Cameron Buckner Wins APA Article Prize


Cameron Buckner, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Houston, has won the 2018 Article Prize from the American Philosophical Association (APA). 

Professor Buckner was awarded the prize for his article, “Rational Inference: The Lowest Bounds,” which was published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research in October, 2017.

Here’s the abstract of the article:

A surge of empirical research demonstrating flexible cognition in animals and young infants has raised interest in the possibility of rational decision‐making in the absence of language. A venerable position, which I here call “Classical Inferentialism”, holds that nonlinguistic agents are incapable of rational inferences. Against this position, I defend a model of nonlinguistic inferences that shows how they could be practically rational. This model vindicates the Lockean idea that we can intuitively grasp rational connections between thoughts by developing the Davidsonian idea that practical inferences are at bottom categorization judgments. From this perspective, we can see how similarity‐based categorization processes widely studied in human and animal psychology might count as practically rational. The solution involves a novel hybrid of internalism and externalism: intuitive inferences are psychologically rational (in the explanatory sense) given the intensional sensitivity of the similarity assessment to the internal structure of the agent’s reasons for acting, but epistemically rational (in the justificatory sense) given an ecological fit between the features matched by that assessment and the structure of the agent’s environment. The essay concludes by exploring empirical results that show how nonlinguistic agents can be sensitive to these similarity assessments in a way that grants them control over their opaque judgments.

The Article Prize is awarded to a member of the APA who is a “younger scholar,” understood as someone who “(a) was 40 years of age or younger in the year of the volume in which the article appears, or (b) received his or her Ph.D. 10 or fewer years before the year in which the article was published.” It is awarded every other year, in even years, alternating with the APA’s Book Prize. The Article Prize is $2,000, and will be officially awarded at the 2019 Eastern Division Meeting of the APA in New York.

Previous winners are listed on the Article Prize information page, and there is more information about Professor Buckner’s prize here.

Hedgehog Review
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

1 Comment
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Jonathan Weinberg
Jonathan Weinberg
5 years ago

Woo-hoo! Go Cameron!