•  20
    Do we think in natural language? Or is language only for communication? Much recent work in philosophy and cognitive science assumes the latter. In contrast, Peter Carruthers argues that much of human conscious thinking is conducted in the medium of natural language sentences. However, this does not commit him to any sort of Whorfian linguistic relativism, and the view is developed within a framework that is broadly nativist and modularist. His study will be essential reading for all those inter…Read more
  •  16
    Robert Cummins, "Meaning and Mental Representation" (review)
    Philosophical Quarterly 40 (61): 527. 1990.
  •  46
    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
  •  1
    The Animals Issue
    Environmental Values 2 (4): 370-371. 1993.
  •  11
    II*—Frege's Regress
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 82 (1): 17-32. 1982.
    Peter Carruthers; II*—Frege's Regress, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 82, Issue 1, 1 June 1982, Pages 17–32, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristoteli.
  •  99
    Two Systems for Mindreading?
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 7 (1): 141-162. 2016.
    A number of two-systems accounts have been proposed to explain the apparent discrepancy between infants’ early success in nonverbal mindreading tasks, on the one hand, and the failures of children younger than four to pass verbally-mediated false-belief tasks, on the other. Many of these accounts have not been empirically fruitful. This paper focuses, in contrast, on the two-systems proposal put forward by Ian Apperly and colleagues. This has issued in a number of new findings. The present paper…Read more
  •  91
    This article outlines the main themes and motivations of Carruthers (2006). Its purpose is to provide some background for the critical commentaries of Cowie, Machery, and Wilson (this volume).
  • Consciousness: Essays from a Higher-Order Perspective
    Philosophical Quarterly 56 (225): 619-622. 2006.
  •  86
    Review: Thinking without words (review)
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 55 (4): 807-810. 2004.
  •  84
    Higher-order theories of consciousness
    In Max Velmans & Susan Schneider (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, Wiley-blackwell. 2007.
    Higher‐order theories purport to account for the conscious character of such states in terms of higher‐order representations. This chapter focuses on three classes of higher‐order theory of phenomenal consciousness, including inner‐sense theory, actualist higher‐order thought theory, and dispositionalist higher‐order thought theory. All three of these higher‐order theories purport to offer reductive explanations of phenomenal consciousness. Inner‐sense theory has important positive virtues, but …Read more
  •  68
    Do we have introspective access to our own thoughts? Peter Carruthers challenges the consensus that we do: he argues that access to our own thoughts is always interpretive, grounded in perceptual awareness and sensory imagery. He proposes a bold new theory of self-knowledge, with radical implications for understanding of consciousness and agency.
  •  99
    On Fodor's problem
    Mind and Language 18 (5): 502-523. 2003.
    This paper sketches a solution to a problem which has been emphasized by Fodor. This is the problem of how to explain distinctively-human flexible cognition in modular terms. There are three aspects to the proposed account. First, it is suggested that natural language sentences might serve to integrate the outputs of a number of conceptual modules. Second, a creative sentence-generator, or supposer, is postulated. And third, it is argued that a set of principles of inference to the best explanat…Read more
  •  22
    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
  •  538
  •  34
    Replies to critics: Explaining subjectivity
    PSYCHE: 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
  •  73
    Monitoring without metacognition
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 26 (3): 342-343. 2003.
    Smith et al. present us with a false dichotomy in explaining their uncertainty data: Either the animals' responses are “under the associative control of stimulus cues,” or the animals must be responding “under the metacognitive control of uncertainty cues.” There is a third alternative to consider: one that is genuinely cognitive, neither associative nor stimulus driven, but purely first-order in character. On this alternative the metacognitive reports of humans in these situations reflect state…Read more
  •  207
    Action-Awareness and the Active Mind
    Philosophical 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
  •  46
    Distinctively human thinking: Modular precursors and components
    In Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence & Stephen P. Stich (eds.), The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents, Oxford University Press Usa. pp. 69--88. 2005.
  •  71
    The Evolution of Self-Knowledge
    Philosophical 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
  •  143
    Meta-cognition in animals: A skeptical look
    Mind 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
  •  29
    Tractarian Semantics.The Metaphysics of the Tractatus
    with Edwin B. Allaire
    Philosophical 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.
  • Review of Recreative Minds (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. forthcoming.