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2In the shadow of Leviathan: John Locke and the politics of conscience In the shadow of Leviathan: John Locke and the politics of conscience, by Jeffrey R. Collins, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2020, Ideas in Context 127, 430 pp., £101.00 (hardback) ISBN 9781108478816, £32.99 (paperback) ISBN 9781108746229 (review)History of European Ideas. forthcoming.Jeffrey Collins’ new book aims to presents Locke’s views on religious toleration in the light of Thomas Hobbes’ political philosophy. At first blush, Hobbes seems an unusual choice as a point of co...
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33C. D. Broad: Key Unpublished WritingsRoutledge. 2022.Although Broad published many books in his lifetime, this volume is unique in presenting some of his most interesting unpublished writings. Divided into five clear sections, the following figures and topics are covered: Autobiography, Hegel and the nature of philosophy, Francis Bacon, Hume's philosophy of the self and belief, F. H. Bradley, The historical development of scientific thought from Pythagoras to Newton, Causation, Change and continuity, Quantitativ…Read more
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13Verso una riconsiderazione dell’Emergentismo BritannicoPhilosophy Kitchen 7 (11): 11-27. 2019.Following McLaughlin, it has become commonplace to refer to a specific group of theorists – Mill, Bain, Lewes, Morgan, Alexander and Broad – as the “British Emergentists”. But whilst McLaughlin’s seminal discussion focused on the similarities between these views, the present paper argues that the differences between them are just as important. Whilst the views of Mill and Lewes emphasize an epistemic characterization of emergence, Morgan and Alexander argue for a much stronger, or ontological th…Read more
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361The worst-motive fallacy: A negativity bias in motive attributionPsychological Science 31 (11): 1430--1438. 2020.In this article, we describe a hitherto undocumented fallacy-in the sense of a mistake in reasoning-constituted by a negativity bias in the way that people attribute motives to others. We call this the "worst-motive fallacy," and we conducted two experiments to investigate it. In Experiment 1, participants expected protagonists in a variety of fictional vignettes to pursue courses of action that satisfy the protagonists' worst motive, and furthermore, participants significantly expected the prot…Read more
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145Artificial intelligence and the value of transparencyAI and Society 36 (2): 585-595. 2021.Some recent developments in Artificial Intelligence—especially the use of machine learning systems, trained on big data sets and deployed in socially significant and ethically weighty contexts—have led to a number of calls for “transparency”. This paper explores the epistemological and ethical dimensions of that concept, as well as surveying and taxonomising the variety of ways in which it has been invoked in recent discussions. Whilst “outward” forms of transparency may be straightforwardly ach…Read more
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77Mysticism and Social EpistemologyEpisteme 1 (2): 139-158. 2004.This article deals with the grounds for accepting or rejecting the insights of mystics. We examine the social-epistemological question of what the non-mystic should make of the mystic's claim, and what she might be able to make of it, given various possible states of the evidence available to her.For clarity, let's reserve the term “mystic” for one who claims to have had an ineffable insight. As such, there are two parts to the mystic's claim: first, a substantive insight into the way the world …Read more
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422The Emergence of Borders: Moral Questions Mapped OutRussian Sociological Review 13 (4): 42-59. 2014.In this paper, we examine the extent to which the concept of emergence can be applied to questions about the nature and moral justification of territorial borders. Although the term is used with many different senses in philosophy, the concept of “weak emergence”—advocated by, for example, Sawyer (2002, 2005) and Bedau (1997)—is especially applicable, since it forces a distinction between prediction and explanation that connects with several issues in the dis-cussion of territory. In particular,…Read more
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33Emergence, group judgment and the discursive dilemmaMind and Society 14 (2): 185-201. 2015.In this paper, I argue that the account of emergence advanced by Broad is both defensible and applicable to some examples of group-level phenomena. Specifically, Broad’s account enables the formulation of a non-reductive physicalism or of a non-reductive individualism, and correctly describes the case of group-judgment under the conditions of the discursive dilemma. Furthermore, this analysis shows that emergent phenomena need not be characterised using the resources of complexity theory.
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17Methodological Situatedness; or, DEEDS Worth Doing and PursuingCognitive Systems Research 9 150-159. 2008.This paper draws a distinction between two possible understandings of the DEEDS (Dynamical, Embodied, Extended, Distributed and Situated) approach to cognition. On the one hand, the DEEDS approach may be interpreted as making a metaphysical claim about the nature and location of cognitive processes. On the other hand, the DEEDS approach may be read as providing a methodological prescription about how we ought to conduct cognitive scientific research. I argue that the latter, methodological, read…Read more
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16An historical overview and evaluation of modern psychology's theoretical foundations, Mind ranges from Descartes to dynamics in its discussion of such topics as introspectionism, psychoanalysis, behaviorism, and the varieties of contemporary cognitive science. Throughout, these theories are examined and assessed as attempts to construct an overall conception of the perso--as general theories of human nature.
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143Explanation in dynamical cognitive scienceMinds and Machines 18 (3): 331-348. 2008.In this paper, I outline two strands of evidence for the conclusion that the dynamical approach to cognitive science both seeks and provides covering law explanations. Two of the most successful dynamical models—Kelso’s model of rhythmic finger movement and Thelen et al.’s model of infant perseverative reaching—can be seen to provide explanations which conform to the famous explanatory scheme first put forward by Hempel and Oppenheim. In addition, many prominent advocates of the dynamical approa…Read more
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21Theres Room in the Lab for an Armchair Report on the Philosophy and Neuroscience Conference Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, 17-20, October 2002 (review)Journal of Consciousness Studies 10 (3): 89-93. 2003.Max Tegmark, a physicist at the University of Pennsylania recently remarked, 'To tell you the truth, I think most of my colleagues are terrified of talking to philosophers -- like being caught coming out of a pornographic cinema.' Fortunately, it would seem that at least some neuroscientists do not suffer from such reticence when it comes to their professional relationship with philosophy. Testament to this was the quality and variety of the papers in both philosophically- ambitious-neuroscience…Read more
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13Cognitive science. An introduction to the science of mind, de José Luis BermúdezTeorema: International Journal of Philosophy 30 (3): 186-191. 2011.
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118Mind and MachinePalgrave-Macmillan. 2012.Walmsley offers a succinct introduction to major philosophical issues in artificial intelligence for advanced students of philosophy of mind, cognitive science and psychology. Whilst covering essential topics, it also provides the student with the chance to engage with cutting edge debates.
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61Emergence and Reduction in Dynamical Cognitive ScienceNew Ideas in Psychology 28 274-282. 2010.This paper examines the widespread intuition that the dynamical approach to cognitive science is importantly related to emergentism about the mind. The explanatory practices adopted by dynamical cognitive science rule out some conceptions of emergence; covering law explanations require a deducibility relationship between explanans and explanandum, whereas canonical theories of emergence require the absence of such deducibility. A response to this problem – one which would save the intuition that…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
General Philosophy of Science |