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50On folk psychology and mental representationIn Hugh Clapin (ed.), Representation in Mind: New Approaches to Mental Representation, Elsevier. pp. 147--162. 2004.into the old view of the mind as a kind of “ghost inside the machine.”
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3Over the past 30 years, one topic much discussed in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychology has been the status of "the representational theory of mind," or "RTM." As usually conceived, the representational theory holds that the mind operates (in part) by creating, storing, and using internal representations of objects and events in the world
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51Mental representation, naturalism, and teleosemanticsIn Graham Macdonald & David Papineau (eds.), Teleosemantics: New Philo-sophical Essays, Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2006.The "teleosemantic" program is part of the attempt to give a naturalistic explanation of the semantic properties of mental representations. The aim is to show how the internal states of a wholly physical agent could, as a matter of objective fact, represent the world beyond them. The most popular approach to solving this problem has been to use concepts of physical correlation with some kinship to those employed in information theory (Dretske 1981, 1988; Fodor 1987, 1990). Teleosemantics, which …Read more
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1322 Induction, Samples, and KindsIn Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O'Rourke & Matthew H. Slater (eds.), Carving nature at its joints: natural kinds in metaphysics and science, Mit Press. pp. 33. 2011.
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5A Continuum of Semantic OptimismIn Stephen P. Stich & Ted A. Warfield (eds.), Mental Representation: A Reader, Blackwell. 1994.
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2Dewey, continuity, and McDowellIn Mario De Caro & David Macarthur (eds.), Naturalism and Normativity, Cambridge University Press. 2010.
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33Dewey and the Subject-Matter of ScienceIn John R. Shook & Paul Kurtz (eds.), Dewey's enduring impact: essays on America's philosopher, Prometheus Books. pp. 73--86. 2011.
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1Darwinian individualsIn Frédéric Bouchard & Philippe Huneman (eds.), From Groups to Individuals: Evolution and Emerging Individuality, Mit Press. 2013.
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33Representationalism reconsideredIn Dominic Murphy & Michael A. Bishop (eds.), Stich and His Critics, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 30--45. 2009.
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268Petition to Include Cephalopods as “Animals” Deserving of Humane Treatment under the Public Health Service Policy on Humane Care and Use of Laboratory AnimalsHarvard Law School Animal Law and Policy Clinic. forthcoming.
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43The Scientific Imagination (edited book)Oup Usa. 2019.This book looks at the role of the imagination in science, from both philosophical and psychological perspectives. These contributions combine to provide a comprehensive and exciting picture of this under-explored subject.
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Untangling the evolution of mental representationIn António Zilhão (ed.), Evolution, Rationality and Cognition: A Cognitive Science for the Twenty-First Century, Routledge. 2005.
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584Theory and reality: an introduction to the philosophy of scienceUniversity of Chicago Press. 2003.How does science work? Does it tell us what the world is "really" like? What makes it different from other ways of understanding the universe? In Theory and Reality , Peter Godfrey-Smith addresses these questions by taking the reader on a grand tour of one hundred years of debate about science. The result is a completely accessible introduction to the main themes of the philosophy of science. Intended for undergraduates and general readers with no prior background in philosophy, Theory and Reali…Read more
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104Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 1996.This book explains the relationship between intelligence and environmental complexity, and in so doing links philosophy of mind to more general issues about the relations between organisms and environments, and to the general pattern of 'externalist' explanations. The author provides a biological approach to the investigation of mind and cognition in nature. In particular he explores the idea that the function of cognition is to enable agents to deal with environmental complexity. The history of…Read more
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121Theories of Theories of Mind (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 1996.Theories of Theories of Mind brings together contributions by a distinguished international team of philosophers, psychologists, and primatologists, who between them address such questions as: what is it to understand the thoughts, feelings, and intentions of other people? How does such an understanding develop in the normal child? Why, unusually, does it fail to develop? And is any such mentalistic understanding shared by members of other species? The volume's four parts together offer a state …Read more
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Quine and PragmatismIn Gilbert Harman & Ernest LePore (eds.), A Companion to W. V. O. Quine, Wiley-blackwell. 2013.
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14Metazoa: animal minds and the birth of consciousnessWilliam Collins. 2020.Expands an inquiry to animals at large, investigating the evolution of experience with the assistance of far-flung species. Godfrey-Smith shows that the appearance of the first animal body form well over half a billion years ago was a profound innovation that set life upon a new path.
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19Meaning, Models and Selection (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 56 (3): 673-678. 1996.
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135Darwinian Populations and Natural SelectionOxford University Press. 2009.The book presents a new way of understanding Darwinism and evolution by natural selection, combining work in biology, philosophy, and other fields.
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45Where to begin? I’ll take three books from my shelves. First, now nearly forty years old, a little book of television lectures by the great physicist Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law. He talks about the laws of motion, the inverse square law of gravitation, conservation laws, symmetry principles and the various ways these all hang together. Feynman obviously takes it that it is a prime aim of science to discover such laws. But what are laws? He writes – and this is about his one an…Read more
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11Book review: explaining chaos (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 52 (1): 201-205. 2001.Review of: Peter Smith, Explaining chaos. Cambridge: Cambridge univeristy Press, 1998. ISBN 0 521 47747 6.
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41Explaining ChaosCambridge University Press. 1998.Chaotic dynamics has been hailed as the third great scientific revolution in physics this century, comparable to relativity and quantum mechanics. In this book, Peter Smith takes a cool, critical look at such claims. He cuts through the hype and rhetoric by explaining some of the basic mathematical ideas in a clear and accessible way, and by carefully discussing the methodological issues which arise. In particular, he explores the new kinds of explanation of empirical phenomena which modern dyna…Read more