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1What are mental images?In Ned Block (ed.), Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology, , Vol. 1981.
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20L4 The possibility of a naturalistic Cartesianism regarding intuitions and introspectionIn Matthew C. Haug (ed.), Philosophical Methodology: The Armchair or the Laboratory?, Routledge. pp. 243. 2013.
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3The intentional inexistence of language — but not carsIn Robert J. Stainton (ed.), Contemporary Debates in Cognitive Science, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 237-55. 2006.
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128Files and Singular Thoughts Without Objects or Acquaintance: The Prospects of Recanati’s “Actualism”Review of Philosophy and Psychology 7 (2): 421-436. 2016.We argue that Recanati burdens his otherwise salutary “Mental File” account of singular thought with an “Actualist” assumption that he has inherited from the discussion of singular thought since at least Evans, according to which singular thoughts can only be about actual objects: apparent singular thoughts involving “empty” terms lack truth-valuable content. This assumption flies in the face of manifestly singular thoughts involving not only fictional and mistakenly postulated entities, such as…Read more
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92Innate a nd Learned: Carey, Mad Dog Nativism, and the Poverty of Stimuli and AnalogiesMind and Language 29 (2): 109-132. 2014.In her recent (2009) book, The Origins of Concepts, Susan Carey argues that what she calls ‘Quinean Bootstrapping’ and processes of analogy in children show that the expressive power of a mind can be increased in ways that refute Jerry Fodor's (1975, 2008) ‘Mad Dog’ view that all concepts are innate. I argue that it is doubtful any evidence about the manifestation of concepts in children will bear upon the logico-semantic issues of expressive power. Analogy and bootstrapping may be ways to bring…Read more
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1Sensational sentencesIn Martin Davies & Glyn W. Humphreys (eds.), Consciousness: Philosophical and Psychological Essays, Blackwell. 1993.
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54(Even Higher-Order) Intentionality Without ConsciousnessRevue Internationale de Philosophie 1 (1): 51-78. 2008.
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70Contemporary Philosophy of Mind: A Contentiously Classical ApproachWiley-Blackwell. 1997.This volume is an introduction to contemporary debates in the philosophy of mind. In particular, the author focuses on the controversial "eliminativist" and "instrumentalist" attacks - from philosophers such as of Quine, Dennett, and the Churchlands - on our ordinary concept of mind. In so doing, Rey offers an explication and defense of "mental realism", and shows how Fodor's representational theory of mind affords a compelling account of much of our ordinary mental talk of beliefs, hopes, and d…Read more
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10Resisting normativism in psychologyIn Brian P. McLaughlin & Jonathan D. Cohen (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind, Blackwell. 2007.“Intentional content,” as I understand it, is whatever serves as the object of “propositional” attitude verbs, such as “think,” “judge,” “represent,” “prefer” (whether or not these objects are “propositions”). These verbs are standardly used to pick out the intentional states invoked to explain the states and behavior of people and many animals. I shall take the “normativity of the intentional,” or “Normativism,” to be the claim that any adequate theory of intentional states involves considerati…Read more
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2Better to study human than world psychology - commentary on Galen Strawson's Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails PanpsychismJournal of Consciousness Studies 13 (10-11): 110-116. 2006.
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3Physicalism and psychology: A plea for a substantive philosophy of mindIn Carl Gillett & Barry Loewer (eds.), Physicalism and its Discontents, Cambridge University Press. 2001.
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74The unavailability of what we mean: A reply to Quine, Fodor and LeporeIn Abraham Zvie Bar-On (ed.), Grazer Philosophische Studien, Distributed in the U.s.a. By Humanities Press. pp. 61-101. 1986.Fodor and LePore's attack on conceptual role semantics relies on Quine's attack on the traditional analytic/synthetic and a priori/a posteriori distinctions, which in turn consists of four arguments: an attack on truth by convention; an appeal to revisability; a claim of confirmation holism; and a charge of explanatory vacuity. Once the different merits of these arguments are sorted out, their proper target can be seen to be not the Traditional Distinctions, but an implicit assumption about thei…Read more
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33An explanatory budget for connectionism and eliminativismIn Terence E. Horgan & John L. Tienson (eds.), Connectionism and the Philosophy of Mind, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 219--240. 1991.
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67Language, Music and MindPhilosophical Review 106 (4): 641. 1997.The central point of Raffman’s discussion is to distinguish the perception, knowledge, and effability of the standard chromatic “categorical” pitch events from what she calls “nuance” pitch events—events whose individuation is more fine-grained than C-events, and which seem to resist reliable, psychologically available categorization. Thus, two pitches a quarter-tone apart may be classified as the same C-event, even though they are different N-events. Experimental evidence suggests that whereas …Read more
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26The Analytic/Synthetic DistinctionIn Peter Adamson (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2012.
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19Folk Psychology from the Standpoint of Conceptual AnalysisIn William T. O'Donohue & Richard F. Kitchener (eds.), The Philosophy of Psychology, Sage Publications. 1996.
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1Functionalism and the EmotionsIn A. O. Rorty (ed.), Explaining Emotions, Univ of California Pr. pp. 21. 1980.
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35Digging Deeper for the A PrioriPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 63 (3): 649-656. 2001.For all the inadequacies of empiricism that BonJour admirably sets out in his first three chapters, one wonders whether rationalism is any better off. I’m afraid I don’t find BonJour’s account reassuring. It seems to be precisely the one that has led so many to be wary of the a priori in the first place. I want here to reiterate the reasons for that wariness, and sketch what seems to me a more promising approach.
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21Systematicity and intentional realism in honeybee navigationIn Robert W. Lurz (ed.), The Philosophy of Animal Minds, Cambridge University Press. pp. 72. 2009.
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38Constituent causation and the reality of mindBehavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (4): 620-621. 1990.
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56We Are Not All ‘Self‐Blind’: A Defense of a Modest IntrospectionismMind and Language 28 (3): 259-285. 2013.Shoemaker (1996) presenteda prioriarguments against the possibility of ‘self‐blindness’, or the inability of someone, otherwise intelligent and possessed of mental concepts, to introspect any of her concurrent attitude states. Ironically enough, this seems to be a position that Gopnik (1993) and Carruthers (2006, 2008, 2009a,b) have proposed as not only possible, but as the actual human condition generally! According to this ‘Objectivist’ view, supposed introspection of one's attitudes is not ‘d…Read more
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3A question about consciousnessIn Herbert R. Otto & James A. Tuedio (eds.), Perspectives on Mind, Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1986.
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12Millikan's compromised externalismIn Richard Schantz (ed.), The Externalist Challenge, De Gruyter. pp. 2--347. 2004.
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20th Century Philosophy |
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