Gomez, C. & Adair, H.V. (2025). Racism as Psychological Essentialism. Res Philosophica. 102. 95-120. 10.5840
As it stands, three broad families of theories (structural, ideological, and volitional) aim to capture the metaphysics of racism. In this paper, we argue for an alternative descriptive theory, the “Racism as Psychological Essentialism” view (RPE). On our view, racism is, at its core, the instantiation of psychological race essentialism, i.e. the tendency to represent races as having discrete “essences” which make their members’ characteristics natural, unified, and stable. As we demonstrate, this approach allows us to account both for the sorts of cases competing theories aim to explain, and those they cannot. The RPE view also sheds light on the cognitive mechanisms which contribute to racism’s prevalence and persistence over time, thus opening the door for a number of empirically informed anti-racist strategies. It is this robust explanatory power that makes the RPE view a particularly strong descriptive theory of racism.
Adair, H. V., & Carruthers, P. (2023). Pretend play: More imitative than imaginative. Mind & Language, 38(2), 464–479.
Pretense is generally thought to constitutively involve imagination. We argue that this is a mistake. Although pretense often involves imagination, it need not; nor is it a kind of imagination. The core nature of pretense is closer to imitation than it is to imagination, and likely shares some of its motivation with the former. Three main strands of argument are presented. One is from the best explanation of cross-cultural data. Another is from task-analysis of instances of pretend play. And the third concerns the different ways in which pretense (especially childhood pretense) and imagination impact one's evaluative/affective systems.
Adair, H.V. (2022). Interest, Disfluency, and Underlying Values: a Better Theory of Aesthetic Pleasure. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 13 (3):779-795.
Over the last few decades, empirical researchers have become increasingly interested in explaining the formation of “basic” aesthetic judgments, i.e. simple judgments of sensory preferability and the pleasure that seems to accompany them. To that end, Reber et al. have recently defended a “processing-fluency” view, which identifies aesthetic pleasure with one’s ability to easily process an object’s perceptual properties (e.g. Reber 2012). While the processing-fluency theory is certainly an improvement over its competitors, it is currently vulnerable to several serious criticisms. In what follows, I aim to provide a more holistic, explanatorily robust, model of the processing-fluency theory of aesthetic pleasure by incorporating what the view neglects: the crucial role of perceptual disfluency, interest, and the underlying values that drive aesthetic appraisal.
Adair, H.V. (2019). Updating Thought Theory: Emotion and the Non‐Paradox of Fiction. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 100 (4):1055-1073.
Over the past four decades, the paradox of fiction has sparked considerable debate among philosophers. Unfortunately, the most promising solution to this puzzle, thought theory, currently earns its plausibility by way of intuition rather than evidence. I aim to address this by updating thought theory in light of recent empirical findings on affect. I will draw upon a wide range of scientific research—on the cognitive mechanisms driving emotion, the role of affect in counterfactual mind wandering and prospection, and the evolutionary function of affect—to substantiate the claim that fictions can give rise to both real and rational emotional states.
Adair H.V. & Carruthers, P. (2017). Attitude–Scenario–Emotion (ASE) sentiments are superficial. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 40 (1,000 words; Commentary on “The deep structure of social affect: Attitudes, emotions, sentiments, and the case of ‘contempt’” by Matthew Gervais and Daniel Fessler.)
Gervais & Fessler's (G&F's) Attitude-Scenario-Emotion (ASE) model reduces sentiments to superficial patterns of emotional responding that emerge when an underlying evaluative attitude interacts with appraisals of a range of specific scenarios. Thus construed, sentiments are epiphenomenal. We argue that G&F would do better to identify each sentiment (love, say) with the attitude that underlies and explains the patterns of emotional responding (in the case of love, this might be the attitude of valuing the good of a specific other).
Adair (WIP). Affective Impossibility, Not Imaginative Resistance.
Adair, H.V. (WIP). Moral Responsibility and Romantic Preferences.
Adair, H.V. (WIP). Understanding without Caring: the Role of Affect in Empathy