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13Unconsciously competing goals can collaborate or compromise as well as win or loseBehavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (2): 139-140. 2014.This commentary offers a friendly extension of Huang & Bargh's (H&B's) account. Not only do active goals sometimes operate unconsciously to dominate or preempt others, but simultaneously active goals can also collaborate or compromise in shaping behavior. Because neither goal wins complete control of behavior, the result may be that each is only partly satisfied.
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Review of John Dupre's Human Nature and the Limits of Science (review)Economics and Philosophy 18 (2): 357-362. 2002.
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Review of The Paradox of Self-Consciousness by José Luis Bermúdez (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 51 (3): 483-486. 2000.
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E Smith, PIn Peter Carruthers & Peter K. Smith (eds.), Theories of Theories of Mind, Cambridge University Press. 1996.
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10Some New Techniques for the Analysis Correlations of Point DistributionsIn R. J. Russell, N. Murphy & A. R. Peacocke (eds.), Chaos and Complexity, Vatican Observatory Publications. pp. 165. 1995.
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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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1Inner-SenseIn Biggs S., Matthen M. & Stokes D. (eds.), Perception and Its Modalities, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.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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280Moral Responsibility and ConsciousnessJournal of Moral Philosophy 9 (2): 200-228. 2012.Our aim in this paper is to raise a question about the relationship between theories of responsibility, on the one hand, and a commitment to conscious attitudes, on the other. Our question has rarely been raised previously. Among those who believe in the reality of human freedom, compatibilists have traditionally devoted their energies to providing an account that can avoid any commitment to the falsity of determinism while successfully accommodating a range of intuitive examples. Libertarians, …Read more
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43Review of Alvin I. Goldman, Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2006 (11). 2006.
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47Review of Gregory Currie, Ian Ravenscroft, Recreative Minds: Imagination in Philosophy and Psychology (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2003 (11). 2003.
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383Reductive explanation and the "explanatory gap"Canadian Journal of Philosophy 34 (2): 153-174. 2004.Can phenomenal consciousness be given a reductive natural explanation? Exponents of an
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111Who is blind to blindsight?PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 7. 2001.This paper uses the explanation of blindsight generated by a two-systems theory of vision in order to set Siewert a dilemma. Either his blindsight examples are modelled on actual blindsight, in which case certain reductive theories of phenomenal consciousness will have no difficulty in accommodating them. Or they are intended to be purely imaginary, in which case they will have no force against a reductive naturalist
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102Thinking in language?: Evolution and a modularist possibilityIn Peter Carruthers & Jill Boucher (eds.), [Book Chapter], Cambridge University Press. pp. 94-119. 1998.This chapter argues that our language faculty can both be a peripheral module of the mind and be crucially implicated in a variety of central cognitive functions, including conscious propositional thinking and reasoning. I also sketch arguments for the view that natural language representations (e.g. of Chomsky's Logical Form, or LF) might serve as a lingua franca for interactions (both conscious and non-conscious) between a number of quasi-modular central systems. The ideas presented are compar…Read more
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43Languages 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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55Massive modularity is consistent with most forms of neural reuseBehavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (4): 289-290. 2010.Anderson claims that the hypothesis of massive neural reuse is inconsistent with massive mental modularity. But much depends upon how each thesis is understood. We suggest that the thesis of massive modularity presented in Carruthers (2006) is consistent with the forms of neural reuse that are actually supported by the data cited, while being inconsistent with a stronger version of reuse that Anderson seems to support
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20Better tests of consciousness are needed, but skepticism about unconscious processes is unwarrantedBehavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (1): 36-37. 2014.
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10Human Consciousness By Alistair Hannay London: Routledge, 1990, 221 pp., No price given (review)Philosophy 66 (258): 535-. 1991.
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106Pretend 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.