-
213The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Animal Minds (edited book)Routledge. 2017.While philosophers have been interested in animals since ancient times, in the last few decades the subject of animal minds has emerged as a major topic in philosophy. _The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Animal Minds_ is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting subject and is the first collection of its kind. Comprising nearly fifty chapters by a team of international contributors, the _Handbook_ is divided into eight parts: Mental representat…Read more
-
Scott Sehon, Teleological Realism: Mind, Agency, and Explanation (review)Philosophy in Review 26 291-293. 2006.
-
16Explaining TerrorismThe Proceedings of the Twenty-First World Congress of Philosophy 9 167-171. 2006.The official explanations the US gave for the September 11th terrorist attacks are not in fact explanatory, and there has been popular condemnation of those who attempt to offer causal explanations for the attacks. This paper is an investigation of the difficulty people have with finding and accepting explanations for acts they strongly condemn. Using research in the philosophy of mind and moral psychology, I distinguish between explanations for actual immoral behavior and explanations for ficti…Read more
-
1648Beyond Anthropomorphism: Attributing Psychological Properties to AnimalsIn Tom L. Beauchamp R. G. Frey (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics, Oxford University Press. pp. 469--494. 2011.In the context of animal cognitive research, anthropomorphism is defined as the attribution of uniquely human mental characteristics to animals. Those who worry about anthropomorphism in research, however, are immediately confronted with the question of which properties are uniquely human. One might think that researchers must first hypothesize the existence of a feature in an animal before they can, with warrant, claim that the property is uniquely human. But all too often, this isn't the appro…Read more
-
595The Folk Psychological Spiral: Explanation, Regulation, and LanguageSouthern Journal of Philosophy 53 (S1): 50-67. 2015.The view that folk psychology is primarily mindreading beliefs and desires has come under challenge in recent years. I have argued that we also understand others in terms of individual properties such as personality traits and generalizations from past behavior, and in terms of group properties such as stereotypes and social norms (Andrews 2012). Others have also argued that propositional attitude attribution isn’t necessary for predicting others’ behavior, because this can be done in terms of t…Read more
-
118Politics or metaphysics? On attributing psychological properties to animalsBiology and Philosophy 24 (1): 51-63. 2009.Biology and Philosophy, forthcoming. Following recent arguments that there is no logical problem with attributing mental or agential states to animals, I address the epistemological problem of how to go about making accurate attributions. I suggest that there is a two-part general method for determining whether a psychological property can be accurately attributed to a member of another species: folk expert opinion and functionality. This method is based on well-known assessments used to attribu…Read more
-
152Knowing mental states: The asymmetry of psychological prediction and explanationIn Aleksandar Jokic & Quentin Smith (eds.), Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives, Oxford University Press. 2002.Perhaps because both explanation and prediction are key components to understanding, philosophers and psychologists often portray these two abilities as though they arise from the same competence, and sometimes they are taken to be the same competence. When explanation and prediction are associated in this way, they are taken to be two expressions of a single cognitive capacity that differ from one another only pragmatically. If the difference between prediction and explanation of human behavior…Read more
-
168Chimpanzee theory of mind: Looking in all the wrong places?Mind and Language 20 (5): 521-536. 2005.I respond to an argument presented by Daniel Povinelli and Jennifer Vonk that the current generation of experiments on chimpanzee theory of mind cannot decide whether chimpanzees have the ability to reason about mental states. I argue that Povinelli and Vonk’s proposed experiment is subject to their own criticisms and that there should be a more radical shift away from experiments that ask subjects to predict behavior. Further, I argue that Povinelli and Vonk’s theoretical commitments should lea…Read more
-
261Telling Stories without WordsJournal of Consciousness Studies 16 (6-8): 6-8. 2009.In this review article of Dan Hutto's bok Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding Reasons, I argue that we can take a functional approach to FP that identifies it with the practice of explaining behaviour -- that is, we can understand folk psychology as having the purpose of explaining behaviour and promoting social cohesion by making others’ behaviour comprehensible, without thinking that this ability must be limited to those with linguistic abilities. One reason…Read more
-
111Speaking without interpreting: A reply to bouma on autism and Davidsonian interpretationPhilosophical Psychology 19 (5). 2006.We clarify some points previously made by Andrews, and defend the claim that Davidson's account of belief can be and is challenged by the existence of some people with autism. We argue that both Bouma and Andrews (Philosophical Psychology, 15) blurred the subtle distinctions between the psychological concepts of theory of mind and joint attention and the Davidsonian concepts of interpretation and triangulation. And we accept that appeal to control group studies is not the appropriate place to lo…Read more
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Applied Ethics |
Asian Philosophy |
PhilPapers Editorships
Methodology in Animal Mind Sciences |