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2541The self and its brainSocial Cognition 30 (4): 474-518. 2012.In this paper I argue that much of the confusion and mystery surrounding the concept of "self" can be traced to a failure to appreciate the distinction between the self as a collection of diverse neural components that provide us with our beliefs, memories, desires, personality, emotions, etc (the epistemological self) and the self that is best conceived as subjective, unified awareness, a point of view in the first person (ontological self). While the former can, and indeed has, been extensive…Read more
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1377Autonoesis and belief in a personal past: an evolutionary theory of episodic memory indicesReview of Philosophy and Psychology 5 (3): 427-447. 2014.In this paper I discuss philosophical and psychological treatments of the question "how do we decide that an occurrent mental state is a memory and not, say a thought or imagination?" This issue has proven notoriously difficult to resolve, with most proposed indices, criteria and heuristics failing to achieve consensus. Part of the difficulty, I argue, is that the indices and analytic solutions thus far offered seldom have been situated within a well-specified theory of memory function. As I hop…Read more
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1574The Unplanned Obsolescence of Psychological Science and an Argument for its RevivalPyshcology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice 3 357-379. 2016.I examine some of the key scientific pre-commitments of modern psychology, and argue that their adoption has the unintended consequence of rendering a purely psychological analysis of mind indistinguishable from a purely biological treatment. And, since these pre-commitments sanction an “authority of the biological”, explanation of phenomena traditionally considered the purview of psychological analysis is fully subsumed under the biological. I next evaluate the epistemic warrant of these pre-co…Read more
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1852What can Recent Replication Failures tell us about the Theoretical Commitments of Psychology?Theory and Psychology 24 326-338. 2014.I suggest that the recent, highly visible, and often heated debate over failures to replicate the results in the social sciences reveals more than the need for greater attention to the pragmatics and value of empirical falsification. It also is a symptom of a serious issue -- the underdeveloped state of theory in many areas of psychology. While I focus on the phenomenon of “social priming” -- since it figures centrally in current debate -- it is not the only area of psychological inquiry to whic…Read more
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3375The complex act of projecting oneself into the futureWIREs Cognitive Science 4 63-79. 2013.Research on future-oriented mental time travel (FMTT) is highly active yet somewhat unruly. I believe this is due, in large part, to the complexity of both the tasks used to test FMTT and the concepts involved. Extraordinary care is a necessity when grappling with such complex and perplexing metaphysical constructs as self and time and their co-instantiation in memory. In this review, I first discuss the relation between future mental time travel and types of memory (episodic and semantic). …Read more
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468Klein and Loftus's model of trait self-knowledge: The importance of familiarizing oneself with the foundational research prior to reading about its neuropsychological applicationsFrontiers in Human Neuroscience 7 1-3. 2013.In this article I want to alert investigators who are familiar only with our neuropsychological investigations of self-knowledge to our earlier work on model construction. A familiarity with this foundational research can help avert concerns and issues likely to arise if one is aware only of neuropsychological extensions of our work.
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