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131'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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63Levels 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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62The 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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30Is the Postmodern World a Nietzschean World?International Studies in Philosophy 27 (2): 1-14. 1995.
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151Self-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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1520Frege 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.
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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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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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203Nonconceptual 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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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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27Review of Dominic Murphy, Michael Bishop (eds.), Stich and His Critics (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2009 (9). 2009.
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Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |