Talks & Events

Event Details

General-purpose Modal Representations - Dr. Jonathan Phillips, Dartmouth College

  • Event Date: 2025-10-21
  • Event Start Time: 2:00 PM
  • Event End Time: 3:20 PM
  • Event Location: 152 Frelinghuysen Rd, Psych Bldg., Busch Campus, Room 105
  • Event Type: Talks: RuCCS Colloquia
  • Event Semester: Fall 2025

 Abstract:

Much of high-level cognition relies on a capacity to represent the relevant possibilities in a given situation. To judge that someone is morally responsible for a given action requires assessing what other actions were available to that person. To decide what caused something to happen requires determining what else could have happened instead. To make a decision requires representing possible options and deciding between them. And so on. An important but unanswered question is whether each different high-level judgment relies on a domain-specific representation of the possibilities relevant for that judgment, or whether humans have a more general-purpose representation of possibilities that is recruited across various forms of high-level cognition. I’ll provide evidence for the latter hypothesis. I’ll introduce a general method for empirically measuring the set of possibilities that people consider to be relevant in a particular situation (through sequential sampling), quantitatively characterize both this generation process and the structure of the space of possibilities represented, and show that the same representation of possibility is recruited across distinct forms of high-level reasoning, namely decision making, force judgments, causal judgments, and blame attribution. I’ll then illustrate that this general-purpose modal representation has a particularly interesting set of features: it is both highly flexible (reflecting relatively small changes in context), and it also seems to be represented at some level of abstraction rather than estimated through online sampling.

Bio:  Dr. Jonathan Phillips

Jonathan joined Dartmouth as the inaugural faculty member in the Cognitive Science Program in 2019, where he directs the PhilLab. Before starting at Dartmouth, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Psychology Department at Harvard and before that completed his Ph.D. in Philosophy and Psychology at Yale. Jonathan’s lab combines methods from philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and computer science to study the psychological representation of possibilities and its role in high-level cognition, including moral judgment, decision making, causal reasoning, semantics, and theory of mind.