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29Decomposing the Will (edited book)Oxford University Press USA. 2013.There is growing evidence from the science of human behavior that our everyday, folk understanding of ourselves as conscious, rational, responsible agents may be mistaken. The new essays in this volume display and explore this radical claim. folk concept of the responsible agent after abandoning the image of a central executive and "decomposing" the notion of the conscious will into multiple interlocking aspects and functions.
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27Acknowledgement of external reviewers for 2002Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 2 (95): 151-152. 2003.
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24Embodiment and the Philosophy of MindRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 43 35-51. 1998.Cognitive science is in some sense the science of the mind. But an increasingly influential theme, in recent years, has been the role of the physical body, and of the local environment, in promoting adaptive success. No right-minded cognitive scientist, to be sure, ever claimed that body and world were completely irrelevant to the understanding of mind. But there was, nonetheless, an unmistakeable tendency to marginalize such factors: to dwell on inner complexity whilst simplifying or ignoring t…Read more
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22Book reviews (review)Philosophical Psychology 9 (3): 391-410. 1996.The engine of reason, the seat of the soul: a philosophical journey into the brain, Paul M. Churchland. Cambridge: Bradford Books, MIT Press, 1995 ISBN: 0–262–03244–4Cognition in the wild, Edwin Hutchins. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. ISBN: 0–262–08231–4Dimensions of creativity, Margaret A. Boden, (Ed.) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994 ISBN 0–262–02368–7Contemplating minds: a forum for Artificial Intelligence, William J. Clancey, Stephen W. Smoliar & Mark J. Stefik (Eds) Cambridge: Bradford Book…Read more
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20Socially Extended Epistemology (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2018.This volume explores the epistemology of distributed cognition, the idea that groups of people can generate cognitive systems that consist of all participating members. Can distributed cognitive systems generate knowledge in a similar way to individuals? If so, how does this kind of knowledge differ from normal, individual knowledge?
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20Editorial to the special issue on perspectives on human probabilistic inference and the 'Bayesian brain'Brain and Cognition 112 1-2. 2017.
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19That lonesome whistle: a puzzle for the sensorimotor model of perceptual experienceAnalysis 66 (1): 22-25. 2006.
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19Machine Intelligence: Perspectives on the Computational Model (edited book)Routledge. 1998.This volume traces the modern critical and performance history of this play, one of Shakespeare's most-loved and most-performed comedies. The essay focus on such modern concerns as feminism, deconstruction, textual theory, and queer theory.
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17Cognitive incrementalism: The big issueBehavioral and Brain Sciences 23 (4): 536-537. 2000.Neural organization raises, in an especially clear way, a major problem confronting contemporary cognitive science. The problem (the “big issue” of my title) is: What is the relation between the strategies used to solve basic problems of perception and action and those used to solve more abstract or “cognitive” problems? Is there a smooth, incremental route from what Arbib et al. call “instinctual schemas” to higher-level kinds of cognitive prowess? I argue that, despite some suggestive comments…Read more
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17Making Moral Space: A Reply to ChurchlandCanadian Journal of Philosophy 30 (sup1): 307-312. 2000.Like those famous nations divided by a single tongue, my paper and Professor P.M. Churchland's deep and engaging reply offer different spins on a common heritage. The common heritage is, of course, a connectionist vision of the inner neural economy- a vision which depicts that economy in terms of supra-sentential state spaces, vector-to-vector transformations, and the kinds of skillful pattern-recognition routine we share with the bulk of terrestrial intelligent life-forms. That which divides us…Read more
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13In Memoriam: Susan HurleyIn Lawrence Weiskrantz & Martin Davies (eds.), Frontiers of consciousness, Oxford University Press. pp. 2008. 2008.
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13Putting Concepts to Work: Some Thoughts for the Twentyfirst CenturyMind and Language 19 (1): 57-69. 2004.Fodor's theory makes thinking prior to doing. It allows for an inactive agent or pure reflector, and for agents whose actions in various ways seem to float free of their own conceptual repertoires. We show that naturally evolved creatures are not like that. In the real world, thinking is always and everywhere about doing. The point of having a brain is to guide the actions of embodied beings in a complex material world. Some of those actions are, to be sure, more recondite than others. But in ev…Read more
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12Embodied, Situated, and Distributed CognitionIn William Bechtel & George Graham (eds.), A Companion to Cognitive Science, Blackwell. 2017.Biological brains are first and foremost the control systems for biological bodies. Biological bodies move and act in rich real‐world surroundings. These apparently mundane facts are amongst the main driving forces behind a growing movement within cognitive science – a movement that seeks to reorient the scientific study of mind so as to better accommodate the roles of embodiment and environmental embedding.
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11What is the significance of cross-national variability in sociosexuality?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28 (2): 280-280. 2005.Schmitt finds that national sex ratios predict levels of sociosexuality, but how we should interpret this result is unclear for both methodological and conceptual reasons. We criticize aspects of Schmitt's theorizing and his analytic strategy, and suggest that some additional analyses of the data in hand might be illuminating.
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11Language and Meaning in Cognitive Science: Cognitive Issues and Semantic Theory (edited book)Routledge. 1998.First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company
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11Cyborgs UnpluggedIn Susan Schneider (ed.), Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence, Wiley. 2016.This chapter presents an excerpt from Natural Born Cyborgs, which argues that we are already seamlessly interwoven with technologies around us and that the path toward becoming cyborgs does not lead us to become essentially different than we are. Human minds are already both computational and integrated with the larger technological world around us. Such is our cyborg nature. The idea of human cognition as subsisting in a hybrid, extended architecture remains vastly under‐appreciated. We need to…Read more
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10Philosophy of the Web: Representation, Enaction, Collective IntelligenceIn Harry Halpin & Alexandre Monnin (eds.), Philosophical Engineering, Wiley. 2013-12-13.This chapter contains sections titled: Is Philosophy Part of Web Science?; Representations and the Web; Enactive Search; Cognitive Extension and Cognitive Intelligence; From the Extended Mind to the Web; and the Web as Collective Intelligence.
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8Book reviews (review)Philosophical Psychology 11 (1): 89-109. 1998.How to build a theory in cognitive science. Valerie Gray Hardcastle. Albany: State University of New York. Press, 1996Language, thought, and consciousness. Peter Carruthers. Cambridge: Cambridge University. Press, 1996. ISBN 0–521–48158–9 (hc)Young children's knowledge about thinking. John H. Flavell, Frances L. Green & Eleanor R. Flavell with Commentary by Paul L. Harris & Janet Wilde Astington. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 1995, 60 (1, Serial No, 243) Chicago: T…Read more
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8Mind and Morals: Essays on Cognitive Science and EthicsMIT Press (MA). 1996.The essays in this anthology deal with the growing interconnections developmental psychology and evolutionary biology. This cross-disciplinary interchange coincides, not accidentally, with the renewed interest in ethical naturalism.
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8Machines and Thought: The Legacy of Alan Turing, Volume 1 (edited book)Oxford University Press UK. 1996.This is the first of two volumes of essays in commemoration of Alan Turing, whose pioneering work in the theory of artificial intelligence and computer science continues to be widely discussed today. A group of prominent academics from a wide range of disciplines focus on three questions famously raised by Turing: What, if any, are the limits on machine `thinking'? Could a machine be genuinely intelligent? Might we ourselves be biological machines, whose thought consists essentially in nothing m…Read more
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7Re-Inventing Ourselves: The Plasticity of EmbodimentIn Max More & Natasha Vita‐More (eds.), The Transhumanist Reader, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 111-127. 2013.In a short article in the May 2004 edition of Wired magazine (revealingly subtitled “Fear and Loathing on the Human‐Machine Frontier”) the futurist and science fiction writer Bruce Sterling sounds an increasingly familiar alarm. After warning us of the imminent dangers of “brain augmentation” he adds: Another troubling frontier is physical, as opposed to mental, augmentation. Japan has a rapidly growing elderly population and a serious shortage of caretakers. So Japanese roboticists … envision w…Read more
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7Machines and Thought: The Legacy of Alan Turing, Volume I (edited book)Clarendon Press. 1996.This is the first of two volumes of essays on the intellectual legacy of Alan Turing, whose pioneering work in artificial intelligence and computer science made him one of the seminal thinkers of the century. A distinguished international cast of contributors focus on the three famous ideas associated with his name: the Turing test, the Turing machine, and the Church-Turing thesis. 'a fascinating series of essays on computation by contributors in many fields' Choice