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207Action-Awareness and the Active MindPhilosophical Papers 38 (2): 133-156. 2009.In a pair of recent papers and his new book, Christopher Peacocke (2007, 2008a, 2008b) takes up and defends the claim that our awareness of our own actions is immediate and not perceptually based, and extends it into the domain of mental action.1 He aims to provide an account of action-awareness that will generalize to explain how we have immediate awareness of our own judgments, decisions, imaginings, and so forth. These claims form an important component in a much larger philosophical edifice,…Read more
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34Replies to critics: Explaining subjectivityPSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 6. 2000.This article replies to the main objections raised by the commentators on Carruthers . It discusses the question of what evidence is relevant to the assessment of dispositional higher-order thought theory; it explains how the actual properties of phenomenal consciousness can be dispositionally constituted; it discusses the case of pains and other bodily sensations in non-human animals and young children; it sketches the case for preferring higher-order to first-order theories of phenomenal consc…Read more
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117The Evolution of Self-KnowledgePhilosophical Topics 40 (2): 13-37. 2012.Humans have the capacity for awareness of many aspects of their own mental lives—their own experiences, feelings, judgments, desires, and decisions. We can often know what it is that we see, hear, feel, judge, want, or decide. This article examines the evolutionary origins of this form of self-knowledge. Two alternatives are contrasted and compared with the available evidence. One is first-person based: self-knowledge is an adaptation designed initially for metacognitive monitoring and control. …Read more
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143Meta-cognition in animals: A skeptical lookMind and Language 23 (1). 2008.This paper examines the recent literature on meta-cognitive processes in non-human animals, arguing that in each case the data admit of a simpler, purely first-order, explanation. The topics discussed include the alleged monitoring of states of certainty and uncertainty, knowledge-seeking behavior in conditions of uncertainty, and the capacity to know whether or not the information needed to solve some problem is stored in memory. The first-order explanations advanced all assume that beliefs and…Read more
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29Tractarian Semantics.The Metaphysics of the TractatusPhilosophical Review 106 (3): 444. 1997.Tractarian Semantics is full of claims that clash with the Tractatus, not to mention each other. There seems to be a method to it though. The book.
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46Distinctively human thinking: Modular precursors and componentsIn Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence & Stephen P. Stich (eds.), The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents, Oxford University Press Usa. pp. 69--88. 2005.
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15The Cognitive Basis of Science (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2002.The Cognitive Basis of Science concerns the question 'What makes science possible?' Specifically, what features of the human mind and of human culture and cognitive development permit and facilitate the conduct of science? The essays in this volume address these questions, which are inherently interdisciplinary, requiring co-operation between philosophers, psychologists, and others in the social and cognitive sciences. They concern the cognitive, social, and motivational underpinnings of scienti…Read more
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312Language in cognitionIn Eric Margolis, Richard Samuels & Stephen P. Stich (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Cognitive Science, Oxford University Press. 2012.In E. Margolis, R. Samuels, and S. Stich (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Cognitive Science. Oxford University Press, 2008.
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282Conscious experience versus conscious thoughtIn Uriah Kriegel & Kenneth Williford (eds.), Consciousness and Self-Reference, Mit Press. 2006.Are there different constraints on theories of conscious experience as against theories of conscious propositional thought? Is what is problematic or puzzling about each of these phenomena of the same, or of different, types? And to what extent is it plausible to think that either or both conscious experience and conscious thought involve some sort of selfreference? In pursuing these questions I shall also explore the prospects for a defensible form of eliminativism concerning conscious thinking…Read more
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51Invertebrate concepts confront the generality constraint (and win)In Robert W. Lurz (ed.), The Philosophy of Animal Minds, Cambridge University Press. pp. 89--107. 2009.
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46Languages of thought need to be distinguished from learning mechanisms, and nothing yet rules out multiple distinctively human learning systemsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 31 (2): 148-149. 2008.We distinguish the question whether only human minds are equipped with a language of thought (LoT) from the question whether human minds employ a single uniquely human learning mechanism. Thus separated, our answer to both questions is negative. Even very simple minds employ a LoT. And the comparative data reviewed by Penn et al. actually suggest that there are many distinctively human learning mechanisms
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183Creative action in mindPhilosophical Psychology 24 (4). 2011.The goal of this article is to display the attractiveness of a novel account of the place of creativity in the human mind. This is designed to supplement (and perhaps replace) the widespread assumption that creativity is thought-based, involving novel combinations of concepts to form creative thoughts, with the creativity of action being parasitic upon prior creative thinking. According to the proposed account, an additional (or perhaps alternative) locus of creativity lies in the assembly and a…Read more
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964Should damage to the machinery for social perception damage perceptionCognitive Neuroscience 2 (2): 116-17. 2011.We argue that Graziano and Kastner are mistaken to claim that neglect favors their self-directed social perception account of consciousness. For the latter should not predict that neglect would result from damage to mechanisms of social perception. Neglect is better explained in terms of damage to attentional mechanisms.
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230Human creativity: Its cognitive basis, its evolution, and its connections with childhood pretenceBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 53 (2): 225-249. 2002.This paper defends two initial claims. First, it argues that essentially the same cognitive resources are shared by adult creative thinking and problem-solving, on the one hand, and by childhood pretend play, on the other—namely, capacities to generate and to reason with suppositions (or imagined possibilities). Second, it argues that the evolutionary function of childhood pretence is to practice and enhance adult forms of creativity. The paper goes on to show how these proposals can provide a s…Read more
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139Animal subjectivityPSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 4. 1998.Carruthers, P. . Natural theories of consciousness. European Journal of Philosophy
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14The Innate Mind, Volume 3: Foundations and the Future (edited book)Oup Usa. 2008.This book is the third of a three-volume set on the innate mind. It provides an assessment of nativist thought and definitive reference point for future inquiry. Nativists have long been interested in a variety of foundational topics relating to the study of cognitive development and the historical opposition between nativism and empiricism. Among the issues here are questions about what it is for something to be innate in the first place; how innateness is related to such things as heritability…Read more
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215Moderately massive modularityIn Anthony O'Hear (ed.), Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, Cambridge University Press. pp. 67-89. 2003.This paper will sketch a model of the human mind according to which the mind’s structure is massively, but by no means wholly, modular. Modularity views in general will be motivated, elucidated, and defended, before the thesis of moderately massive modularity is explained and elaborated.
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66Human Knowledge and Human Nature: A New Introduction to an Ancient DebatePhilosophical Review 105 (4): 530. 1996.Based on lectures developed for an audience ignorant of analytic thought, Carruthers’s clearly and elegantly written book introduces many central issues in modern philosophy, including knowledge, justification, truth, the a priori, Platonism, learning, the evolution of mind, explanation. Its organizing principle being the rationalist-empiricist controversy from the 1700s onwards, it also offers an intriguing reinterpretation of that debate and mounts a lively defense of a hybrid position that es…Read more
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23Assertion and ConditionalsPhilosophical Quarterly 36 (145): 566. 1986.This book develops in detail the simple idea that assertion is the expression of belief. In it the author puts forward a version of 'probabilistic semantics' which acknowledges that we are not perfectly rational, and which offers a significant advance in generality on theories of meaning couched in terms of truth conditions. It promises to challenge a number of entrenched and widespread views about the relations of language and mind. Part I presents a functionalist account of belief, worked thro…Read more
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Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Cognitive Sciences |