•  41
    There is a doctrine in the theory of consciousness known as representationalism, or intentionalism. According to this doctrine, what it feels like to be in a particular state of consciousness — the qualitative character of that state — is identical to the content of some mental representation(s) For instance, the state of consciousness I am enjoying just now as I see a pattern of sunlight and shadow falling on my wall is, in part, a state of consciousness that presents to me a patch of light gre…Read more
  •  200
    Three Faces of Desire
    Oxford University Press. 2004.
    To desire something is a condition familiar to everyone. It is uncontroversial that desiring has something to do with motivation, something to do with pleasure, and something to do with reward. Call these "the three faces of desire." The standard philosophical theory at present holds that the motivational face of desire presents its unique essence--to desire a state of affairs is to be disposed to act so as to bring it about. A familiar but less standard account holds the hedonic face of desire …Read more
  •  80
    Desire and pleasure in John Pollock’s Thinking about Acting (review)
    Philosophical Studies 148 (3). 2010.
    The first third of John Pollock’s Thinking about Acting is on the topics of pleasure, desire, and preference, and these topics are the ones on which this paper focuses. I review Pollock’s position and argue that it has at least one substantial strength (it elegantly demonstrates that desires must be more fundamental than preferences, and embraces this conclusion wholeheartedly) and at least one substantial weakness (it holds to a form of psychological hedonism without convincingly answering the …Read more
  •  125
    A recipe for concept similarity
    Mind and Language 22 (1): 68-91. 2007.
    Sometimes your concept and mine have exactly the same content. When this is so, it is comparatively easy for me to understand what you say when you deploy your concept, for us to disagree, agree, and so on. But what if your concept and mine do not have exactly the same content? This question has occupied a number of philosophers, including Paul Churchland, Jerry Fodor, and Ernie Lepore. This paper develops a novel and rigorous measure of concept similarity, Proportion, such that concepts with di…Read more
  •  6
    Review of Shaun Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2006 (3). 2006.
  •  87
    Pleasure, displeasure, and representation
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 31 (4): 507-530. 2001.
    The object of the present work is to rectify the neglect that pleasure and displeasure have been suffering from in the philosophy of mind, and to give an account of pleasure and displeasure which reveals a striking degree of unity and theoretical tractabiliy underlying the diverse phenomena: a representationalist account.
  •  112
    Monsters Among Us
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 31 (sup1): 167-184. 2001.
    There are monsters that scare children and monsters that scare grownups, and then there are monsters that scare philosophers of mind. This paper is concerned with this third sort of monster, whose primary representative is the zombie—a living being, physically just like a person but lacking consciousness. Though zombies act like normal people and appear to have normal brains, everything is blank inside. Unfortunately, the term ‘zombie’ covers a narrower class of deficits than is convenient, fail…Read more
  •  28
    Two Ways of Seeing Ways of Seeing
    Dialogue 46 (2): 341-345. 2007.
    A brief critical essay on Marc Jeannerod and Pierre Jacob's book, Ways of Seeing. The essay praises Jeannerod and Jacob for their insightful treatment of the recent neuroscience of vision, and raises questions about their teleosemantic theory of mind.
  •  161
    Donald Davidson's theory of mind is non-normative
    Philosophers' Imprint 3 1-14. 2003.
    Donald Davidson's theory of mind is widely regarded as a normative theory. This is a something of a confusion. Once a distinction has been made between the categorisation scheme of a norm and the norm's force-maker, it becomes clear that a Davidsonian theory of mind is not a normative theory after all. Making clear the distinction, applying it to Davidson's theory of mind, and showing its significance are the main purposes of this paper. In the concluding paragraphs, a sketch is given of how a t…Read more
  •  25
    An Unexpected Pleasure
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 36 (sup1): 255-272. 2006.
    This paper considers the hedonic aspect of emotions: the fact that part of an emotion is feeling good (pleasure) or feeling bad (displeasure), in various ways, to various degrees. It argues that some aspects of what might reasonably be called the modularity of emotions reduces to the modularity of the hedonic aspects of emotions. In this regard, the way in which pleasure and displeasure reflect what is expected at the visceral level (what one is jaded to, what one is hardened to, what one takes …Read more
  •  43
    Reflection, reason, and free will
    Philosophical Explorations 10 (1). 2007.
    Ju¨rgen Habermas has a familiar style of compatibilism to offer, according to which a person has free will insofar as that person responds appropriately to her reasons. But because of the ways in which Habermas understands reasons and causes, he sees a special objection to his style of compatibilism: it is not clear that our reasons can suitably cause our responses. This objection, however, takes us out of the realm of free will and into the realm of mental causation. In this response to Haberma…Read more
  •  80
  •  230
    Moral Motivation
    In John M. Doris (ed.), Moral Psychology Handbook, Oxford University Press. 2010.
    In this chapter, we begin with a discussion of motivation itself, and use that discussion to sketch four possible theories of distinctively moral motivation: caricature versions of familiar instrumentalist, cognitivist, sentimentalist, and personalist theories about morally worthy motivation. To test these theories, we turn to a wealth of scientific, particularly neuroscientific, evidence. Our conclusions are that (1) although the scientific evidence does not at present mandate a unique philosop…Read more
  •  168
    Desire
    Philosophy Compass 1 (6). 2006.
    Desires move us to action, give us urges, incline us to joy at their satisfaction, and incline us to sorrow at their frustration. Naturalistic work on desire has focused on distinguishing which of these phenomena are part of the nature of desire, and which are merely normal consequences of desiring. Three main answers have been proposed. The first holds that the central necessary fact about desires is that they lead to action. The second makes pleasure the essence of desire. And the third holds …Read more
  •  93
    The Impossibility of Conscious Desire
    with Donovan Hulse and Cynthia Read
    American Philosophical Quarterly 41 (1). 2004.
    We argue for the conclusion that intrinsic desires, at least, and every other propositional attitude having the world-to-mind direction of fit exclusively, are never found within consciousness. All desire-like states found in consciousness are experiences or exercises of imaginative capacities pertaining either to the desire or the content of the desire, but never the desire itself.
  •  63
    Unexpected pleasure
    In Luc Faucher & Christine Tappolet (eds.), The Modularity of Emotions, University of Calgary Press. pp. 255-272. 2008.
    As topics in the philosophy of emotion, pleasure and displeasure get less than their fair share of attention. On the one hand, there is the fact that pleasure and displeasure are given no role at all in many theories of the emotions, and secondary roles in many others.1 On the other, there is the centrality of pleasure and displeasure to being emotional. A woman who tears up because of a blustery wind, while an ill-advised burrito weighs heavily upon her digestive tract, feels an impressive numb…Read more
  •  145
    New norms for teleosemantics
    In Hugh Clapin (ed.), Representation in Mind, Elsevier. pp. 1--91. 2004.
    Teleosemantics has a problem: it holds that to have a mind one must have a history, often a long evolutionary history. The solution to the problem is for teleosemanticists to give up on natural selection as the source of natural norms (functions) for neural structures, and to find a different source of natural norms which is not essentially history-involving. Such a source in fact exists, in cybernetic governance. This paper argues for the existence of natural norms derived from cybernetic go…Read more
  •  33
    Imagine you are looking at a cat and make the following inference: That cat sneezed; That cat is missing an ear; thus There exists a sneezing cat missing an ear. Such an inference is valid only if there is no equivocation on the term “that cat.” If “that cat” in refers to Puss, but in refers to Midnight, then the inference is invalid. This much is elementary. Now imagine that Puss is the cat in front of you when you think, but that a nefarious semanticist quickly substitutes similar-looking Midn…Read more
  •  21
    Blindsight and the Nature of Consciousness (review)
    Dialogue 44 (1): 196-198. 2005.