•  16
    The Limits of Spectatorial Folk Psychology
    Mind and Language 19 (5): 548-573. 2004.
    It is almost universally agreed that the main business of commonsense psychology is that of providing generally reliable predictions and explanations of the actions of others. In line with this, it is also generally assumed that we are normally at theoretical remove from others such that we are always ascribing causally efficacious mental states to them for the purpose of prediction, explanation and control. Building on the work of those who regard our primary intersubjective interactions as a f…Read more
  •  91
    The Extended Mind (review)
    Analysis 71 (4): 785-787. 2011.
  •  638
    The limits of spectatorial folk psychology
    Mind and Language 19 (5): 548-73. 2004.
      It is almost universally agreed that the main business of commonsense psychology is that of providing generally reliable predictions and explanations of the actions of others. In line with this, it is also generally assumed that we are normally at theoretical remove from others such that we are always ascribing causally efficacious mental states to them for the purpose of prediction, explanation and control. Building on the work of those who regard our primary intersubjective interactions as a…Read more
  •  47
    Truly Enactive Emotion
    Emotion Review 4 (2): 176-181. 2012.
    Any adequate account of emotion must accommodate the fact that emotions, even those of the most basic kind, exhibit intentionality as well as phenomenality. This article argues that a good place to start in providing such an account is by adjusting Prinz’s (2004) embodied appraisal theory (EAT) of emotions. EAT appeals to teleosemantics in order to account for the world-directed content of embodied appraisals. Although the central idea behind EAT is essentially along the right lines, as it stand…Read more
  •  104
    Representation Reconsidered (review)
    Philosophical Psychology 24 (1): 135-139. 2011.
    This Article does not have an abstract
  •  3303
    There is a paradox about how our social understanding develops if we take seriously both theory theory and the cognitivist dictum that all skilful interaction has robust conceptual underpinnings. On the one hand, it is clear that young infants demonstrate a capacity to reliably detect and respond to other’s intentions. For example, recent experimental evidence confirms that they have the capacity to appropriately parse what would otherwise be an undifferentiated behaviour stream at its mentalist…Read more
  •  73
    REC: Revolution Effected by Clarification
    Topoi 36 (3): 377-391. 2017.
    This paper shows how a radical approach to enactivism provides a way of clarifying and unifying different varieties of enactivism and enactivist-friendly approaches so as to provide a genuine alternative to classical cognitivism. Section 1 reminds readers of the broad church character of the enactivism framework. Section 2 explicates how radical enactivism is best understood not as a kind of enactivism per se but as a programme for radicalizing and consolidating the many different enactivist off…Read more
  •  23
    The Character of Consciousness. (review)
    Philosophy 87 (2): 298-306. 2012.
  •  84
    Wittgenstein and Reason (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2009 (2). 2009.
  •  25
    Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (review)
    Philosophical Quarterly 65 (260): 572-576. 2015.
  •  71
    Re-Authoring Narrative Therapy
    Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 24 (2): 157-167. 2017.
    How we narrate our lives can affect us, for good or ill. Our narrative practices make an undeniable difference to our psychosocial well-being. All so-called "talking cures" – including traditional psychoanalytic and psychodynamic approaches to therapy and newer techniques – are motivated by this insight about the power of personal narratives. All therapies of the discursive ilk make use of narratives, in one way or another, as a means of enabling individuals to frame, or reframe, and to manage t…Read more
  •  38
    Ask nearly any analytic philosopher of mind how we understand intentional actions performed for reasons and you are bound to be told that we do so by deploying mental concepts, such as beliefs and desires, in systematic ways. This way of making sense of actions is known as commonsense or folk psychology (or CSP or FP for short). There have been many interesting debates about CSP over the years. These have focused on questions including: How fundamental and universal is this practice? Which speci…Read more
  •  10
    Consciousness (review)
    Philosophy 86 (2): 303-308. 2011.
  •  179
    In this book, Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin promote the cause of a radically enactive, embodied approach to cognition that holds that some kinds of minds -- basic minds -- are neither best explained by processes involving the manipulation of ...
  •  780
    Questing for Happiness: Augmenting Aristotle with Davidson?
    South African Journal of Philosophy 32 (4). 2004.
    Drawing heavily on Aristotle, Tabensky attempts to establish ‘an ethic that flows from the very structure of our being’, but he also calls on Davidson’s arguments about the essentially social character of rationality to shore up Aristotle’s claim that we are essentially social beings. This much of his project, I argue is successful. However Tabensky takes this a step further and proposes a pluralist ethic on the grounds that a ‘fully’ or ‘properly’ instantiated account of the ‘ideal’ conditions …Read more
  •  1174
    Many psychopathological disorders – clinical depression, borderline personality disorder, schizophrenia and autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) – are commonly classified as disorders of the self. In an intuitive sense this sort of classification is unproblematic. There can be no doubt that such disorders make a difference to one’s ability to form and maintain a coherent sense of oneself in various ways. However, any theoretically rigourous attempt to show that they relate to underlying problems wit…Read more
  •  754
    It is possible to pursue philosophy with a clarificatory end in mind. Doing philosophy in this mode neither reduces to simply engaging in therapy or theorizing. This paper defends the possibility of this distinctive kind of philosophical activity and gives an account of its product—non-theoretical insights—in an attempt to show that there exists a third, ‘live’ option for understanding what philosophy has to offer. It responds to criticisms leveled at elucidatory philosophy by defenders of extre…Read more
  •  182
    Philosophy of Mind’s New Lease on Life: Autopoietic Enactivism meets Teleosemiotics
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 18 (5-6): 44-64. 2011.
    This commentary will seek to clarify certain core features of Thompson’s proposal about the enactive nature of basic mentality, as best it can, and to bring his ideas into direct conversation with accounts of basic cognition of the sort favoured by analytical philosophers of mind and more traditional cognitive scientists – i.e. those who tend to be either suspicious or critical of enactive/embodied approaches (to the extent that they confess to understanding them at all). My proposed way of open…Read more
  •  1044
    Presumptuous Naturalism: A Cautionary Tale
    American Philosophical Quarterly 48 (2): 129-145. 2011.
    Concentrating on their treatment of folk psychology, this paper seeks to establish that, in the form advocated by its leading proponents, the Canberra project is presumptuous in certain key respects. Crucially, it presumes (1) that our everyday practices entail the existence of implicit folk theories; (2) that naturalists ought to be interested primarily in what such theories say; and (3) that the core content of such theories is adequately characterized by establishing what everyone finds intui…Read more
  •  38
    The ability to produce and consume stories is a commonplace yet remarkable human activity. No wonder, then, that thinkers from vastly diverse fields are so interested in our narrative practices. Some argue that storytelling helps us to make sense of our lives and actions, while others claim that narratives are crucial in shaping or creating our identities. yet in all this discussion, the nature and core properties of stories are rarely put under philosophical scrutiny in the way that Gregory Cur…Read more
  • Prins Autos Herredomme: Psykologi I Naturbidenskabens Tidsalder
    Philosophia: tidsskrift for filosofi 21 (1-2): 61-80. 1992.
  •  73
    Overly Enactive Imagination? Radically Re‐Imagining Imagining
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 53 (S1): 68-89. 2015.
    A certain philosophical frame of mind holds that contentless imaginings are unimaginable, “inconceivable” (Shapiro, p. 214) ‐ that it is simply not possible to imagine acts of imagining in the absence of representational content. Against this, this paper argues that there is no naturalistically respectable way to rule out the possibility of contentless imaginings on purely analytic or conceptual grounds. Moreover, agreeing with Langland‐Hassan (2015), it defends the view that the best way to und…Read more
  •  153
    Narrative self-shaping: a modest proposal
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 15 (1): 21-41. 2016.
    Decoupling a modestly construed Narrative Self Shaping Hypothesis from Strong Narrativism this paper attempts to motivate devoting our intellectual energies to the former. Section one briefly introduces the notions of self-shaping and rehearses reasons for thinking that self-shaping, in a suitably tame form, is, at least to some extent, simply unavoidable for reflective beings. It is against this background that the basic commitments of a modest Narrative Self-Shaping Hypothesis are articulated.…Read more
  •  124
    Neural representations not needed - no more pleas, please
    with Erik Myin
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 13 (2): 241-256. 2014.
    Colombo (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2012) argues that we have compelling reasons to posit neural representations because doing so yields unique explanatory purchase in central cases of social norm compliance. We aim to show that there is no positive substance to Colombo’s plea—nothing that ought to move us to endorse representationalism in this domain, on any level. We point out that exposing the vices of the phenomenological arguments against representationalism does not, on its …Read more
  •  914
    Nonconceptual content and objectivity
    Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy (6). 1998.
    In recent times the question of whether or not there is such a thing as nonconceptual content has been the object of much serious attention. For analytical philosophers, the locus classicus of the view that there is such a phenomena is to be found in Evans remarks about perceptual experience in Varieties of Reference. John McDowell has taken issue with Evans over his claim that "conceptual capacities are first brought into operation only when one makes a judgement of experience, and at that poi…Read more
  •  119
    Narrative and Understanding Persons
    Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 60 1-16. 2007.
    The human world is replete with narratives – narratives of our making that are uniquely appreciated by us. Some thinkers have afforded special importance to our capacity to generate such narratives, seeing it as variously enabling us to: exercise our imaginations in unique ways; engender an understanding of actions performed for reasons; and provide a basis for the kind of reflection and evaluation that matters vitally to moral and self development. Perhaps most radically, some hold that narrati…Read more
  •  27
    Narrative, Emotion, and Insight (review)
    Mind 121 (484): 1052-1055. 2012.
  •  19
    Narrative and Understanding Persons (edited book)
    Cambridge University Press. 2007.
    The human world is replete with narratives - narratives of our making that are uniquely appreciated by us. Some thinkers have afforded special importance to our capacity to generate such narratives, seeing it as variously enabling us to: exercise our imaginations in unique ways; engender an understanding of actions performed for reasons; and provide a basis for the kind of reflection and evaluation that matters vitally to moral and self development. Perhaps most radically, some hold that narrati…Read more