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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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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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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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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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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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106Rationality and psychological explanation without languageIn José Luis Bermúdez & Alan Millar (eds.), Reason and Nature: Essays in the Theory of Rationality, Clarendon Press. 2002.
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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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79Psychologism and psychologyInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 42 (3-4). 1999.This critical notice explores the distinction central to analytic philosophy between the logical study of the normative principles governing rational thought and the psychological study of the processes of thinking. Thomas Nagel maintains (1) that the fundamental principles of reasoning have normative force and make claims to universal validity; (2) that the fundamental principles of reasoning cannot be construed as the expression of contingent forms of life; and (3) that the identification of f…Read more
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110The object properties model of object perception: Between the binding model and the theoretical modelJournal of Consciousness Studies 14 (9-10): 43-65. 2007.This article proposes an object properties approach to object perception. By thinking about objects as clusters of co-instantiated features that possess certain canonical higher-order object properties we can steer a middle way between two extreme views that are dominant in different areas of empirical research into object perception and the development of the object concept. Object perception should be understood in terms of perceptual sensitivity to those object properties, where that perceptu…Read more
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204Nonconceptual content and the nature of perceptual experienceElectronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy 6. 1998.[1] Recent philosophy of mind and epistemology has seen an important and influential trend towards accounting for at least some features of experiences in content-involving terms. It is a contested point whether ascribing content to experiences can account for all the intrinsic properties of experiences, but on many theories of experiences there are close links between the ascription of content and the ways in which experiences are ascribed and typed. The issues here have both epistemological an…Read more
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37Truth, indefinite extensibility, and fitch's paradoxIn Joe Salerno (ed.), New Essays on the Knowability Paradox, Oxford University Press. 2009.A number of authors have noted that the key steps in Fitch’s argument are not intuitionistically valid, and some have proposed this as a reason for an anti-realist to accept intuitionistic logic (e.g. Williamson 1982, 1988). This line of reasoning rests upon two assumptions. The first is that the premises of Fitch’s argument make sense from an anti-realist point of view – and in particular, that an anti-realist can and should maintain the principle that all truths are knowable. The second is tha…Read more
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181Bodily ownership, bodily awareness and knowledge without observationAnalysis 75 (1): 37-45. 2015.In a recent paper, Fredérique de Vignemont has argued that there is a positive quale of bodily ownership . She thinks that tactile and other forms of somatosensory phenomenology incorporate a distinctive feeling of myness and takes issue with my defense in Bermúdez of a deflationary approach to bodily ownership. That paper proposed an argument deriving from Elizabeth Anscombe’s various discussions of what she terms knowledge without observation . De Vignemont is not convinced and appeals to the …Read more
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62Two arguments for the language-dependence of thoughtGrazer Philosophische Studien 81 (1): 37-54. 2010.
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85Arguing for eliminativismIn Brian L. Keeley (ed.), Paul Churchland, Cambridge University Press. 2005.This paper considers how best an eliminativist might argue for the radical falsity of commonsense psychology. I will be arguing that Paul Churchland’s “official” arguments for eliminative materialism (in, e.g., Churchland 1981) are unsatisfactory, although much of the paper will be developing themes that are clearly present in Churchland’s writings. The eliminativist needs to argue that the representations that feed into action are fundamentally different from those invoked by propositional atti…Read more
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13The Philosophy of Psychology: Towards a Fifth Picture?SWIF Philosophy of Mind Review 5 (3). 2006.
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28Review of Dominic Murphy, Michael Bishop (eds.), Stich and His Critics (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2009 (9). 2009.
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318Nonconceptual Content: From Perceptual Experience to Subpersonal Computational StatesMind and Language 10 (4): 333-369. 1995.Philosophers have often argued that ascriptions of content are appropriate only to the personal level states of folk psychology. Against this, this paper defends the view that the familiar propositional attitudes and states defined over them are part of a larger set of cognitive proceses that do not make constitutive reference to concept possession. It does this by showing that states with nonconceptual content exist both in perceptual experience and in subpersonal information-processing systems…Read more
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47Indistinguishable elements and mathematical structuralismAnalysis 67 (2): 112-116. 2007.The existence of structures with non-trivial authomorphisms (such as the automorphism of the field of complex numbers onto itself that swaps the two roots of – 1) has been held by Burgess and others to pose a serious difficulty for mathematical structuralism. This paper proposes a model-theoretic solution to the problem. It suggests that mathematical structuralists identify the “position” of an n-tuple in a mathematical structure with the type of that n-tuple in the expansion of the structure th…Read more
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152Pitfalls for realistic decision theory: an illustration from sequential choiceSynthese 176 (1): 23-40. 2010.Decision theory is a theory of rationality, but the concept of rationality has several different dimensions. Making decision theory more realistic with respect to one dimension may well have the result of making it less realistic in another dimension. This paper illustrates this tension in the context of sequential choice. Trying to make decision theory more realistic by accommodating resoluteness and commitment brings the normative assessment dimension of rationality into conflict with the acti…Read more
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328The sources of self-consciousnessProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 102 (1): 87-107. 2002.This paper explores the relation between two ways of thinking about the sources of self-consciousness. We can think about the sources of self-consciousness either in genetic terms (as the origins or precursors of self-conscious thoughts) or in epistemic terms (as the grounds of self-conscious judgements). Using Christopher Peacocke's account of self-conscious judgements in Being Known as a foil, this paper brings out some important ways in which we need to draw upon the sources of self-conscious…Read more
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Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |