Masashi Nakanishi

Research interests

Socio-Cognitive Psychology
- intuition and automaticity
- attention and frame problem, heuristics in decision making
- inductive and abductive inferences
- controllability, agency, counterfactuals, and causal epistemics
- self-regulation and goal systems
- confidence, uncertainty, and subjective probability
- explanatory coherence and simplicity
- justification and sharedness of knowledge and common sense
Philosophy of Mind
- propositional attitudes (esp., intentionality, higher order, and their network)
- instrumentalism
- need for functionalism, representationalism, and computationalism (including connectionism)
- consciousness
Philosophy of Science
- causation
- determinism and free will
- validity of induction
- scientific realism vs. constructivism
Methodology and Philosophy of Psychology
- null hypothesis testing, bayesian hypothesis evaluation, and model selection
- psychological behaviorism and functionalism
- Occam's razor, Morgan's canon, and predictability
Artificial Mind and Robotics
- architecture of autonomous robots
- genuine human-likeness and "other"ness