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102Credibility, confirmation and explanationBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 38 (3): 301-317. 1987.
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2Brain Fiction: Self-Deception and the Riddle of Confabulation, by William Hirstein (review)Philosophy in Review 25 (4): 262-264. 2005.
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106Emergence in science and philosophy * edited by Antonella Corradini and Timothy O'ConnorAnalysis 72 (2): 396-398. 2012.
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377Rosenberg, reducibility and consciousnessPSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 12. 2006.Rosenberg’s general argumentative strategy in favour of panpsychism is an extension of a traditional pattern. Although his argument is complex and intricate, I think a model that is historically significant and fundamentally similar to the position Rosenberg advances might help us understand the case for panpsychism. Thus I want to begin by considering a Leibnizian argument for panpsychism
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66Probabilistic Semantics, Identity and BeliefCanadian Journal of Philosophy 13 (3). 1983.The goal of standard semantics is to provide truth conditions for the sentences of a given language. Probabilistic Semantics does not share this aim; it might be said instead, if rather cryptically, that Probabilistic Semantics aims to provide belief conditions.The central and guiding idea of Probabilistic Semantics is that each rational individual has ‘within’ him or her a personal subjective probability function. The output of the function when given a certain sentence as input represents the …Read more
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79The reality of nowInternational Studies in the Philosophy of Science 13 (1). 1999.The apparent 'flow' of time is one of its most mysterious features, and one which discomforts both scientists and philosophers. One of the most striking assaults upon it is McTaggart's argument that the idea of temporal flow is demonstratively incoherent. In this paper I first urge that the idea of temporal flow is an important part of our intuitive understanding of time, underpinning several of our notions about rationality and time. Second, I try to undercut McTaggart's argument by showing tha…Read more
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14Conscious intentionalityIn Denis Fisette (ed.), Consciousness and Intentionality: Models and Modalities of Attribution, Springer. pp. 33--49. 1999.
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12Kant and the Mind Andrew Brook Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 341 pp (review)Dialogue 37 (3): 653-. 1998.
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376Is self-representation necessary for consciousness?PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 12. 2006.Brook and Raymont do not assert that self-representing representations are sufficient to generate consciousness, but they do assert that they are necessary, at least in the sense that self-representation provides the most plausible mechanism for generating conscious mental states. I argue that a first-order approach to consciousness is equally capable of accounting for the putative features of consciousness which are supposed to favor the self-representational account. If nothing is gained the s…Read more
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1The constructed and the secret selfIn Andrew Brook & Richard Devidi (eds.), Self-Reference Amd Self-Awareness, Advances in Consciousness Research Volume 11, John Benjamins. 2001.
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62A note on the 'quantum eraser'Philosophy of Science 63 (1): 81-90. 1996.This note aims to make more familiar to philosophers yet another bizarre quantum mechanical effect with disturbing metaphysical implications. It is possible to modify the classic double-slit experiment so that one can register the path of a particle to determine which slit it passes through, and then erase this registered information so that the interference effects which would normally disappear upon registration of the "which path" information are reconstituted. Thus the "trajectory" of partic…Read more
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17Fodor's Theory of Content: Problems and ObjectionsPhilosophy of Science 60 (2): 262-277. 1993.Jerry Fodor has recently proposed a new entry into the list of information based approaches to semantic content aimed at explicating the general notion of representation for both mental states and linguistic tokens. The basic idea is that a token means what causes its production. The burden of the theory is to select the proper cause from the sea of causal influences which aid in generating any token while at the same time avoiding the absurdity of everything's being literally meaningful. I argu…Read more
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70Externalism and token identityPhilosophical Quarterly 42 (169): 439-48. 1992.Donald Davidson espouses two fundamental theses about the individuation of mental events. The thesis of causal individuation asserts that sameness of cause and effect is sufficient and necessary for event identity. The thesis of content individuation gives only a sufficient condition for difference of mental events: if e and f have different contents then they are different mental events. I argue that given these theses, psychological externalism--the view that mental content is determined by fa…Read more
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27Review of Alexander batthyany, Avshalom Elitzur (eds.), Mind and its Place in the World: Non-Reductionist Approaches to the Ontology of Consciousness (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2006 (9). 2006.
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24Our knowledge forms a highly interconnected and dynamically changing body of propositions. One obviously important way that knowledge changes is via rational inference, based either upon new insight into the content of what we already know or upon new knowledge provided by the senses. The most obvious codification of the acceptability of inference driven knowledge growth is the so-called known entailment closure principle, the principle that if S knows that p and knows that p implies q then S kn…Read more
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2David Copp, ed., Nuclear Weapons, Deterrence and Disarmament Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 8 (11): 436-438. 1988.
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47Higher Order Thought theories of consciousness contend that consciousness can be explicated in terms of a relation between mental states of different
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7The Routledge Handbook of Panpsychism (edited book)Routledge. 2019.Panpsychism is the view that consciousness a sh the most puzzling and strangest phenomenon in the entire universe a sh is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the.
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1Jeremy Butterfield and Constantine Pagonis, eds., From Physics to Philosophy Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 20 (5): 318-319. 2000.
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405The 'intrinsic nature' argument for panpsychismJournal of Consciousness Studies 13 (10-11): 129-145. 2006.Strawson’s case in favor of panpsychism is at heart an updated version of a venerable form of argument I’ll call the ‘intrinsic nature’ argument. It is an extremely interesting argument which deploys all sorts of high caliber metaphysical weaponry (despite the ‘down home’ appeals to common sense which Strawson frequently makes). The argument is also subtle and intricate. So let’s spend some time trying to articulate its general form
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190Concessionary Dualism and PhysicalismRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 67 217-237. 2010.The doctrine of physicalism can be roughly spelled out simply as the claim that the physical state of the world determines the total state of the world. However, since there are many forms of determination, a somewhat more precise characterization is needed. One obvious problem with the simple formulation is that the traditional doctrine of epiphenomenalism holds that the mental is determined by the physical (and epiphenomenalists need not assert that there are any properties except mental and p…Read more
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41Introspection and the Elementary Acts of MindDialogue 39 (1): 53-76. 2000.RésuméFred Dretske a développé, à titre de composante de sa théorie de la conscience, une théorie de I'introspection. Celle-ciprésente une plausibilityé indépendante, elle résiste à des objections qui affectent nombre d'autres théories et elle suggère des liens très féconds dans plusieurs domaines de la science cognitive. La version qu'en donne Dretske est restreinte à la connaissance introspective des états perceptuels. Mon objectif ici est d'étendre la théorie à tous les états mentaux. Le méca…Read more
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250Thought and syntaxPhilosophy of Science Association 1992 481-491. 1992.It has been argued that Psychological Externalism is irrelevant to psychology. The grounds for this are that PE fails to individuate intentional states in accord with causal power, and that psychology is primarily interested in the causal roles of psychological states. It is also claimed that one can individuate psychological states via their syntactic structure in some internal "language of thought". This syntactic structure is an internal feature of psychological states and thus provides a key…Read more