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Review of Jonardon Ganeri: Attention Not Self (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (1): 194-207. 2018.
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25Attention and Attentiveness: A defence of the argument for adverbialismAustralasian 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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158Stokes’s malleability thesis and the normative grounding of propositional attitudesPhilosophy and the Mind Sciences 4 1-8. 2023.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
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59Emancipatory AttentionPhilosophers' 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
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The moral psychology of salienceIn Sophie Archer (ed.), Salience: A Philosophical Inquiry, Routledge. pp. 140-158. 2022.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
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663What is Attention? Adverbialist TheoriesWIREs 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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129Ideas in Their Infancy: Review of Susan Engel The Intellectual Lives of Children (review)TLS: The Times Literary Supplement 6168 23. 2021.
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4Review of Nes and Chan (eds.) Inference and Consciousness (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2020. 2020.
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260Review 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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142Famous Wet Raincoat: Review of Erik Larson The Myth of Artificial Intelligence (review)TLS: The Times Literary Supplement 6169 (June 25th): 25. 2021.Book review
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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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4Consciousness and AttentionIn Uriah Kriegel (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness, Oxford University Press. 2020.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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48The Role of Attention in Multisensory IntegrationMultisensory 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
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The process of inferenceIn 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
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103Understanding 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
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452Wittgenstein on the duration and timing of mental phenomena: episodes, understanding and rule-followingBritish 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
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56The 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
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332Enactive processing of the syntax of sign languagePhenomenology 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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459Autism and ‘disease’: The semantics of an ill-posed questionPhilosophical 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
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333Are there Special Mechanisms of Involuntary Memory?Review of Philosophy and Psychology 8 (3): 557-571. 2017.Following the precedent set by Dorthe Berntsen’s 2009 book, Involuntary Autobiographical Memory, this paper asks whether the mechanisms responsible for involuntarily recollected memories are distinct from those that are responsible for voluntarily recollected ones. Berntsen conjectures that these mechanisms are largely the same. Recent work has been thought to show that this is mistaken, but the argument from the recent results to the rejection of Berntsen’s position is problematic, partly becau…Read more
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123The Metaphysics of AttentionIn Christopher Mole, Declan Smithies & Wayne Wu (eds.), Attention: Philosophical and Psychological Essays, Oxford University Press. pp. 60-77. 2011.This paper gives a brief presentation of adverbialism about attention, and explains some of the reasons why it gives an appealing account of attention's metaphysics.
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173Causes and Correlates of Intrusive Memory: a response to Clark, MacKay, Holmes and BournePsychological Medicine 46 (15): 3255-3258. 2016.
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143On the demonstration of blindsight in monkeysMind and Language 21 (4): 475-483. 2006.The work of Alan Cowey and Petra Stoerig is often taken to have shown that, following lesions analogous to those that cause blindsight in humans, there is blindsight in monkeys. The present paper reveals a problem in Cowey and Stoerig's case for blindsight in monkeys. The problem is that Cowey and Stoerig's results would only provide good evidence for blindsight if there is no difference between their two experimental paradigms with regard to the sorts of stimuli that are likely to come to consc…Read more
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1136Embodied Demonstratives: A Reply to WuMind 122 (485): 231-239. 2013.Although Wayne Wu correctly identifies a flaw in the way in which my 2009 article frames the debate about ‘zombie action’, he fails in his attempts to strengthen the case for thinking that our actions are under less conscious control than we usually imagine. His argument, like the arguments that my earlier paper addressed, can be blocked by allowing that an embodied demonstrative concept can contribute contents to a visual experience
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493Attention in the absence of consciousness?Trends in Cognitive Sciences 12 (2): 44. 2008.A response to Christof Koch and Naotsugu Tsuchiya's 'Attention and Consciousness: Two Distinct Brain Processes'.
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1879The Performative Limits of PoetryBritish Journal of Aesthetics 53 (1): 55-70. 2013.J. L. Austin showed that performative speech acts can fail in various ways, and that the ways in which they fail can often be revealing, but he was not concerned with understanding performative failures that occur in the context of poetry. Geoffrey Hill suggests, in both his poetry and his prose writings, that these failures are more interesting than Austin realized. This article corrects Maximilian de Gaynesford’s misunderstanding of Hill’s treatment of this point. It then explains the way in w…Read more
APA Western Division
Vancouver, Canada
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Mind |
Aesthetics |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |