Charles Lassiter

Gonzaga University · Department of Philosophy

Some epistemic agents will not change their position on a claim. These are dogmatists, common creatures in our epistemic communities. This paper discusses the population-level epistemic effects of increasing numbers of dogmatists. All agents in the model are assigned a degree of belief (using a Likert-type scale) and adopt the beliefs of others in...

Book Review of David Chalmers, Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the problems of Philosophy

Novices sometimes misidentify authorities and end up endorsing false beliefs as a result. In this paper, I suggest that this phenomenon is at least sometimes the result of culturally evolved mechanisms functioning in faulty epistemic contexts. I identify three background conditions which, when satisfied, enable expert-identifying mechanisms to func...

In this paper, we describe causal powers realism as a conjunction of four claims: causal powers are not reducible to counterfactuals; they are empirically-discoverable; they manifest effects in conjunction with partners; and their manifestations empower further manifestations. We describe four challenges to extended mind theory and for each show ho...

In this paper, I develop a view about machine autonomy grounded in the theoretical frameworks of 4E cognition and PF Strawson’s reactive attitudes. I begin with critical discussion of White (this issue), and conclude that his view is strongly committed to functionalism as it has developed in mainstream analytic philosophy since the 1950s. After sug...

Embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended (4E) theorists do not typically focus on the ontological frameworks in which they develop their theories. One exception is 4E theories that embrace New Mechanism. In this paper, we endorse the New Mechanist’s general turn to ontology, but argue that their ontology is not the best on the market for 4E theor...

This model explores consensus among agents in a population in terms of two properties. The first is a probability of belief change (PBC). This value indicates how likely agents are to change their mind in interactions. The other is the size of the agents audience: the proportion of the population the agent has access to at any given time. In all in...

I argue that Grice's account of particularized conversational implicatures makes successful implicatures miraculous. Successful conversational implicatures satisfy three conditions. The first is Calculability, that implicatures are able to be calculated. The second is Grasped Content, that the hearer work out the implicature as intended by the spea...

Cultural psychologists often describe the relationship between mind and culture as ‘dynamic.’ In light of this, we provide two desiderata that a theory about encultured minds ought to meet: the theory ought to reflect how cultural psychologists describe their own findings and it ought to be thoroughly naturalistic. We show that a realist theory of...

In this paper, I argue for a way to evaluate beliefs grounded in the testimony of sham epistemic authorities and then apply that principle to beliefs tokened as a consequence of implicit biases. As a result, such implicitly biased beliefs are correctly evaluated as praiseworthy by their possessors, even though the belief is epistemically defective.

We argue that two society-level properties-resistance to change and diversity within a culture-significantly affect agents' degrees of marginalization, which is here defined as access to cultural knowledge and institutional means for accomplishing cultural goals. We develop an agent-based model using findings from Norasakkunkit et al. (Norasakkunki...

The notion of simplexity is that complex problems are often solved by novel combinations of simple mechanisms. These solutions aren't simple; they're simplex. Language use, as a complex behavior, is ripe for simplex analysis. In this paper, I argue that the notion of powers—an organism's capacity to instigate or undergo change—is doubly useful. Fir...

Implicit bias results from living in a society structured by race. Tamar Gendler has drawn attention to several epistemic costs of implicit bias and concludes that paying some costs is unavoidable. In this paper, we reconstruct Gendler's argument and argue that the epistemic costs she highlights can be avoided. Though epistemic agents encode discri...

When my spouse once asked me ‘Where’s the milk?’ I thought that my answer ‘In the refrigerator’ was fine. Turns out, I was less helpful than I thought I was. The intended effect of my utterance turned out to be different from what it actually brought about. This feature of utterances is especially salient in discussions of perlocutionary acts, whic...

The coupling-constitution fallacy claims that arguments for extended cognition involve the inference of “x and y constitute z” from “x is coupled to y” and that such inferences are fallacious. We argue that the coupling-constitution fallacy fails in its goal to undermine the hypothesis of extended cognition: appeal to the coupling-constitution fall...

The aim of this article is to support the position that what is implicated is not determined by speaker intention, a claim which runs counter to the widely accepted position that what is implicated is determined by speaker intention. This article argues for the conclusion that communication of conversational implicatures can be unintended by presen...

In this paper, I argue that an embodied cognition theorist has resources available to her to fulfill the explanatory role of "communicative intention" without postulating inner, private intentions, as is typically done by cognitivists. I argue for this conclusion by identifying a publicity requirement and a sensitivity requirement that must be sati...