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19The problem of armchair knowledge arises when there are armchair warrants for believing the premises of a palpably valid argument, yet it is implausible that the question whether or not the conclusion of the argument is true can be settled from the armchair. In the first lecture, I presented three instances of the problem, arising from an architecturalist argument, (LOT), an externalist argument, (WATER), and an argument about colour concepts, (RED). Other instances could be presented; I shall m…Read more
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234Epistemic Entitlement, Warrant Transmission and Easy KnowledgeAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 78 (1): 213-245. 2004.
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1The philosophy of mindIn A. C. Grayling (ed.), Philosophy: A Guide Through the Subject, Oxford University Press. 1995.
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177Folk psychology and mental simulationIn Anthony O'Hear (ed.), Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, Cambridge University Press. pp. 53-82. 1998.This paper is about the contemporary debate concerning folk psychology – the debate between the proponents of the theory theory of folk psychology and the friends of the simulation alternative.<sup>1</sup> At the outset, we need to ask: What should we mean by this term ‘folk psychology’?
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3Tacit knowledge and subdoxastic statesIn A. George (ed.), Reflections on Chomsky, Blackwell. 1989.
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98Pathologies of Belief (edited book)Blackwell. 1991.In this book, psychologists and philosophers describe and discuss a range of case studies of delusional beliefs, drawing out general lessons both for the cognitive architecture of the mind and for the notion of rationality, and exploring connections between the delusional beliefs that occur in schizophrenia and the flawed understanding of beliefs that is characteristic of autism.
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12Ethics briefingsJournal of Medical Ethics 36 (11): 716-718. 2010.In August, Amnesty International and the World Medical Association expressed concern at reports that a judge in Saudi Arabia had asked several hospitals in the country whether they could perform an operation to damage a man's spinal cord as punishment for attacking another man and leaving him paralysed. The man had already been sentenced to seven months imprisonment for the crime, the injured victim requested the further sentence under Sharia Law, which is strictly enforced across Saudi Arabia. …Read more
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239Reference, contingency, and the two-dimensional frameworkPhilosophical Studies 118 (1-2): 83-131. 2004.I review and reconsider some of the themes of ‘Two notions of necessity’ (Davies and Humberstone, 1980) and attempt to reach a deeper understanding and appreciation of Gareth Evans’s reflections (in ‘Reference and contingency’, 1979) on both modality and reference. My aim is to plot the relationships between the notions of necessity that Humberstone and I characterised in terms of operators in two-dimensional modal logic, the notions of superficial and deep necessity that Evans himself described, …Read more
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104Externalism and armchair knowledgeIn Paul Artin Boghossian & Christopher Peacocke (eds.), New Essays on the A Priori, Oxford University Press. pp. 384--414. 2000.[I]f you could know a priori that you are in a given mental state, and your being in that state conceptually or logically implies the existence of external objects, then you could know a priori that the external world exists. Since you obviously _can.
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28Mental Simulation: Evaluations and Applications - Reading in Mind and Language (edited book)Wiley-Blackwell. 1995.Many philosophers and psychologists argue that out everyday ability to predict and explain the actions and mental states of others is grounded in out possession of a primitive 'folk' psychological theory. Recently however, this theory has come under challenge from the simulation alternative. This alternative view says that human beings are able to predict and explain each other's actions by using the resources of their own minds to simulate the psychological aetiology of the actions of the other…Read more
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286Folk psychology and mental simulationRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 43 53-82. 1998.This paper is about the contemporary debate concerning folk psychology – the debate between the proponents of the theory theory of folk psychology and the friends of the simulation alternative.<sup>1</sup> At the outset, we need to ask: What should we mean by this term ‘folk psychology’?
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143Consciousness and the varieties of aboutnessIn C. Macdonald (ed.), Philosophy of Psychology: Debates on Psychological Explanation, Oxford University Press. pp. 2. 1995.Thinking is special. There is nothing quite like it. Thinking
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24Klassische Aufklärung. Überlegungen zur Modernisierung der deutsch-jüdischen Kultur am Beispiel des Exlibris von David FriedländerZeitschrift für Religions- Und Geistesgeschichte 55 (1): 40-61. 2003.
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118Understanding Minds and Understanding Communicated Meanings in SchizophreniaMind and Language 17 (1‐2): 68-104. 2002.The work reported in this paper investigated the putative functional dependence of pragmatic language skills on general mind‐reading capacity by testing theory‐of‐mind abilities and understanding of non‐literal speech in patients with schizophrenia and in healthy controls. Patients showed difficulties with inferring mental states on a false‐belief picture‐sequencing task and with understanding metaphors and irony on a story‐comprehension task. These difficulties were independent of low verbal IQ…Read more
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29The 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 ev…Read more
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23Thinking persons and cognitive scienceAI and Society 4 (1): 39-50. 1990.Cognitive psychology and cognitive science are concerned with a domain of cognition that is much broader than the realm of judgement, belief, and inference. The idea of states with semantic content is extended far beyond the space of reasons and justification. Within this broad class of states we should, however, differentiate between the states distinctive of thinking persons — centrally, beliefs, desires, and intentions — and other states. The idea of consciousness does not furnish a principle…Read more
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28An approach to the philosophy of cognitive scienceIn Frank Jackson & Michael A. Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Analytic Philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2005.Expanded version of a chapter to appear in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Analytic Philosophy, edited by Frank Jackson and Michael Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)
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33Externalism, self-knowledge and transmission of warrantIn Maria J. Frapolli & E. Romero (eds.), Meaning, Basic Self-Knowledge, and Mind, Csli Publications. 2003.Externalism about some mental property, M, is the thesis that whether a person (or other physical being) has M depends, not only on conditions inside the person
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90Consciousness without conflationBehavioral and Brain Sciences 18 (2): 248-249. 1995.Although information-processing theories cannot provide a full explanatory account of P-consciousness, there is less conflation and confusion in cognitive psychology than Block suspects. Some of the reasoning that Block criticises can be interpreted plausibly in the light of a folk psychological view of the relation between P-consciousness and A-consciousness.
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58Two hands are better than one: A new assessment method and a new interpretation of the non-visual illusion of self-touchConsciousness and Cognition 20 (3): 956-964. 2011.A simple experimental paradigm creates the powerful illusion that one is touching one’s own hand even when the two hands are separated by 15 cm. The participant uses her right hand to administer stimulation to a prosthetic hand while the Examiner provides identical stimulation to the participant’s receptive left hand. Change in felt position of the receptive hand toward the prosthetic hand has previously led to the interpretation that the participant experiences self-touch at the location of the…Read more
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19Ethics briefingsJournal of Medical Ethics 39 (7): 483-484. 2013.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 c…Read more
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48Philosophy of LanguageIn Nicholas Bunnin & E. P. Tsui‐James (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy, BlackwellThis chapter contains sections titled: Introduction: Questions of Meaning Theories of Meaning Language, Mind and Metaphysics: Questions of Priority Semantic Theories: Davidson's Programme Analysing the Concept of Meaning: Grice's Programme Pragmatics: Conversational Implicature and Relevance Theory.
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20Cognitive scienceIn Frank Jackson & Michael Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy, Oxford University Press New York. 2005.The so-called ‘cognitive revolution’ (Gardner, 1985) in American psychology owed much to developments in adjacent disciplines, especially theoretical linguistics and computer science. Indeed, the cognitive revolution brought forth, not only a change in the conception of psychology, but also an inter-disciplinary approach to understanding the mind, involving philosophy, anthropology and neuroscience along with computer science, linguistics and psychology. Many commentators agree in dating the con…Read more
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191Monothematic delusions: Towards a two-factor accountPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 8 (2-3): 133-58. 2001.We provide a battery of examples of delusions against which theoretical accounts can be tested. Then, we identify neuropsychological anomalies that could produce the unusual experiences that may lead, in turn, to the delusions in our battery. However, we argue against Maher’s view that delusions are false beliefs that arise as normal responses to anomalous experiences. We propose, instead, that a second factor is required to account for the transition from unusual experience to delusional belief…Read more
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102Autonomous psychology and the moderate neuron doctrineBehavioral and Brain Sciences 22 (5): 849-850. 1999._Two notions of autonomy are distinguished. The respective_ _denials that psychology is autonomous from neurobiology are neuron_ _doctrines, moderate and radical. According to the moderate neuron_ _doctrine, inter-disciplinary interaction need not aim at reduction. It is_ _proposed that it is more plausible that there is slippage from the_ _moderate to the radical neuron doctrine than that there is confusion_ _between the radical neuron doctrine and the trivial version._.