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, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics.

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 functions 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, 2020) 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, 2022) 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. 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 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 am actively working on 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.