Charles Lassiter

Charles Lassiter is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Gonzaga University, College of Arts and Sciences. He holds a Ph.D. from Fordham University (2013) and specializes in philosophy of mind and language, with strong interdisciplinary ties to cognitive science, ethics, and epistemology.

Research Interests: His work centers on 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended), causal powers realism, extended mind, linguistic pragmatics, perlocutionary acts, implicit bias, and machine autonomy. He integrates Aristotelian metaphysics with empirical findings in cognitive science to develop non-representational models of mind and language.

Recent Research Trends: His recent publications emphasize ontological foundations for extended cognition, particularly advocating for causal powers realism over new mechanism. He explores arational belief convergence in social epistemology, the epistemic status of beliefs from sham authorities, and the social dimensions of language use through simplexity and distributed cognition. His work on robot flirting applies Strawsonian reactive attitudes to machine autonomy.

• Email: lassiter@gonzaga.edu
• Phone: (509) 313-6761

Scientific Contributions:

• Co-developer of a powers-based ontology for encultured minds with Joseph Vukov.
• Collaborator with Aaron Kagan on the coupling-constitution fallacy and extended cognition.
• Pioneer in applying ecological and affordance-based models to perlocutionary speech acts.
• Advocate for environmental interventions to mitigate epistemic harms of implicit bias.

Teaching & Service: He teaches ethics, symbolic logic, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and theory of knowledge. He serves as the administrator of the logic requirement for the philosophy graduate program.