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The manifest and the philosophical image of perceptual knowledgeIn Christoph Limbeck-Lilienau & Friedrich Stadler (eds.), The Philosophy of Perception: Proceedings of the 40th International Ludwig Wittgenstein Symposium, De Gruyter. 2019.
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17The point of view of shared agencyInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.This paper introduces the special issue 'The point of view of shared agency', a collection of papers that develops, and critically assesses, a striking development in recent philosophy of mind, epistemology, and developmental psychology, that is, the fundamental reappraisal of the time-honoured distinction between a ‘first-person' and a ‘third-person perspective' on our mental lives. In recent years, the nature of the ‘second-person standpoint' has become a major focus of work across a range of …Read more
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165Perception, Causation, and Objectivity (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2011.Perceptual experience, that paradigm of subjectivity, constitutes our most immediate and fundamental access to the objective world. At least, this would seem to be so if commonsense realism is correct — if perceptual experience is (in general) an immediate awareness of mind-independent objects, and a source of direct knowledge of what such objects are like. Commonsense realism raises many questions. First, can we be more precise about its commitments? Does it entail any particular conception of …Read more
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58The practical other : teleology and its developmentInterdisciplinary Science Reviews 43 (2). 2018.We argue for teleology as a description of the way in which we ordinarily understand others’ intentional actions. Teleology starts from the close resemblance between the reasoning involved in understanding others’ actions and one’s own practical reasoning involved in deciding what to do. We carve out teleology’s distinctive features more sharply by comparing it to its three main competitors: theory theory, simulation theory, and rationality theory. The plausibility of teleology as our way of und…Read more
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133From infants' to children's appreciation of beliefTrends in Cognitive Sciences 16 (10): 519-525. 2012.
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69Pro-social cognition: helping, practical reasons, and ‘theory of mind’Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 14 (4): 755-767. 2015.There is converging evidence that over the course of the second year children become good at various fairly sophisticated forms of pro-social activities, such as helping, informing and comforting. Not only are toddlers able to do these things, they appear to do them routinely and almost reliably. A striking feature of these interventions, emphasized in the recent literature, is that they show precocious abilities in two different domains: they reflect complex ‘ theory of mind’ abilities as well …Read more
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29Practical knowledge and testimonyIn Roger Teichmann (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Elizabeth Anscombe, . 2022.Statements purporting to convey practical knowledge in Anscombe's sense are subject to two distinctive kinds of error: errors in performance and errors of practical judgement. I argue that reflection on these kinds of errors sheds light both on the nature of practical knowledge and on the status of Anscombe's account of it. Briefly: practical knowledge is knowledge we ordinarily find intelligible in the light of the agent's non-defective exercise of practical judgement. And Anscombe's account is…Read more
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The manifest and the philosophical image of perceptual knowledgeIn Christoph Limbeck-Lilienau & Friedrich Stadler (eds.), The Philosophy of Perception: Proceedings of the 40th International Ludwig Wittgenstein Symposium, De Gruyter. 2019.
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19Thought insertion and the ontology of thinkingIn P. López-Silva & T. McClelland (eds.), Intruders in The Mind: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Thought Insertion, Oxford University Press. 2013.On what I will call the No Subject view, there is a sense in which one may be aware of a thought, conceived as an event in one's stream of consciousness, without being aware of oneself thinking something. Philosophical work on the delusion of thought insertion is one of the areas in which the No Subject view has been highly influential: the view has framed what, in the philosophy of mind, has become the standard interpretation of the delusion. Here I want to present a challenge to the No Subject…Read more
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48Plural practical knowledgeInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. 2020.he paper examines the thesis that participants in shared intentional activities have first-person plural ‘practical knowledge’ of what they are jointly doing, in the sense of ‘practical knowledge’ articulated by G.E.M Anscombe. Who is supposed to be the subject of such knowledge? The group, or members of the group, or both? It is argued that progress with this issue requires conceiving of collective activities as instances, not of supra-personal agency, but of interpersonal agency; specifically:…Read more
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71III—The Epistemic Role of IntentionsProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 113 (1pt1): 41-56. 2013.According to David Velleman, it is part of the ‘commonsense psychology’ of intentional agency that an agent can know what she will do without relying on evidence, in virtue of intending to do it. My question is how this claim is to be interpreted and defended. I argue that the answer turns on the commonsense conception of calculative practical reasoning, and the link between such reasoning and warranted claims to knowledge. I also consider the implications of this argument for Velleman's project…Read more
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2Intentional Action and Self-AwarenessIn Johannes Roessler & Naomi Eilan (eds.), Agency and Self-Awareness: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology, Clarendon Press. 2003.
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42Action, emotion, and the development of self-awarenessEuropean Review of Philosophy 5 33-52. 2002.
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74Thought Insertion, Self-Awareness, and RationalityIn K. W. M. Fulford, Martin Davies, Richard Gipps, George Graham, John Sadler, Giovanni Stanghellini & Tim Thornton (eds.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy and psychiatry, Oxford University Press. 2013.This chapter argues that recent attempts to make sense of the delusion of thought insertion in terms of a distinction between two notions of thought ownership have been unsuccessful. It also proposes an alternative account, in which the delusion is to be interpreted in the light of its prehistory.
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230Perceptual experience and perceptual knowledgeMind 118 (472): 1013-1041. 2009.Commonsense epistemology regards perceptual experience as a distinctive source of knowledge of the world around us, unavailable in ‘blindsight’. This is often interpreted in terms of the idea that perceptual experience, through its representational content, provides us with justifying reasons for beliefs about the world around us. I argue that this analysis distorts the explanatory link between perceptual experience and knowledge, as we ordinarily conceive it. I propose an alternative analysis, …Read more
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45Causation in commonsense realismIn Johannes Roessler, Hemdat Lerman & Naomi Eilan (eds.), Perception, Causation, and Objectivity, Oxford University Press. 2011.Leading philosophers & psychologists offer an assessment of the commonsense view that perceptual experience is an immediate awareness of mind-independent objects. They examine the nature of perception, its role in the acquisition of knowledge, the role of causation in perception, & how perceptual understanding develops in humans
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240Agency and Self-Awareness: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2003.In recent years there has been much psychological and neurological work purporting to show that consciousness and self-awareness play no role in causing actions, and indeed to demonstrate that free will is an illusion. The essays in this volume subject the assumptions that motivate such claims to sustained interdisciplinary scrutiny. The book will be compulsory reading for psychologists and philosophers working on action explanation, and for anyone interested in the relation between the brain sc…Read more
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Reply to J. Nadel's chapter:“Some reasons to link imitation and imitation recognition to theory of mind”In Jérôme Dokic & Joëlle Proust (eds.), Simulation and Knowledge of Action, John Benjamins. pp. 137--149. 2002.
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141Joint attention and the problem of other mindsIn Naomi Eilan, Christoph Hoerl, Teresa McCormack & Johannes Roessler (eds.), Joint Attention: Communication and Other Minds: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology, Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2005.The question of what it means to be aware of others as subjects of mental states is often construed as the question of how we are epistemically justified in attributing mental states to others. The dominant answer to this latter question is that we are so justified in virtue of grasping the role of mental states in explaining observed behaviour. This chapter challenges this picture and formulates an alternative by reflecting on the interpretation of early joint attention interactions. It argues …Read more
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59Agents' knowledgeIn Timothy O'Connor & Constantine Sandis (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Action, Wiley-blackwell. 2010.This chapter contains sections titled: References.
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88Agency and self-awareness: Mechanisms and epistemologyIn Johannes Roessler (ed.), Agency and Self-Awareness: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology, Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2003.
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155Thinking, Inner Speech, and Self-AwarenessReview of Philosophy and Psychology 7 (3): 541-557. 2015.This paper has two themes. One is the question of how to understand the relation between inner speech and knowledge of one’s own thoughts. My aim here is to probe and challenge the popular neo-Rylean suggestion that we know our own thoughts by ‘overhearing our own silent monologues’, and to sketch an alternative suggestion, inspired by Ryle’s lesser-known discussion of thinking as a ‘serial operation’. The second theme is the question whether, as Ryle apparently thought, we need two different ac…Read more
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22Agency and Self-Awareness: Issues in Philosophy and PsychologyPhilosophical Quarterly 55 (220): 528-530. 2005.
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61Self-knowledge and communicationPhilosophical Explorations 18 (2): 153-168. 2015.First-person present-tense self-ascriptions of belief are often used to tell others what one believes. But they are also naturally taken to express the belief they ostensibly report. I argue that this second aspect of self-ascriptions of belief holds the key to making the speaker's knowledge of her belief, and so the authority of her act of telling, intelligible. For a basic way to know one's beliefs is to be aware of what one is doing in expressing them. This account suggests that we need to re…Read more
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464Perceptual attention and the space of reasonsIn Christopher Mole, Declan Smithies & Wayne Wu (eds.), Attention: Philosophical and Psychological Essays, Oxford University Press. pp. 274. 2011.
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |
Meta-Ethics |