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10UIn Samuel Guttenplan (ed.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, Blackwell. 2017.Psychoanalytic theory describes a range of motives, mental states, and processes of which persons are ordinarily unaware, and which they can acknowledge, avow, and alter only with difficulty. Freud's collective term for these, and for the functional division of the mind to which he assigned them, was the unconscious. (For references and further discussion of italicized terms seeLaplanche and Pointalais, 1973). The term has also been used to describe other mental states, such as hypothesized beli…Read more
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57Mental States, Natural Kinds and Psychophysical LawsAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 52 (1): 195-236. 1978.
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128Mental States, Natural Kinds and Psychophysical LawsAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 52 (1): 195-236. 1978.
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4Philosophical Essays on Freud (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 1982.Philosophers are increasingly coming to recognize the importance of Freudian theory for the understanding of the mind. The picture Freud presents of the mind's growth and organization holds implications not just for such perennial questions as the relation of mind and body, the nature of memory and personal identity, the interplay of cognitive and affective processes in reasoning and acting, but also for the very way in which these questions are conceived and an interpretation of the mind is sou…Read more
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Kantian neuroscience and radical interpreation : ways of meaning in the Bayesian BrianIn Gustavo Ortiz-Millán & Juan Antonio Cruz Parcero (eds.), Mind, Language and Morality: Essays in Honor of Mark Platts, Routledge. 2018.
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Reply: Irrationality, interpretation and divisionIn Cynthia Macdonald & Graham Macdonald (eds.), Philosophy of Psychology: Debates on Psychological Explanation, Blackwell. pp. 1--461. 1995.
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666IX*—Wittgenstein and PhysicalismProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 75 (1): 121-146. 1975.James Hopkins; IX*—Wittgenstein and Physicalism, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 75, Issue 1, 1 June 1975, Pages 121–146, https://doi.org/10.109.
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488Evolution, Consciousness, and the Internality of MindIn P. Carruthers & A. Chamberlen (eds.), Evolution and the Human Mind: Modularity, Language and Meta-Cognition, Cambridge University Press. pp. 276. 2000.Understanding the notion of innerness that we ascribe to mental items is central to understanding the problem of consciousness, and we can do so in evolutionary and physical terms.
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467Psychoanalysis Interpretation and ScienceIn J. Hopkins & A. Savile (eds.), Psychoanalysis Mind and Art, Blackwell. 1992.Our commonsense understanding of meaning and motive is realized via the semantic encoding of causal role. Appreciating this together with other features of semantic theories enables us to see that methodological critiques of psychoanalysis, such as those by Popper and Grunbaum, systematically fail to take account of empirical data, and if taken seriously would render commonsense understanding of mind and language void. This is particularly problematic if we consider much of what we regard ours…Read more
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792Rules, Privacy, and PhysicalismIn J. Ellis & D. Guevara (eds.), Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Mind, Oxford University Press. pp. 107-144. 2012.Wittgenstein's arguments about rule-following and private language turn both on interpretation and what he called our 'pictures' of the mind. His remarks about these can be understood in terms of the conceptual metaphor of the mind as a container, and enable us to give a better account of physicalism.
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541Freud's biological notion of a death drive is not well founded but a number of closely associated notions (including those of a drive, and of aggression turned against the self) are.
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566Kantian Neuroscience and Radical InterpretationIn Festschfrift for Mark Platts, . forthcoming.This is an unedited version of a paper written in 2012 accepted for publication in a forthcoming Festschrift for Mark Platts. In it I argue that the Helmholtz/Bayes tradition of free energy neuroscience begun by Geoffrey Hinton and his colleagues, and now being carried forward by Karl Friston and his, can be seen as a fulfilment of the Quine/Davidson program of radical interpretation, and also of Quine’s conception of a naturalized epistemology. This program, in turn, is rooted in Helmholtz’s …Read more
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755This paper argues that psychoanalysis enables us to see mental disorder as rooted in emotional conflicts, particularly concerning aggression, to which our species has a natural liability. These can be traced in development, and seem rooted in both parent-offspring conflict and in-group cooperation for out-group conflict. In light of this we may hope that work in psychoanalysis and neuroscience will converge in indicating the most likely paths to a better neurobiological understanding of mental …Read more
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1046Epistemology and Depth PsychologyIn C. Wright & P. Clark (eds.), Mind, Psychoanalysis, and Science, Blackwell. 1988.Psychoanalysis provides the best explanation of a range of empirical phenomena; epistemic criics do not take this fully into account.
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826Wittgenstein and the life of signsIn Max Kölbel & Bernhard Weiss (eds.), Wittgenstein's Lasting Significance, Routledge. 2004.Both Wittgenstein's account of following a rule and his private language argument turn on the notion of interpretation.
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265Patterns of Interpretation: Speech, Action, and DreamIn L. Marcus (ed.), Cultural Documents: The Interpretation of Dream, Manchester University Press. 1999.Freud's account of dreams can be understood via interpretive patterns that span language and action, enabling an extension of common sense psychology that is potentially cogent, cumulative, and radical.
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468Emotion, Evolution and ConflictIn Man Chung (ed.), Psychoanalytic Knowledge, . 2003.The psychoanalytic notions of identification and projection fit with Darwinian theory in explaining human group conflict and relating it to emotional conflict in individuals.
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1554Psychoanalysis, Philosophical IssuesIn SAGE Reference project Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences, Sage Publications. 2014.This paper briefly addresses questions of confirmation and disconfirmation in psychoanalysis. It argues that psychoanalysis enjoys Bayesian support as an interpretive extension of commonsense psychology that provides the best explanation of a large range of empirical data. Suggestion provides no such explanation, and recent work in attachment, developmental psychology, and neuroscience accord with this view.
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395The Problem of Consciousness and the Innerness of the MindIn Mary Margaret McCabe & Mark Textor (eds.), Perspectives on Perception, De Gruyter. 2007.The problem of consciousness is taken to concern items which are internal to the mind, and phenomenal, subjective, and private. Understanding the notion of innerness in this enables us to understand the rest in physical terms.
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718Wittgenstein, Interpretation, and the Foundations of PsychoanalysisNew Formations. 1995.In his work on following a rule Wittgenstein discerned principles of interpretation that apply to commonsense psychology and psychoanalysis. We can use these to assess the cogency of psychoanalytic reasoning.
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550Free Energy and Virtual Reality in Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience: A Complexity Theory of Dreaming and Mental DisorderFrontiers in Psychology 7. 2016.This paper compares the free energy neuroscience now advocated by Karl Friston and his colleagues with that hypothesised by Freud, arguing that Freud's notions of conflict and trauma can be understood in terms of computational complexity. It relates Hobson and Friston's work on dreaming and the reduction of complexity to contemporary accounts of dreaming and the consolidation of memory, and advances the hypothesis that mental disorder can be understood in terms of computational complexity and t…Read more
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This is a longer version of the paper published as 'Wittgenstein, Davidson, and Radical Interpretation. In everyday life we understand one another's utterances and actions, and hence interpret one another's linguistic and non-linguistic behaviour, with remarkable certainty, precision, and accuracy; and understanding of this kind seems basic to much else. Our interactions with others are mediated by interpretation of their actions, including speech; and much of what we regard ourselves as knowing…Read more
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694Freud and the Science of MindIn G. Howie (ed.), The Edinburgh Encylopaedia of Continental Philosophy, Edinburgh University Press. 1999.Freudian theory as an extension of commonsense psychology that is potentially cogent, cumulative, and radical.
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