My Research
I'm interested in a whole lot of things. Most of them could be summed up by saying that I'm interested in how the mind works. This interest manifests itself in the study of cognitive architecture. A cognitive architecture would offer a specification of a) what the different faculties of the mind are and how they operate, b) how the different faculties interact (or fail to interact), and c) a specification of the representational medium of thought. That's a lot to ask for, and no doubt pretty much every theory and model I'll offer will turn out to be wrong in some serious ways. But hopefully, they'll be wrong in interesting and illuminating ways. Alas, cognitive science is not for those who demand that the questions they pose get answered in their lifetime. Anyway that’s all a little high level. More specifics below.
Belief:
One cannot just study cognitive architecture in the abstract--it's best to have a nose to the ground approach. So as a means to studying the architecture of the mind, I have a few more catholic research interests. For a while, much of my energy was spent focusing on belief acquisition (“Thinking is Believing”). I still work on belief acquisition (see the ‘new work’ below), but I've branched out to work on belief change (“Troubles with Bayesianism: An Introduction to the Psychological Immune System”), and belief storage (“Fragmentation of Belief”, coauthored with Joseph Bendana), building what one might call a 'Psychofunctional' theory of belief--detailing the empirical laws that govern belief acquisition, storage, and change. (I’m actually writing a book on the topic).
Cognitive architecture is a lot of fun. You get to work on topics such as: How can human beings, seemingly the smartest animals ever encountered, be so freaking dumb (which is the topic of a different in progress book I’m writing)? We seem to acquire beliefs with the ease with which we catch colds, yet we also seem to learn nothing. How this is possible is a fun topic to examine, and will ensure your swear jar is full.
The Structure of Thought:
Alongside Nic Porot and Jake Quilty-Dunn I have argued that there is a Language of Thought. In our paper “The Best Game in Town: The Re-Emergence of the Language of Thought Hypothesis Across the Cognitive Sciences” in Behavioral and Brain Sciences we argue that the evidence for LoT has just gotten stronger over time. We focus on putative problem areas for LoT such as infant thought, animal thought (primate down to insect), visual cognition, computational cognitive science, and “system-1" intuitive thought. In a follow-up many co-authored paper “Problems and Mysteries of the Many Languages of Thought” (with linguists, developmental psychologists, social psychologists, action and motor theorists, philosophers of mind and vision researchers) we expand the idea to introduce the concept of the many languages of thought. The goal is to taxonomize minds and mental processes by differences in the expressive power of thought, as well as differences in the 6 core properties we think are indicative of having a LoT.
At the present moment LoT is taking up most of my thought, but it’s because how absolutely incredible the pace of research on the topic has proceeded. The absolute most brilliant researchers (more or less in all of this history of cognitive science) are focused on some basic questions here. If you can’t be excited when Susan Carey, Liz Spelke, Josh Tenenbaum, Ned Block, are all banging on the same questions, then I we are coming from very, very different places. Here the goal is to find the basic building blocks of thought—what are the primitive representations in the language of thought? There are two types of questions here: what are the simple concepts, and what are the simplest well formed formulae, i.e., the simplest sentences in the language of thought. Other basic goals are to characterize the transitions between thoughts—what are the rules that dictate when you turn from one thought to another?
The other end of this is to map the evolution of the mind in terms of the many different languages of thought. LoTs can vary in their expressive power (e.g., if one LoT has quantifiers but another doesn’t but only has Boolean connectives), in addition to how many of the 6 criteria the mind in question (or mental process) has. Mapping the many languages of thought is about as exciting a project as there can be.
“Unconscious” Thought:
Our ‘unconscious’ ‘automatic’ thought is extremely smart (shudder quotes is because I don’t quite care if it’s 100% unconscious or 100% automatic). Specifically, much of my recent work has been on unconscious logic and inference. Related research topics include judgment and decision making (particularly anchoring and adjustment), and detailed examinations (and taxonomies) of associative processing. Many of these interests intersect in the study of implicit attitudes, and so I've spent a whole lot of time research the behavior of implicit attitudes, particularly in the context of implicit bias, unconscious reasoning, and associative models of thought (see, e.g., “Attitude, Inference, Association”). Although much of my cognitive work is negative it's unsporting not to put positive views forward. Accordingly, I've been cobbling together a model of unconscious mental logic, to at least offer up some reasonably justifiable hypotheses about the rules of unconscious thought. For some steps towards this check out “Assimilation and Control” and the “S1” section of the BBS paper.
Language and iconicity:
I have an interest in how arbitrary language is and, more generally, in iconic versus discursive thought. Iconic language is an interesting middle case for this. Along with my collaborators (Jennifer Ware and Steve Young, now at Harvard Law and Meta, respectively) we have argued that some of natural language is, in a very real sense, onomatopoetic such that the valence of referents is smuggled into the phonetics of words. The first paper from this project is “The Sound of Slurs: Bad Sounds for Bad Words” There we show that slurs (at least in English) have a preponderence of phonemes that are disliked more than other phonemes. Part of this project is about psychoacoustic preferences. A related project is about whether there is a sense of iconicity that covers both visual and linguistics cases (a project I’m working on with the excellent David Neely).
My former student Jake Quilty-Dunn and current one Tomasz Zyglewicz have both been working on polysemy. Jake did seminal work on polysemy and pointers. Tomasz is amazing and just starting on the topic, but when you are lucky enough to have a student this good working on something, you start working on it too. So, my current interests here are on inhibition and facilitation in polysemy (as a part of my broader interest on the mechanics of priming, speaking of which).
Priming and number cog
I’ve had standing interests in numerical cognition since my early graduate days. The work here has exploded so much that it is a great area for peering into the structure of the mind, particularly for a non-LoT medium of representation (as number representations traffic in analog magnitudes). My standing interest here is in the role of analog magnitudes interfacing with LoT, and their role in both learning the discrete number system, and in online deployment of discrete numerical concepts.
Metaphysics of belief and inference:
I've also been kicking around a few ideas that are naturally outgrowths of the cognitive work, and sit at the intersection of cognition and epistemology. Specifically, I have some papers characterizing unconscious inference (“Inferential Transitions”, and “Non-Inferential Transitions”). I also have an essay on realism vs dispositionalism about belief (“Against Dispositionalism: Belief in Cognitive Science”). All of papers mentioned in this paragraph are written in collaboration with the amazing Jake Quilty-Dunn. (I highly recommend reading any of his solo papers, as they all rock. In particular, his paper on death and unconscious thought is one of the best pieces of philosophy I have ever read [even though it criticizes me.] And of course his work with EJ Green on the format of thought is the best work on the the topic.)
Uploading, the Singularity, and The Computational Theory of Mind:
If we uploaded your mind, would you still be you? Would we be able to create artificial general intelligence through a bunch of these uploads? What would it even mean to upload your mind? In a recent paper in Jphil “Everything and More: The Prospects of Whole Brain Emulation” I argue that maybe we can chill about singularity. Transhumanists have argued that whole-brain emulation—uploading your mind—is the best route to achieving the singularity, AGI, and even immortality. I argue that connectomics is not as promising as it seems, and even what connectomics and uploading are is, perhaps, a bit confused. Seeing why the program is confused opens up fissures in the foundation of the computational theory of mind itself. Along the way there are also some morals for perceptual overflow and the biological theory of consciousness.
Perception Research Program:
Outside of cognition, I have an active perceptual research program. Much of my philosophical work in perception has been on understanding information flow in perceptual processes. I've a some work on using categorization to understand the perception/cognition border, which also argues that perception underwrites categorization of basic-level objects on its own, without the need for any help from cognition (“Seeing and Conceptualizing: Modularity and the Shallow Contents of Perception”). Other recent work has focused on conceptualizing modularity, particularly on whether there is an understanding of modularity that can be extended to modules in central cognition (e.g., “Numerical Architecture”). I've also done some work on automaticity of processing, mostly (but not wholly by any means) in perceptual processing (“The Automatic and the Ballistic”). On the empirical side, my collaborators and I are examining causal perception, and links between causal perception and concept activation. Additionally, we are investigating statistical summary representations of certain kinds (“The Outlier Paradox” with JQD, Tatiana Emmanouil, and Michael Epstein). My current interests here are in propositional representations in perception, and haptic categorization.
Moral Cognition:
In addition to using the relatively standard routes of perception and cognition for understanding cognitive architecture, I've intermittently used empirical investigations into moral cognition as a tool for understanding cognitive architecture (particularly, unconscious logic). But regardless of the architectural questions (e.g., how do emotion and cognition interact), the questions arising from moral cognition are fascinating in their own right. I've worked on issues of responsibility for the mentally ill, and models of responsibility judgments in general. Both projects attempt to reduce moral specific machinery (like a moral module) to more basic processes of change detection in violations of expectations. For a while I had the idea for a project examining how violations of expectations lead to agency detection and beliefs in the supernatural, but I’ve pretty much shelved this to work on the other projects here.
Other Current Projects:
I am working on some new stuff. With Cristina Ballarini we are working on a paper mapping theories of belief. With Griffin Pion and JQD we are working on a paper on the different notions of strengths of belief. Nic Porot and I are putting out a paper against broadly evolutionary theories of belief (e.g., that beliefs are just markers in the social marketplace of ideas, or were just made in order to signal affiliation, or just evolved to argue with others). With Ryan Tracy, Steven Young, and Nic Porot we are working on a series of papers on fluency, belief, and pseudoprofound bullshit. I’m also kicking around a draft of a paper on <puts on continental philosophy hat, smokes a skinny cigarette, deeply exhales> on what profundity is. Lastly: I have a project on propaganda and whether its all things considered bad, and whether it’s worse now than it was before. Fun times.