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151Consciousness: Explaining the phenomenaIn D. Walsh (ed.), Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, Cambridge University Press. pp. 61-85. 2001.Can phenomenal consciousness be given a reductive natural explanation? Many people argue not. They claim that there is an
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268The Architecture of the Mind:Massive Modularity and the Flexibility of Thought: Massive Modularity and the Flexibility of ThoughtOxford University Press UK. 2006.This book is a comprehensive development and defense of one of the guiding assumptions of evolutionary psychology: that the human mind is composed of a large number of semi-independent modules. The Architecture of the Mind has three main goals. One is to argue for massive mental modularity. Another is to answer a 'How possibly?' challenge to any such approach. The first part of the book lays out the positive case supporting massive modularity. It also outlines how the thesis should best be devel…Read more
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359""Banishing" I" and" we" from accounts of metacognitionBehavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (2): 148. 2009.SHORT ABSTRACT: A number of accounts of the relationship between third-person mindreading and first-person metacognition are compared and evaluated. While three of these accounts endorse the existence of introspection for propositional attitudes, the fourth (defended here) claims that our knowledge of our own attitudes results from turning our mindreading capacities upon ourselves. The different types of theory are developed and evaluated, and multiple lines of evidence are reviewed, including e…Read more
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219Theories of Theories of Mind (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 1996.Theories of Theories of Mind brings together contributions by a distinguished international team of philosophers, psychologists, and primatologists, who between them address such questions as: what is it to understand the thoughts, feelings, and intentions of other people? How does such an understanding develop in the normal child? Why, unusually, does it fail to develop? And is any such mentalistic understanding shared by members of other species? The volume's four parts together offer a state …Read more
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12Phenomenal Concepts and Higher‐Order ExperiencesPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 68 (2): 316-336. 2004.Relying on a range of now‐familiar thought‐experiments, it has seemed to many philosophers that phenomenal consciousness is beyond the scope of reductive explanation. (Phenomenal consciousness is a form of state‐consciousness, which contrasts with creature‐consciousness, or perceptual ‐consciousness. The different forms of state‐consciousness include various kinds of access‐consciousness, both first‐order and higher‐order–see Rosenthal, 1986; Block, 1995; Lycan, 1996; Carruthers, 2000. Phenomena…Read more
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255Sympathy and subjectivityAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 77 (4): 465-82. 1999.This paper shows that even if the mental states of non-human animals lack phenomenological properties, as some accounts of mental-state consciousness imply, this need not prevent those states from being appropriate objects of sympathy and moral concern. The paper argues that the most basic form of mental (as opposed to biological) harm lies in the existence of thwarted agency, or thwarted desire, rather than in anything phenomenological
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75Opening Up Vision: The Case Against EncapsulationReview of Philosophy and Psychology 7 (4): 721-742. 2016.Many have argued that early visual processing is encapsulated from the influence of higher-level goals, expectations, and knowledge of the world. Here we confront the main arguments offered in support of such a view, showing that they are unpersuasive. We also present evidence of top–down influences on early vision, emphasizing data from cognitive neuroscience. Our conclusion is that encapsulation is not a defining feature of visual processing. But we take this conclusion to be quite modest in s…Read more
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Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Cognitive Sciences |