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138Language, thought, and the language of thought (aunty's own argument revisited)In P. Carruthers & J. Boucher (eds.), Language and Thought: Interdisciplinary Themes, Cambridge University Press. pp. 226. 1998.In this chapter, I shall be examining an argument for the language of thought hypothesis
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6Multiple Review of Norton Nelkin's Consciousness and the Origins of Thought: IntroductionMind and Language 12 (2): 178-180. 1997.
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147Concepts, connectionism, and the language of thoughtIn W Ramsey, Stephen P. Stich & D. Rumelhart (eds.), Philosophy and Connectionist Theory, Hillsdale, Nj: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. pp. 485-503. 1991.The aim of this paper is to demonstrate a _prima facie_ tension between our commonsense conception of ourselves as thinkers and the connectionist programme for modelling cognitive processes. The language of thought hypothesis plays a pivotal role. The connectionist paradigm is opposed to the language of thought; and there is an argument for the language of thought that draws on features of the commonsense scheme of thoughts, concepts, and inference. Most of the paper (Sections 3-7) is taken up w…Read more
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13Thinking persons and cognitive scienceIn A. Clark & Ronald Lutz (eds.), Connectionism in Context, Springer Verlag. pp. 111--122. 1992.
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Professor Strawson was interviewed on video on location at King's College, London during the Spring of 1992. Professor Strawson discusses his thoughts on a variety of topics on which he has written previously, providing some illuminating insights into how his thoughts has progressed. The text published here is en excerpt from this interview, translated with kind permission of Mr Rudolf V. Fara, the producer, in which prof. Strawson discusses his philosophical views with Martin Davies, Wilde Read…Read more
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35Foundational Issues in the Philosophy of LanguageIn Michael Devitt & Richard Hanley (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Language, Wiley-blackwell. 2006.This chapter contains sections titled: Meaning and Communication: Semantics and Pragmatics Meaning, Science, and Philosophy: Semantics and Metasemantics Semantics as a Philosophical Project Approaches to Questions in Philosophy of Language Two Programs in Philosophy of Language: Davidson and Grice The Problem of Meaning without Use.
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2Tacit knowledge and the structure of thought and languageIn Charles Travis (ed.), Meaning and interpretation, Blackwell. 1986.
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13Ethics briefingsJournal of Medical Ethics 36 (6): 375-377. 2010.Complementary and alternative therapiesThere has long been debate about the degree to which conventional health professionals should work closely with complementary and alternative medicine practitioners, if patients choose treatment from both. Some doctors are trained in conventional and alternative therapies but often, liaison depends on the type of therapy, whether it is regulated by law and whether it supplements conventional methods of diagnosis and treatment or claims to provide an alterna…Read more
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27Ethics briefingsJournal of Medical Ethics 39 (9): 599-600. 2013.Force-feeding of detainees at Guantánamo BayIn April, the US Department of Defense reportedly sent 40 additional military medical personnel, including doctors and nurses, to the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base to carry out the force-feeding of detainees on hunger strike.1 By the end of June, up to 104 of the remaining 166 individuals held in US military detention at Guantánamo were refusing food. The protest against conditions at the base, and the fate of those being held there—including those already…Read more
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16Psychological understanding and social skillsIn B. Repacholi & V. Slaughter (eds.), Individual Differences in Theory of Mind: Implications for Typical and Atypical Development, Hove, E. Sussex: Psychology Press. 2003.<b>In B. Repacholi and V. Slaughter (eds), _Individual Differences in Theory of Mind: Implications for Typical and Atypical</b>_ _<b>Development_. Macquarie Monographs in Cognitive Science. Hove, E. Sussex: Psychology Press, 2003.</b>
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36Monothematic Delusions: Towards a Two-Factor AccountPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 8 (2): 133-158. 2001.Article copyright 2002. 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 experien…Read more
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305Chomsky among the philosophersMind and Language 17 (3): 276-289. 2002.A major recurrent feature of the intellectual landscape in cognitive science is the appearance of a collection of essays by Noam Chomsky. These collections serve both to inform the wider cognitive science community about the latest developments in the approach to the study of language that Chomsky has advocated for almost fifty years now,1 and to provide trenchant criticisms of what he takes to be mistaken philosophical objections to this approach. This new collection contains seven essays, the …Read more
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139Double Dissociation: Understanding its Role in Cognitive NeuropsychologyMind and Language 25 (5): 500-540. 2010.The paper makes three points about the role of double dissociation in cognitive neuropsychology. First, arguments from double dissociation to separate modules work by inference to the best, not the only possible, explanation. Second, in the development of computational cognitive neuropsychology, the contribution of connectionist cognitive science has been to broaden the range of potential explanations of double dissociation. As a result, the competition between explanations, and the characterist…Read more
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10Sitting 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 bein…Read more
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132Individualism and SupervenienceAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 60 (1): 235-283. 1986.
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Consciousness and explanationIn Lawrence Weiskrantz & Martin Davies (eds.), Frontiers of consciousness, Oxford University Press. 2008.
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23As 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 positio…Read more
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54Ethics briefingJournal of Medical Ethics 39 (6): 413-414. 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 …Read more
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74Mental 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…Read more
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71Spatial limits on the nonvisual self-touch illusion and the visual rubber hand illusion: Subjective experience of the illusion and proprioceptive driftConsciousness and Cognition 22 (2): 613-636. 2013.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 …Read more
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23Explicit and implicit knowledge: Philosophical aspectsIn N. J. Smelser & P. B. Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Elsevier Science. 2001.from the fact that the subject reacts faster to those words than to words that were not on the list. The subject
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Poggio BraccioliniIn Jill Kraye (ed.), Cambridge translations of Renaissance philosophical texts, Cambridge University Press. pp. 135. 1997.
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32Frontiers of consciousness (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2008.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 bo…Read more
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341Connectionism, modularity, and tacit knowledgeBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 40 (December): 541-55. 1989.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 le…Read more