•  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
  • Historically, the philosophy of language has held pride of place in the analytical tradition. In fact, it would be safe to say that for a long time it had been unquestioningly regarded as first philosophy. The reason for this is twofold. Firstly, many analytical philosophers held (and many still hold) that we could only get at the underlying nature of our world by understanding the nature of thought. And secondly, they held (and many still hold) that we could only understand the nature of though…Read more
  •  68
    Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (review)
    Topoi 35 (2): 617-626. 2016.
    Readers beware! This book is other than it first seems. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s latest philosophical offering is unlike anything that we have had from him to date. Its preface warns that the Tractatus is no textbook. This is an extreme understatement; really it is a deep puzzle—one that must be handled with great care. As the first lines signal there has been a radical change in the author’s characteristic style. Gone are the ingenious, probing explorations of topics undertaken in his highly fragm…Read more
  •  911
    Knowing what? Radical versus conservative enactivism
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4 (4): 389-405. 2005.
    The binary divide between traditional cognitivist and enactivist paradigms is tied to their respective commitments to understanding cognition as based on knowing that as opposed to knowing how. Using O’Regan’s and No¨e’s landmark sensorimotor contingency theory of perceptual experience as a foil, I demonstrate how easy it is to fall into conservative thinking. Although their account is advertised as decidedly ‘skill-based’, on close inspection it shows itself to be riddled with suppositions thre…Read more
  •  51
    Limited engagements and narrative extensions
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 16 (3). 2008.
    E-approaches to the mind stress the embodied, embedded and enactive nature of mental phenomena. In their more radical, non-representational variants these approaches offer innovative and powerful new ways of understanding fundamental modes of intersubjective social interaction: I-approaches. While promising, E and I accounts have natural limits. In particular, they are unable to explain human competence in making sense of reasons for actions in folk-psychological terms. In this paper I outline t…Read more
  •  84
    Predictive Processing accounts of Cognition, PPC, promise to forge productive alliances that will unite approaches that are otherwise at odds. Can it? This paper argues that it can’t—or at least not so long as it sticks with the cognitivist rendering that Clark and others favor. In making this case the argument of this paper unfolds as follows: Sect. 1 describes the basics of PPC—its attachment to the idea that we perceive the world by guessing the world. It then details the reasons why so many …Read more
  •  88
    This is a truly groundbreaking work that examines today’s notions of folk psychology. Bringing together disciplines as various as cognitive science and anthropology, the authors analyze and question key assumptions about the nature, scope and function of folk psychology.
  •  944
    Deciding what role perspicuous representations play in Wittgenstein’s philosophy matters, not only for determining what one thinks of the contributions of this great figure of twentieth century philosophy but also for recognising the ‘live options’ for conducting philosophical enquiries full stop. It is not surprising, given this importance, that perspicuous representations is the topic of the opening chapter of Gordon Baker’s posthumous collection of essays on philosophical method. In that cont…Read more
  •  49
    This paper introduces this special issue which is focused on its target paper - The Natural Origins of Content. The target paper has had a robust and considered set of fifteen replies; a literal A to Z of papers. This extended introduction explains the background thinking and challenges that motivated the target article's proposed research programme. It also provides a sneak peak preview and navigational aid to the special issue’s contents. Brief highlights of each commentary are provided and th…Read more
  •  88
    Folk Psychology without Theory or Simulation
    In D. Hutto & M. Ratcliffe (eds.), Folk Psychology Reassessed, Springer. pp. 115--135. 2007.
    This paper spells out just how the Narrative Practice Hypothesis, if true, undercuts any need to appeal to either theory or simulation when it comes to explaining the basis of folk psychological understanding: these heuristics do not come into play other than in cases of in which the framework is used to speculate about why another may have acted. To add appropriate force to this observation, I first say something about why we should reject the widely held assumption that the primary business of…Read more
  •  48
    Established wisdom in cognitive science holds that the everyday folk psychological abilities of humans -- our capacity to understand intentional actions performed for reasons -- are inherited from our evolutionary forebears. In _Folk Psychological Narratives_, Daniel Hutto challenges this view and argues for the sociocultural basis of this familiar ability. He makes a detailed case for the idea that the way we make sense of intentional actions essentially involves the construction of narratives …Read more
  •  151
    Folk psychology as narrative practice
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 16 (6-8). 2009.
    There has been a long-standing interest in the putative roles that various so-called ‘theory of mind’ abilities might play in enabling us to understand and enjoy narratives. Of late, as our understanding of the complexity and diversity of everyday psychological capacities has become more nuanced and variegated, new possibilities have been articulated: (i) that our capacity for a sophisticated, everyday understanding of actions in terms of reason (our folk psychology) may itself be best character…Read more
  •  101
    Editorial: Social Cognition: Mindreading and Alternatives
    with Mitchell Herschbach and Victoria Southgate
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 2 (3): 375-395. 2011.
    Human beings, even very young infants, and members of several other species, exhibit remarkable capacities for attending to and engaging with others. These basic capacities have been the subject of intense research in developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, comparative psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind over the last several decades. Appropriately characterizing the exact level and nature of these abilities and what lies at their basis continues to prove a tricky business. …Read more
  •  5
    First communions
    In J. Zlatev, T. Racine, C. Sinha & E. Itkonen (eds.), The Shared Mind: Perspectives on Intersubjectivity, John Benjamins. pp. 12--245. 2008.
  •  62
  •  42
    Edouard Machery , Doing Without Concepts. (review)
    Philosophy in Review 33 (2): 142-145. 2013.
  •  100
    Enactivism, from a Wittgensteinian Point of View
    American Philosophical Quarterly 50 (3): 281-302. 2013.
    Enactivists seek to revolutionize the new sciences of the mind. In doing so, they promote adopting a thoroughly anti-intellectualist starting point, one that sees mentality as rooted in engaged, embodied activity as opposed to detached forms of thought. In advocating the so-called embodied turn, enactivists touch on recurrent themes of central importance in Wittgenstein's later philosophy. More than this, today's enactivists characterize the nature of minds and how they fundamentally relate to t…Read more
  •  922
    The core claim of this paper is that mind minding of the sort required for the simplest and most pervasive forms of joint attentional activity is best understood and explained in non-representational, enactivist terms. In what follows I will attempt to convince the reader of its truth in three steps. The first step, section two, clarifies the target explanandum. The second step, section three, is wholly descriptive. It highlights the core features of a Radically Enactivist proposal about elemen…Read more
  •  361
    Extensive enactivism: why keep it all in?
    Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8 (706): 102178. 2014.
    Radical enactive and embodied approaches to cognitive science oppose the received view in the sciences of the mind in denying that cognition fundamentally involves contentful mental representation. This paper argues that the fate of representationalism in cognitive science matters significantly to how best to understand the extent of cognition. It seeks to establish that any move away from representationalism toward pure, empirical functionalism fails to provide a substantive “mark of the cognit…Read more
  •  13
    Davidson’s Identity Crisis
    Dialectica 52 (1): 45-61. 1998.
    Professor Davidson's anomalous monism has been subject to the criticism that, despite advertisements to the contrary, if it were true mental properties would be epiphenomenal. To this Davidson has replied that his critics have misunderstood his views concerning the extensional nature of causal relations and the intensional character of causal explanations. I call this his 'extension reply'. This paper argues that there are two ways to read Davidson's 'extension reply'; one weaker and one stronge…Read more
  •  939
    Misreadings, clarifications and reminders: A reply to Hutchinson and read
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 14 (4). 2006.
    This is a reply to Hutchinson, P. and Read, R. “An Elucidatory Interpretation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: Critique of Daniel D. Hutto’s and Marie McGinn’s Reading of Tractatus 6.54″. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 14(1) 2006: 1-29. A further reply from Hutchinson, P.”Unsinnig: A Reply to Hutto” is also forthcoming.
  •  526
    Cognition without representation?
    In A. Reigler & Markus F. Peschl (eds.), Understanding Representation, Plenum Press. 1999.
    A principled understanding of representations requires that they have objective, systematic content. It is claimed that there is an interesting form of nonconceptual, intentionality which is processed by non-systematic connectionist networks and has its correctness conditions provided by a modest biosemantics; but this type of content is not properly representational. Finally, I consider the consequences that such a verdict has on eliminativist views that look to connectionism as a means of radi…Read more
  •  51
    Choking RECtified: embodied expertise beyond Dreyfus
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 14 (2): 309-331. 2015.
    On a Dreyfusian account performers choke when they reflect upon and interfere with established routines of purely embodied expertise. This basic explanation of choking remains popular even today and apparently enjoys empirical support. Its driving insight can be understood through the lens of diverse philosophical visions of the embodied basis of expertise. These range from accounts of embodied cognition that are ultra conservative with respect to representational theories of cognition to those …Read more
  •  54
    This comment on Stueber’s article clarifies the nature of the core disagreement between his approach to understanding reasons and mine. The purely philosophical nature of the dispute is highlighted. It is argued that understanding someone’s narrative often suffices for understanding the person’s reasons in ordinary cases. It is observed that Stueber has yet to provide a compelling counter case. There is also a brief clarification of some of the empirical commitments of the narrative practice hyp…Read more
  •  244
    Consciousness Demystified
    The Monist 78 (4): 464-479. 1995.
    Professor Dennett has recently embarked on what he considers a “demystifying philosophical investigation” with respect to the phenomena of consciousness. In essence the strategy he has employed is one of getting us to “trade in” our ordinary intuitions so as to soften us up for the first phases of a full-fledged “scientific” explanation of consciousness in terms of sub-personal systems and their ontogenetic origins. His hope is that, once we are freed from certain misleading metaphors about the …Read more