Full Professor | Department of Philosophy | California State University, Fullerton
My metaphilosophical and methodological research is devoted to providing concrete demonstrations that overcome three problems that still beset answering interdisciplinary big questions, or pioneering new methods that chart a way through them.
Read MoreModeling the Contested Relationship between Analects, Mencius, and Xunzi (PDF)
Topic models of a five-million-character corpus of early and medieval Chinese texts confirmed many close-reading judgments and called for a reappraisal of what the Xunzi shares with the Analects. The Journal of Asian Studies, 2018.
Rethinking Human Development and the Shared Intentionality Hypothesis (PDF)
Infants already take a second-personal stance toward others, we argue, which revises Tomasello’s account of when shared intentionality develops. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2021.
Cultural Evolution: A Review of Theoretical Challenges
Most of the problems that members of the Cultural Evolution Society identify in their field are conceptual at root, from slippery key terms to an unclear relation with biological evolution. Evolutionary Human Sciences, 2024.
The Presumption of Compatibilism
Experiments in the United States, India, and South Korea found that people’s untutored intuitions treat divine foreknowledge as compatible with free will. Religious Studies, 2025.
The Status of Women in Neolithic & Pre-Imperial China
DNA, burial sex ratios, and evidence of diet and dental health indicate that women in pre-Imperial China were treated less well than women in other early societies. World Archaeology, 2021.
Cross-Cultural Variation in Cognitive Style
Cognitive style varies across cultures in categorization, attention, judgments of change and causation, and reasoning; the review weighs the evidence in each, including reasoning studies whose replications failed. Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science, 2025.
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