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107Mental events as structuring causes of behaviorIn Pascal Engel (ed.), Mental causation, Oxford University Press. 1995.1. Causal explanations depend on our interests, our purposes, and our prior knowledge. ⇒ No uniquely real causal explanation
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3The epistemology of painIn Murat Aydede (ed.), Pain: New Essays on its Nature and the Methodology of its Study, Mit Press. pp. 3-20. 2005.
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MisinterpretationIn Stephen P. Stich & Ted A. Warfield (eds.), Mental Representation: A Reader, Blackwell. pp. 157--173. 1994.
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100Perception, Knowledge and Belief: Selected EssaysCambridge University Press. 2000.This collection of essays by eminent philosopher Fred Dretske brings together work on the theory of knowledge and philosophy of mind spanning thirty years. The two areas combine to lay the groundwork for a naturalistic philosophy of mind. The fifteen essays focus on perception, knowledge, and consciousness. Together, they show the interconnectedness of Dretske's work in epistemology and his more contemporary ideas on philosophy of mind, shedding light on the links which can be made between the t…Read more
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1726Knowledge and the Flow of InformationMIT Press. 1981.This book presents an attempt to develop a theory of knowledge and a philosophy of mind using ideas derived from the mathematical theory of communication developed by Claude Shannon. Information is seen as an objective commodity defined by the dependency relations between distinct events. Knowledge is then analyzed as information caused belief. Perception is the delivery of information in analog form for conceptual utilization by cognitive mechanisms. The final chapters attempt to develop a theo…Read more
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423What we see : the texture of conscious experienceIn Bence Nanay (ed.), Perceiving the world, Oxford University Press. pp. 54. 2010.
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52Naturalizing the MindPhilosophical Review 106 (3): 429. 1997.Aware that the representational thesis is more plausible for the attitudinal than for the phenomenal, Dretske courageously focuses on sensory experience, where progress in our philosophical understanding of the mental has lagged. His view, essentially, is that what makes any mental state what it is is not so much what it's like as what it's about.
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178IntrospectionProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 94 263-278. 19934.Fred Dretske; XI*—Introspection, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 94, Issue 1, 1 June 1994, Pages 263–278, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/9.
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385Perception and other mindsNoûs 7 (1): 34-44. 1973.We ordinarily speak of being able to see that there are people on the bus, Students in the class, And children playing in the street. If human beings are understood to be conscious entities, Then one of our ways of knowing that there are other conscious entities in the world besides ourselves is by seeing that there are. We also speak of seeing that he is angry, She is depressed, And so on. It is argued that this is, Indeed, One way of knowing that there are other minds (and, Hence, That the pro…Read more
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396Entitlement: Epistemic rights without epistemic duties?Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 60 (3): 591-606. 2000.The debate between externalists and internalists in epistemology can be viewed as a disagreement about whether there are epistemic rights without corresponding duties or obligations. Taking an epistemic right to believe P as an authorization to not only accept P as true but to use P as a positive reason for accepting other propositions, the debate is about whether there are unjustified justifiers. It is about whether there are propositions that provide for others what nothing need provide for th…Read more
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6The Metaphysics of FreedomCanadian Journal of Philosophy 22 (1): 1-13. 1992.I offer Jimmy a dollar to wiggle his ears. He wiggles them because he wants the dollar and, as a result of my offer, thinks he will earn it by wiggling his ears. So I cause him to believe something that explains, or helps to explain, why he wiggles his ears. If I push a button, and a bell, wired to the button, rings because the button is depressed, I cause the bell to ring. I make it ring. Indeed, I ring it. So why don’t I, by offering him a dollar, make Jimmy wiggle his ears? Why, indeed, don’t…Read more
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Reply: Causal relevance and explanatory exclusionIn Enrique Villanueva (ed.), Information, Semantics and Epistemology, Blackwell. 1990.
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55The informational character of representationsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 5 (3): 376-377. 1982.
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182Mental causationIn The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, Volume 2: Metaphysics, Bowling Green: Philosophy Doc Ctr. pp. 81-88. 1999.Materialist explanations of cause and effect tend to embrace epiphenomenalism. Those who try to avoid epiphenomenalism tend to deny either the extrinsicness of meaning or the intrinsicness of causality. I argue that to deny one or the other is equally implausible. Rather, I prefer a different strategy: accept both premises, but deny that epiphenomenalism is necessarily the conclusion. This strategy is available because the premises do not imply the conclusion without the help of an additional pr…Read more
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223Psychological vs. biological explanations of behaviorBehavior and Philosophy 32 (1): 167-177. 2004.Causal explanations of behavior must distinguish two kinds of cause. There are triggering causes, the events or conditions that come before the effect and are followed regularly by the effect, and structuring causes, events that cause a triggering cause to produce its effect. Moving the mouse is the triggering cause of cursor movement; hardware and programming conditions are the structuring causes of cursor movement. I use this distinction to show how representational facts can be structuring ca…Read more
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74Two Conceptions of KnowledgeGrazer Philosophische Studien 40 (1): 15-30. 1991.There are two ways to think about knowledge: From the bottom-up point of view, knowledge is an early arrival on the evolutionary scene; it is what animals need in order to coordinate their behavior with the environmental conditions. The top-down approach, departing from Descartes, considers knowledge constituted by a justified belief which gains its justification only in so far as the process by means of which it is reached conforms to canons of sciemific inference and rational theory choice. Ke…Read more
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274Knowing what you think vs. knowing that you think itIn Richard Schantz (ed.), The Externalist Challenge, De Gruyter. 2004.