Joshua Alexander
Siena College, USA
Fall Term 2014
The Cognitive Science of Disagreement

Joshua Alexander is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of Cognitive Science at Siena College. His work is at the intersection of philosophy and cognitive science, and focuses primarily on the nature of philosophical cognition and intellectual disagreement. He is the author of Experimental Philosophy: An Introduction (Polity, 2012), has published articles and reviews in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, The Monist, Philosophical Psychology, Philosophy Compass, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Philosophy of Science, and Review of Philosophy and Psychology, and has contributed chapters to several anthologies including Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy, Current Controversies in Experimental Philosophy, Advances in Experimental Philosophy, and Intuitions. While at the Center he will be working on a book on the philosophy and cognitive science of disagreement, tentatively titled: Making Sense of Disagreement.

2016 Update

Joshua Alexander presented two papers at the 2016 Meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology: "Framing why we disagree about disagreement" and "On second thought: Why the reflection defense doesn't work."
He also presented "Experimental philosophy meets philosophy of science at the 2016 Meeting of the Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice, and will be presenting "The epistemic benefits of cognitive diversity" at the 2017 Bled Philosophy Conference. He published "Constitutional crises: How understanding constitutive elements in science can help us better understand the nature of conceptual change in science" in Metascience 25: 459-463, and has two papers forthcoming:  "The challenges involved with going negative" in a special issue of the Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research and "Knowledge, certainty, and skepticism: A cross-cultural study" in Epistemology for the Rest of the World (OUP).

2015 Update

I have the following papers forthcoming:

"Thought Experiments, Mental Models, and Experimental Philosophy." To appear in J. Nado (ed.), Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical Methodology, Continuum Press.

"Philosophical Expertise." To appear in J. Sytsma and W. Buckwalter (eds), A Companion to Experimental Philosophy, Wiley-Blackwell.

"Experimental Philosophy – A Short Introduction." To appear in J. Horvath (ed), Methods in Analytic Philosophy: A Contemporary Reader, Bloomsbury Press.

Waterman, J., C. Gonnerman, and J. Alexander. (forthcoming). "Knowledge, Subjective Certainty, and Philosophical Skepticism: A Cross-Cultural Study." To appear in E. McCready, M. Mizumoto, J. Stanley, and S. Stich (eds), Epistemology for the Rest of the World, Oxford University Press.