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72Philosophy for Everyone: second editionRoutledge. 2016.Philosophy for Everyone begins by explaining what philosophy is before exploring the questions and issues at the foundation of this important subject. Key topics in this new edition and their areas of focus include: Moral philosophy – the nature of our moral judgments and reactions, whether they aim at some objective moral truth, or are mere personal or cultural preferences; and the possibility of moral responsibility given the sorts of things that cause behavior; Political philosophy – fundamen…Read more
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31Philosophy for EveryoneRoutledge. 2013.Philosophy for Everyone begins by explaining what philosophy is before exploring the questions and issues at the foundation of this important subject.Key topics and their areas of focus include:Epistemology - what our knowledge of the world and ourselves consists in, and how we come to have it;Philosophy of Science - foundational conceptual issues in scientific research and practice;Philosophy of Mind - what it means for something to have a mind, and how minds should be understood and explained;…Read more
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1Do our modern skulls house stone-age minds?In Michela Massimi (ed.), Philosophy and the Sciences for Everyone, Routledge. 2014.
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13The Social Mind: A Philosophical IntroductionRoutledge. 2018.We spend a lot of time thinking about other people: their motivations, what they are thinking, why they want particular things. Sometimes we are aware of it, but it often occurs without conscious thought, and we can respond appropriately to other people's thoughts in a diverse range of situations. The Social Mind: A Philosophical Introduction examines the cognitive capacities that facilitate this amazing ability. It explains and critiques key philosophical theories about how we think about other…Read more
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1Mindreading and Social CognitionCambridge University Press. 2022.The cognitive ability to think about other people's psychological states is known as `mindreading'. This Element critiques assumptions that have been formative in shaping philosophical theories of mindreading: that mindreading is ubiquitous, underpinning the vast majority of our social interactions; and that its primary goal is to provide predictions and explanations of other people's behaviour. It begins with an overview of key positions and empirical literature in the debate. It then introduce…Read more
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41When a Crisis Becomes an Opportunity: The Role of Replications in Making Better TheoriesBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 73 (4): 965-986. 2022.While it is widely acknowledged that psychology is in the throes of a replication ‘crisis’, relatively little attention has been paid to the role theory plays in our evaluation of replications as ‘failed’ or ‘successful’. This paper applies well-known arguments in philosophy of science about the interplay between theory and experiment to a contemporary case study of infants’ understanding of false belief (Onishi and Baillargeon [2005]), and attempts to replicate it. It argues that the lack of co…Read more
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23Attention Not SelfPhilosophical Quarterly 71 (1): 208-210. 2021.Attention Not Self. by Ganeri Jonardon.
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52The impact of culture on mindreadingSynthese 198 (7): 6351-6374. 2019.The role of culture in shaping folk psychology and mindreading has been neglected in the philosophical literature. This paper shows that there are significant cultural differences in how psychological states are understood and used by drawing on Spaulding’s recent distinction between the ‘goals’ and ‘methods’ of mindreading to argue that the relations between these methods vary across cultures; and arguing that differences in folk psychology cannot be dismissed as irrelevant to the cognitive arc…Read more
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59Is a modular cognitive architecture compatible with the direct perception of mental states?Consciousness and Cognition 36 508-518. 2015.
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253Theory-Theory and the Direct Perception of Mental StatesReview of Philosophy and Psychology 3 (2): 213-230. 2012.Philosophers and psychologists have often maintained that in order to attribute mental states to other people one must have a ‘theory of mind’. This theory facilitates our grasp of other people’s mental states. Debate has then focussed on the form this theory should take. Recently a new approach has been suggested, which I call the ‘Direct Perception approach to social cognition’. This approach maintains that we can directly perceive other people’s mental states. It opposes traditional views on …Read more
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83Two Challenges to Hutto’s Enactive Account of Pre-linguistic Social CognitionPhilosophia 40 (3): 459-472. 2012.Daniel Hutto’s Enactive account of social cognition maintains that pre- and non-linguistic interactions do not require that the participants represent the psychological states of the other. This goes against traditional ‘cognitivist’ accounts of these social phenomena. This essay examines Hutto’s Enactive account, and proposes two challenges. The account maintains that organisms respond to the behaviours of others, and in doing so respond to the ‘intentional attitude’ which the other has. The fi…Read more
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182Contrastive explanation and the many absences problemSynthese 190 (16): 3495-3510. 2013.We often explain by citing an absence or an omission. Apart from the problem of assigning a causal role to such apparently negative factors as absences and omissions, there is a puzzle as to why only some absences and omissions, out of indefinitely many, should figure in explanations. In this paper we solve this ’many absences problem’ by using the contrastive model of explanation. The contrastive model of explanation is developed by adapting Peter Lipton’s account. What initially appears to be …Read more
Edinburgh, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Mind |
General Philosophy of Science |