Essays on Mental Ontology

for Introducing Philosophy of Mind, Today [pdf]

Consciousness really was the mark of the mental relative to Descartes’s theory of mind. It probably isn’t relative to yours.

The Routledge Handbook of Mindshaping, 330–341, 2025 [pdf]

Scientific psychology is a variety of social cognition, and as such plays a role in socially constructing minds.

Essays on Intelligence

Philosophers’ Imprint, forthcoming [pdf]

The best ways of talking about minds (for scientific or social purposes) are not the only accurate ways.

Psyche, 1500 words, 2022 [pdf]

Conceptions of intelligence primarily reflect people’s values.

Philosophy of Science 88:5, 1067–1078, 2021 [pdf] [spp poster]

IQ is of theoretical interest despite being a poor model of both folk psychological intelligence and its neural underpinnings.

Synthese 199:1–2, 161–180, 2021 [pdf]

To be intelligent is to be comparatively good at solving puzzles that an interpreter deems worth solving.

Philosophical Perspectives 37:1, 119–144, 2023 [pdf]

Clarity about the metaphysics of belief can help remove obstacles to progress in animal cognition research.

Philosophia 51:4, 2139–2145, 2023 [pdf]

Krzysztof Poslajko says my interpretivism is metaphysically immodest [here]. I invite him to embrace my immodesty.

American Philosophical Quarterly 59:1, 27–42, 2022 [pdf]

Atticus Finch lives out his racist beliefs in a very different style than Bob Ewell. (The title is a quadruple entendre.)

Synthese 199:3–4, 7889–7918, 2021 [pdf]

The beliefs that figure in folk psychology evolved to serve as ecological signifiers, not cogs in cognitive systems.

Philosophia 49:2, 611–615, 2021 [pdf]

Phenomena like beliefs and intelligence emerge relative to folks’ models thereof (not judgements about particular cases).

Philosophical Studies 177:4, 905–930, 2020 [pdf]

If beliefs exist relative to interpretation, then they exist relative to particular interpreters.

Philosophical Psychology 31:6, 850–877, 2018 [pdf] [lizardo review]

There is no evidence that people ordinarily construe beliefs as inner causes that produce behavior.

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 69, 72–85, 2018 [pdf]

Fabulous Cartesian brains reconstruct ideas, but cannot reflectively recognize those ideas as reconstructions.

Ergo 3:24, 609–637, 2016 [pdf]

Method actors really feel sad. Analogously, Descartes sincerely doubted everything.