Martin Davies

Sitting in the philosopher’s armchair, I am not engaged in any detailed empirical investigation of the world. But, as I pursue philosophy’s distinctive armchair methodology, I sometimes come upon arguments that appear to disclose requirements for thought. According to some of these arguments, being a thinking person requires having the right kind of history, or having the right kind of cognitive architecture. According to other arguments, being able to think about particular topics requires being a member of a community of speakers, or being in contact with the right kinds of stuff. These arguments have the potential to raise an epistemological problem. For, suppose that armchair philosophical arguments such as these can yield knowledge about requirements for thought, and suppose too that I can know from the armchair that I am a thinking being who has thoughts about various particular topics. Then I seem to have a route to armchair knowledge about my history, my cognitive architecture, my community, and my material environment – knowledge about these things that does not depend on detailed empirical investigation of the world

As an undergraduate from 1964 to 1967, Gareth Evans, a British philosopher of language and mind, studied for the PPE degree (philosophy, politics and economics) at University College, Oxford, where his philosophy tutor was Peter Strawson. He was then a Senior Scholar at Christ Church, Oxford (1967–68) and a Kennedy Scholar visiting Harvard and Berkeley (1968–69). In 1968, less than a year after completing his degree, Evans was elected to a Fellowship at University College. He took up the position in 1969, succeeding Strawson who had become Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford. During the 1970s, Evans and his University College colleague John McDowell played leading roles in developing a distinctive conception of truth-theoretic semantics, drawing on the work of Strawson, Michael Dummett, and especially Donald Davidson. Their co-edited collection, Truth and Meaning: Essays in Semantics, appeared in 1976. While philosophy of language enjoyed a central position in Oxford philosophy of that period, Evans did not share the view (regarded by Dummett as constitutive of analytic philosophy) that philosophy of language is foundational and so takes priority over philosophy of mind in the order of philosophical explanation. He attached particular importance to the mentalistic notion of understanding, and his work on the theory of reference was set within a theory of thought and especially thought about particular objects. Evans’s published work ranged over philosophy of language, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of psychology. In 1979 he was elected to the Wilde Readership in Mental Philosophy at Oxford. He died in August 1980, at the age of thirtyfour. His book, The Varieties of Reference (1982), incomplete at the time of his death, was edited and brought to publication by McDowell. A collection of thirteen of his papers and two shorter notes appeared in 1985 and a further note was published in 2004..

The nonvisual self-touch rubber hand paradigm elicits the compelling illusion that one is touching one’s own hand even though the two hands are not in contact. In four experiments, we investigated spatial limits of distance and alignment on the nonvisual self-touch illusion and the well-known visual rubber hand illusion. Common procedures and common assessment methods were used. Subjective experience of the illusion was assessed by agreement ratings for statements on a questionnaire and time of illusion onset. The nonvisual self-touch illusion was diminished though never abolished by distance and alignment manipulations, whereas the visual rubber hand illusion was more robust against these manipulations. We assessed proprioceptive drift, and implications of a double dissociation between subjective experience of the illusion and proprioceptive drift are discussed

Ever so often in the UK, there is a flurry of activity around the information requirements of donor-conceived individuals. In April 2013, it was the launch of a report from the Nuffield Council on Bioethics that brought the issue back to public consciousness.1Since 1991, information about treatment with donor gametes or embryos has been collected by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority . Since then, over 35 000 donor-conceived individuals have been born through treatment in licensed clinics. Medical information and information about donors’ appearance are collected by clinics, and donors are encouraged to put together a ‘pen portrait’ giving information about themselves for any resulting children. One focus of the new report is on improving the quality and quantity of information available about donors.Traditionally, gamete and embryo donations were practised on an anonymous basis, so that those born as a result of such donation may receive only non-identifying information about the donor when they reach the age of 18 . This changed in 2005 when donor anonymity was removed so that anyone donating after that time could be identified to individuals born as a result of the treatment. Those who have donated in the past are also able to reregister as identifiable donors. Much concern was expressed at the time that this would exacerbate the shortage of donors although the Nuffield Council on Bioethics reports that, 8 years on, those clinics that actively recruit donors appear to be successful in finding sufficient donors. The report recommends that the option of anonymous donation should not be reintroduced.A big issue of debate in the UK has been, and continues to be, whether parents should tell their …

Mental simulation is the simulation, replication or re-enactment, usually in imagination, of the thinking, decision-making, emotional responses, or other aspects of the mental life of another person. According to simulation theory, mental simulation in imagination plays a key role in our everyday psychological understanding of other people. The same mental resources that are used in our own thinking, decision-making or emotional responses are redeployed in imagination to provide an understanding of the thoughts, decisions or emotions of another.

In recent years consciousness has become a significant area of study in the cognitive sciences. The Frontiers of Consciousness is a major interdisciplinary exploration of consciousness. The book stems from the Chichele lectures held at All Souls College in Oxford, and features contributions from a 'who's who' of authorities from both philosophy and psychology. The result is a truly interdisciplinary volume, which tackles some of the biggest and most impenetrable problems in consciousness. The book includes chapters considering the apparent explanatory gap between science and consciousness, our conscious experience of emotions such as fear, and of willed actions by ourselves and others. It looks at subjective differences between two ways in which visual information guides behaviour, and scientific investigation of consciousness in non-human animals. It looks at the challenges that the mind-brain relation presents for clinical practice as well as for theories of consciousness. The book draws on leading research from philosophy, experimental psychology, functional imaging of the brain, neuropsychology, neuroscience, and clinical neurology. Distinctive in its accessibility, authority, and its depth of coverage, Frontiers of Consciousness will be a groundbreaking and influential addition to the consciousness literature

In this paper, I define tacit knowledge as a kind of causal-explanatory structure, mirroring the derivational structure in the theory that is tacitly known. On this definition, tacit knowledge does not have to be explicitly represented. I then take the notion of a modular theory, and project the idea of modularity to several different levels of description: in particular, to the processing level and the neurophysiological level. The fundamental description of a connectionist network lies at a level between the processing level and the physiological level. At this level, connectionism involves a characteristic departure from modularity, and a correlative absence of syntactic structure. This is linked to the fact that tacit knowledge descriptions of networks are only approximately true. A consequence is that strict causal systematicity in cognitive processes poses a problem for the connectionist programme

He then argues that (1), (2) and (3) constitute an inconsistent triad as follows (1991, p. 15): Suppose (1) that Oscar knows a priori that he is thinking that water is wet. Then by (2), Oscar can simply deduce E, using premisses that are knowable a priori, including the premiss that he is thinking that water is wet. Since Oscar can deduce E from premisses that are knowable a priori, Oscar can know E itself a priori. But this contradicts (3), the assumption that E cannot be known a priori. Hence (1), (2), and (3) are inconsistent. McKinsey’s conclusion is that ‘anti-individualism is inconsistent with privileged access’ (ibid.)

The question posed by Dunn and Kirsner (D&K) is an instance of a more general one: What can we infer from data? One answer, if we are talking about logically valid deductive inference, is that we cannot infer theories from data. A theory is supposed to explain the data and so cannot be a mere summary of the data to be explained. The truth of an explanatory theory goes beyond the data and so is never logically guaranteed by the data. This is not just a point about cognitive neuropsychology, or even about psychology in general. It is a familiar point about all science

In his paper ‘Scmantic Theory and Tacit Knowlcdgc’, Gareth Evans uscs a familiar kind of cxamplc in ordcr to render vivid his account of tacit knowledge. We arc to consider a finite language, with just one hundrcd scntcnccs. Each scntcncc is made up of a subjcct (a name) and a prcdicatc. The names are ‘a’, ‘b’, . . ., T. The prcdicatcs arc ‘F’, ‘G’, . . ., ‘O’. Thc scntcnccs have meanings which dcpcnd in a systematic way upon their construction. Thus, all scntcnccs containing ‘a’ mean something about john; all scntcnccs containing ‘b’ mean something about Harry; all scntcnccs containing ‘F’ mean something about being bald; all scntcnccs containing ‘G’ mean something about being happy; and so 011. For this vcry simple language L, wc arc to consider various semantic theories. We could consider thcorics whosc dclivcranccs about wholc scntcnccs are of..

This paper addresses a problem about epistemic warrant. The problem is posed by philosophical arguments for externalism about the contents of thoughts, and similarly by philosophical arguments for architecturalism about thinking, when these arguments are put together with a thesis of first person authority. In each case, first personal knowledge about our thoughts plus the kind of knowledge that is provided by a philosophical argument seem, together, to open an unacceptably ‘non-empirical’ route to knowledge of empirical facts. Furthermore, this unwelcome prospect of transferring a ‘non-empirical’ warrant from premises about our own mental states and about philosophical theory to a conclusion about external environment or internal architecture seems to depend upon little more than the possibility of knowledge by inference. (The use of the scare-quoted term ‘non-empirical’ is explained a couple of paragraphs further on.)

Starting from Dennett's distinction between personal and sub-personal levels of description, I consider the relationships amongst three levels: the personal level, the level of information-processing mechanisms, and the level of neurobiology. I defend a conception of the relationship between the personal level and the sub-personal level of information-processing mechanisms as interaction without reduction . Even given a nonreductionist conception of persons, philosophical theorizing sometimes supports downward inferences from the personal to the sub-personal level. An example of a downward inference is provided and an objection is considered

Anosognosia is literally ‘unawareness of or failure to acknowledge one’s hemi- plegia or other disability’ (OED). Etymology would suggest the meaning ‘lack of knowledge of disease’ so that anosognosia would include any denial of impairment, such as denial of blindness (Anton’s syndrome). But Babinski, who introduced the term in 1914, applied it only to patients with hemiplegia who fail to acknowledge their paralysis. Most commonly, this is failure to acknowledge paralysis of the left side of the body following damage to the right hemisphere of the brain. In this paper, we shall mainly be concerned with anosognosia for hemiplegia. But we shall also use the term ‘anosognosia’ in an inclusive way to encompass lack of knowledge or acknowledgement of any impairment. Indeed, in the construction ‘anosognosia for X’, X might even be anosognosia for some Y.