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18The Developing Mind: A Philosophical IntroductionRoutledge. 2017.The development of children’s minds raises fundamental psychological and scientific questions, from how we are able to know about and describe basic aspects of the world such as words, numbers and colours to how we come to grasp causes, actions and intentions. This is the first book to properly introduce and examine philosophical questions concerning children’s cognitive development and considers the implications of scientific breakthroughs for the philosophy of developmental psychology. Each ch…Read more
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173Is goal ascription possible in minimal mindreading?Psychological Review 123 (2): 228-233. 2016.In this response to the commentary by Michael and Christensen, we first explain how minimal mindreading is compatible with the development of increasingly sophisticated mindreading behaviours that involve both executive functions and general knowledge, and then sketch one approach to a minimal account of goal ascription.
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12811. What Does Knowledge Explain? Commentary on Jennifer Nagel,'Knowledge as a Mental State'Oxford Studies in Epistemology 4 309. 2013.
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348Intention and Motor Representation in Purposive ActionPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 88 (1): 119-145. 2012.Are there distinct roles for intention and motor representation in explaining the purposiveness of action? Standard accounts of action assign a role to intention but are silent on motor representation. The temptation is to suppose that nothing need be said here because motor representation is either only an enabling condition for purposive action or else merely a variety of intention. This paper provides reasons for resisting that temptation. Some motor representations, like intentions, coordina…Read more
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53Shared Emotions, Joint Attention and Joint Action, Centre for Functionally Integrative Neuroscience, Aarhus University, Denmark, 26 October 2010
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245On a puzzle about relations between thought, experience and the motoricSynthese 192 (6): 1923-1936. 2015.Motor representations live a kind of double life. Although paradigmatically involved in performing actions, they also occur when merely observing others act and sometimes influence thoughts about the goals of observed actions. Further, these influences are content-respecting: what you think about an action sometimes depends in part on how that action is represented motorically in you. The existence of such content-respecting influences is puzzling. After all, motor representations do not feature…Read more
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97Two kinds of purposive actionEuropean Journal of Philosophy 9 (2). 2001.It is normally assumed that there is only one kind of purposive action. This article argues that there are two kinds of purposive action, which require different models of explanation. One kind of action is done without awareness of reasons; another kind of action is done because the agent is aware of reasons for that action. The argument starts by noting that philosophers disagree about what explains action. Some claim that actions are explained by impersonal facts, such as facts about how thin…Read more
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872Interacting mindreadersPhilosophical Studies 165 (3): 841-863. 2013.Could interacting mindreaders be in a position to know things which they would be unable to know if they were manifestly passive observers? This paper argues that they could. Mindreading is sometimes reciprocal: the mindreader’s target reciprocates by taking the mindreader as a target for mindreading. The paper explains how such reciprocity can significantly narrow the range of possible interpretations of behaviour where mindreaders are, or appear to be, in a position to interact. A consequence …Read more
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92What are modules and what is their role in development?Mind and Language 22 (4). 2007.Modules are widely held to play a central role in explaining mental development and in accounts of the mind generally. But there is much disagreement about what modules are, which shows that we do not adequately understand modularity. This paper outlines a Fodoresque approach to understanding one type of modularity. It suggests that we can distinguish modular from nonmodular cognition by reference to the kinds of process involved, and that modular cognition differs from nonmodular forms of cogni…Read more
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136Seeing causings and hearing gesturesPhilosophical Quarterly 59 (236): 405-428. 2009.Can humans see causal interactions? Evidence on the visual perception of causal interactions, from Michotte to contemporary work, is best interpreted as showing that we can see some causal interactions in the same sense as that in which we can hear speech. Causal perception, like speech perception, is a form of categorical perception.
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59Perceiving expressions of emotion: What evidence could bear on questions about perceptual experience of mental states?Consciousness and Cognition 36 438-451. 2015.
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88Infants' representations of causationBehavioral and Brain Sciences 34 (3): 126-127. 2011.It is consistent with the evidence in The Origin of Concepts to conjecture that infants' causal representations, like their numerical representations, are not continuous with adults', so that bootstrapping is needed in both cases
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364Cue competition effects and young children's causal and counterfactual inferencesDevelopmental Psychology 45 (6): 1563-1575. 2009.The authors examined cue competition effects in young children using the blicket detector paradigm, in which objects are placed either singly or in pairs on a novel machine and children must judge which objects have the causal power to make the machine work. Cue competition effects were found in a 5- to 6-year-old group but not in a 4-year-old group. Equivalent levels of forward and backward blocking were found in the former group. Children's counterfactual judgments were subsequently examined b…Read more
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125Anti-Individualism: Mind and Language, Knowledge and Justification * By SANFORD C. GOLDBERG (review)Analysis 69 (3): 582-585. 2009.Reflection on testimony provides novel arguments for anti-individualism. What is anti-individualism? Sanford Goldberg's book defends three main claims under this heading: first, facts about the contents of beliefs do not supervene on individualistic facts about the believers ; second, an individual's epistemic entitlement to accept a piece of testimony depends on facts about her peers ; third, processes by which some humans acquire knowledge from testimony includes activities performed for them …Read more
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Planning for Collective AgencyIn Catrin Misselhorn (ed.), Collective Agency and Cooperation in Natural and Artificial Systems, Springer Verlag. 1st ed. 2015.
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |