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465What is at stake in the debate on nonconceptual content?Philosophical Perspectives 21 (1). 2007.It is now 25 years since Gareth Evans introduced the distinction between conceptual and nonconceptual content in The Varieties of Reference. This is a fitting time to take stock of what has become a complex and extended debate both within philosophy and at the interface between philosophy and psychology. Unfortunately, the debate has become increasingly murky as it has become increasingly ramified. Much of the contemporary discussion does not do full justice to the powerful theoretical tool orig…Read more
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33Personal and sub‐personal; A difference without a distinctionPhilosophical Explorations 3 (1): 63-82. 2000.This paper argues that, while there is a difference between personal and sub‐personal explanation, claims of autonomy should be treated with scepticism. It distinguishes between horizontal and vertical explanatory relations that might hold between facts at the personal and farts at the sub‐personal level. Noting that many philosophers are prepared to accept vertical explanatory relations between the two levels, I argue for the stronger claim that, in the case of at least three central personal l…Read more
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43The reinterpretation hypothesis: Explanation or redescription?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31 (2): 131-132. 2008.Penn et al. propose the relational reinterpretation hypothesis as an explanation of the profound discontinuities that they identify between human and nonhuman cognition. This hypothesis is not a genuine replacement for the explanations that they reject, however, because as it stands, it simply redescribes the phenomena it is trying to explain
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14Negation, Contrariety, and Practical Reasoning: Comments on Millikan’s Varieties of MeaningPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 (3): 663-669. 2007.
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184The limits of thinking without wordsIn Jose Luis Bermudez (ed.), Thinking Without Words, Oxford University Press Usa. 2003.
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43Music, Isomorphism and Metaphor: Comments on Peacocke’s ‘The Perception of Music: Sources of Significance’Modern Schoolman 86 (3-4): 261-265. 2009.
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256The Body and the Self (edited book)MIT Press. 1995.Table of Contents Acknowledgments 1 Self-Consciousness and the Body: An Interdisciplinary Introduction by Naomi Eiland, Anthony Marcel and José Luis Bermúdez 2 The Body Image and Self-Consciousness by John Campbell 3 Infants’ Understanding of People and Things: From Body Imitation to Folk Psychology by Andrew N. Meltzoff and M. Keith Moore 4 Persons, Animals, and Bodies by Paul F. Snowdon 5 An Ecological Perspective on the Origins of Self by George Butterworth 6 Objectivity, Causality, and Agenc…Read more
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50Aspects of the self: John Campbell's Past, Space, and SelfInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 38 (4): 1-15. 1995.
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236Immunity to error through misidentification and past-tense memory judgementsAnalysis 73 (2): 211-220. 2013.Autobiographical memories typically give rise either to memory reports (“I remember going swimming”) or to first person past-tense judgements (“I went swimming”). This article focuses on first person past-tense judgements that are (epistemically) based on autobiographical memories. Some of these judgements have the IEM property of being immune to error through misidentification. This article offers an account of when and why first person past-tense judgements have the IEM property
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15Review of José Luis Bermúdez: The Paradox of Self-Consciousness: Representation and Mind (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 50 (3): 483-486. 1999.
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51Scepticism and the justification of transcendental idealismRatio 8 (1): 1-20. 1995.In this paper I explore a justification for transcendental idealism that emerges from the dialogue with philosophical scepticism in which Kant is on and off engaged throughout the Critique of Pure Reason. Many commentators, most prominently Strawson, have claimed that transcend‐ ental idealism is an unfortunate addition to the Critique, one that can profitably be excised in the interests of clarity and coherence. Against this general picture I urge that transcendental idealism is in fact a very …Read more
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8Do non-linguistic creatures possess second-order propositional attitudes? Reply to ShantonSWIF Philosophy of Mind Review 5 (3). 2006.
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100Thinking Without Words: An Overview for Animal EthicsThe Journal of Ethics 11 (3): 319-335. 2007.In Thinking without Words I develop a philosophical framework for treating some animals and human infants as genuine thinkers. This paper outlines the aspects of this account that are most relevant to those working in animal ethics. There is a range of different levels of cognitive sophistication in different animal species, in addition to limits to the types of thought available to non-linguistic creatures, and it may be important for animal ethicists to take this into account in exploring issu…Read more
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121The Opacity of Mind: An Integrative Theory of Self-Knowledge, by Peter CarruthersMind 122 (485): 263-266. 2013.
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92Consciousness, higher-order thought, and stimulus reinforcementBehavioral and Brain Sciences 23 (2): 194-195. 2000.Rolls defends a higher-order thought theory of phenomenal consciousness, mapping the distinction between conscious and non-conscious states onto a distinction between two types of action and corresponding neural pathways. Only one type of action involves higher-order thought and consequently consciousness. This account of consciousness has implausible consequences for the nature of stimulus-reinforcement learning.
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16Nietzsche and the tradition (review)British Journal for the History of Philosophy 5 (2): 402-414. 1997.Nietzsche and Modern Times: A study of Bacon, Descartes and Nietzsche. Laurence Lampert. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Pp. xii + 475. £35.00 Nietzsche and Metaphysics. Peter Poellner. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Pp. xi + 320
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1211The Force-field Puzzle and Mindreading in Non-human PrimatesReview of Philosophy and Psychology 2 (3): 397-410. 2011.What is the relation between philosophical theorizing and experimental data? A modest set of naturalistic assumptions leads to what I term the force-field puzzle. The assumption that philosophy is continuous with natural science, as captured in Quine’s force-field metaphor, seems to push us simultaneously towards thinking that there have to be conceptual constraints upon how we interpret experimental data and towards thinking that there cannot be such conceptual constraints, because all theorizi…Read more
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191Bodily awareness and self-consciousnessIn Shaun Gallagher (ed.), The Oxford handbook of the self, Oxford University Press. 2011.This article argues that bodily awareness is a basic form of self-consciousness through which perceiving agents are directly conscious of the bodily self. It clarifies the nature of bodily awareness, categorises the different types of body-relative information, and rejects the claim that we can have a sense of ownership of our own bodies. It explores how bodily awareness functions as a form of self-consciousness and highlights the importance of certain forms of bodily awareness that share an imp…Read more
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171The cognitive neuroscience of primitive self-consciousnessPsycoloquy 11 (35). 2000.Myin, Erik (2000) Direct Self-Consciousness (2)Bermúdez, José Luis (2000) Concepts and the Priority Principle (10)Bermúdez, José Luis (2000) Circularity, "I"-Thoughts and the Linguistic Requirement for Concept Possession (11)Meeks, Roblin R. (2000) Withholding Immunity: Misidentification, Misrepresentation, and Autonomous Nonconceptual Proprioceptive First-Person Content (12)Newen, Albert (2001) Kinds of Self-Consciousness (13)Bermudez, Jose Luis (2000) Direct Self-Consciousness (4)Bermudez, Jos…Read more
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129'I'-thoughts and explanation: Reply to GarrettPhilosophical Quarterly 53 (212). 2003.Brian Garrett has criticized my diagnosis of the paradox of self-consciousness. In reply, I focus on the classification of 'I'-thoughts, and show how the notion of immunity to error through misidentification can be used to characterize 'I'-thoughts, even though an important class of 'I'-thoughts (those whose expression involves what Wittgenstein called the use of 'I' as object) are not themselves immune to error through misidentification. 'I'-thoughts which are susceptible to error through misid…Read more
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107Rationality, logic, and fast and frugal heuristicsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 23 (5): 744-745. 2000.Gigerenzer and his co-workers make some bold and striking claims about the relation between the fast and frugal heuristics discussed in their book and the traditional norms of rationality provided by deductive logic and probability theory. We are told, for example, that fast and frugal heuristics such as “Take the Best” replace “the multiple coherence criteria stemming from the laws of logic and probability with multiple correspondence criteria relating to real-world decision performance.” This …Read more
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66Levels of scepticism in the first meditationBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 6 (2): 237-245. 1998.
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12Properties, first-order representationalism and reinforcement: Reply to CarruthersAnthropology and Philosophy 6 (1-2): 84-88. 2005.
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65The Self in Question: Memory, the Body, and Self-Consciousness, by Andy HamiltonMind 125 (499): 903-906. 2016.
College Station, Texas, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |