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.

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).  I am currently in the process of elaborating on these ideas in book form: The Signaling Mind: Belief as Social Manipulation. The result, I hope, will be a systematic theory of how the mind can function to signal information to others. (Here is a link to an accessible introduction to the idea.) In this 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 beliefs, as well as many pro-social beliefs that are not necessarily well-grounded in reason and evidence. So far, this theory has been developed in four main papers:

• "Beliefs as Signals" (Philosophical Psychology, 2017) introduces this proposal, making the conceptual case for the very possibility of belief-signaling. But I prefer that people rely more on the next paper ("Tribal Mind"), as there are some real confusions/mistakes in my original presentation.

  • "Detection Not Perception: A Reply to Glazer" (Philosophical Psychology, 2018). This is a reply to an objection from Trip Glazer.

• "A Tribal Mind" (Mind & Language, 2022) applies the theory to certain group-characterizing beliefs, such as climate change denial and religious belief. This is the most accessible presentation of the belief signaling hypothesis, and this corrects some mistakes from the previous paper.

• "Evolutionary Psychology, Learning, and Belief Signaling" (Synthese, 2021) offers an evolutionary account of how different levels of mindreading (or agency detection) lead to novel signals, including beliefs.

• "Dangerous Beliefs, Effective Signals" (Philosophical Psychology, 2023) argues that certain beliefs are honest signals because they are costly.

A few years ago, 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.