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3REVIEW ARTICLE1: Correlations and Causes (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 42 (3): 397-412. 1991.
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29My first university was in my home town, Durban, in the mid-1960s. I was doing a mathematics degree but most of my friends were doing arts subjects. Sartre and Marx were the thinkers of the moment and my friends would press their (mostly illegal) writings on me. Ideologically I was entirely sympathetic, but intellectually they didn’t do much for me—too obscure, too difficult, too dogmatic. In my final year I chanced on Ayer’s The Problem of Knowledge. It wasn’t exactly relevant to apartheid Sout…Read more
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30Human MindsRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 53 159-183. 2003.Humans are part of the animal kingdom, but their minds differ from those of other animals. They are capable of many things that lie beyond the intellectual powers ofthe rest of the animal realm. In this paper, I want to ask what makes human minds distinctive. What accounts for the special powers that set humans aside from other animals?
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210 The rise of physicalismIn M. W. F. Stone & Jonathan Wolff (eds.), The Proper Ambition of Science, Routledge. pp. 2--174. 2000.
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2Russell’s place in the public eye was maintained by a steady stream of writing for the general reader. He no longer held any academic position, and needed to support himself and his family by his pen. While he continued to do some technical work in philosophy, more of his energies were devoted to journalism and other popular writings. He was in great demand. His distinctive prose and dry wit enabled him to puncture the fusty assumptions of contemporary thinking, and his rationalist alternatives …Read more
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2A Scandal of Probability TheoryIn Simon Saunders, Jonathan Barrett, Adrian Kent & David Wallace (eds.), Many Worlds?: Everett, Quantum Theory & Reality, Oxford University Press. 2010.
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32The Evolution of Means-End ReasoningRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 49 145-178. 2001.When I woke up a few days ago, the following thoughts ran through my mind. ‘I need a haircut. If I don't get it first thing this morning, I won't have another chance for two weeks. But if I go to the barber down the road, he'll want to talk to me about philosophy. So I'd better go to the one in Camden Town. The tube will be very crowded, though. Still, it's a nice day. Why don't I just walk there? It will only take twenty minutes. So I'd better put on these shoes now, have breakfast straight awa…Read more
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345I_– _David PapineauAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 73 (1): 17-43. 1999.It is widely assumed that the normativity of conceptual judgement poses problems for naturalism. Thus John McDowell urges that 'The structure of the space of reasons stubbornly resists being appropriated within a naturalism that conceives nature as the realm of law' (1994, p 73). Similar sentiments have been expressed by many other writers, for example Robert Brandom (1994, p xiii) and Paul Boghossian (1989, p 548)
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132The new nativism: a commentary on Gary Marcus’s The birth of the mind (review)Biology and Philosophy 21 (4): 559-573. 2006.Gary Marcus has written a very interesting book about mental development from a nativist perspective. For the general readership at which the book is largely aimed, it will be interesting because of its many informative examples of the development of cognitive structures and because of its illuminating explanations of ways in which genes can contribute to these developmental processes. However, the book is also interesting from a theoretical point of view. Marcus tries to make nativism compatibl…Read more
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16Explanation in Psychology: Truth and TeleologyRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 27 21-43. 1990.A number of recent writers have argued that we should explain mental representation teleologically, in terms of the biological purposes of beliefs and other mental states.A rather older idea is that the truth condition of a belief is that condition which guarantees that actions based on that belief will succeed.What I want to show in this paper is that these two ideas complement each other. The teleological theory is inadequate unless it incorporates the thesis that truth is the guarantee of suc…Read more
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4The Baldwin Effect and Genetic AssimilationIn Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence & Stephen P. Stich (eds.), The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents, Oxford University Press Usa. pp. 2--102. 2005.
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1The vis viva controversyIn Roger Stuart Woolhouse (ed.), Leibniz, Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science, Oxford University Press. 1981.
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225The status of teleosemantics, or how to stop worrying about swampmanAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 79 (2): 279-89. 2001.This Article does not have an abstract
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85Kim Sterelny, thought in a hostile world: The evolution of human cognition , oxford: Blackwell, 2003, pp. XI 262, £50 (cloth), £16.95 (paper). Friendly thoughts on the evolution of cognition (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 82 (3). 2004.This Article does not have an abstract
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124Can We Really See A Million ColoursIn Paul Coates & Sam Coleman (eds.), The Nature of Phenomenal Qualities, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
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64Choking and The YipsPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 14 (2): 295-308. 2015.IntroductionSporting skills divide contemporary theorists into two camps. Let us call them the habitualists and the intellectualists. The habitualists hold that thought is the enemy of sporting excellence. In their view, skilled performers need to let their bodies take over; cognitive effort only interferes with skill. The intellectualists retort that sporting performance depends crucially on mental control. As they see it, the exercise of skill is a matter of agency, not brute reflex; the tailo…Read more
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333Thinking About ConsciousnessOxford University Press UK. 2002.The relation between subjective consciousness and the physical brain is widely regarded as the last mystery facing science. David Papineau argues that there is no real puzzle here. Consciousness seems mysterious, not because of any hidden essence, but only because we think about it in a special way. Papineau exposes the confusion, and dispels the mystery: we see consciousness in its place in the material world, and we are on the way to a proper understanding of the mind.
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146Philosophical devices: proofs, probabilities, possibilities, and setsOxford University Press. 2012.This book is designed to explain the technical ideas that are taken for granted in much contemporary philosophical writing. Notions like "denumerability," "modal scope distinction," "Bayesian conditionalization," and "logical completeness" are usually only elucidated deep within difficult specialist texts. By offering simple explanations that by-pass much irrelevant and boring detail, Philosophical Devices is able to cover a wealth of material that is normally only available to specialists. The …Read more
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18The empirical evidence often justifies belief in scientific theories. For instance, the great wealth of chemical and other relevant data leaves us with no real alternative to believing that matter is made of atoms. Similarly, the natural history of past and present organisms makes it irrational to deny that life on earth has evolved from a common ancestry. Again, the character and epidemiology of infectious diseases effectively establishes that they are caused by microbes. Peter Lipton did much …Read more
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Metaphysics |
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General Philosophy of Science |