Mental Action and Epistemology
Mental Means (under contract with Oxford University Press)
This book is about complex mental action. When you do one type of thing intentionally in thought—say, J—by intentionally doing another type of thing in thought—say, K-ing—then you J by K-ing, and in so doing perform a complex (as opposed to basic) mental action. Understanding complex mental action can help us understand how one and the same mental event can have several contents under several (true) descriptions. By seeing judgment and inference as forms of complex mental action, we can see how the intrinsically evaluative structure of intentional action grounds the application of norms to thought—including, most importantly, epistemic norms. By seeing other forms of thought as complex mental action too, we can understand how executive control is more unified than some cognitive scientists say it is.
How to Judge Intentionally (invited at Philosophical Perspectives)
Contrary to popular philosophical belief, judgment can indeed be an intentional action. That’s because an intentional judgment, even one with content p, need not be intentional as a judgment that p. It can instead be intentional just as a judgment wh- for some specific wh- question—e.g. a judgment of which x is F or a judgment whether p. This paper explains how this is possible by laying out the means by which you can perform such an intentional action. This model of intentional judgment does not stand in tension with the fact that judgment is causally regulated for truth, and that it is correct only if it is true. On the contrary, the structure of intentional action explains how an intentional judgment has these features. An extended example is developed, and sufficient conditions on intentional judgment are laid out.
Mental Action (Philosophy Compass)
This opinionated overview of historical and contemporary philosophy of mental action argues for its crucial importance in epistemology and the philosophy of mind.
How to Think Several Thoughts at Once: Content Plurality in Mental Action (Mental Action and the Conscious Mind, ed. Michael Brent and Lisa Miracchi, forthcoming)
Thoughts that are intentional mental actions can have several contents at once. Recognizing the content plurality of mental actions lets us ask better questions in epistemology—e.g. about self-knowledge, the relationship between judgment and decision, and the nature of inference. In this paper I give lots of examples and explain how mental action with content plurality is possible.
Embedded Mental Action in Self-Attribution of Belief (Philosophical Studies)
You can self-attribute a belief that p 'transparently' partly by judging that p. I argue that, in the relevant embedded context, an event of judging that p is also an event of self-attributing a belief that p. Seeing the numerical identity of these mental actions in this context solves an epistemological puzzle about 'transparent' self-knowledge of belief.
Aesthetics and Literature
The Problem of Creative Intention (Art & Philosophy, ed. King)
It’s plausible that conception of new ideas for aesthetic works involves intentional action: we ask how and why artists conceive of their works, and we give them great praise for conceiving them. But such creative conception can’t just involve acting on an intention to conceive the new idea in all its particularity, since having that intention in the first place already requires you to have conceived that idea. Then what is the content of a creative intention that can guide the process of creative conception? There are at least two existing models of creative intention: a value realization model endorsed by Nick Zangwill; and an inspiration/selection model set out by Monroe Beardsley, among many others. Each model fails to identify a way for a creator to be properly active in the origination of their own ideas. A better model, the refinement model, can combine the strength of both of these. On this model, a creator intends to do justice to some proto-work—a draft or component of a final idea which sets up a standard to be met in further refinement. The content of the creator’s intention is demonstrative in nature; an artist might have no insight into what she is trying to do except via her grasp on this proto-work. This model is illuminated by application to a real-world example of creative conception by the band Grizzly Bear.
Realism, Particularism, and Grounding in Aesthetics (Normative Realism, ed. Boghossian and Peacocke)
It's clear that aesthetic properties like elegance, beauty, and wit must be grounded in lower-level non-aesthetic properties of an object. The grounding relation that links facts about aesthetic properties and facts about these lower-level properties is usually taken to be general: it relies on patterns, forms, or principles linking the relevant properties. This is part of why grounding is taken to enjoy a tight link with genuine explanation. But this can seem to make trouble for the (realist) particularist in aesthetics, she who denies that there are any such principles linking aesthetic properties to their grounds, while insisting that aesthetic properties are part of the fabric of the world as it is regardless of how we judge it to be. This paper makes sense of grounding for a realist particularist view in aesthetics. It proposes that the explanatory role that grounding plays can be supported by a special kind of aesthetic counterfactual, understood by a removal conception of support. An extended example (Kathleen Ryan's Bad Lemon) is discussed.
Aesthetic Experience (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
This broad historical overview offers a summary of the most influential work on the nature of aesthetic experience - its objects and its mental components.
What Makes Value Aesthetic? (Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism)
A brief overview of my position on the nature of aesthetic value, which I call "liberalism" about aesthetic value.
Phenomenal Experience and the Aesthetics of Agency (Journal of the Philosophy of Sport)
The most provocative proposal in C. Thi Nguyen’s gripping and creative book Games: Agency as Art is the claim that there is a genuine aesthetics of agency. It is provocative in the implications it generates in conjunction with the further compelling claim that aesthetic appreciation and evaluation is properly centered on firsthand phenomenal experience. I consider the role of emotions of agency, patterns of attention, and affordances in making game experiences feel some way to their subjects, and argue that these genuinely phenomenal aspects of striving play are aesthetically significant.
Let's Be Liberal: An Alternative to Aesthetic Hedonism (British Journal of Aesthetics, 2020)
Aesthetic hedonism meets four basic adequacy conditions on a theory of aesthetic value, but it is not the only view that can do so. In this paper I introduce and motivate an alternative to hedonism I call “aesthetic liberalism,” which counts more responses than pleasurable ones as crucially relevant to the aesthetic value of an object.
How Literature Expands Your Imagination (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 2021)
You can only phenomenally imagine what you have already experienced. But appreciating literary comparisons can nonetheless give you new phenomenal concepts, and thereby expand the range of what you can actively call to mind in phenomenal imagination. This fact explains poets’ optimism about the personal and moral importance of their work.