•  5
    Self-knowledge and Moore's paradox
    Philosophical Studies 77 (2-3). 1995.
    As G. E. Moore famously observed, sentences such as 'It's raining but I don't think it is', though they aren't contradictory, cannot be used to make coherent assertions.' The trouble with such sentences is not a matter of their truth conditions; such sentences can readily be true. Indeed, it happens often enough with each of us that we think, for example, that it isn't raining even though it is. This shows that such sentences are not literally contradictory. But even though such sentences have u…Read more
  •  11
    Higher-order theories of consciousness
    Scholarpedia 3 (5): 4407. 2008.
    in Scholarpedia, forthcoming
  •  37
    Philosophy of Mind
    Social Research: An International Quarterly 47. 1980.
  •  2
    Descartes's Meditations: Critical Essays (edited book)
    with John P. Carriero, Peter J. Markie, Stephen Schiffer, Robert Delahunty, Frederick J. O'Toole, Fred Feldman, Anthony Kenny, Margaret D. Wilson, John Cottingham, and Jonathan Bennett
    Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 1997.
    This collection of recent articles by leading scholars is designed to illuminate one of the greatest and most influential philosophical books of all time. It includes incisive commentary on every major theme and argument in the Meditations, and will be valuable not only to philosophers but to historians, theologians, literary scholars, and interested general readers
  •  18
    Unity of consciousness and the self
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 103 (3): 325-352. 2003.
    The so-called unity of consciousness consists in the compelling sense we have that all our conscious mental states belong to a single conscious subject. Elsewhere I have argued that a mental state's being conscious is a matter of our being conscious of that state by having a higher-order thought (HOT) about it. Contrary to what is sometimes argued, this HOT model affords a natural explanation of our sense that our conscious states all belong to a single conscious subject. HOTs often group states…Read more
  •  11
    Expressing One’s Mind
    Acta Analytica 25 (1). 2010.
    Remarks such as ‘I am in pain’ and ‘I think that it’s raining’ are puzzling, since they seem to literally describe oneself as being in pain or having a particular thought, but their conditions of use tend to coincide with unequivocal expressions of pain or of that thought. This led Wittgenstein, among others, to treat such remarks as expressing, rather than as reporting, one’s mental states. Though such expressivism is widely recognized as untenable, Bar-On has recently advanced a ne…Read more
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  •  21
    There is much in Bridgeman's account that I find congenial and compelling, especially appealing is Bridgeman's application of his thesis to the tie between consciousness and language. Nonetheless, I want to raise some questions about whether the tie he finds between plans and consciousness actually does hold. Not all memory and attention is conscious. Although attention and accessing of memories are required to execute plans, we need not be at all conscious of the relevant states of memory and a…Read more
  •  13
    Mentality and neutrality
    Journal of Philosophy 73 (13): 386-415. 1976.
  •  3
    red and round. According to common sense, the red, round thing we see is the tomato itself. When we have a hallucinatory vision of a tomato, however, there may be present to us no red and round phys- ical object. Still, we use the words 'red' and 'round' to describe that situation as well, this time applying them to the visual experience itself. We say that we have a red, round visual image, or a visual experience of a red disk, or some such. Because we see physical objects far more often than w…Read more
  •  152
    consciousness. Such unconscious processing always " Cambridge, UK " tends to re?ect habitual or strong responses. From this