• The Papineau Discussion
    Philosophy International. 1997.
  •  12
    Reviews (review)
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 29 (3): 304-310. 1978.
  •  71
    Choking and The Yips
    Phenomenology 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
  •  211
    Thinking About Consciousness
    Oxford 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.
  •  104
    What is x-phi good for?
    The Philosophers' Magazine 52 (52): 83-88. 2011.
    When philosophers study knowledge, consciousness, free will, moral value, and so on, their first concern is with these things themselves, rather than with what people think about them. So why exactly is it so important to philosophy to discover experimentally that people differ in their views on these matters? We wouldn’t expect physicists to throw up their hands in excitement just because somebody shows that different cultures have different views about the origin of the universe
  •  4
    Conditionals
    Philosophical Quarterly 39 (57): 493. 1989.
  •  18
    The 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
  •  147
    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
  •  1
    Arguments for supervenience and physical realization
    In Elias E. Savellos & Ümit D. Yalçin (eds.), Supervenience: New Essays, Cambridge University Press. 1995.
  •  31
    Reuniting (scene) phenomenology with (scene) access
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30 (5-6): 521-521. 2007.
    Block shows that we can consciously see a scene without being able to identify all the individual items in it. But in itself this fails to drive a wedge between phenomenology and access. Once we distinguish scene phenomenology from item phenomenology, the link between phenomenology and access is restored
  •  120
    The philosophy of science (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 1996.
    The newest addition to the successful Oxford Readings in Philosophy series, this collection contains the most important contributions to the recent debate on the philosophy of science. The contributors crystallize the often heated arguments of the last two decades, assessing the skeptical attitudes within philosophy of science and the counter-challenges of the scientific realists. Contributors include Nancy Cartwright, Brian Ellis, Arthur Fine, Clark Glymour, Larry Laudan, Peter Lipton, Alan Mus…Read more
  •  9
    Review: Conditionals (review)
    Philosophical Quarterly 39 (157). 1989.
  • Editorial
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 49 (4): 531-531. 1998.
  •  1
    Teleosemántíca e Indeterminación
    Ideas Y Valores 47 (106): 136-159. 1998.
  •  25
    A reduction of causation to probabilities would be a great achievement, if it were possible.  In this paper I want to defend this reductionist ambition against some recent criticisms from Gurol Irzik (1996) and Dan Hausman (1998). In particular, I want to show that the reductionist programme can be absolved of a vice which is widely thought to disable it--the vice of infidelity
  •  44
    Tainted Cash?
    The Philosophers' Magazine 3 (3): 26-27. 1998.
  •  4
    Reviews (review)
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 33 (4): 444-448. 1982.
  •  5
    Content, reasons and knowledge
    Philosophical Books 28 (1): 1-9. 1987.
  •  42
    Theory and meaning
    Oxford University Press. 1979.
    This book is concerned with those aspects of the theory of meaning for scientific terms that are relevant to questions about the evaluation of scientific theories. The contemporary debate about theory choice in science is normally presented as a conflict between two sets of ideas. On the one hand are notions of objectivity, realism, rationality, and progress in science. On the other is the view that meanings depend on theory, with associated claims about the theory dependence of observation, the…Read more
  •  72
    Must a physicalist be a microphysicalist?
    In Jakob Hohwy & Jesper Kallestrup (eds.), Being Reduced: New Essays on Reduction, Explanation, and Causation, Oxford University Press. 2008.
    This chapter challenges the entailment from physicalism to microphysicalism — the view that all facts metaphysically supervene on the microphysical facts. It observes that physicalists can avoid microphysicalism by rejecting physical microscopism. Humean supervenience is a strong version of microphysicalism, and it is false if a non-Humean view of laws is true. But such a view is consistent with physicalism. A weaker form of microphysicalism adds microphysical non-Humean laws to get a broader mi…Read more
  •  37
    Scientific realism without reference
    with Pierre Cruse
    In Michele Marsonet (ed.), The Problem of Realism, Ashgate. pp. 174--189. 2002.
  •  209
    By way of an example, Lewis imagines your being invited to join Schrödinger’s cat in its box for an hour. This box will either fill up with deadly poison fumes or not, depending on whether or not some radioactive atom decays, the probability of decay within an hour being 50%. The invitation is accompanied with some further incentive to comply (Lewis sets it up so there is a significant chance of some pretty bad but not life-threatening punishment if you don’t get in the box). Lewis argues that t…Read more
  •  8
    Response to Ehring’s ’Papineau on Causal Asymmetry’
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 39 (4): 521-525. 1988.