Ron Mallon's Homepage

Ron Mallon
Associate Professor
Department of Philosophy
University of Utah
rmallon@philosophy.utah.edu

cv in .pdf format
or .html

My research pursues naturalistic understandings of culture and the mind.

Spring 2008 Office Hours:Thurs 11AM-12 Noon and by appointment

Spring 2008 Course

Modularity, Intention, and Intelligence:
An Inquiry into Horizontal Faculties
PHIL 7450: Philosophy and Cognitive Science
Th 1-4 PM OSH 334

Selected Papers (for a fuller list of on-line papers, click here):

Against Arguments from Reference forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
(With Edouard Machery, Shaun Nichols, and Stephen P. Stich). We argue that recent evidence of variation in the intuitions about reference undermines the use of theories of reference in making metaphysical arguments.

Knobe vs Machery: Testing the Trade-Off Hypothesis forthcoming in Mind and Language [penultimate draft .pdf file]
Recent work by Joshua Knobe has established that people are far more likely to describe bad but foreseen side effects as intentionally performed than good but foreseen side effects (this is sometimes called the 'Knobe effect' or the 'side-effect effect.' Edouard Machery has proposed a novel explanation for this asymmetry: it results from construing the bad side effect as a cost that must be incurred to receive a benefit. In this paper, I argue that Machery's 'trade-off hypothesis' is wrong. I do this by reproducing the asymmetry between judgments about good and bad side effects in cases that cannot plausibly be construed as trade-offs.

Intention, Temporal Order, and Moral Judgment forthcoming in Mind and Language [penultimate draft .pdf file]
(With Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Tom McCoy, and Jay G. Hull. The traditional philosophical doctrine of double effect claims that agents' intentions affect whether acts are morally wrong. Our behavioral study reveals that agents' intentions affect whether acts are judged morally wrong but not whether acts are classified as killings, whereas the temporal order of good and bad effects affects whether acts are classified as killings but not whether acts are judged morally wrong. These findings suggest that the moral judgments are not based on the classifications. Our results also undermine recent claims that prior moral judgments determine whether agents are seen as causing effects intentionally rather than as side effects.

Arguments from Reference and the Worry About Dependence. in Midwest Studies in Philosophy XXXI pp. 160-183 [penultimate draft .pdf file] [published version]
This paper raises concern with the use of theories of reference in philosophical discourse and then to consider the possibility of empirically validating this concern by reference to a novel sort of "quantitative" empirical approach suggested recently by Shaun Nichols (forthcoming). The concern is whether the particular theories of reference or reference relations employed in particular philosophical discussions are actually chosen with a view to entailing or accommodating a desired philosophical outcome. I argue that such dependent selections of assumptions about reference give us little reason to think the assumptions are true. I go on to argue that if we became convinced that such assumptions really are chosen simply to ensure a desired outcome, it would give us reason for skepticism about arguments from reference since it would undermine our sense that such arguments tracked any independent truth about the reference of our words or concepts.

A Field Guide to Social Construction in Philosophy Compass [penultimate draft .pdf file] [published version]
A survey of the contemporary social constructionist landscape.

Transgressors, victims, and cry babies: Is basic moral judgment spared in autism? forthcoming in Social Neuroscience. [nearly final draft in .pdf]
(With Alan M. Leslie and Jennifer DiCorcia). An empirical investigation of moral judgment in autism.

Innateness as Closed Process Invariance forthcoming in Philosophy of Science [penultimate draft .doc file]
(With Jonathan Weinberg). We suggest a novel account of innateness: closed process invariantism.

Human Categories Beyond Non-Essentialism forthcoming in Journal of Political Philosophy [penultimate draft]
Social theorists have misplaced their interest in the essentialism/non-essentialism divide, for non-essentialism is too weak a constraint to satisfy central theoretical aims of anti-essentialists. This focus on non-essentialism stems in part from a mistaken assumption regarding the connection between categories with necessary and sufficient conditions and generalizations, and this mistake also animates and distorts the project of attempting to frame more plausible and theoretically fruitful non-essentialist accounts. Abandoning this mistake suggests a reorientation of social theory towards the a posteriori investigation of human categories.

'Race':Normative, not Metaphysical or Semantic in Ethics (April 2006) [penultimate draft]
I argue that much of the dispute over the metaphysics of race is an illusion, that this illusion is produced in part by an implicit appeal to theories of reference for racial terms - what I call the "semantic strategy," and that reliance on the semantic strategy is a mistake.

Moral Rules and Moral Dilemmas [in .pdf] forthcoming in Cognition (Vol. 100, 2006, 530-542)
(With Shaun Nichols). We argue that recent emotion-based explanations of reasoning about moral dilemmas have neglected the contribution that rules make. We propose that judgments of whether an action is wrong, all things considered, implicates a complex set of psychological processes, including representations of rules, emotional responses, and assessments of costs and benefits.

Semantics, Cross-Cultural Style [in .pdf] in Cognition (2004)
(With Edouard Machery, Shaun Nichols, and Stephen P. Stich). We critique the appeal to referential intuitions in the philosophy of language by presenting evidence that at least some referential intuitions vary with cultural background. We argue this calls for a revision of this widely employed philosophical methodology.

Passing, Traveling, and Reality: Social Construction and the Metaphysics of Race [in .pdf] in Noûs (December 2004)
I discuss three constraints on an adequate constructionist theory of race, and I argue that they cannot be simultaneously satisfied.

Social Roles, Social Construction, and Stability in F. Schmitt (Ed.) Socializing Metaphysics (2003)
I offer a theory of social roles as a model of cultural explanation.

The Odd Couple: The Compatibility of Social Construction and Evolutionary Psychology [in.pdf] in Philosophy of Science (March 2000)
(With Stephen P. Stich). We argue that a great deal of apparently empirical disagreement between constructionists and evolutionary psychologists with respect to the emotions is illusory, having its origin in a dispute over the correct theory of reference.

Political Liberalism, Cultural Membership and The Family [in .pdf] in Social Theory and Practice (Summer 1999)
Much recent liberal political theory assumes that the institution of the family is just, despite its being (a prima facie) a source of inequality. Focusing on Rawls's theory of justice, I argue that the family poses a serious problem for Rawls. I go on to suggest that the family can be justified by appeal to the good of cultural membership, but that this justification works on within the newer framework of Political Liberalism rather than that of A Theory of Justice.