoyed several forays into political theory, some that were spin-offs of social epistemology and others that were autonomous. They include two articles on the conceptual analysis of social power (“Toward a Theory of Social Power,” 1972; “On the Measurement of Power,” 1974), and one article on why citizens should vote – despite the apparently low probability that one’s vote will “make a difference” (“Why Citizens Should Vote: A Causal Responsibility Approach,” 2001). In Knowledge in a Social World a chapter on democracy and information tackled the question of why accurate political information in the hands of voters is critical to democracy. My notion of “core voter knowledge” generalized the concept of voter competence in epistemic democracy frameworks, by relaxing the assumption that the “correct” option or candidate is the same for all voters.

Finally, I have been led by social epistemology into the area of evidence in the law. A long chapter of Knowledge in a Social World argued for truth as the fundamental aim of legal adjudication systems. It also ventured comparative assessments (from a truth-oriented perspective) of the two Western traditions of legal adjudication: the common-law system and the civil-law system. Specific provisions in the federal rules of evidence were also examined. Another overview of legal evidence can be found in “Legal Evidence” (2005), and more specific topics were addressed in “Games Lawyers Play: Legal Discovery and Social Epistemology” (1998, with William Talbott), “Quasi-Objective Bayesianism and Legal Evidence” (2002), and “Simple Heuristics and Legal Evidence” (2003).