•  51
    Book reviews (review)
    with Stephen E. Braude, Hilary Kornblith, William W. Schonbein, and Thomas Nickles
    Philosophical Psychology 10 (4): 551-564. 1997.
  •  80
    Jay Garfield’s Engaging Buddhism admirably shows the relevance of Indian philosophy to the interests of mainstream analytic Anglophone philosophers. Garfield deploys the Indian tradition to critique phenomenal realism, the view that there really are qualia or phenomenal properties—that there really is ‘something it’s like’ to be undergoing the experience you are undergoing right now. I argue that Garfield’s critique probably turns on a false dilemma that omits the possibility of introspection as…Read more
  •  67
    Reply to Hurlburt
    with Alan T. Moore
    Consciousness and Cognition 63 (C): 143-145. 2018.
  •  103
    The experience of reading
    with Alan Tonnies Moore
    Consciousness and Cognition 62 (C): 57-68. 2018.
    What do people consciously experience when they read? There has been almost no rigorous research on this question, and opinions diverge radically among both philosophers and psychologists. We describe three studies of the phenomenology of reading and its relationship to memory of textual detail and general cognitive abilities. We find three main results. First, there is substantial variability in reports about reading experience, both within and between participants. Second, reported reading exp…Read more
  •  214
    We present evidence that mainstream Anglophone philosophy is insular in the sense that participants in this academic tradition tend mostly to cite or interact with other participants in this academic tradition, while having little academic interaction with philosophers writing in other languages. Among our evidence: In a sample of articles from elite Anglophone philosophy journals, 97% of citations are citations of work originally written in English; 96% of members of editorial boards of elite A…Read more
  • Little or No Experience Outside of Attention?
    with Russell Hurlburt
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 18 (1): 234-252. 2011.
  • Presuppositions and Background Assumptions
    with Russell Hurlburt
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 18 (1): 206-233. 2011.
  •  4
    How well do we know our own conscious experience? the case of visual imagery
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 9 (5-6): 35-53. 2002.
    Philosophers tend to assume that we have excellent knowledge of our own current conscious experience or 'phenomenology'. I argue that our knowledge of one aspect of our experience, the experience of visual imagery, is actually rather poor. Precedent for this position is found among the introspective psychologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Two main arguments are advanced toward the conclusion that our knowledge of our own imagery is poor. First, the reader is asked to …Read more
  •  3662
    Knowing That P without Believing That P
    Noûs 47 (2): 371-384. 2013.
    Most epistemologists hold that knowledge entails belief. However, proponents of this claim rarely offer a positive argument in support of it. Rather, they tend to treat the view as obvious and assert that there are no convincing counterexamples. We find this strategy to be problematic. We do not find the standard view obvious, and moreover, we think there are cases in which it is intuitively plausible that a subject knows some proposition P without—or at least without determinately—believing tha…Read more
  •  221
    We present several quantitative analyses of the prevalence and visibility of women in moral, political, and social philosophy, compared to other areas of philosophy, and how the situation has changed over time. Measures include faculty lists from the Philosophical Gourmet Report, PhD job placement data from the Academic Placement Data and Analysis project, the National Science Foundation's Survey of Earned Doctorates, conference programs of the American Philosophical Association, authorship in e…Read more
  •  185
    This paper distinguishes two conceptions of representation at work in the philosophical literature. On the first, "contentive" conception (found, for example, in Searle and Fodor), something is a representation, roughly, if it has "propositional content". On the second, "indicative" conception (found, for example, in Dretske), representations must not only have content but also have the function of indicating something about the world. Desire is representational on the first view but not on the …Read more
  •  739
    People often sincerely assert or judge one thing (for example, that all the races are intellectually equal) while at the same time being disposed to act in a way evidently quite contrary to the espoused attitude (for example, in a way that seems to suggest an implicit assumption of the intellectual superiority of their own race). Such cases should be regarded as ‘in-between’ cases of believing, in which it's neither quite right to ascribe the belief in question nor quite right to say that the pe…Read more
  •  108
    In Schwitzgebel I argued that the United States, considered as a concrete entity with people as some or all of its parts, meets plausible materialistic criteria for consciousness. Kammerer defends materialism against this seemingly unintuitive conclusion by means of an “anti-nesting principle” according to which group entities cannot be literally phenomenally conscious if they contain phenomenally conscious subparts who stand in a certain type of functional relation to the group as a whole. I ra…Read more
  • The Philosophical and Psychological Context of DES
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 18 (1): 288-294. 2011.
  •  346
    Human Nature and Moral Education in Mencius, Xunzi, Hobbes, and Rousseau
    History of Philosophy Quarterly 24 (2). 2007.
    (2007) History of Philosophy Quarterly. 24, 147-168.
  •  147
    Philosophers tend to be pretty impressed by human self-knowledge. Descartes (1641/1984) thought our knowledge of our own stream of experience was the secure and indubitable foundation upon which to build our knowledge of the rest of the world. Hume – who was capable of being skeptical about almost anything – said that the only existences we can be certain of are our own sensory and imagistic experiences (1739/1978, p. 212). Perhaps the most prominent writer on self-knowledge in contemporary phil…Read more
  •  882
    A Phenomenal, Dispositional Account of Belief
    Noûs 36 (2): 249-275. 2002.
    This paper describes and defends in detail a novel account of belief, an account inspired by Ryle's dispositional characterization of belief, but emphasizing irreducibly phenomenal and cognitive dispositions as well as behavioral dispositions. Potential externalist and functionalist objections are considered, as well as concerns motivated by the inevitably ceteris paribus nature of the relevant dispositional attributions. It is argued that a dispositional account of belief is particularly well-s…Read more
  •  93
    Précis: Perplexities of Consciousness (review)
    Philosophical Studies 165 (3): 1161-1163. 2013.
  •  3
    Presuppositions and background assumptions
    with Russell Hurlburt
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 18 (1): 206-233. 2011.
  •  266
    Mad Belief?
    Neuroethics 5 (1): 13-17. 2011.
    “Mad belief” (in analogy with Lewisian “mad pain”) would be a belief state with none of the causal role characteristic of belief—a state not caused or apt to have been caused by any of the sorts of events that usually cause belief and involving no disposition toward the usual behavioral or other manifestations of belief. On token-functionalist views of belief, mad belief in this sense is conceptually impossible. Cases of delusion—or at least some cases of delusion—might be cases of belief gone h…Read more
  •  215
    In this dissertation, I examine three philosophically important concepts that play a foundational role in developmental psychology: theory, representation, and belief. I describe different ways in which the concepts have been understood and present reasons why a developmental psychologist, or a philosopher attuned to cognitive development, should prefer one understanding of these concepts over another.
  •  418
    In-between believing
    Philosophical Quarterly 51 (202): 76-82. 2001.
    For any proposition P, it may sometimes occur that a person is not quite accurately describable as believing that P, nor quite accurately describable as failing to believe that P. Such a person, I will say, is in an "in-between state of belief." This paper argues for the prevalence of in-between states of believing and asserts the need for an account of belief that allows us intelligibly to talk about in-between believing. It is suggested that Bayesian and representationalist approaches are inad…Read more
  •  33
    Theories in Children and the Rest of Us
    Philosophy of Science 63 (S3). 1996.
    I offer an account of theories useful in addressing the question of whether children are young theoreticians whose development can be regarded as the product of theory change. I argue that to regard a set of propositions as a theory is to be committed to evaluating that set in terms of its explanatory power. If theory change is the substance of cognitive development, we should see patterns of affect and arousal consonant with the emergence and resolution of explanation-seeking curiosity. Affect …Read more
  •  205
    According to rich views of consciousness (e.g., James, Searle), we have a constant, complex flow of experience (or 'phenomenology') in multiple modalities simultaneously. According to thin views (e.g., Dennett, Mack and Rock), conscious experience is limited to one or a few topics, regions, objects, or modalities at a time. Existing introspective and empirical arguments on this issue (including arguments from 'inattentional blindness') generally beg the question. Participants in the present expe…Read more
  •  113
    Children's theories and the drive to explain
    Science & Education 8 (5): 457-488. 1999.
    Debate has been growing in developmental psychology over how much the cognitive development of children is like theory change in science. Useful debate on this topic requires a clear understanding of what it would be for a child to have a theory. I argue that existing accounts of theories within philosophy of science and developmental psychology either are less precise than is ideal for the task or cannot capture everyday theorizing of the sort that children, if they theorize, must do. I then pr…Read more