Peter Carruthers

Valence is a central component of all affective states, including pains, pleasures, emotions, moods, and feelings of desire or repulsion.This paper has two main goals. One is to suggest that enough is now known about the causes, consequences, and properties of valence to indicate that it forms a unitary natural-psychological kind, one that seemingly plays a fundamental role in motivating all kinds of intentional action. If this turns out to be true, then the correct characterization of the nature of valence becomes an urgent philosophical issue. There appear to be just two accounts that have the required generality. According to one, valence is a nonconceptual representation of value. According to the other, valence is an intrinsic qualitative property of experience. The second goal of the paper is to contrast and evaluate these two views of the nature of valence, drawing on the relevant empirical findings. Overall, I suggest that the representational account is more plausible.

Can phenomenal consciousness be given a reductive natural explanation? Exponents of an ‘explanatory gap’ between physical, functional and intentional facts, on the one hand, and the facts of phenomenal consciousness, on the other, argue that there are reasons of principle why phenomenal consciousness cannot be reductively explained: Jackson, ; Levine,, ; McGinn ; Sturgeon, ; Chalmers,. Some of these writers claim that the existence of such a gap would warrant a belief in some form of ontological dualism, whereas others argue that no such entailment holds. In the other main camp, there are people who argue that a reductive explanation of phenomenal consciousness is possible in principle, and yet others who claim, moreover, to have provided such an explanation in practice.

Implicit and explicit attitudes manifest themselves as distinct and partly dissociable behavioral dispositions. It is natural to think that these differences reflect differing underlying representations. The present article argues that this may be a mistake. Although non-verbal and verbal measures of attitudes often dissociate, this may be because the two types of outcome-measure are differentially impacted by other factors, not because they are tapping into distinct kinds of representation or distinct storage systems. I arrive at this view through closer consideration than is usual of the mechanisms and processes that underlie overt behavior.

This paper argues that a set of questioning attitudes are among the foundations of human and animal minds. While both verbal questioning and states of curiosity are generally explained in terms of metacognitive desires for knowledge or true belief, I argue that each is better explained by a prelinguistic sui generis type of mental attitude of questioning. I review a range of considerations in support of such a proposal and improve on previous characterizations of the nature of these attitudes. I then broaden their explanatory scope to include a number of forms of exploratory search. The paper has three main goals: to characterize the nature of the questioning attitudes, outlining their causal role and type of content; to argue that they are fundamental components of the mind, being widespread among animals and not constructed during ontogeny out of other attitudes; and to suggest that they explain a great deal more behavior than one might think.

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 smooth and evolutionarily-plausible explanation of the gap between the first appearance of our species in Southern Africa some 100,000 years ago, and the ‘creative explosion’ of cultural, technological and artistic change which took place within dispersed human populations some 60,000 years later. The intention of the paper is to sketch a proposal which might serve as a guide for future interdisciplinary research. 1 Introduction 2 Creativity and Pretence 3 Language and Creativity 4 Language and Cultural Accretions 5 Language, Play and Model-Building 6 Creativity, Protean Cognition and Sexual Selection 7 The Evolution of Pretence 8 The Emergence of Supposing 9 Pretence and Motivation 10 Two Objections 11 Conclusion.

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 through a modified form of decision theory. In Part II the author generates a theory of meaning in terms of 'assertibility conditions', whereby to know the meaning of an assertion is to know the belief it expresses.

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, genetic information, and theories of cognitive development; the status of arguments both for and against nativism; and how best to understand the role of genes in development and inheritance. These issues are all explored in one way or another in this book. But the book also looks to the future. Alongside state-of-the-art discussions of such established nativist concerns as language, number, spatial cognition, and social cognition, this book examines nativist work in a variety of areas where detailed nativist exploration is relatively new, including cultural learning, creativity, economic choice, culture, and morality. The expansion of nativist theorizing into all these new areas shows both the power and the promise of nativist approaches, and points the way to the future.