philosophy

O'Madagain, C. (2016). Outsourcing Concepts: Deference, the Extended Mind, and Expanding our Epistemic Capacity. pdf

In J. A. Carter, Andy Clark, Jesper Kallestup, Duncan Pritchard and Orestis Palermos (eds.), Socially Extended Knowledge, Oxford University Press.

I argue that conceptual or semantic deference - whereby we allow others to determine the reference of the concepts in our own thoughts - is best understood in terms of extended mind reasoning. We defer to others such as experts because they are literally storing our concepts for us. I argue that this affords a major expansion of our ability to acquire and store knowledge, both at the level of the individual and of the community.

O'Madagain, C. (2015). Davidson and Husserl on the Social Origin of our Concept of Objectivity. pdf

In Discovering the We: The Phenomenology of Sociality, Dermot Moran and Thomas Szanto (eds). Routledge, 2015

Husserl and Davidson both argued that interaction with others is required for us to recognise that the world exists independently of our minds. I argue that independently, their arguments fail, but together they provide the basis for a much stronger argument. I also consider results in developmental psychology that support this view, and argue that the Davidson Husserl approach may allow us to better understand these results.

O'Madagain, C. (2014) Indexicals and the Metaphysics of Semantic Tokens: When Shapes and Sounds become Utterances pdf

Thought - A Journal of Philosophy, Volume 3, Issue 1, pages 71–79, March 2014.

Here I discuss Cohen's 'token-contextual' theory of indexicals, and consider that if we are to defend a semantics based on the properties of semantic tokens, we must refine our understanding of what counts as a semantic token in the first place. I argue that when properly understood, the shapes and sounds we produce in speech and writing are not always semantic tokens, but only become semantic tokens or utterances when we intend them to, and that this solves a series of problems that arise for the token-contextual approach.

O'Madagain, C. (2014). Can Groups have Concepts? Semantics for Collective Intentions. pdf

Philosophical Issues, a supplement to Nous, Volume 24, Issue 1, pages 347–363, October 2014

A great deal of work has gone into explaining how beliefs and intentions can be attributed to groups, but if we can do that, we ought to be able to attribute concepts to groups. Drawing on Lewis's conventionalist semantics, I propose a model for how this can be done.

O'Madagain, C. (2014) Mind and Machine (review) pdf

International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 22:2 2014

Walmsley argues that Dynamic Systems Theory offers the most promising account of how machines can underlie our cognition. I consider his argument and offer a concern: that since dynamic systems theory makes the time in which cognitive events unfold essential to their individuation, this implies that creatures whose cognition unfolds over very different time scales could not have the same cognitive states. While the mind-brain identity theory risked imposing upon us a sort of matter-chauvinism, then, Dynamic Systems accounts of cognition risk a sort of time-chauvinism.

O'Madagain, C. (2013) Intentionality link

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2013.

An overview of theories of intentionality.

O'Madagain, C. (2012) Group Agents: Persons, Mobs or Zombies? pdf

International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 22:2, 2012

List and Pettit (2012) argue that groups can be attributed beliefs, desires, intentions, and even rights. Here I argue that because groups don't have conscious states, the attribution to them of desires and rights is problematic.

In Progress or Under Review

O'Madagain, C. (under review) This is a Paper about Demonstratives pdf

Under Review

Here I develop the token-contextual model of indexicals explored in 'Indexicals and the Metaphysics of Utterances', and extend that model to cover demonstratives.

O'Madagain, C. (under review) Statues, Stones, and Demonstrative Thought pdf

Under Review

A debate continues over whether we need to think of the objects we perceive as particular kinds of things, which is sometimes called 'sortalism', or whether our perceptual system can identify them without our knowing what kind of thing they are. Here I argue that distinct thoughts about statues and stones give us further reasons to think that sortals are necessary for demonstrative thought, and I propose a way of including sortals that avoids the pitfalls of standard approaches.

O'Madagain, C. Stober G and Strickland B. (in progress - see poster - pdf) Is Pointing Ritualized Touch?

Here we present in poster form (presented at Society for Research in Child Development, Philadelphia March 2015) the results of three studies that indicate that pointing originates in touch.

Egre P. and O'Madagain, C. (in progress) Concept Utility

It seems that often enough, scientists or laypersons decide that we might improve one of our concepts by changing it. This seems to assume that one meaning for a concept might be better than another. But how can that be? Here we argue that forming inductive inferences over different concepts will result in more or less useful beliefs. On this basis, we formulate a notion of concept utility, which has been missing, we argue, from the literature on concepts. We argue that this explains cases of conceptual change, which we defend with a close analysis of the recent decision to alter the scientific concept 'planet'.

O'Madagain, C. and Tomasello M. (in progress) Joint Attention to Mental Representations. pdf

For all the work that has gone into thinking about joint attention, one of the most straightforward kinds of joint attention has been almost entirely overlooked. This is joint attention to mental representations. Consider an ordinary conversation - I suggest "let's go for a picnic!", and you reply "that's a great idea, but we should wait until the sun comes out". In this case, we are jointly focused on the proposal that we go for a picnic - this is the object of the discourse demonstrative 'that' which appears in your comment on my suggestion. We argue here that this ability plays a tranformative role in human cognition and culture. It facilitates the social learning of rational norms, and it facilitates the cultural transmission of knowledge across generations by a kind of selection that we call 'rationale dependent selection'.

O'Madagain, C. Schmidt, M. Call, J. and Tomasello, M. (in progress). A New Approach to Metacognition

Here we develop a new paradigm for research metacognition in apes and children.

O'Madagain, C. and Haun, D. (in progress). "10 Million people can't be wrong": What do the Folk Really think about Majorities?

Here we investigate under what circumstances people expect the majority answers of large groups to be helpful in answering questions. If Condorcet's Jury Theorem is intuitively understood, we should expect large groups to be helpful in some circumstances but not others. We find that in fact participants systematically overestimate the reliability of groups to answer questions.

Doctoral Dissertation: "The Public Dimension of Meaning"

The ideas in several of the papers above are drawn together in my doctoral dissertation. It can be read here.

Non-Academic Work

Essays:

Pointing and Valuing - an essay on art and value in Directions, ed. Anthony Kelly, Triskill Design Publishing, 2007

Memory and Form - a program note for the EAR electronic music festival, Drogheda, Ireland