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111Yes, essential indexicals really are essentialAnalysis 77 (4): 690-694. 2017.In their recent book The Inessential Indexical Herman Cappelen and Josh Dever take issue with what has become close to philosophical orthodoxy – the view, most often associated with John Perry and David Lewis, that psychological explanations are essentially indexical. Cappelen and Dever claim that claims of essential indexicality are typically driven by intuitions rather than supported by arguments. They issue a challenge to supporters of essential indexicality: Produce an argument to back up th…Read more
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38Fenomenologia cielesnej percepcjiAvant: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies 2 (T): 25-36. 2011.[Phenomenology of Bodily Perception] Since this is colloquium on phenomenological and experimental approaches to cognition I’d like to set up te problem I want to address in terms of two of the different strands that we find in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking about the phenomenology of the body. One of these strands is profoundly insightful. The other one, however, seems to me to be lacking in plausibility – or rather, to put it less confrontationally and more in keeping with the spirit of the colloqui…Read more
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20Nonconceptual Self-Consciousness And Cognitive ScienceSynthese 129 (1): 129-149. 2001.This paper explores some of the areaswhere neuroscientific and philosophical issuesintersect in the study of self-consciousness. Taking aspoint of departure a paradox (the paradox ofself-consciousness) that appears to blockphilosophical elucidation of self-consciousness, thepaper illustrates how the highly conceptual forms ofself-consciousness emerge from a rich foundation ofnonconceptual forms of self-awareness. Attention ispaid in particular to the primitive forms ofnonconceptual self-consciou…Read more
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3Rational Decisions, Ken Binmore. Princeton University Press, 2009, x + 200 pages (review)Economics and Philosophy 26 (1): 95-101. 2010.
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214Thinking Without WordsOxford University Press USA. 2003.Thinking without Words provides a challenging new theory of the nature of non-linguistic thought. Many scientific disciplines treat non-linguistic creatures as thinkers, explaining their behavior in terms of their thoughts about themselves and about the environment. But this theorizing has proceeded without any clear account of the types of thinking available to non-linguistic creatures. One consequence of this is that ascriptions of thoughts to non-linguistic creatures have frequently been held…Read more
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15Thought, Reference, and Experience: Themes From the Philosophy of Gareth Evans (edited book)Oxford University Press UK. 2005.Thought, Reference, and Experience is a collection of important new essays on topics at the intersection of philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and philosophical logic. The starting-point for the papers is the brilliant work of the British philosopher Gareth Evans before his untimely death in 1980 at the age of 34. Evans's work on reference and singular thought transformed the Fregean approach to the philosophy of thought and language, showing how seemingly technical issues in philosophi…Read more
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16Rational Decisions, Binmore Ken. Princeton University Press, 2009, x + 200 pages. (review)Economics and Philosophy 26 (1): 95-101. 2010.
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177Nonconceptual Self-Consciousness And Cognitive ScienceSynthese 129 (1): 129-149. 2001.This paper explores some of the areas where neuroscientific and philosophical issues intersect in the study of self-consciousness. Taking as point of departure a paradox (the paradox of self-consciousness) that appears to block philosophical elucidation of self-consciousness, the paper illustrates how the highly conceptual forms of self-consciousness emerge from a rich foundation of nonconceptual forms of self-awareness. Attention is paid in particular to the primitive forms of nonconceptual sel…Read more
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The domain of folk psychologyIn Anthony O'Hear (ed.), Minds and Persons, Cambridge University Press. 2001.
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63Levels of scepticism in the first meditationBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 6 (2): 237-245. 1998.
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132'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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72Cognitive Science : An Introduction to the Science of the MindCambridge University Press. 2010.Cognitive Science combines the interdisciplinary streams of cognitive science into a unified narrative in an all-encompassing introduction to the field. This text presents cognitive science as a discipline in its own right, and teaches students to apply the techniques and theories of the cognitive scientist's 'toolkit' - the vast range of methods and tools that cognitive scientists use to study the mind. Thematically organized, rather than by separate disciplines, Cognitive Science underscores t…Read more
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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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63The Self in Question: Memory, the Body, and Self-Consciousness, by Andy HamiltonMind 125 (499): 903-906. 2016.
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Tiles, M. and Tiles, J.-An Introduction to Historical EpistemologyPhilosophical Books 37 124-124. 1996.
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58Memory judgments and immunity to error through misidentificationGrazer Philosophische Studien 84 (1): 123-142. 2012.First person judgments that are immune to error through misidentifi cation (IEM) are fundamental to self-conscious thought. The IEM status of many such judgments can be understood in terms of the possession conditions of the concepts they involve. However, this approach cannot be extended to first person judgments based on autobiographical memory. Th e paper develops an account of why such judgments have the IEM property and how thinkers are able to exploit this fact in inference.
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The concept of decadenceIn Jose Luis Bermudez & Sebastian Gardner (eds.), Art and Morality, Routledge. 2003.
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53Transcendental arguments and psychology:The example of O'Shaughnessy on intentional actionMetaphilosophy 26 (4): 379-401. 1995.
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30Is the Postmodern World a Nietzschean World?International Studies in Philosophy 27 (2): 1-14. 1995.
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152Self-consciousnessIn Max Velmans & Susan Schneider (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, Blackwell. 2007.Self‐consciousness is a topic located at the intersection of a range of different philosophical concerns. One set of concerns is metaphysical. Another is epistemological. When discussing the phenomenon of consciousness in general, philosophers generally think it possible to give an account of consciousness that is independent of how one understands the objects, properties, and events of which one is conscious. Self‐consciousness is important because of the role it plays in the cognitive economy.…Read more
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278Vagueness, Phenomenal Concepts and Mind-Brain IdentityAnalysis 64 (2). 2004.In Thinking about Consciousness David Papineau develops a position that combines the following four theses: A) Phenomenal properties exist. B) Any phenomenal property is identical to some material property. C) Phenomenal concepts refer to material properties that are identical to phenomenal properties. D) Phenomenal concepts are vague. The overall position is intended to do justice to materialism (in virtue of (B) and (C)), while at the same time accommodating the concerns both of those impresse…Read more
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1526Frege on thoughts and their structureHistory of Philosophy & Logical Analysis 4 87-105. 2001.The idea that thoughts are structured is essential to Frege's understanding of thoughts. A basic tenet of his thinking was that the structure of a sentence can serve as a model for the structure of a thought. Recent commentators have, however, identified tensions between that principle and certain other doctrines Frege held about thoughts. This paper suggests that the tensions identified by Dummett and Bell are not really tensions at all. In establishing the case against Dummett and Bell the pa…Read more
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106Rationality and psychological explanation without languageIn José Luis Bermúdez & Alan Millar (eds.), Reason and Nature: Essays in the Theory of Rationality, Clarendon Press. 2002.
College Station, Texas, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |