•  178
    Homeostatic Property Cluster (HPC) theory suggests that species and other biological taxa consist of organisms that share certain similarities. HPC theory acknowledges the existence of Darwinian variation within biological taxa. The claim is that “homeostatic mechanisms” acting on the members of such taxa nonetheless ensure a significant cluster of similarities. The HPC theorist’s focus on individual similarities is inadequate to account for stable polymorphism within taxa, and fails properly to…Read more
  •  172
    Biological functions and perceptual content
    Journal of Philosophy 85 (January): 5-27. 1988.
    Perceptions "present" objects as red, as round, etc.-- in general as possessing some property. This is the "perceptual content" of the title, And the article attempts to answer the following question: what is a materialistically adequate basis for assigning content to what are, after all, neurophysiological states of biological organisms? The thesis is that a state is a perception that presents its object as "F" if the "biological function" of the state is to detect the presence of objects that …Read more
  •  171
    Chicken, eggs, and speciation
    Noûs 43 (1): 94-115. 2009.
    Standard biological and philosophical treatments assume that dramatic genotypic or phenotypic change constitutes instantaneous speciation, and that barring such saltation, speciation is gradual evolutionary change in individual properties. Both propositions appear to be incongruent with standard theoretical perspectives on species themselves, since these perspectives are (a) non-pheneticist, and (b) tend to disregard intermediate cases. After reviewing certain key elements of such perspectives, …Read more
  •  166
    John Campbell argues that visual attention to objects is the means by which we can refer to objects, and that this is so because conscious visual attention enables us to retrieve information about a location. It is argued here that while Campbell is right to think that we visually attend to objects, he does not give us sufficient ground for thinking that consciousness is involved, and is wrong to assign an intermediary role to location. Campbell’s view on sortals is also queried, as is his espou…Read more
  •  160
    How to understand casual relations in natural selection: Reply to Rosenberg and Bouchard (review)
    with André Ariew
    Biology and Philosophy 20 (2-3): 355-364. 2005.
    In “Two Ways of Thinking About Fitness and Natural Selection” (Matthen and Ariew [2002]; henceforth “Two Ways”), we asked how one should think of the relationship between the various factors invoked to explain evolutionary change – selection, drift, genetic constraints, and so on. We suggested that these factors are not related to one another as “forces” are in classical mechanics. We think it incoherent, for instance, to think of natural selection and drift as separate and opposed “forces” in e…Read more
  •  157
    Review: Action in Perception (review)
    Mind 115 (460): 1160-1166. 2006.
    This a review of Alva Noë's Action in Perception. It argues that a distinction should be made between the proposition that sensorimotor feedback is used in sensory perception and that perception is of sensorimotor features of the world. Noë fails to make this distinction.
  •  142
    Features, places, and things: Reflections on Austen Clark's theory of sentience
    Philosophical Psychology 17 (4): 497-518. 2004.
    The paper argues that material objects are the primary referents of visual states -- not places, as Austen Clark would have it in his A Theory of Sentience.
  •  138
    Review of Fairweather and Montemayor, Knowledge, Dexterity, and Attention (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 201712. 2017.
    In common with many other "virtue epistemologists," Abrol Fairweather and Carlos Montemayor contend that in order to count as knowledge, a mental state must be the product of truth-apt dispositions. I question their theoretical motivations. First, I note that unlike virtue ethics, affect is irrelevant to knowledge. A generous act is arguably better if it is performed warm-heartedly, but a belief is no more creditable if it is performed with the right affect. Second, I argue that non-discursive s…Read more
  •  129
    Naturalism and Teleology
    Journal of Philosophy 88 (11): 656-657. 1991.
    A brief comment on Mark Bedau's critique of naturalist theories of teleology. A positive account is offered in "Teleology and the Product Analogy".
  •  128
    Two Visual Systems and the Feeling of Presence
    In Nivedita Gangopadhyay, Michael Madary & Finn Spicer (eds.), Perception, Action, and Consciousness: Sensorimotor Dynamics and Two Visual Systems, Oxford University Press. pp. 107. 2010.
    Argues for a category of “cognitive feelings”, which are representationally significant, but are not part of the content of the states they accompany. The feeling of pastness in episodic memory, of familiarity (missing in Capgras syndrome), and of motivation (that accompanies desire) are examples. The feeling of presence that accompanies normal visual states is due to such a cognitive feeling; the “two visual systems” are partially responsible for this feeling.
  •  127
    Biological universals and the nature of fear
    Journal of Philosophy 95 (3): 105-132. 1998.
    Cognitive definitions cannot accommodate fear as it occurs in species incapable of sophisticated cognition. Some think that fear must, therefore, be noncognitive. This paper explores another option, arguably more in line with evolutionary theory: that like other "biological universals" fear admits of variation across and within species. A paradigm case of such universals is species: it is argued that they can be defined by ostension in the manner of Putnam and Kripke without implying that they m…Read more
  •  116
    The Categories and Aristotle's Ontology
    Dialogue 17 (2): 228-243. 1978.
    Much recent work on Aristotle's Categories assumes that there is an ontological theory presented in that work and tries to reconstruct it on the basis of the slender evidence in the book. I claim that this is misguided. Using a distinction made by G.E.L. Owen between theory and the "phaenomena", I argue that the Categories is mainly concerned with setting out the phenomena -- the intuitions that any ontology must explain. This thesis has consequences for the interpretation of Aristotle's ontolog…Read more
  •  91
    It commonly occurs that one person sees a particular colour chip B as saturated blue with no admixture of red or green (i.e., as “uniquely blue”), while another sees it as a somewhat greenish blue. Such a difference is often accompanied by agreement with respect to colour matching – the two persons may mostly agree when asked whether two chips are of the same colour, and this may be so across the whole range of colours. Asked whether B is the same or different from other chips, they mostly agree…Read more
  •  85
    The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Perception (edited book)
    Oxford University Press UK. 2015.
    Perception has been for philosophers in the last few decades an area of compelling interest and intense investigation. Developments in contemporary cognitive science and neuroscience has thrown up new information about the brain and new conceptions of how sensory information is processed and used. These new conceptions offer philosophers opportunities for reconceptualising the senses--what they tell us, how we use them, and the nature of the knowledge they give us. Today, the philosophy of perce…Read more
  •  80
    Ostension, Names and Natural Kind Terms
    Dialogue 23 (1): 44-58. 1984.
    It has been suggested that the theory of reference advanced by Kripke and Putnam implies, or presupposes, an aristotelian vision of natural kinds and essences. I argue that what is in fact established is that there are degrees of naturalness among kinds. A parallel argument shows that there are degrees of naturalness among individuals. A subsidiary theme of the paper is that the definition of "natural kind term" as "rigid designator of a natural kind" is mistaken. Names and natural kind terms ar…Read more
  •  80
    Teleology, error, and the human immune system
    with Edwin Levy
    Journal of Philosophy 81 (7): 351-372. 1984.
    The authors attempt to show that certain forms of behavior of the human immune system are illuminatingly regarded as errors in that system's operation. Since error-ascription can occur only within the context of an intentional/teleological characterization of the system, it follows that such a characterization is illuminating. It is argued that error-ascription is objective, non-anthropomorphic, irreducible to any purely causal form of explanation of the same behavior, and further that it is wro…Read more
  •  75
    Plants Sense. But Only Animals Perceive.
    In Gabriele Ferretti, Peter Schulte & Markus Wild (eds.), Philosophy of Plant Cognition: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Routledge. forthcoming.
    All living things have sensory capacities. Plants, in particular, have sensory receptors, transduce the activations of these receptors, and process these outputs in order to manage actions that demand sensory integration. However, there is a kind of sensory function that plants cannot perform. They cannot sense something as other than themselves. Animals, by contrast, perceive. They experience two kinds of "othering impressions"—impressions of entities as located outside and available for intera…Read more
  •  75
    Teleology and the product analogy
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 75 (1). 1997.
    This article presents an analogical account of the meaning of function attributions in biology. To say that something has a function analogizes it with an artifact, but since the analogy rests on a necessary (but possibly insufficient) basis, function statements can still be assessed as true or false in an objective sense.
  •  75
    Color Ontology and Color Science (edited book)
    Bradford. 2010.
    Philosophers and scientists have long speculated about the nature of color. Atomists such as Democritus thought color to be "conventional," not real; Galileo and other key figures of the Scientific Revolution thought that it was an erroneous projection of our own sensations onto external objects. More recently, philosophers have enriched the debate about color by aligning the most advanced color science with the most sophisticated methods of analytical philosophy. In this volume, leading scienti…Read more
  •  69
    Our Knowledge of Colour
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 31 (Supplement): 215-246. 2001.
    Scientists are often bemused by the efforts of philosophers essaying a theory of colour: colour science sports a huge array of facts and theories, and it is unclear to its practitioners what philosophy can or is trying to contribute. Equally, philosophers tend to be puzzled about how they can fit colour science into their investigations without compromising their own disciplinary identity: philosophy is supposed to be an _a priori_ investigation; philosophers do not work in psychophysics labs – …Read more
  •  68
    Review of Alva Noe, Strange Tools (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2016. 2016.
  •  64
    Review of Tyler Burge,, Foundations of Mind: Philosophical Essays, Volume 2 (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (3). 2008.
    Review of collected papers on philosophy of mind by Tyler Burge
  •  63
    Is sex really necessary? And other questions for Lewens
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 54 (2): 297-308. 2003.
    It has been claimed that certain forms of individual essentialism render the Theory of Natural Selection unable to explain why any given individual has the traits it does. Here, three reasons are offered why the Theory ought to ignore these forms of essentialism. First, the trait-distributions explained by population genetics supervene on individual-level causal links, and thus selection must have individual-level effects. Second, even if there are individuals that possess thick essences, they l…Read more
  •  57
    A Note on Parmenides' Denial of Past and Future
    Dialogue 25 (3): 553-. 1986.
    Does Parmenides really use the non-existence argument to deny the past?
  •  57
    The author attempts here to sketch the beginnings of an adequate interpretation of Plato's treatment of the tall and the equal in the "Phaedo". The paper consists of seven sections (roman numerals). In I-II, he (a) argues that any attempt to solve the puzzle stated at "Phaedo" 102 bc within the parameters there set down would "eo ipso" be an attempted theory of relational statements; (b) formulates that puzzle; and (c) shows that Frege solved it by denying its presuppositions. In IV the author p…Read more
  •  57
    Review of Daniel W. McShea and Robert N. Brandon, Biology's First Law (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2011 (1). 2011.
    McShea and Brandon propose that in the absence of constraint, biological diversity increases spontaneously. While heuristically useful, the thesis is unclear and of dubious empirical validity. The authors have no natural way to distinguish entropic decrease of diversity from the kind of increase that they are interested in. They make unsupported claims about how to explain dramatic increases of diversity and increases of functional complexity.
  •  55
    Reply to Egan and Clark (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 76 (2). 2008.