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678Exploring the informational sources of metaperception: The case of Change Blindness BlindnessConsciousness and Cognition 20 (4): 1489-1501. 2011.Perceivers generally show a poor ability to detect changes, a condition referred to as “Change Blindness” . They are, in addition, “blind to their own blindness”. A common explanation of this “Change Blindness Blindness” is that it derives from an inadequate, “photographical” folk-theory about perception. This explanation, however, does not account for intra-individual variations of CBB across trials. Our study aims to explore an alternative theory, according to which participants base their sel…Read more
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393A plea for mental actsSynthese 129 (1): 105-128. 2001.A prominent but poorly understood domain of human agency is mental action, i.e., thecapacity for reaching specific desirable mental statesthrough an appropriate monitoring of one's own mentalprocesses. The present paper aims to define mentalacts, and to defend their explanatory role againsttwo objections. One is Gilbert Ryle's contention thatpostulating mental acts leads to an infinite regress.The other is a different although related difficulty,here called the access puzzle: How can the mindalr…Read more
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374Metacognition and metarepresentation: Is a self-directed theory of mind a precondition for metacognition? (review)Synthese 159 (2). 2007.Metacognition is often defined as thinking about thinking. It is exemplified in all the activities through which one tries to predict and evaluate one’s own mental dispositions, states and properties for their cognitive adequacy. This article discusses the view that metacognition has metarepresentational structure. Properties such as causal contiguity, epistemic transparency and procedural reflexivity are present in metacognition but missing in metarepresentation, while open-ended recursivity an…Read more
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310Looking for the agent: An investigation into consciousness of action and self-consciousness in schizophrenic patientsCognition 65 (1): 71-86. 1997.The abilities to attribute an action to its proper agent and to understand its meaning when it is produced by someone else are basic aspects of human social communication. Several psychiatric syndromes, such as schizophrenia, seem to lead to a dysfunction of the awareness of one’s own action as well as of recognition of actions performed by other. Such syndromes offer a framework for studying the determinants of agency, the ability to correctly attribute actions to their veridical source. Thirty…Read more
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277Perceiving IntentionsIn Johannes Roessler & Naomi Eilan (eds.), Agency and Self-Awareness: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology, Clarendon Press. 2003.This paper defends the view that knowledge about one's own intentions can be gained in part through perception, although not through introspection. The various kinds of misperception of one's intentions are discussed. The latter distinction is applied to the analysis of schizophrenic patients' delusion of control.
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202Epistemic agency and metacognition: An externalist viewProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 108 (1pt3): 241-268. 2008.Controlling one's mental agency encompasses two forms of metacognitive operations, self-probing and post-evaluating. Metacognition so defined might seem to fuel an internalist view of epistemic norms, where rational feelings are available to instruct a thinker of what she can do, and allow her to be responsible for her mental agency. Such a view, however, ignores the dynamics of the mind–world interactions that calibrate the epistemic sentiments as reliable indicators of epistemic norms. A 'brai…Read more
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184MetacognitionPhilosophy Compass 5 (11): 989-998. 2010.Given disagreement about the architecture of the mind, the nature of self‐knowledge, and its epistemology, the question of how to understand the function and the scope of metacognition – the control of one’s cognition – is still a matter of hot debate. A dominant view, the self‐ascriptive view, has been that metacognition necessarily requires representing one’s own mental states as mental states, and, therefore, necessarily involves an ability to read one’s mind. The main claims of this view are…Read more
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178Mind, space and objectivity in non-human animalsErkenntnis 51 (1): 545-562. 1999.This article is a summary of two chapters of a book published in French in 1997, entitled Comment L'esprit vient aux Bêtes, Paris, Gallimard. The core idea is that the crucial distinction between internal and external states, often used uncritically by theorists of intentionality, needs to be made on a non-circular basis. The proposal is that objectivity - the capacity to reidentify individuals as the same across places and times depends on the capacity to extract spatial crossmodal invariants, …Read more
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133Does metacognition necessarily involve metarepresentation?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 26 (3): 352-352. 2003.Against the view that metacognition is a capacity that parallels theory of mind, it is argued that metacognition need involve neither metarepresentation nor semantic forms of reflexivity, but only process-reflexivity, through which a task-specific system monitors its own internal feedback by using quantitative cues. Metacognitive activities, however, may be redescribed in metarepresentational, mentalistic terms in species endowed with a theory of mind.
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122The philosophy of metacognition: Mental agency and self- awarenessOxford University Press. 2013.Does metacognition--the capacity to self-evaluate one's cognitive performance--derive from a mindreading capacity, or does it rely on informational processes? Joëlle Proust draws on psychology and neuroscience to defend the second claim. She argues that metacognition need not involve metarepresentations, and is essentially related to mental agency
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105Overlooking metacognitive experienceBehavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (2): 158-159. 2009.Peter Carruthers correctly claims that metacognition in humans may involve self-directed interpretations (i.e., may use the conceptual interpretative resources of mindreading). He fails to show, however, that metacognition cannot rely exclusively on subjective experience. Focusing on self-directed mindreading can only bypass evolutionary considerations and obscure important functional differences
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95Thinking of oneself as the sameConsciousness and Cognition 12 (4): 495-509. 2003.What is a person, and how can a person come to know that she is a person identical to herself over time ? The article defends the view that the sense of being oneself in this sense consists in the ability to consciously affect oneself : in the memory of having affected oneself, joint to the consciousness of being able to affect oneself again. In other words, being a self requires a capacity for metacognition (control and monitoring of one's own internal states). This view is compatible with the …Read more
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95Malfunction and Mental IllnessThe Monist 82 (4): 658-670. 1999.For years a debate has raged within the various literatures of philosophy, psychiatry, and psychology over whether, and to what degree, the concepts that characterize psychopathology are social constructions that reflect cultural values. While the majority position among philosophers has been normativist, i.e., that the conception of a mental disorder is value-laden, a vocal and cogent minority have argued that psychopathology results from malfunctions that can be described by terminology that i…Read more
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89Les conditions de la connaissance de soiPhilosophiques 27 (1): 161-186. 2000.La connaissance de soi suppose que l'on puisse former des pensées vraies de la forme 'je Y que P', où 'Y' fait référence à une attitude propositionnelle, 'P' à son contenu, et 'je' au penseur de cette pensée. La question qui se pose est de savoir, ce qui, dans le contenu mental occurrent [P], justifie l'auto-attribution de cette pensée. Ce problème dit de la transition soulève trois difficultés ; celle de la préservation du contenu intentionnel entre la pensée de premier et de second ordre ; cel…Read more
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87Simulation and Knowledge of Action (edited book)John Benjamins. 2002.CHAPTER Simulation theory and mental concepts Alvin I. Goldman Rutgers University. Folk psychology and the TT-ST debate The study of folk psychology, ...
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86The norms of acceptancePhilosophical Issues 22 (1): 316-333. 2012.An area in the theory of action that has received little attention is how mental agency and world-directed agency interact. The purpose of the present contribution is to clarify the rational conditions of such interaction, through an analysis of the central case of acceptance. There are several problems with the literature about acceptance. First, it remains unclear how a context of acceptance is to be construed. Second, the possibility of conjoining, in acceptance, an epistemic component, which…Read more
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81Criticial Review of: When self-consciousness breaks, by G. Lynn Stephens & G. GrahamPhilosophical Psychology 15 (4): 543-550. 2002.The book under review offers two important contributions. One is a valuable discussion of the various ways of addressing the paradoxical experience of externality. The other is an emphasis on a distinction between the experience of subjectivity and the experience of agency. This review tries to show that this distinction is indeed a crucial feature in any solution to the question of externality, but that it is associated with a view of thinking as acting that is questionable
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76Metacognition and mindreading: one or two functions?In Michael Beran, Johannes Brandl, Josef Perner & Joëlle Proust (eds.), The foundations of metacognition, Oxford University Press. pp. 234. 2012.Given disagreements about the architecture of the mind, the nature of self-knowledge, and its epistemology, the question of how to understand the function and scope of metacognition – the control of one's cognition - is still a matter of hot debate. A dominant view, the self-ascriptive view (or one-function view), has been that metacognition necessarily requires representing one's own mental states as mental states, and, therefore, necessarily involves an ability to read one's own mind. The sel…Read more
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75Epistemic action, extended knowledge, and metacognitionPhilosophical Issues 24 (1): 364-392. 2014.How should one attribute epistemic credit to an agent, and hence, knowledge, when cognitive processes include an extensive use of human or mechanical enhancers, informational tools, and devices which allow one to complement or modify one's own cognitive system? The concept of integration of a cognitive system has been used to address this question. For true belief to be creditable to a person's ability, it is claimed, the relevant informational processes must be or become part of the cognitive c…Read more
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75The foundations of metacognition (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2012.Bringing together researchers from across the cognitive sciences, the book is valuable for philosophers of mind, developmental and comparative psychologists, and neuroscientists.
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72Can 'radical' simulation theories explain psychological concept acquisition?In Jérôme Dokic & Joëlle Proust (eds.), Simulation and Knowledge of Action, John Benjamins. 2002.This paper examines the response offered by Robert Gordon to the question how an interpreter can reach the correct content of others'psychological states. It exposes the main problems raised by Gordon's proposal, and provides a tentative solution that emphasizes the structuring role of counterfactual reasoning in embedding simulations and deriving facts that are holding across them.
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72Time and Action: Impulsivity, Habit, StrategyReview of Philosophy and Psychology 6 (4): 717-743. 2015.Granting that various mental events might form the antecedents of an action, what is the mental event that is the proximate cause of action? The present article reconsiders the methodology for addressing this question: Intention and its varieties cannot be properly analyzed if one ignores the evolutionary constraints that have shaped action itself, such as the trade-off between efficient timing and resources available, for a given stake. On the present proposal, three types of action, impulsive,…Read more
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66Bolzano’s Analytic RevisitedThe Monist 64 (2): 214-230. 1981.What I propose is to reconsider the interpretation of Bolzano’s concept of analytic propositions which was offered thirty years ago by Bar-Hillel. The claim of Bar-Hillel was that, in a late addition to his book, The Theory of Science, Bolzano actually had been radically improving his concept of analyticity, thus creating some inconsistencies with the previous, uncorrected version. This allows us to equate the new Bolzanian definition of analytic with what was to be defined, a century later, as …Read more
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64Indexes for actionRevue Internationale de Philosophie 1999 (3): 321-345. 1999.This articles examines three ways in which the connection between semantic and pragmatic representations of a single action can be tightened up in order to remedy the puzzle of deviant causation. A first move consists in making the feedback process, i.e. the dynamics of the relationship between both representational components, a central element in the definition of an action. A second step brings in the action-effect principle, emphasizing the teleological relation of each pragmatic representat…Read more
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64Réponse à Édouard Machery. Pour une pensée évolutionniste des répresentationsDialogue 44 (1): 161-166. 2005.Dans son compte-rendu de mon livre, Les Animaux Pensent-ils?, Machery objecte que l'évolution n'étant ni hiérarchique ni linéaire, il n'et pas justifié de proposer une analyse hiérarchique des représentations. Je réponds à cette objection, en montrant qu'on peut en effet distinguer des types de représentation par leurs propriétés sémantiques et computationnelles. On peut reconnaître le caractère anagénétique du développement de la cognition sans pour autant légitimer une conception hiérarchique …Read more
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61Why Evolution Has to Matter to Cognitive Psychology and to Philosophy of MindBiological Theory 1 (4): 346-348. 2006.Growing suspicions were raised however that an exclusively language-oriented view of the mind, focussing on the characterization of anhistorical, static mental states through their propositional contents, was hardly compatible with what is currently known of brain architecture and did not fare well when confronted with results from many behavioral studies of mental functions. My aim in what follows is to show that these forms of dissatisfaction stem from the fact that brain evolution and develop…Read more
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60Can Nonhuman Primates Read Minds?Philosophical Topics 27 (1): 203-232. 1999.Granted that a given species is able to entertain beliefs and desires, i.e. to have (epistemic and motivational) internal states with semantically evaluable contents, one can raise the question of whether the species under investigation is, in addition, able to represent properties and events that are not only perceptual or physical, but mental, and use the latter to guide their actions, not only as reliable cues for achieving some output, but as mental cues (that is: whether it can 'read minds'…Read more
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59Le langage forme-t-il une condition nécessaire de la rationalité?Dialogue 46 (1): 165-172. 2007.A propos de 'Evolution et Rationalité' de Ronald de Sousa (2004)
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51A critical review of G. Lynn Stephens & G. Graham's when self-consciousness breaks (review)Philosophical Psychology 15 (4). 2002.This book deals with the experience of externality, i.e. an experience, common in schizophrenia, present both in verbal hallucination and in thought insertion. The view defended is that thought insertion is a case of failed agency, experienced by the agent at the personal level as an intelligible thought with which she cannot identify. Such a case in which sense of agency and sense of subjectivity come apart reveals the existence of two dimensions in self-consciousness. Several difficulties of t…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Biology |