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30Arguing about consciousness: A blind Alley and a red HerringBehavioral and Brain Sciences 22 (1): 162-163. 1999.O'Brien & Opie hold that phenomenal experience should be identified with “stable patterns of activation” across the brain's neural networks, and that this proposal has the potential for closing the ‘explanatory gap' between mental states and brain processes. I argue that they have too much respect for the conceivability argument and that their proposal already does much to close the explanatory gap, but that a “perspicuous nexus” can in principle never be achieved.
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16Review of “self-deception unmasked” by Alfred R. Mele (review)Consciousness and Emotion 2 (1): 173-180. 2001.
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36Introspection and the secret agentBehavioral and Brain Sciences 22 (4): 629-629. 1999.The notion of introspection is unparsimonious and unnecessary to explain the experiential grounding of our mentalistic concepts. Instead, we can look at subtle proprioceptive experiences, such as the experience of agency in planning motor acts, which may be explained in part by the phenomenon of collateral discharge or efference copy. Proprioceptive sensations experienced during perceptual and motor activity may account for everything that has traditionally been attributed to a special mental ac…Read more
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55The role of action representations in the dynamics of embodied cognitionBehavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (1): 58-59. 2001.Thelen et al. present a convincing explanation of the A-not-B error, but contrary to their own claims, their explanation essentially involves mental representations. As is too common among cognitive scientists, they equate mental representations with representations of external physical objects. They clearly show, however, that representations of bodily actions on physical objects are central to the dynamical system producing the error.
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37Foundations of UnderstandingJohn Benjamins. 1996.How can symbols have meaning for a subject? Foundations of Understanding argues that this is the key question to ask about intentionality, or meaningful thought. It thus offers an alternative to currently popular linguistic models of intentionality, whose inadequacies are examined: the goal should be to explain, not how symbols, mental or otherwise, can refer to or mean states of affairs in the external world, but how they can mean something to us, the users. The essence of intentionality is sho…Read more
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22Acting and perceiving in body and mindPhilosophy Research Archives 11 407-429. 1985.In this paper I sketch an account of (a) the origin of the terms and concepts of folk psychology, and (b) the true nature of mental states. I argue that folk psychology is built on metaphors for the functioning physical body, and that mental states are neurological traces which serve as schematic ‘mental images’ of those same functions. Special attention is paid to the folk psychology of self-consciousness. In particular, I argue that the notion of introspection is mistaken, and I criticize rece…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |