The sentence 'The boss fired the employee who is always late' invites the defeasible inference that the speaker is attempting to convey that the lateness caused the firing (cf. 'The boss fired the employee who is from Philadelphia', which does not invite an analogous inference). We argue that such inferences cannot be understood in terms of familia...
Molyneux's Question (MQ) concerns whether a newly sighted man would recognize/distinguish a sphere and a cube by vision, assuming he could previously do this by touch. We argue that MQ splits into questions about (a) shared representations of space in different perceptual systems, and about (b) shared ways of constructing higher dimensional spatiot...
Significant variations in the way objects appear across different viewing conditions pose a challenge to the view that they have some true, determinate color. This view would seem to require that we break the symmetry between multiple appearances in favor of a single variant. A wide range of philosophical and non-philosophical writers have held tha...
Published in Nature
Letter to the Editor
The study of social justice asks: what sorts of social arrangements are equitable ones? But also: how do we derive the inequitable arrangements we often observe in human societies? In particular, in spite of explicitly stated equity norms, categorical inequity tends to be the rule rather than the exception. The cultural Red King hypothesis predicts...
