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22Explanation 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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948 The evolution of knowledgeIn Peter Carruthers & Andrew Chamberlain (eds.), Evolution and the Human Mind: Modularity, Language and Meta-Cognition, Cambridge University Press. pp. 170. 2000.
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149Teleosemantics: New Philo-sophical Essays (edited book)Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2006.Teleosemantics seeks to explain meaning and other intentional phenomena in terms of their function in the life of the species. This volume of new essays from an impressive line-up of well-known contributors offers a valuable summary of the current state of the teleosemantics debate
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210Representation and explanationPhilosophy of Science 51 (December): 550-72. 1984.Functionalism faces a problem in accounting for the semantic powers of beliefs and other mental states. Simple causal considerations will not solve this problem, nor will any appeal to the social utility of semantic interpretations. The correct analysis of semantic representation is a teleological one, in terms of the biological purposes of mental states: whereas functionalism focuses, so to speak, only on the structure of the cognitive mechanism, the semantic perspective requires in addition th…Read more
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44Can We Reduce Causal Direction to Probabilities?PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1992 238-252. 1992.This paper defends the view that the asymmetry of causation can be explained in terms of probabilistic relationships between event types. Papineau first explores three different versions of the "fork asymmetry", namely David Lewis' asymmetry of overdetermination, the screening-off property of common causes, and Spirtes', Glymour's and Scheines' analysis of probabilistic graphs. He then argues that this fork asymmetry is both a genuine phenomenon and a satisfactory metaphysical reduction of causa…Read more
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59Truth and TeleologyIn Dudley Knowles (ed.), Explanation and its Limits, Cambridge University Press. pp. 21-43. 1990.
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44Mental Disorder, Illness and Biological DisfunctionRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 37 73-82. 1994.This paper will be about the relationship between mental disorder and physical disorder. I shall also be concerned with the connection between these notions and the notion of ‘illness’.
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6Objectivity in Social Science By Frank Cunningham University of Toronto Press, 1973, ix + 154 pp., $8.50 (review)Philosophy 50 (193): 364-. 1975.
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Mind |
General Philosophy of Science |
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
Areas of Interest
Metaphilosophy |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Mind |
General Philosophy of Science |