Jacob Beck
	Contact Information Email jacob.beck[at]ttu.edu Mailing Address Texas Tech University Department of Philosophy Box 43092 Lubbock, TX 79409	Courses Fall 2011 HONS 3303: The Science of the Mind PHIL 5331: Philosophical Psychology (Concept Learning) Spring 2012 PHIL 2300: Introduction to Philosophy
Bio I’m an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at Texas Tech. In June 2008, I received my Ph.D. from Harvard for a dissertation on the structure of cognition. Some years earlier I earned my B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, where I majored in philosophy and minored in cognitive science. In between I taught English at Language House in Japan. From 2009 to 2011 I served as a James S. McDonnell postdoctoral fellow in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Program at Washington University in Saint Louis. Research My research centers on the intersection of philosophy and the cognitive sciences. I am especially interested in bringing traditional philosophical analyses of mental representation into contact with empirical work on the topic. Among the issues I’m currently investigating are: the existence of cognitive states with nonconceptual content; the nature and extent of indeterminacy in our attributions of cognitive contents; and the nature of concepts and concept learning. Here are some papers I’ve been working on. The Generality Constraint and the Structure of Thought (forthcoming in Mind) Abstract: According to the Generality Constraint, mental states with conceptual content must be capable of recombining in certain systematic ways. Drawing on empirical evidence from cognitive science, I argue that so-called analog magnitude states violate this recombinability condition and thus have nonconceptual content. I further argue that this result has two significant consequences: it demonstrates that nonconceptual content seeps beyond perception and infiltrates cognition; and it shows that whether mental states have nonconceptual content is largely an empirical matter determined by the structure of the neural representations underlying them. Do Animals Engage in Conceptual Thought? (penultimate draft; forthcoming in Philosophy Compass) Abstract: This paper surveys and evaluates the answers that philosophers and animal researchers have given to two questions. Do animals have thoughts? If so, are their thoughts conceptual? Along the way, special attention is paid to distinguish debates of substance from mere battles over terminology, and to isolate fruitful areas for future research. Why We Can’t Say What Animals Think (forthcoming in Philosophical Psychology) Abstract: Realists about animal cognition confront a puzzle. If animals have real, contentful cognitive states, why can’t anyone say precisely what the contents of those states are? I consider several possible resolutions to this puzzle that are open to realists, and argue that the best of these is likely to appeal to differences in the format of animal cognition and human language. Last updated: 1/5/12