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64Indexes for actionRevue Internationale de Philosophie 1999 (3): 321-345. 1999.This articles examines three ways in which the connection between semantic and pragmatic representations of a single action can be tightened up in order to remedy the puzzle of deviant causation. A first move consists in making the feedback process, i.e. the dynamics of the relationship between both representational components, a central element in the definition of an action. A second step brings in the action-effect principle, emphasizing the teleological relation of each pragmatic representat…Read more
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2Mental acts as natural kindsIn Till Vierkant, Julian Kieverstein & Andy Clark (eds.), Decomposing the Will, Oxford University Press. pp. 262-282. 2013.This chapter examines whether, and in what sense, one can speak of agentive mental events. An adequate characterization of mental acts should respond to three main worries. First, mental acts cannot have pre-specified goal contents. For example, one cannot prespecify the content of a judgment or of a deliberation. Second, mental acts seem to depend crucially on receptive attitudes. Third, it does not seem that intentions play any role in mental actions. Given these three constraints, mental and …Read more
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41Epistemic normativity from the reasoner's viewpointBehavioral and Brain Sciences 34 (5): 265-265. 2011.Elqayam & Evans (E&E) are focused on the normative judgments used by theorists to characterize subjects' performances (e.g. in terms of logic or probability theory). They ignore the fact, however, that subjects themselves have an independent ability to evaluate their own reasoning performance, and that this ability plays a major role in controlling their first-order reasoning tasks
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45Précis of The Philosophy of MetacognitionPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (3): 703-709. 2014.
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81Criticial Review of: When self-consciousness breaks, by G. Lynn Stephens & G. GrahamPhilosophical Psychology 15 (4): 543-550. 2002.The book under review offers two important contributions. One is a valuable discussion of the various ways of addressing the paradoxical experience of externality. The other is an emphasis on a distinction between the experience of subjectivity and the experience of agency. This review tries to show that this distinction is indeed a crucial feature in any solution to the question of externality, but that it is associated with a view of thinking as acting that is questionable
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11The representational basis of brute metacognition: a proposalIn Robert W. Lurz (ed.), The Philosophy of Animal Minds, Cambridge University Press. pp. 165--183. 2009.
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393A plea for mental actsSynthese 129 (1): 105-128. 2001.A prominent but poorly understood domain of human agency is mental action, i.e., thecapacity for reaching specific desirable mental statesthrough an appropriate monitoring of one's own mentalprocesses. The present paper aims to define mentalacts, and to defend their explanatory role againsttwo objections. One is Gilbert Ryle's contention thatpostulating mental acts leads to an infinite regress.The other is a different although related difficulty,here called the access puzzle: How can the mindalr…Read more
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373Metacognition and metarepresentation: Is a self-directed theory of mind a precondition for metacognition? (review)Synthese 159 (2). 2007.Metacognition is often defined as thinking about thinking. It is exemplified in all the activities through which one tries to predict and evaluate one’s own mental dispositions, states and properties for their cognitive adequacy. This article discusses the view that metacognition has metarepresentational structure. Properties such as causal contiguity, epistemic transparency and procedural reflexivity are present in metacognition but missing in metarepresentation, while open-ended recursivity an…Read more
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34Replies to Langland‐Hassan, Nagel, and SmithPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (3): 736-755. 2014.
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50Questions of Form: Logic and Analytic Proposition From Kant to CarnapUniv of Minnesota Press. 1989.Hence, this book's provocative claim: today's so-called logical empiricism owes much more to Kant's notion of science than to Hume's.
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29This book chapter aims at exploring how intentional a piece of behavior should be to count as an action, and how a minimal view on action, not requiring a richly intentional causation, may still qualify such a behavior as voluntary.
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132Does metacognition necessarily involve metarepresentation?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 26 (3): 352-352. 2003.Against the view that metacognition is a capacity that parallels theory of mind, it is argued that metacognition need involve neither metarepresentation nor semantic forms of reflexivity, but only process-reflexivity, through which a task-specific system monitors its own internal feedback by using quantitative cues. Metacognitive activities, however, may be redescribed in metarepresentational, mentalistic terms in species endowed with a theory of mind.
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Natural descriptors and externalism+ the definition of distality and externalist approach to intentionalityDialectica 48 (3-4): 249-265. 1994.
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41The Evolution of Primate Communication and MetacommunicationMind and Language 31 (2): 177-203. 2016.Against the prior view that primate communication is based only on signal decoding, comparative evidence suggests that primates are able, no less than humans, to intentionally perform or understand impulsive or habitual communicational actions with a structured evaluative nonconceptual content. These signals convey an affordance-sensing that immediately motivates conspecifics to act. Although humans have access to a strategic form of propositional communication adapted to teaching and persuasion…Read more
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24Réponse à Édouard Machery. Pour une pensée évolutionniste des répresentationsDialogue 44 (1): 161-166. 2005.
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672Exploring the informational sources of metaperception: The case of Change Blindness BlindnessConsciousness and Cognition 20 (4): 1489-1501. 2011.Perceivers generally show a poor ability to detect changes, a condition referred to as “Change Blindness” . They are, in addition, “blind to their own blindness”. A common explanation of this “Change Blindness Blindness” is that it derives from an inadequate, “photographical” folk-theory about perception. This explanation, however, does not account for intra-individual variations of CBB across trials. Our study aims to explore an alternative theory, according to which participants base their sel…Read more
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Is there a sense of agency for thought?In Lucy O'Brien & Matthew Soteriou (eds.), Mental actions, Oxford University Press. 2009.
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86The norms of acceptancePhilosophical Issues 22 (1): 316-333. 2012.An area in the theory of action that has received little attention is how mental agency and world-directed agency interact. The purpose of the present contribution is to clarify the rational conditions of such interaction, through an analysis of the central case of acceptance. There are several problems with the literature about acceptance. First, it remains unclear how a context of acceptance is to be construed. Second, the possibility of conjoining, in acceptance, an epistemic component, which…Read more
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71Can 'radical' simulation theories explain psychological concept acquisition?In Jérôme Dokic & Joëlle Proust (eds.), Simulation and Knowledge of Action, John Benjamins. 2002.This paper examines the response offered by Robert Gordon to the question how an interpreter can reach the correct content of others'psychological states. It exposes the main problems raised by Gordon's proposal, and provides a tentative solution that emphasizes the structuring role of counterfactual reasoning in embedding simulations and deriving facts that are holding across them.
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Problèmes d'Histoire de la Philosophie: L'idée de topique comparativeSociété Française de Philosophie, Bulletin 82 (3): 73. 1988.
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Biology |