Colin Allen

Colin Allen

Provost Professor, History and Philosophy of Science

  • colallen@indiana.edu
  • (812) 855-8916
  • Goodbody Hall 113
  • Office Hours
    M-F
    By Appointment Only

Education

  • Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles, 1989

About

I am a philosopher who is interested in evolutionary approaches to animal behavior and cognition (cognitive ethology). I work closely with biologists and psychologists who are dealing with questions about what can legitimately be inferred about the nature of animal cognition from field and laboratory data. I have also published on other topics in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of biology, artificial intelligence and neural networks.

Current projects include a series of papers on animal pain that may lead to a book, a paper on scientific/evolutionary concepts of culture, a book on artificial moral agents, and the capture and analysis of data from web-based logic instructional software to provide context-sensitive feedback to students and to test hypotheses about strategies for teaching and learning logic.

Since 1998 I have been consulting and programming for The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and I am currently its Associate Editor.