•  77
    Evolution Without Adaptation?
    Metascience 18 (2): 319-323. 2009.
  •  73
    In defense of interventionist solutions to exclusion
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 68 51-57. 2018.
    Mental and physical causes do not competedthe presence of one does not exclude the efficacy of the other. This point is obvious from the perspective of an interventionist theory of causation, but only when this theory gets its proper due. Doubts about the interventionist justification for concluding that there is both physical and mental causation, we have argued, rest on misunderstandings of interventionism. When looking to interventions to reveal causal structures, care must be taken to consid…Read more
  •  72
    James bond and the barking dog: Evolution and extended cognition
    Philosophy of Science 77 (3): 400-418. 2010.
    Prominent defenders of the extended cognition thesis have looked to evolutionary theory for support. Roughly, the idea is that natural selection leads one to expect that cognitive strategies should exploit the environment, and exploitation of the right sort results in a cognitive system that extends beyond the head of the organism. I argue that proper appreciation of evolutionary theory should create no such expectation. This leaves open whether cognitive systems might in fact bear a relationshi…Read more
  •  70
    Unifying traditional cognitive science is the idea that thinking is a process of symbol manipulation, where symbols lead both a syntactic and a semantic life. The syntax of a symbol comprises those properties in virtue of which the symbol undergoes rule-dictated transformations. The semantics of a symbol constitute the symbolsÕ meaning or representational content. Thought consists in the syntactically determined manipulation of symbols, but in a way that respects their semantics. Thus, for insta…Read more
  •  65
    Lessons from Causal Exclusion1
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 81 (3): 594-604. 2010.
    Jaegwon Kim’s causal exclusion argument has rarely been evaluated from an empirical perspective. This is puzzling because its conclusion seems to be making a testable claim about the world: supervenient properties are causally inefficacious. An empirical perspective, however, reveals Kim’s argument to rest on a mistaken conception about how to test whether a property is causally efficacious. Moreover, the empirical perspective makes visible a metaphysical bias that Kim brings to his argument tha…Read more
  •  63
    (No abstract is available for this citation)
  •  63
    Reduction redux
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 68 10-19. 2018.
  •  59
    What is Psychophysics?
    PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1994. 1994.
    Since the founding of psychophysics in the latter half of the nineteenth century, controversy has raged over the subject matter of psychophysical laws. Originally, Fechner characterized psycho physics as the science describing the relation between physical magnitudes and the sensations these magnitudes produce in us. Today many psycho-physicists would deny that sensation is or could be a topic of psycho-physical investigation. I consider Savage's (1970) influential objections to the possibility …Read more
  •  57
    Behavior, ISO functionalism, and psychology
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 25 (2): 191-209. 1994.
  •  57
    Arguing About the Mind (edited book)
    Routledge. 2007.
    _Arguing About the Mind_ is an accessible, engaging introduction to the core questions in the philosophy of mind. This collection offers a selection of thought-provoking articles that examine a broad range of issues from the mind and body relation to animal and artificial intelligence. Topics addressed include: the problem of consciousness; the nature of the mind; the relationship between the mind, body and world; the notion of selfhood; pathologies and behavioural problems; animal, machine and …Read more
  •  47
    Some philosophers have offered structural representations as an alternative to indicator-based representations. Motivating these philosophers is the belief that an indication-based analysis of representation exhibits two fatal inadequacies from which structural representations are spared: such an analysis cannot account for the causal role of representational content and cannot explain how representational content can be made determinate. In fact, we argue, indicator and structural representatio…Read more
  •  42
    Representation from bottom to top
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 26 (4): 523-42. 1996.
    I would like to nominate one more principle for initial inclusion in the science of teleonomy. This principle is that the nature of the stimuli that initiate and regulate a response may be no indication of the function of the response.George Williams could not have anticipated the special relevance his principle has for contemporary analyses of representational content. In particular, his principle provides both a concise statement of where a currently popular strategy for naturalizing represent…Read more
  •  42
    Responses to critics
    Philosophical Psychology 31 (3): 446-457. 2018.
    In response to points raised by our critics in this book symposium, we offer some clarifications about how to understand the role of science in assessing the multiple realization thesis. We also consider the connection between functionalism and multiple realization in the contexts of both psychological and biological sciences.
  •  42
    In this paper today, I would like to offer a new analysis of causation and of causal claims. It is an unorthodox one, as you will see, but I suspect that in the not too distant future it will be seen as intuitively, perhaps even trivially, true. I hardly need defend the urgency of my project. Ever since Hume, philosophers have wondered whether there are causes. This is a desperate situation. With no causes, it's hard to see how brushing my teeth is likely to prevent tooth decay. Indeed, it would…Read more
  •  40
    Adapted Minds
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 31 (sup1): 85-101. 2001.
    Minds are obscure things. This is especially obvious and especially onerous to those interested in understanding the mind. One way to begin an investigation of mind, given its abstruseness, is to explore the implications of something we believe must be true of minds. This is the approach I take in this paper. Whatever uncertainties we have about the mind, it’s a safe bet that the mind is an adaptation. So, I begin with this truth about minds: minds are the product of evolution by natural selecti…Read more
  •  30
    (No abstract is available for this citation).
  •  29
    Mechanism or Bust? Explanation in Psychology
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. 2016.
  •  28
    Mind the adaptation
    In D. Walsh (ed.), Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, Cambridge University Press. pp. 23-41. 2001.
    By now, even the kid down the street must be familiar with the functionalist's response to type-identity physicalism. Mental kinds like pain, love, the belief that Madison sits on an isthmus, etc., are not identical to physical kinds because it's conceptually possible that entities physically distinct in kind from human beings experience pain, love, beliefs that Madison sits on an isthmus, etc. Type-identity physicalism, in short, is baselessly chauvinistic in its rejection of the possibility of…Read more
  •  27
    Theories of multiple realization
    American Philosophical Quarterly 57 (1): 17-30. 2020.
    Philosophers look to the realization relation as a way to make sense of the possibility that special science kinds are physical, yet not reducible to kinds in physics. A realized property fails to reduce because it can be realized in multiple ways, thus blocking its identification with lower-level properties. One prominent analysis of realization, subset realization, distinguishes multiple realizers on the basis their “left-over powers,” that is, those that don’t contribute to the individuative …Read more
  •  23
  •  22
    Mind the Adaptation
    Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 49 23-41. 2001.
    By now, even the kid down the street must be familiar with the functionalist's response to type-identity physicalism. Mental kinds like pain, love, the belief that Madison sits on an isthmus, etc., are not identical to physical kinds because it's conceptually possible that entities physically distinct in kind from human beings experience pain, love, beliefs that Madison sits on an isthmus, etc. Type-identity physicalism, in short, is baselessly chauvinistic in its rejection of the possibility of…Read more
  •  19
    Mind the Adaptation
    Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 49 23-41. 2001.
    By now, even the kid down the street must be familiar with the functionalist's response to type-identity physicalism. Mental kinds like pain, love, the belief that Madison sits on an isthmus, etc., are not identical to physical kinds because it's conceptually possible that entities physically distinct in kind from human beings experience pain, love, beliefs that Madison sits on an isthmus, etc. Type-identity physicalism, in short, is baselessly chauvinistic in its rejection of the possibility of…Read more
  •  18
    Saving the phenomenal
    PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 5. 1999.