Joshua Shepherd Florida State University
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  • Graduate student, Florida State University

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  • None specified

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About me
I am a graduate student at Florida State University. This August I will receive my PhD as well as begin a post-doc at the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics.
My works
7 items found.
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  1. Joshua Shepherd (forthcoming). Causalism and Intentional Omission. American Philosophical Quarterly.
    It is natural to think that at root, agents are beings that act. Agents do more than this, however – agents omit to act. Sometimes agents do so intentionally. How should we understand intentional omission? Recent accounts of intentional omission have given causation a central theoretical role. The move is well-motivated. If some form of causalism about intentional omission can successfully exploit similarities between action and omission, it might inherit the broad support causalism about intentional action enjoys. In this paper (...)
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  2. Joshua Shepherd & Michael Bishop (forthcoming). The Case for Naturalized Epistemology. In Stefan Tolksdorf & Dirk Koppleberg (eds.), Erkenntnistheorie: Wie und Wozu? Mentis Publishers.
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  3. Joshua Shepherd (2013). The Apparent Illusion of Conscious Deciding. Philosophical Explorations 16 (1):18 - 30.
    Recent work in cognitive science suggests that conscious thought plays a much less central role in the production of human behavior than most think. Partially on the basis of this work, Peter Carruthers has advanced the claim that humans never consciously decide to act. This claim is of independent interest for action theory, and its potential truth poses a problem for theories of free will and autonomy, which often take our capacity to consciously decide to be of central importance. In (...)
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  4. Joshua Shepherd (2013). Why Block Can't Stand the HOT. Journal of Consciousness Studies 20 (3-4):183-195.
    Ned Block has recently pressed a new criticism of the higher-order thought (HOT) theory of consciousness. HOT proponents have responded in turn. The exchange affords a chance to find some clarity concerning the essential commitments of HOT, as well as a chance to find clarity on the issues that divide Block and HOT proponents. In this paper I discuss the recent exchange, and I draw some lessons. First, I side with HOT proponents in arguing that new criticism presents no new (...)
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  5. Joshua Shepherd (2012). Action, Attitude, and the Knobe Effect: Another Asymmetry. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 3 (2):171-185.
    A majority of people regard the harmful side-effects of an agent’s behavior as much more intentional than an agent’s helpful side-effects. In this paper, I present evidence for a related asymmetry. When a side-effect action is an instance of harming , folk ascriptions are significantly impacted by the relative badness of either an agent’s main goal or her side-effect action, but not her attitude. Yet when a side-effect action is an instance of helping , folk ascriptions are sensitive to an (...)
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  6. Joshua Shepherd (2012). Action, Mindreading and Embodied Social Cognition. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 11 (4):507-518.
    One of the central insights of the embodied cognition (EC) movement is that cognition is closely tied to action. In this paper, I formulate an EC-inspired hypothesis concerning social cognition. In this domain, most think that our capacity to understand and interact with one another is best explained by appeal to some form of mindreading. I argue that prominent accounts of mindreading likely contain a significant lacuna. Evidence indicates that what I call an agent’s actional processes and states—her goals, needs, (...)
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  7. Joshua Shepherd (2012). Free Will and Consciousness: Experimental Studies. Consciousness and Cognition 21 (2):915-927.
    What are the folk-conceptual connections between free will and consciousness? In this paper I present results which indicate that consciousness plays central roles in folk conceptions of free will. When conscious states cause behavior, people tend to judge that the agent acted freely. And when unconscious states cause behavior, people tend to judge that the agent did not act freely. Further, these studies contribute to recent experimental work on folk philosophical affiliation, which analyzes folk responses to determine whether folk views (...)
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