Research

I work in philosophy of mind & consciousness, science, mathematics, and also as a researcher in psychology and data science. I am currently working on a large and ongoing project in natural language processing and machine learning in radiology. Philosophically I am especially interested in the relationship between science, scientific results and philosophical theorizing. I've been at Marquette since 1994 and before that studied at the University of Wisconsin-Madison . . . and way back at Montana State University.

More information: publications · teaching · CV · links · software

News

• Paper just accepted: Racialized Gradients of Human Value and Marx’s Working Day, Today Race in Historical Materialism. 

  Abstract: I reconsider the ‘working day’ discussion in Das Kapital (Ch. 10) and how it centre’s two parameters in the generation and appropriation of surplus value. The first parameter is the cost of labour-power paid by the capitalist and the second is the time that the worker must yield to the capitalist – the ‘length of the working day.’ The first parameter represents the amount of pay required to keep the worker alive and able to work. Marx understood it as a lower limit below which capitalism would cease to function. I argue here that, while analytically coherent, this understanding of a lower limit runs contrary to many ways that actual historical capitalism has found to exploit the working class. That in fact, capitalism regularly exceeds this limit, and in this sense hyper-exploits. What we find instead of a limit are racialized gradients of human value – generated and fostered by capitalism – in which there are regular and persisting areas of hyper-exploitation with devalued racialized gendered workers. Supplemented by the notion of gradients of human value, Marx’s two-parameter account with its unifying analytic of time, in particular, human-time, neatly encompasses the phenomenon of hyper-exploitation and provides an incisive analysis of today’s capitalist exploitation. (Forthcoming in 2025.)

   
• Paper published: Quantifying Synchronization in Groups with Three or More Members Using SyncCalc: The Driver-Empath Model Of Group Dynamics in Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, 27(3), 171–187.  Objectives: This article introduces a nonlinear dynamical systems model to quantify synchronization among group members with regard to physiological activity or overt behaviors. Method: The driver-empath model accommodates asymmetries in influence among group members, separates autocorrelation effects from synchronization with other group members in time series analysis, accommodates dynamics that could be more complex than simple oscillators, and produces metrics at the individual, dyadic, and group levels of analysis. Results: An illustrative example of a team of seven undergraduates in a group decision-making task is presented with commentary for data preparation and determining lag length of time series data. The supporting literature summarizes connections between the group-level synchronization coefficient and group-level workload, cooperation versus competition dynamics, leadership emergence, and team performance. Conclusions: The driver-empath model has accumulated substantial external validity for answering research questions in group dynamics. Suggested new applications include studying synchrony across different network configurations and possible social fault lines.
  (Access it here.) [PsychNet, August 2023].
• Paper published: Against the Philosophical Project of 'Biologizing' Race in Metaphilosophy. 

  Abstract: This paper critiques philosophical efforts to biologize race as racial projects (Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States). The paper argues that the deeply social phenomenon of race defies the analytic schema employed by biologizing philosophers. The very (social) act of theorizing race is already in an involuted relationship with its target concept: analyzing race must be seen as a racial project, in that it simultaneously helps to manage how race is represented in society and helps organize society’s resources along particular racial lines. Such biologizing projects are rife with moral and political dimensions and have a depoliticizing effect that has the potential to camouflage, defuse, or explain away the social-structural reproduction of white power/privilege. The paper begins by considering two recent philosophic-scientific biologizations of race, showing how they conform to the analytic schema, reviewing received critical points, and offering several novel ones.

    (Access it here.) [Wiley Publishing, shareable link version, August 23, 2021].
• Paper presented: “Physiological Synchronization under Three Task Conditions and its Impact on Team Performance,” with Stephen J. Guastello and Lucas Mirabito. Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology & Life Sciences 28th Annual International Conference, Raleigh, NC, August 2–4, 2018.
• Paper published: There is Nothing It is Like to See Red: Holism and Subjective Experience in Synthese.  Topic: I argue against thinking of phenomenal consciousness as a property of mental states, showing how such a view is in fact prevalent, pre-theoretically unwarranted, and philosophically pernicious in that it often leads to an implausible reduction of conscious experience to qualia. I seek to develop a holistic conception of phenomenal consciousness for creatures (not states) and argue that it has at least equal pre-theoretic warrant, is more conservative philosophically in that it decides less from the a priori “armchair” and enjoys a fruitful two-way relationship with empirical work.   (Access it here.) [author proof, revised version, May 2017].
• Paper presented "Physiological Synchronization and the Communication of Emotion”  at Montreal Cognitive Science Day: Université du Quebéc à Montréal (Montreal, Canada), March 29, 2018.
• Another paper recently published: Causation, Probability, and the Continuity Bind in British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. It explores how chance should be understood with respect to the evolution of probabilities as a function of time, particularly as they relate to causality understood probabilistically. I argue that a natural, discontinuous way of understanding chancy events as they occur leads to problems and sketch alternatives.  Access it here [BJPS Advance Article] or here [author proof, revised version, Dec. 2015].
• We (Stephen J. Guastello, David Pincus, Robert W. Bond Jr.) presented: “Computation of Orbital Decomposition with Multiple Categorical Variables,” American Psychological Society 26th Annual Convention, San Francisco, May 25, 2014.
• I presented a paper entitled "Imprecise Probability and the Temporal Evolution of Chance" at the Imprecise Probabilities in Statistics and Philosophy Conference this summer (27-28 June, 2014) in Munich at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (Ludwig-Maximilians Universität Munich). Published in Erkenntnis, September 1, 2015.   Access it here [author proof, revised version, Sept. 2015].
• My paper, Blurring Two Conceptions of Subjective Experience: Folk vs. Philosophical Phenomenality, is available online in Philosophical Psychology. (Access it here.) [author proof, revised version, Mar. 2013] The paper is based on an experimental study of folk conceptions of subjective experience. It builds on work by Justin Sytsma and Edouard Machery in their paper, "Two Conceptions of Subjective Experience" (2010) Philosophical Studies 151(2): 299-327.
• In other work, I've been working on the Integrated Information account of consciousness (Giulio Tononi). My paper, Consciousness as Integrated Information: a Provisional Philosophical Critique from the Journal of Consciousness Studies (2013) may be found here [author proof, revised version, Dec. 2012].
• I am also working on how nonlinear dynamics (chaos, complexity, and catastrophe theories, and related principles) can shed insight into thinking about consciousness and the mind. In particular, I have an interest in symbolic dynamics. Stephen Guastello and I have developed (2010) a piece of software, Orbital Decomposition v1.2. ORBDE, which performs an analysis based on symbolic dynamics that identifies recurring patterns of events in nominally-coded data; it can be found at the Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology & Life Science (sixth choice from the bottom).
• News: I will be a visiting scholar at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain at Humboldt University for the academic year 2012-13.