Cory D. Wright

Cory D. Wright
Department of Philosophy Washington University in St. Louis Campus Box 1073 One Brookings Drive St. Louis, MO 63130–4899 USA Telephone: 314–935–9531 Fax: 314–935–7349 Email: cwright@wustl.edu CV \| RESEARCH \| TEACHING

I am a James S. McDonnell Post-doctoral Fellow in the Philosophy–Neuroscience–Psychology program at Washington University in St. Louis.

RESEARCH
My research interests include epistemology and philosophy of science (esp. cognitive science). I have long-standing interests in explanation, mechanism, and reductionism, as well as in the relations between scientific theories and models describing phenomena at various levels of explanation and organization. Owing to past research at The Scripps Research Institute, I am particularly interested in the role of models of DA modulation in the mesocorticolimbic system in the explanation of brain reward function. Additionally, I have developing long-term interestes in a variety of semantic, pragmatic, and alethic phenomena related to truth, including the cognitive processes and operations that factor in veridical representation and certainty.

A few recent papers:

“Truth: pluralist theories of" (with Nikolaj Pedersen). Invited entry in preparation for Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
"What is psychological explanation?" (with William Bechtel). Forthcoming in P. Calvo & J. Symons (Eds.), Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Psychology. New York: Routledge.
“Embodied Cognition: grounded until further notice?” British Journal of Psychology, 99 (2008): 157–164.
"Truth as a normative modality of cognitive acts" (with Gila Sher). In Dirk Greimann & Geo Siegwart (Eds.), Truth and Speech Acts: Studies in the Philosophy of Language (2007: 525–574). New York: Routledge.
"Is psychological explanation going extinct?" In Huib Looren de Jong & Maurice K. D. Schouten (Eds.), The Matter of the Mind: Philosophical Essays on Psychology, Neuroscience and Reduction (2007: 249–274). Oxford: Blackwell.
"Mechanisms and psychological explanation" (with William Bechtel). In Paul Thagard (Ed.), Handbook of Philosophy of Psychology and Cognitive Science (2006, 39–79). New York: Elsevier.

Currently, I'm also working on two book-length projects with Nikolaj Pedersen, as well writing an entry with him on alethic pluralism for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The first book is tentatively entitled Alethic Pluralism: Current Debates, which focuses on issues related to the thesis that there is more than one way of being true (as well as related issues, such as relativism, mixed inferences, truth-predication, etc.). Some of the contributors include: Crispin J. G. Wright, Michael Williams, Jason Turner, Chris Swoyer, Gila Sher, Michael P. Lynch, Max Kolbel, Terence Horgan & Robert Barnard, Wolfram Hinzen, Dorothy Grover, Richard Fumerton, Pascal Engel, Julian Dodd, Marian David, Simon Blackburn, and JC Beall. The second book is tentatively entitled New Waves in Truth, as part of the New Waves in Philosophy series (Ed. Vincent Hendricks & Duncan Pritchard). The volume gathers "young and up-and-coming scholars" poised to set the agenda on debates about truth, so as to provide a "snap-shot of cutting-edge research." Some of the contributors include: Chase Wrenn, Mark Schroeder, Kevin Scharp, Gillian Russell, Gurpreet Rattan, Douglas Patterson, Matthew McGrath, Patricia Marino, Dan Lòpez de Sa, Adam Kovach, Claire Horisk, Patrick Greenough, Matti Eklund, Dale Dorsey, Nic Damnjanovic, John Collins, Berit Brogaard, Bradley Armour-Garb.

CONFERENCE/COLLOQUIUM NEWS
Upcoming talks:

March 19, 2008: 'Comments on Mark Couch's 'Multiple realization in comparative perspective'." APA Pacific Division (Pasadena, CA).
April 10, 2008: PNP Colloquium, Washington University in St. Louis.
May 22, 2008: 'Why the best ontic conception of scientific explanation is an epistemic one.' TiLPS Seminar in Epistemelogy and Philosophy of Science, Universiteit van Tilburg.
June 28, 2008: 'Psychological explanation and folk theories of truth.' European Society for Philosophy and Psychology (Utrecht, NL).
August 4, 2008: 'Truth, meaning, and the lexical semantics of alethic terms.' International Conference on Language, Communication, and Cognition (Brighton, UK).

I recently co-organized with David Kaplan a conference on spatial perception and the linguistic representation of space, held March 1–2, 2008 at Washington University in St. Louis. Speakers were: Len Talmy, Barbara Landau, Barbara Tversky, Rick Grush, Laura Carlson, Anjan Chatterjee, and Jeff Zacks. The conference website is here.