About

Jason Bridges is a professor whose work involves the study of the brain, neuroanatomy, and related psychological phenomena. He has contributed to educational initiatives, including giving the annual Aims of Education address at the University of Chicago and recording neuroanatomical dissections to provide a framework for understanding brain structure. His research includes demonstrating the Bystander Effect in rats, illustrating social and behavioral responses in animal models, and exploring psychological concepts such as helping behavior and diffusion of responsibility. Bridges has also engaged in public discussions on ethics, perception, and history, and has a background that includes involvement in academic debates and art related to historical figures. His work emphasizes understanding the brain's structure and function, as well as its influence on behavior and social dynamics.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Philosophy
• Epistemology
• Psychology
• Psychoanalysis
• Cognitive science

Selected publications

• “Rational Explanation” and the Logic of Practical Reasons

  2025-04-10

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract It is widely assumed that explaining an intentional action must involve explaining why the agent chose that action rather than the available alternatives to it. Holding to this assumption, while recognizing that justifying reasons are typically incapable of doing this contrastive explanatory work, led Joseph Raz to his “classical conception” of human agency, on which “thick desires” are recruited to play the envisioned role. But this expediency is needless; the initial contrastive assumption is mistaken. The forms of understanding provided by reasons for action are teleological, and such forms do not require a marking of relevant differences between alternatives. This chapter develops this point through an examination of two forms of rational understanding of actions: knowing the reason for which an action is done and recognizing an action as justified all things considered. The chapter concludes by locating Raz’s “classical conception” in the history of philosophical reflection governed by the “principle of sufficient reason.”

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• Francis Skinner’s dictations of Wittgenstein

  Metascience · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Philosophy
  • Epistemology
  • Psychoanalysis
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• The Unity of a Practical Inference

  De Gruyter eBooks · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Epistemology
  • Computer Science

  This essay seeks to hold together two fundamental ideas. The first idea is that an inference between thoughts is itself a thought: inferring one thought from another is nothing other than thinking a connection to lie between them. The second idea is that practical justification is teleological: a reason for an action derives from its potential to serve an end. The second idea poses a problem for the first, here called the challenge of singularization. Ideas that might seem equipped to solve this challenge-such as that of a special category of means, of an "allthings- considered" assessment of justification, and of a distinctively practical mode of means-end judgment-fail to do so. The right solution is to understand practical inference as a logically complex form of intention. The essay concludes by considering the import of this intentionalist solution for the "standard causal story" of rational action.

  PublisherDOI

• Austin’s Way with Skepticism: An Essay on Philosophical Method by Mark Kaplan

  ˜The œreview of metaphysics · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Epistemology
  • Philosophy

  Reviewed by: Austin’s Way with Skepticism: An Essay on Philosophical Method by Mark Kaplan Jason Bridges KAPLAN, Mark. Austin’s Way with Skepticism: An Essay on Philosophical Method. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. 192 pp. Cloth, $66.00 John Austin encouraged philosophers to pay attention to how language is ordinarily used. If we seek philosophical insight into such topics as knowledge, truth, and possibility, then, he thought, we would do well to examine how speakers use words like “know,” “true,” and “can” as they go about the business of everyday life. This advice sounds refreshingly down to earth. But how is it to work? What is the nature of the path Austin envisions from observations about ordinary use to philosophical understanding? No doubt his own essays are meant to illustrate the advice’s merits. But it turns out to be difficult to distill from the variegated arguments, examples, and aperçus contained in these essays straightforward answers to our questions. Mark Kaplan’s Austin’s Way with Skepticism is one of a recent flurry of monographs seeking to do what Austin himself apparently did not: to tell us what, in general, is the method of “ordinary-language philosophy.” Kaplan’s book is a fine work. It is thought-provoking and elegantly written. It patiently examines objections and carefully disposes of competing interpretations. There is much to be learned here, and anyone interested in Austin and his legacy should give it careful study. Although the discussion of particulars can get complex, Kaplan’s master thought is simple. What Austin demands of the philosopher is that “she must not be willing to espouse any philosophical doctrine that she would be unwilling to take to heart and act on in ordinary life.” This, says Kaplan, is the “requirement” of “fidelity to ordinary language.” We might just as well think of it as a requirement of fidelity to one’s espoused philosophical doctrines. Either way, the demand is: Live your philosophical truth—and if you find you cannot, then admit it was not your truth after all. It is not hard to see how to bring this “fidelity requirement” to bear against epistemological skepticism. Consider the initial reflections of Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy, which purport to show that we are incapable of acquiring knowledge of the world around us. This result is manifestly at odds with our perennial readiness in everyday contexts to ascribe instances of such knowledge to ourselves and others. The fidelity requirement directs a philosopher who professes to accept the skeptical result to give up making such ascriptions. Presumably no one would be willing to do this. Indeed, it seems plausible that no one could do this, willing or not. So the only way to honor the fidelity requirement is to renounce any commitment to the skeptical result. If this is indeed the substance of Austin’s “way with skepticism,” it seems to me to fall short of providing an adequate reckoning with the problem. It is a familiar point that philosophical arguments can have implications that look outrageous from the perspective of ordinary thought and talk. Certainly, this would not be news to skeptics themselves. Hume, to take a familiar example, is painfully aware that his skeptical conclusions will look absurd to him the moment he leaves his [End Page 410] study and ventures into the world outside. He is tempted on this account to throw his writings into the fire. Why doesn’t he? His problem is that, so far as he can see, his philosophical arguments are solid. To convince him he is wrong about this, it would hardly do to point out that there is an incongruity between the conclusions of these arguments and what he is inclined to think and say when immersed in the commerce of everyday life. Rather, we would need to take the actual measure of the arguments. We would need to examine the reasons Hume gives for his conclusions and endeavor to explain why they lack the force they at first seem to have. It is just this that Kant and other serious critics of Hume sought to do. It leaves us with the falsity of Hume’s conclusions...

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• Epistemic Contextualism: A Defense By Peter Baumann

  Analysis · 2019-02-21

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Epistemic Contextualism: A Defense is a contribution to a crowded literature. Probably more has been written on its titular subject, over the last three or four decades, than on any other comparable topic in epistemology. In recent years, new programmes for epistemological enquiry – such as that of ‘conceptual engineering’ – have begun to gain traction, suggesting fresh perspectives on our perennial philosophical problems. You don’t have to be a trend chaser to wonder how much interest there might be at this late date in another exposition and defence of epistemological contextualism. Baumann knows this question will occur to the reader (1–2). And he has an answer: the existing contextualist literature contains a major lacuna. Proponents of contextualism have failed to make clear the most compelling grounds for the view. In promoting contextualism, they have relied chiefly on ‘the argument from cases’. ‘Cases’ are little vignettes of conversation, in which, at some juncture, a character enters a claim about what someone ‘knows’. Contextualists construct these vignettes with the aim of eliciting intuitions in the reader about the truth values of the know-claims, intuitions which, taken at face value, imply that uses of ‘know’ have context-sensitive truth conditions.

  PublisherDOI

• Knowledge and presuppositions

  Analysis · 2017-01-04

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Michael Blome-Tillmann’s Knowledge and Presuppositions proposes and defends a novel form of epistemological contextualism. As the title would suggest, the view’s novelty lies in its deployment of the pragmatic-theoretic concept of a conversational presupposition to delineate a role for context in shaping the meaning of our knowledge claims. Over the course of six dense, argument-filled chapters, Blome-Tillmann brings his approach into focus and claims for it several advantages. While existing varieties of contextualism can account for widely shared intuitions about the truth values of knowledge ascriptions in various familiar thought experiments, the distinctive flexibility of Presuppositional Epistemological Contextualism (PEC for short), Blome-Tillmann argues, enables it to account as well for cases in which our intuitions diverge. This flexibility also allows for especially satisfying analyses of scepticism and other epistemological puzzles. And the approach sidesteps or defuses many of the philosophical and linguistic objections that have been pressed upon contextualism by its legions of detractors.

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• Department of the Navy (DON) Additive Manufacturing (AM) Implementation Plan V2.0 (2017)

  2017-05-04 · 1 citations

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• The Search for “The Essence of Human Language” in Wittgenstein and Davidson

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2017-10-03 · 3 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper offers an interpretation of the later Wittgenstein's handling of the idea of an "essence of human language", and examines in particular his treatment of the 'Augustinean' vision of reference as constituting this "essence". A central theme of the interpretation is the perennial philosophical desire to impose upon linguistic meaning conceptual templates drawn from outside the forms of thought about meaning in which we engage when we exercise our capacity to speak and understand a language. The paper closes with a consideration of ways in which Donald Davidson's generally congenial work on interpretation may diverge from Wittgenstein's thinking in this vicinity.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Skepticism and Beyond

  2016-01-01

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• Meaning and Understanding

  2016-12-23 · 3 citations

  otherOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Explores the central role in Wittgenstein's later work of his opposition to a 'mechanistic' conception of understanding. Offers a diagnosis of Kripke's skeptical paradox on this basis.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Claudine Verheggen

  York University

  4 shared

• Niko Kolodny

  2 shared

• Jim Pluta

  1 shared

• Barry Stroud

  1 shared

• Wai‐hung Wong

  1 shared

• Tim Thornton

  Monash University

  1 shared

• P.-P. Huang

  1 shared

• Robert H. Myers

  1 shared

Labs

• Amyoli Internet Research LabPI

Awards & honors

• ACM Fellow
• Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers…
• Technology Review 35 “Top Young Innovators Under 35” award
• ACM SIGCOMM Rising Star Award
• Sloan Research Fellowship