• Review of Jonardon Ganeri: Attention Not Self (review)
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (1): 194-207. 2018.
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    Attention and Attentiveness: A defence of the argument for adverbialism
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    In recent philosophical work on attention, several authors have employed versions of an argument purporting to show that attention is not identical to any cognitive process. Others have criticised this argument. The present article addresses their various criticisms, and shows the original argument to be a valid one. It also shows that this argument cannot be resisted by taking attention to be a disjunction of several processes, by taking it be a genus of process that is composed of various spec…Read more
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    The position that Stokes’s Thinking and Perceiving aims to overthrow is committed to the idea that the facts about one’s propositional attitudes and the facts about one’s perceptual experiences are alike grounded in facts about representations (in various formats) that are being held in a short or long term memory store, so that computations can be performed upon them. Claims about modularity are claims about the distinctness of these memory stores, and of these representations. One way in which…Read more
  •  49
    Emancipatory Attention
    Philosophers' Imprint. forthcoming.
    The aim of this paper is to show that, for the purposes of addressing the epistemic aspects of systemic injustice, we need a notion of emancipatory attention. When the epistemic and ethical elements of an injustice are intertwined, it is a misleading idealisation to think of these epistemological elements as calling for the promotion of knowledge through a rational dialectic. Taking them to instead call for a campaign of consciousness-raising runs into difficulties of its own, when negotiating…Read more
  • The moral success or failure of our conduct is sometimes determined by the rationality of our practical decision making, and sometimes by the continence with which we act on the decisions that we have made. Both factors depend on the things that we find salient. And rather than making some culpable error in reasoning, or failing to resist some temptation, we often behave poorly just because some important aspect of the situation never became salient to us. We might also act well only because the…Read more
  •  617
    What is Attention? Adverbialist Theories
    WIREs Cognitive Science 14 (1). 2023.
    This article presents theories of attention that attempt to derive their answer to the question of what attention is from their answers to the question of what it is for some activity to be done attentively. Such theories provide a distinctive account of the difficulties that are faced by the attempt to locate processes in the brain by which the phenomena of attention can be explained. Their account does not share the pessimism of theories suggesting that the concept of attention is defective. I…Read more
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    Review of Mark Solms' The Hidden Spring (review)
    TLS: The Times Literary Supplement 6173 (July 23): 25. 2021.
    Brief review of Mark Solms' "The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness"
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    Famous Wet Raincoat: Review of Erik Larson The Myth of Artificial Intelligence (review)
    TLS: The Times Literary Supplement 6169 (June 25th): 25. 2021.
    Book review
  • Mind the gaps (review)
    TLS: The Times Literary Supplement 6153 27. 2021.
    Review of Matthew Cobb 'The Idea of the Brain: The past and future of neuroscience'
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    As a tactic for preventing an enquiry into attention’s relationship to consciousness from lapsing into ill-definition, this chapter treats ‘attention’ as a term defined by the role that is assigned to it in our explanations of empirically established psychological phenomena (especially those involving the modulation of reaction times). It reviews evidence showing that such modulations are associated with processing that stands in various relations to consciousness. The psychological phenomena th…Read more
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    The Role of Attention in Multisensory Integration
    Multisensory Research 31 (3). 2020.
    Evidence concerning the relationship between attention and multisensory integration has long been thought to lead us into a paradox. The paradox has its roots in evidence that seems to show that attention exerts an influence on integration, and that integration also exerts an influence on attention. This creates an appearance of paradox only if it is understood to imply that particular instances of the integration process must occur both before and after particular instances of the attention pro…Read more
  • The process of inference
    In Rowland Stout (ed.), Process, Action, and Experience, Oxford University Press. pp. 149-167. 2018.
    The set of entities that serves as the domain for our discourse about the mind is metaphysically heterogenous. It includes processes, events, properties, modes, and states. In the latter part of the twentieth century, philosophers started to suppose that a philosophical theory of the mind should be primarily concerned with the explanation of mental states. Those states could then be mentioned in the explanations that would need to be given for mental entities of other sorts. If, for example, we …Read more
  • Shooting the Messenger (review)
    TLS: The Times Literary Supplement 6060 35. 2019.
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    Spies and Pies (review)
    TLS: The Times Literary Supplement 6008 36. 2018.
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    Understanding Mental Disorders aims to help current and future psychiatrists, and those who work with them, to think critically about the ethical, conceptual, and methodological questions that are raised by the theory and practice of psychiatry. It considers questions that concern the mind’s relationship to the brain, the origins of our norms for thinking and behavior, and the place of psychiatry in medicine, and in society more generally. With a focus on the current debates around psychiatry’s …Read more
  •  419
    Wittgenstein on the duration and timing of mental phenomena: episodes, understanding and rule-following
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 26 (6): 1153-1175. 2018.
    Wittgenstein’s later works are full of questions about the timing and duration of mental phenomena. These questions are often awkward ones, and Wittgenstein seems to take their awkwardness to be philosophically revealing, but if we ask what it is that these questions reveal then different interpretations are possible. This paper suggests that there are at least six different ways in which the timing of mental phenomena can be awkward. By identifying these we can give sense to some of Wittgens…Read more
  •  52
    The relationship between intelligent systems and their environment is at the forefront of research in cognitive science. The Unexplained Intellect: Complexity, Time, and the Metaphysics of Embodied Thought shows how computational complexity theory and analytic metaphysics can together illuminate long-standing questions about the importance of that relationship. It argues that the most basic facts about a mind cannot just be facts about mental states, but must include facts about the dynamic, int…Read more
  •  292
    Enactive processing of the syntax of sign language
    with Graham H. Turner
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 18 (2): 317-332. 2019.
    It is unfashionable to suggest that enactive processes - including some that involve the mirror neuron system - might contribute to the comprehension of sign language. The present essay formulates and defends a version of that unfashionable suggestion, as it applies to certain forms of syntactic processing. There is evidence that has been thought to weigh against any such suggestion, coming from neuroimaging experiments and from the study of Deaf aphasics. In both cases it is shown to be unpersu…Read more
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    Skylduboðið um að veita athygli
    Hugur: Tímarit Um Heimspeki 28 17-28. 2017.
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    Autism and ‘disease’: The semantics of an ill-posed question
    Philosophical Psychology 30 (8): 1126-1140. 2017.
    It often seems incorrect to say that psychiatric conditions are diseases, and equally incorrect to say that they are not. This results in what would seem to be an unsatisfactory stalemate. The present essay examines the considerations that have brought us to such a stalemate in our discussions of autism. It argues that the stalemate in this particular case is a reflection of the fact that we need to find the logical space for a position that rejects both positive and negative answers. It then su…Read more
  •  155
    In their 2013 study of traumatic flashback formation, Bourne, Mackay and Holmes raise the question of whether the propensity of a traumatic experience to produce flashbacks is determined by the emotions that are felt at the time of that experience. They suggest that it is not, but the grounds on which they make this suggestion are flawed. Further research is required. That research will need to overcome a significant methodological difficulty — one which is hard to avoid when fMRI data and int…Read more
  •  214
    The Good of Friendship at the End of Life
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 23 (4): 445-459. 2015.
    This article attempts to explain the value that we assign to the presence of friends at the time when life is ending. It first shows that Aristotle’s treatment of friendship does not provide a clear account of such value. It then uses J. L. Austin’s notion of performativity to supplement one recent theory of friendship – given by Dean Cocking and Jeanette Kennett – in such a way that that theory can then account for friendship’s special value at our time of death.
  •  160
    Nineteen fifty-eight was an extraordinary year for cultural innovation, especially in English literature. It was also a year in which several boldly revisionary positions were first articulated in analytic philosophy. And it was a crucial year for the establishment of structural linguistics, of structuralist anthropology, and of cognitive psychology. Taken together these developments had a radical effect on our conceptions of individual creativity and of the inheritance of tradition. The present…Read more
  •  30
    Campbell, Richard. The Concept of Truth (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 65 (4): 864-866. 2012.
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    The Motor Theory of Speech Perception
    In Matthew Nudds & Casey O'Callaghan (eds.), Sounds and Perception: New Philosophical Essays, Oxford University Press. 2009.
    There is a long‐standing project in psychology the goal of which is to explain our ability to perceive speech. The project is motivated by evidence that seems to indicate that the cognitive processing to which speech sounds are subjected is somehow different from the normal processing employed in hearing. The Motor Theory of speech perception was proposed in the 1960s as an attempt to explain this specialness. The first part of this essay is concerned with the Motor Theory's explanandum. It sho…Read more
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