Shaun Nichol
Biographic Data
| ID | 3789149 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Shaun Nichol |
| GIVEN NAMES | Shaun |
| FAMILY NAME | Nichol |
| SIGNATURE | NICHOL S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Cornell University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9447-5618 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 47 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 85 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 47 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Explaining value: The principle of sufficient reason and the realm of value in ordinary cognition
Folk explanatory judgements seem to conform to the principle of sufficient reason (PSR), according to which if x is a fact, x must have an explanation. That is, children and adults judge that facts across a wide variety of descriptive domains must have an explanation. We test whether PSR‐conforming judgements extend to the realm of value. Across four studies, we find that adults are less willing to judge that claims about moral and aesthetic valu…
Praise Is for Actions That Are Neither Expected nor Required
In six studies, we examined two foundational questions about moral praise. First, what makes an action praiseworthy? In Study 1, participants reported that actions that exceed duties (compared with dutiful actions) deserve greater praise and are perceived as less likely to happen. Second, what do observers infer from praise? Praise may communicate information about local norms. In Study 2, we found that—in general—participants expect praise to in…
On the Ontology of Composites in Abhidharma Buddhism
Abhidharma Buddhism maintains that the only ultimately real ( paramārtha ) entities in the universe are dharmas , which are simples. What then is the ontological status of composites on this theory? One possibility is that Abhidharma Buddhists deny the reality of composites. We argue, however, that Abhidharma Buddhists affirm the reality of some composites, based on the causal efficacy of the composites. This depends on distinguishing between two…
How to make people do things with words
Sometimes we do what other people tell us to. A natural thought is that the motivation to act on an instruction comes about rationally as the result of interpreting an imperative and deciding to act on it; that is, by updating on information that gets mediated through belief‐desire reasoning. We defend an alternative “Spinozan” view about how instructions—specifically those performed with imperative sentences —might give rise to a motivation to a…
Is the cosmological argument intuitive
The cosmological argument for the existence of God seems to have significant intuitive resonance. According to a familiar version of the cosmological argument, there must be some explanation for why the universe exists, and God provides the explanation. This argument seems to depend on the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), according to which, if something exists, there must be an explanation for why it exists. As we detail, recent evidence in…
The do-gooder dilemma: A self/other asymmetry in the perceived emotional costs of self-reporting good deeds
The identity of what? Pluralism, practical interests, and individuation
In this paper, we present a set of preregistered studies inspired by both Lockean pluralism about individuation and discussions of conjoined twinning in the contemporary personal identity debate. In combination, these studies provide evidence of folk pluralism about individuation of “individuals like us” and also ways in which individuation judgments are integral to practical interests. First, our studies show that individuation judgments depend …
Gratitude Without a Self
Western psychology primarily studies human emotions via physiological reactions to external stimuli. Research suggests that cultural variations lead East Asians and Western-heritage individuals to experience distinct emotional patterns beyond bodily responses. A more thorough understanding of affect, involving culturally influenced emotions, remains unexplored in cross-cultural contexts. Influenced by Confucianism, East Asian cultures show unique…
No brute facts: The Principle of Sufficient Reason in ordinary thought
The Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) has been an influential thesis since the earliest stages of western philosophy. According to a simple version of the PSR, for every fact, there must be an explanation of that fact. In the present research, we investigate whether people presuppose a PSR-like principle in ordinary judgment. Across five studies (N = 1121 in total, U.S., Prolific), we find that participants consistently make judgments that con…
Ownership and convention
Which kind of sameness? Disambiguating two senses of identity with a novel linguistic task
Rational learners and parochial norms
Parochial norms are narrow in social scope, meaning they apply to certain groups but not to others. Accounts of norm acquisition typically invoke tribal biases: from an early age, people assume a group's behavioral regularities are prescribed and bounded by mere group membership. However, another possibility is rational learning: given the available evidence, people infer the social scope of norms in statistically appropriate ways. With this pape…
Self-Control without a Self
Self-control is essential to the Buddhist soteriological project, but it is not immediately clear how we can make sense of it in light of the doctrine of no-self. Exercising control over our actions, thoughts, volitions, and emotions seems to presuppose a conception of self and agency that is not available to the Buddhist. Thus, there seems to be a fundamental mismatch in the practical instructions for exercising control in the Buddhist texts and…
Vows without a self
Vows play a central role in Buddhist thought and practice. Monastics are obliged to know and conform to hundreds of vows. Although it is widely recognized that vows are important for guiding practitioners on the path to enlightenment, we argue that they have another overlooked but equally crucial role to play. A second function of the vows, we argue, is to facilitate group harmony and cohesion to ensure the perpetuation of the dhamma and the saṅg…
Two Concepts of Cause in Antiphon’s Second Tetralogy
Using a framework from recent metaphysics and philosophy of science, according to which we have two concepts of cause, producer and necessary condition, we investigate causal notions in Antiphon’s Second Tetralogy, which concerns the unintentional homicide of a boy by a javelin-throwing youth. The prosecution maintains that the youth, having produced the boy’s death, is legally responsible; the defense argues, first, that the youth is patient, no…
“False positive” emotions, responsibility, and moral character
Cause and burn
Experiential Unity without a Self: The Case of Synchronic Synthesis
The manifest fact of experiential unity—namely, that a single experience often seems to be composed of multiple features and multiple objects—was lodged as a key objection to the Buddhist no-self view by Nyāya philosophers in the classical Indian tradition. We revisit the Nyāya-Buddhist debate on this issue. The early Nyāya experiential unity arguments depend on diachronic unification of experiences in memory, but later Nyāya philosophers explici…
The meta-wisdom of crowds
Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy Volume 4
The essence of mentalistic agents
The essential moral self
You, Robot
Experimental Philosophy
Free Will and the Bounds of the Self
This article appeals to experimental studies in order to elucidate the reactions of ordinary persons to the picture of the human mind that is prevalent in contemporary cognitive science. According to this prevalent cognitive-scientific picture, the mind is made up of states and processes that interact according to certain rules to generate specific behaviors. The discussion argues that this picture is disturbing to ordinary persons, who reason th…
Against Arguments from Reference
It is common in various quarters of philosophy to derive philosophically significant conclusions from theories of reference. In this paper, we argue that philosophers should give up on such ‘arguments from reference.’ Intuitions play a central role in establishing theories of reference, and recent cross‐cultural work suggests that intuitions about reference vary across cultures and between individuals within a culture ( Machery et al. 2004 ). We …
The Architecture of the Imagination: New Essays on Pretence, Possibility, and Fiction
This book presents essays in the form of thirteen chapters on the propositional imagination. The propositional imagination — the mental capacity we exploit when we imagine that everyone is colour-blind or that Hamlet is a procrastinator — plays an essential role in philosophical theorizing, engaging with fiction, and in everyday life. These thirteen chapters extend the theoretical picture of the imagination and explore the philosophical implicati…
On the Genealogy of Norms: A Case for the Role of Emotion in Cultural Evolution
One promising way to investigate the genealogy of norms is by considering not the origin of norms, but rather what makes certain norms more likely to prevail. Emotional responses, I maintain, constitute one important set of mechanisms that affects the cultural viability of norms. To corroborate this, I exploit historical evidence indicating that sixteenth-century etiquette norms prohibiting disgusting actions were much more likely to survive than…
Theories of Theories of Mind
Theories of Theories of Mind brings together contributions by a distinguished international team of philosophers, psychologists, and primatologists, who between them address such questions as: what is it to understand the thoughts, feelings, and intentions of other people? How does such an understanding develop in the normal child? Why, unusually, does it fail to develop? And is any such mentalistic understanding shared by members of other specie…
If Folk Intuitions Vary, Then What
We have recently presented evidence for cross‐cultural variation in semantic intuitions and explored the implications of such variation for philosophical arguments that appeal to some theory of reference as a premise. Devitt (2011) and Ichikawa and colleagues (forthcoming) offer critical discussions of the experiment and the conclusions that can be drawn from it. In this response, we reiterate and clarify what we are really arguing for, and we sh…
Side Constraints and the Structure of Commonsense Ethics
Folk Intuitions on Free Will
This paper relies on experimental methods to explore the psychological underpinnings of folk intuitions about free will and responsibility. In different conditions, people give conflicting responses about agency and responsibility. In some contexts, people treat agency as indeterminist; in other contexts, they treat agency as determinist. Furthermore, in some contexts people treat responsibility as incompatible with determinism, and in other cont…
Is Religion What We Want? Motivation and the Cultural Transmission of Religious Representations
Many psychologists and philosophers have suggested that religious ideas emerge because they are motivationally attractive. This paper attempts to support a version of the motivational thesis by relying on religious creeds as a source of historical evidence. This simple source of evidence indicates that the cultural evolution of religious ideas is partly a function of the motivational attractiveness of the religious ideas
Adaptive Complexity and Phenomenal Consciousness
Arguments about the evolutionary function of phenomenal consciousness are beset by the problem of epiphenomenalism. For if it is not clear whether phenomenal consciousness has a causal role, then it is difficult to begin an argument for the evolutionary role of phenomenal consciousness. We argue that complexity arguments offer a way around this problem. According to evolutionary biology, the structural complexity of a given organ can provide evid…
Is Desert in the Details? 1
Emotions, norms, and the genealogy of fairness
In The Grammar of Society, Bicchieri maintains that behavior in the Ultimatum game (and related economic games) depends on people’s allegiance to ‘social norms’. In this article, I follow Bicchieri in maintaining that an adequate account of people’s behavior in such games must make appeal to norms, including a norm of equal division; I depart from Bicchieri in maintaining that at least part of the population desires to follow such norms even when…
After Incompatibilism: A Naturalistic Defense of the Reactive Attitudes
“Some philosophers have...written as if moral concepts were a timeless, limited, unchanging, determinate species of concept, necessarily having the same features throughout their history... In fact, of course, moral concepts change as social life changes ” (MacIntyre 1966) From the first time I encountered the problem of free will in college, it struck me that a clear-eyed view of free will and moral responsibility demanded some form of nihilism.…
Imagination and immortality: Thinking of me
Un fragment de la généalogie des normes
Pour qui entend expliquer la généalogie des normes, mieux vaut peut-être laisser de côté la question de leurs origines et s'intéresser à ce qui fait que certaines normes ont plus de chances que d'autres de s'installer durablement au sein d'une population humaine donnée. Or la capacité d'une norme à susciter une réaction émotionnelle est un facteur important de sa viabilité. L'histoire en offre maintes preuves : c'est ainsi, par exemple, que parmi…
Theories of Theories of Mind
Theories of Theories of Mind brings together contributions by a distinguished international team of philosophers, psychologists, and primatologists, who between them address such questions as: what is it to understand the thoughts, feelings, and intentions of other people? How does such an understanding develop in the normal child? Why, unusually, does it fail to develop? And is any such mentalistic understanding shared by members of other specie…
A cognitive theory of pretense
The Mind’s “I” and the Theory of Mind’s “I”: Introspection and Two Concepts of Self
Adaptive Complexity and Phenomenal Consciousness
Arguments about the evolutionary function of phenomenal consciousness are beset by the problem of epiphenomenalism. For if it is not clear whether phenomenal consciousness has a causal role, then it is difficult to begin an argument for the evolutionary role of phenomenal consciousness. We argue that complexity arguments offer a way around this problem. According to evolutionary biology, the structural complexity of a given organ can provide evid…
Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions
On the Genealogy of Norms: A Case for the Role of Emotion in Cultural Evolution
One promising way to investigate the genealogy of norms is by considering not the origin of norms, but rather what makes certain norms more likely to prevail. Emotional responses, I maintain, constitute one important set of mechanisms that affects the cultural viability of norms. To corroborate this, I exploit historical evidence indicating that sixteenth-century etiquette norms prohibiting disgusting actions were much more likely to survive than…
Mindreading: An Integrated Account of Pretence, Self-Awareness, and Understanding Other Minds
This volume defends an integrated account of the psychological mechanisms underlying “mindreading,” the commonplace capacity to understand the mind. The authors maintain that it is, as commonsense would suggest, vital to distinguish between reading others’ minds and reading one’s own. In reading other minds, the imagination plays a central role. As a result, the authors begin with an explicit and systematic account of pretense and imagination whi…
Sentimental Rules: On the Natural Foundations of Moral Judgement
This volume develops a new account of the nature of moral judgment. Evidence from developmental psychology and psychopathologies suggests that emotions play a crucial role in normal moral judgment. This indicates that philosophical accounts of moral judgment that eschew the emotions are mistaken. However, the volume also argues that prevailing philosophical accounts that embrace a role for the emotions are also mistaken. The empirical work points…
Is Religion What We Want? Motivation and the Cultural Transmission of Religious Representations
Many psychologists and philosophers have suggested that religious ideas emerge because they are motivationally attractive. This paper attempts to support a version of the motivational thesis by relying on religious creeds as a source of historical evidence. This simple source of evidence indicates that the cultural evolution of religious ideas is partly a function of the motivational attractiveness of the religious ideas
Free Will and the Folk: Responses to Commentators
Experimental research on folk intuitions concerning free will is still in its infancy. So it is especially helpful to have such an excellent set of commentaries, and I greatly appreciate the work of the commentators in advancing the project. Because of space limitations, I can’t respond to all of the comments. I will focus on just a few issues that emerge from the comments that I think are especially promising for illumination
Folk Intuitions on Free Will
This paper relies on experimental methods to explore the psychological underpinnings of folk intuitions about free will and responsibility. In different conditions, people give conflicting responses about agency and responsibility. In some contexts, people treat agency as indeterminist; in other contexts, they treat agency as determinist. Furthermore, in some contexts people treat responsibility as incompatible with determinism, and in other cont…
The Architecture of the Imagination: New Essays on Pretence, Possibility, and Fiction
This book presents essays in the form of thirteen chapters on the propositional imagination. The propositional imagination — the mental capacity we exploit when we imagine that everyone is colour-blind or that Hamlet is a procrastinator — plays an essential role in philosophical theorizing, engaging with fiction, and in everyday life. These thirteen chapters extend the theoretical picture of the imagination and explore the philosophical implicati…
After Incompatibilism: A Naturalistic Defense of the Reactive Attitudes
“Some philosophers have...written as if moral concepts were a timeless, limited, unchanging, determinate species of concept, necessarily having the same features throughout their history... In fact, of course, moral concepts change as social life changes ” (MacIntyre 1966) From the first time I encountered the problem of free will in college, it struck me that a clear-eyed view of free will and moral responsibility demanded some form of nihilism.…
Imagination and immortality: Thinking of me
Un fragment de la généalogie des normes
Pour qui entend expliquer la généalogie des normes, mieux vaut peut-être laisser de côté la question de leurs origines et s'intéresser à ce qui fait que certaines normes ont plus de chances que d'autres de s'installer durablement au sein d'une population humaine donnée. Or la capacité d'une norme à susciter une réaction émotionnelle est un facteur important de sa viabilité. L'histoire en offre maintes preuves : c'est ainsi, par exemple, que parmi…
Side Constraints and the Structure of Commonsense Ethics
Against Arguments from Reference
It is common in various quarters of philosophy to derive philosophically significant conclusions from theories of reference. In this paper, we argue that philosophers should give up on such ‘arguments from reference.’ Intuitions play a central role in establishing theories of reference, and recent cross‐cultural work suggests that intuitions about reference vary across cultures and between individuals within a culture ( Machery et al. 2004 ). We …
Is Belief in Free Will a Cultural Universal?
Recent experimental research has revealed surprising patterns in people's intuitions about free will and moral responsibility. One limitation of this research, however, is that it has been conducted exclusively on people from Western cultures. The present paper extends previous research by presenting a cross-cultural study examining intuitions about free will and moral responsibility in subjects from the United States, Hong Kong, India and Colomb…
Is Desert in the Details? 1
Emotions, norms, and the genealogy of fairness
In The Grammar of Society, Bicchieri maintains that behavior in the Ultimatum game (and related economic games) depends on people’s allegiance to ‘social norms’. In this article, I follow Bicchieri in maintaining that an adequate account of people’s behavior in such games must make appeal to norms, including a norm of equal division; I depart from Bicchieri in maintaining that at least part of the population desires to follow such norms even when…
Free Will and the Bounds of the Self
This article appeals to experimental studies in order to elucidate the reactions of ordinary persons to the picture of the human mind that is prevalent in contemporary cognitive science. According to this prevalent cognitive-scientific picture, the mind is made up of states and processes that interact according to certain rules to generate specific behaviors. The discussion argues that this picture is disturbing to ordinary persons, who reason th…
Experimental Philosophy
If Folk Intuitions Vary, Then What
We have recently presented evidence for cross‐cultural variation in semantic intuitions and explored the implications of such variation for philosophical arguments that appeal to some theory of reference as a premise. Devitt (2011) and Ichikawa and colleagues (forthcoming) offer critical discussions of the experiment and the conclusions that can be drawn from it. In this response, we reiterate and clarify what we are really arguing for, and we sh…
Experimental Philosophy
The essential moral self
Psychology (34 works) · Philosophy (33 works) · Epistemology (32 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (21 works) · Social Psychology (18 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Metaphysics (11 works) · Political science (10 works)