•  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.
  •  81
    Reply to critics
    Dialogue 45 (1): 165-174. 2006.
  •  103
    Practical rationality is a problem in the philosophy of mind
    Philosophical Issues 20 (1): 394-409. 2010.
    The philosophy of mind encompasses a familiar set of topics: consciousness, intentionality, mental causation, emotion, whatever topics in psychology happen to capture our interest (concepts, mindreading . . .), and so on. There is a topic deserving of addition to this list, a topic that should be receiving regular attention from philosophers of mind but is not: practical rationality. The philosophy of mind bears directly upon what can be called the ‘meta-theory’ of practical rationality, and met…Read more
  •  99
    Moral responsibility and tourette syndrome
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 71 (1). 2005.
    Philosophers generally assume that individuals with Tourette syndrome are not responsible for their Tourettic tics, and so not blameworthy for any harm their tics might cause. Yet this assumption is based largely on ignorance of the lived experience of Tourette syndrome. Individuals with Tourette syndrome often experience their tics as freely chosen and reason-responsive. Yet it still seems wrong to treat a Tourettic individual’s tic as on a moral par with others’ actions. In this paper, I exami…Read more
  •  279
    Desire
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 1 (6): 631-639. 2006.
    To desire is to be in a particular state of mind. It is a state of mind familiar to everyone who has ever wanted to drink water or desired to know what has happened to an old friend, but its familiarity does not make it easy to give a theory of desire. Controversy immediately breaks out when asking whether wanting water and desiring knowledge are, at bottom, the same state of mind as others that seem somewhat similar: wishing never to have been born, preferring mangoes to peaches, craving gin, h…Read more
  •  61
    In this paper we develop a novel argument against the extended mind hypothesis. Our argument constitutes an advance in the debate, insofar as we employ only premises that are acceptable to a coarse-grained functionalist, and we do not rely on functional disanalogies between putative examples of extended minds and ordinary human beings that are just a matter of fine detail or degree. Thus, we beg no questions against proponents of the extended mind hypothesis. Rather, our argument consists in mak…Read more
  •  100
    Unexpected pleasure
    In Luc Faucher & Christine Tappolet (eds.), The Modularity of Emotions, University of Calgary Press. pp. 255-272. 2007.
    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
  •  321
    Propositional attitudes
    Philosophy Compass 1 (1): 65-73. 2006.
    The propositional attitudes are attitudes such as believing and desiring, taken toward propositions such as the proposition that snow flurries are expected, or that the Prime Minister likes poutine. Collectively, our views about the propositional attitudes make up much of folk psychology, our everyday theory of how the mind works.
  •  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