Eric Funkhouser

About Me:

I am Professor and Department Chair of Philosophy at the University of Arkansas. My main areas of research are in the philosophy of psychology/cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics. I am also starting to connect some of my prior philosophical work to the philosophy of AI, both in my teaching and my research.

My near-term research is focused on these specific projects:

• Completing my book manuscript The Signaling Mind: Belief as Social Manipulation. Over the last several years, I have published a series of articles on how social forces shape the functions of our beliefs and other mental states. This grew out of my previous work on self-deception, with the realization that much self-deception is for the sake of impression management ( as opposed to, say, self-esteem or mood regulation).  Here is a link to an accessible introduction to the idea. In the book manuscript, I argue that many beliefs serve a signaling function that affects how others treat us—much like animal signals used to manipulate other animals. This functionality explains why we hold various group-defining beliefs, self-serving and self-enhancing beliefs, as well as pro-social beliefs that are not necessarily well-grounded in reason and evidence.

• Developing related work on incentivized reasoning and social signaling. This includes rebutting epistemic or rationality based challenges that assimilate so-called incentivized reasoning to epistemically normal (e.g., Bayesian) reasoning instead. I am also working on drawing out the consequences of belief signaling for high stakes moral and political issues. How can we hope to correct reckless political belief signals? What are the prospects for moral progress if our moral judgments signal our coalitional affiliations? 

• AI papers on LLM agency, information exchange, bias, and sycophancy. I am working to apply the cognitive science of belief and related phenomena to AI systems. LLMs introduce new epistemic problems given that for most conversational exchanges they are not vested agents. ("Counterfeit people" introduce problems of their own.) I am especially interested in ways in which chatbots enable our self-deception and otherwise feed our cognitive biases.

Back in 2019, I published a book, Self-Deception, for Routledge's New Problems of Philosophy series. This book provides a comprehensive and relatively neutral introduction to contemporary philosophical debates over self-deception. I critically examine the prominent, recent accounts that aspire to address the philosophical problems raised by self-deception (e.g., intentionalism vs. motivationalism; unitary vs. divided minds; full belief vs. less robust substitutes). The book also engages with some of the psychological and biological considerations that bear on the topic. I continue to write on self-deception, with recent interests in self-handicapping as well as self-deception in digital spaces.

In my more metaphysical youth, I published a book—The Logical Structure of Kinds (Oxford, 2014)—in which I develop and defend a theory of properties and kinds, with special applications to debates over multiple realizability and reduction in the philosophy of mind. (The main idea behind that theory—my conception of a property space—was first presented in my paper "The Determinable-Determinate Relation.") I like the theory that I advanced in that book (i.e., property space models structured by determination dimensions), but I was pretty brief when it came to drawing out all the consequences and applying it to particular cases. I envision certain applications of my property space models to modality, naturalness, and fundamentality. I am writing a bit more on property theory now, including a recent handbook entry on the determinable-determinate relation and another paper on how determinates exclude one another. 

In all of my work, but especially in my book projects, I tend to favor the development of positive views and theories. I am willing to sacrifice a bit of scholarship for the sake of creativity, breadth, and advancement. 

I recently concluded an interdisciplinary project on "Reasoning in the Digital Age," funded by a University of Arkansas Chancellor's Grant in the Humanities. This project produced research, an academic conference, and curriculum development.

Some years back, I was the Co-PI on a Templeton funded project on the philosophy and psychology of self-control.