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156Phenomenal Consciousness: A Naturalistic TheoryCambridge University Press. 2000.How can phenomenal consciousness exist as an integral part of a physical universe? How can the technicolour phenomenology of our inner lives be created out of the complex neural activities of our brains? Many have despaired of finding answers to these questions; and many have claimed that human consciousness is inherently mysterious. Peter Carruthers argues, on the contrary, that the subjective feel of our experience is fully explicable in naturalistic terms. Drawing on a variety of interdiscipl…Read more
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68Block's Overflow ArgumentPacific Philosophical Quarterly 65-70. 2017.This article challenges Block's ‘overflow argument’ for the conclusion that phenomenal consciousness and access-consciousness are distinct. It shows that the data can be explained just as well in terms of a distinction between contents that are made globally accessible through bottom–up sensory stimulation and those that are sustained and made available in working memory through top-down attention.
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28Introducing PersonsPhilosophical Quarterly 38 (150): 123. 1988.This is an elegant and clear tour through many of the issues in philosophy of mind that have occupied philosophers of this century. The topics covered include the problem of other minds, arguments for and against the existence of the soul, a discussion of the bundle theory of the mind, behaviorism, functionalism, mind/brain identity, the argument against the possibility of private language, personal identity and the possibility of after-life, and the question of whether animals and computers can…Read more
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574The illusion of conscious willSynthese 159 (2). 2007.Wegner (Wegner, D. (2002). The illusion of conscious will. MIT Press) argues that conscious will is an illusion, citing a wide range of empirical evidence. I shall begin by surveying some of his arguments. Many are unsuccessful. But one—an argument from the ubiquity of self-interpretation—is more promising. Yet is suffers from an obvious lacuna, offered by so-called ‘dual process’ theories of reasoning and decision making (Evans, J., & Over, D. (1996). Rationality and reasoning. Psychology Press…Read more
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86Are epistemic emotions metacognitive?Philosophical Psychology 30 (1-2): 58-78. 2017.This article addresses the question whether epistemic emotions are in any sense inherently metacognitive. The paper begins with some critical discussion of a recent suggestion made by Joelle Proust, that these emotions might be implicitly or procedurally metacognitive. It then explores the theoretical resources that are needed to explain how such emotions arise and do their work. While there is a perennial temptation to think that epistemic emotions are somehow about the cognitive states of the …Read more
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342Introspection: Divided and Partly EliminatedPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 80 (1): 76-111. 2009.This paper will argue that there is no such thing as introspective access to judgments and decisions. It won't challenge the existence of introspective access to perceptual and imagistic states, nor to emotional feelings and bodily sensations. On the contrary, the model presented in Section 2 presumes such access. Hence introspection is here divided into two categories: introspection of propositional attitude events, on the one hand, and introspection of broadly perceptual events, on the other. …Read more
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96This article evaluates the scientific credentials of a distinction that is frequently endorsed by scientists who study human reasoning, between so-called “System 1” and “System 2”. The paper argues that one aspect of what is generally intended by this distinction is real. In particular, there is a real distinction between intuitive and reflective cognitive processes. But this distinction fails to line up with many of the other properties attributed to System 1 and System 2. Accordingly, the pape…Read more
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127Mindreading in adults: evaluating two-systems viewsSynthese 194 (3): 673-688. 2017.A number of convergent recent findings with adults have been interpreted as evidence of the existence of two distinct systems for mindreading that draw on separate conceptual resources: one that is fast, automatic, and inflexible; and one that is slower, controlled, and flexible. The present article argues that these findings admit of a more parsimonious explanation. This is that there is a single set of concepts made available by a mindreading system that operates automatically where it can, bu…Read more
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15Review of José Luis Bermúdez: The Paradox of Self-Consciousness: Representation and Mind (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 50 (3): 483-486. 1999.
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47Review of Shaun Nichols, Stephen Stich, Mindreading: An Integrated Account of Pretence, Self-Awareness, and Understanding of Other Minds (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2004 (8). 2004.
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59Descriptive Experience Sampling: What is it good for?Journal of Consciousness Studies 18 (1): 130-149. 2011.We defend the reliability of Hurlburt's Descriptive Experi-ence Sampling method against some of Schwitzgebel's attacks. But we agree with Schwitzgebel that the method could be used much more widely than it has been, helping to answer questions about the nature and structure of consciousness in addition to cataloguing the latter's contents. We sketch a number of potential lines of further enquiry.
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380The case for massively modular models of mindIn Robert J. Stainton (ed.), Contemporary Debates in Cognitive Science, Wiley-blackwell. 2006.My charge in this chapter is to set out the positive case supporting massively modular models of the human mind.1 Unfortunately, there is no generally accepted understanding of what a massively modular model of the mind is. So at least some of our discussion will have to be terminological. I shall begin by laying out the range of things that can be meant by ‘modularity’. I shall then adopt a pair of strategies. One will be to distinguish some things that ‘modularity’ definitely can’t mean, if th…Read more
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254 list of publications by Stephen StichIn Dominic Murphy & Michael A. Bishop (eds.), Stich and His Critics, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 14--17. 2009.
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11Review of Peter Carruthers and Andrew Chamberlain: Evolution and the Human Mind: Modularity, Language and Meta-Cognition (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 52 (3): 623-628. 2001.
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157Simple heuristics meet massive modularityIn Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence & Stephen P. Stich (eds.), The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents, Oxford University Press Usa. 2005.This chapter investigates the extent to which claims of massive modular organization of the mind (espoused by some members of the evolutionary psychology research program) are consistent with the main elements of the simple heuristics research program. A number of potential sources of conflict between the two programs are investigated and defused. However, the simple heuristics program turns out to undermine one of the main arguments offered in support of massive modularity, at least as the latt…Read more
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69Invertebrate Minds: A Challenge for Ethical TheoryThe Journal of Ethics 11 (3): 275-297. 2007.This paper argues that navigating insects and spiders possess a degree of mindedness that makes them appropriate (in the sense of “possible”) objects of sympathy and moral concern. For the evidence suggests that many invertebrates possess a belief-desire-planning psychology that is in basic respects similar to our own. The challenge for ethical theory is find some principled way of demonstrating that individual insects do not make moral claims on us, given the widely held belief that some other …Read more
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104The roots of scientific reasoning: Infancy, modularity, and the art of trackingIn Peter Carruthers & Jill Boucher (eds.), [Book Chapter], Cambridge University Press. pp. 73--95. 1998.This chapter examines the extent to which there are continuities between the cognitive processes and epistemic practices engaged in by human hunter-gatherers, on the one hand, and those which are distinctive of science, on the other. It deploys anthropological evidence against any form of 'no-continuity' view, drawing especially on the cognitive skills involved in the art of tracking. It also argues against the 'child-as-scientist' accounts put forward by some developmental psychologists, which …Read more
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75This paper argues that a Cartesian belief in the self-transparency of minds might actually be an innate aspect of our mind-reading faculty. But it acknowledges that some crucial evidence needed to establish this claim hasn’t been looked for or collected. What we require is evidence that a belief in the self-transparency of mind is universal to the human species. The paper closes with a call to anthropologists (and perhaps also developmental psychologists), who are in a position to collect such e…Read more
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61Reply to Shriver and AllenPhilosophical Psychology 18 (1): 113-122. 2005.Shriver and Allen (this volume, this journal; hereafter S&A) make three unconnected criticisms of my views concerning phenomenal consciousness and the question of animal consciousness. First, they claim that my dispositional higher-order thought theory of consciousness has much greater significance for ethics than I recognize. Second, they claim that, in the course of attempting to motivate that theory, I have presented inadequate criticisms of first-order theories (according to which phenomenal…Read more
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1Inner-SenseIn Dustin Stokes, Mohan Matthen & Stephen Biggs (eds.), Perception and Its Modalities, Oxford University Press. 2014.This chapter considers whether any of the inner sense mechanisms that have been postulated to detect and represent some of our own mental states should qualify as sensory modalities. We first review and reject the four standard views of the senses, and then propose a set of properties that would be possessed by a prototypical sensory system. Thereafter we consider how closely the existing models of inner sense match the prototype. Some resemble a prototypical sense to a high degree, some much le…Read more
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43Human knowledge and human nature: a new introduction to an ancient debateOxford University Press. 1992.Contemporary debates in epistemology devote much attention to the nature of knowledge, but neglect the question of its sources. This book focuses on the latter, especially on the question of innateness. Carruthers' aim is to transform and reinvigorate contemporary empiricism, while also providing an introduction to a range of issues in the theory of knowledge. He gives a lively presentation and assessment of the claims of classical empiricism, particularly its denial of substantive a priori know…Read more
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172On central cognitionPhilosophical Studies 170 (1): 143-162. 2014.This article examines what is known about the cognitive science of working memory, and brings the findings to bear in evaluating philosophical accounts of central cognitive processes of thinking and reasoning. It is argued that central cognition is sensory based, depending on the activation and deployment of sensory images of various sorts. Contrary to a broad spectrum of philosophical opinion, the central mind does not contain any workspace within which goals, decisions, intentions, or non-sens…Read more
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109Pretend playMind and Language 9 (4): 445-468. 1994.Children’s ability to pretend, and the apparent lack of pretence in children with autism, have become important issues in current research on ‘theory of mind’, on the assumption that pretend play may be an early indicator of metarepresentational abilities.
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Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Cognitive Sciences |