•  617
    Accessibility, implicit bias, and epistemic justification
    Synthese 198 (Suppl 7): 1529-1547. 2018.
    It has recently been argued that beliefs formed on the basis of implicit biases pose a challenge for accessibilism, since implicit biases are consciously inaccessible, yet they seem to be relevant to epistemic justification. Recent empirical evidence suggests, however, that while we may typically lack conscious access to the source of implicit attitudes and their impact on our beliefs and behaviour, we do have access to their content. In this paper, I discuss the notion of accessibility required…Read more
  •  562
    Doing without representing?
    with Andy Clark
    Synthese 101 (3): 401-31. 1994.
      Connectionism and classicism, it generally appears, have at least this much in common: both place some notion of internal representation at the heart of a scientific study of mind. In recent years, however, a much more radical view has gained increasing popularity. This view calls into question the commitment to internal representation itself. More strikingly still, this new wave of anti-representationalism is rooted not in armchair theorizing but in practical attempts to model and understand …Read more
  •  307
    Is action-guiding vision cognitively penetrable? More specifically, is the visual processing that guides our goal-directed actions sensitive to semantic information from cognitive states? This paper critically examines a recent family of arguments whose aim is to challenge a widespread and influential view in philosophy and cognitive science: the view that action-guiding vision is cognitively impenetrable. I argue, in response, that while there may very well be top–down causal influences on acti…Read more
  •  288
    Implicit Bias: from social structure to representational format
    Theoria : An International Journal for Theory, History and Fundations of Science 33 (1): 41-60. 2018.
    In this paper, I argue against the view that the representational structure of the implicit attitudes responsible for implicitly biased behaviour is propositional—as opposed to associationist. The proposal under criticism moves from the claim that implicit biased behaviour can occasionally be modulated by logical and evidential considerations to the view that the structure of the implicit attitudes responsible for such biased behaviour is propositional. I argue, in particular, against the truth …Read more
  •  261
    Responsibility for implicitly biased behavior: A habit‐based approach
    Journal of Social Philosophy 53 (2): 239-254. 2021.
    This paper has a two-fold goal. First, I defend the view that the prejudicial behaviour that results from implicit biases is best understood as a type of habitual action—as a harmful, yet deeply entrenched, passively acquired, socially relevant type of habit. Second, I explore how characterizing such implicitly biased behaviour as a habit aids our understanding of the responsibility we bear for it. As habits are ultimately susceptible of being controlled, agents ought to be held responsible for …Read more
  •  225
    Ruritania and ecology
    Philosophical Issues 6 188-195. 1995.
    Ned Block has argued for the truth of the following conditional: If there is such a thing as narrow content, it is holistic. This paper addresses and criticises this claim.
  •  199
    Meaning and other non-biological categories
    Philosophical Papers 27 (2): 129-150. 1998.
    In this paper I display a general metaphysical assumption that characterizes basic naturalistic views and that is inherited, in a residual form, by their leading teleological rivals. The assumption is that intentional states require identifiable inner vehicles and that to explain intentional properties we must develop accounts that bind specific contents to specific vehicles. I show that this assumption is deeply rooted in representationalist and reductionist theories of content and I argue that…Read more
  •  195
    Michael Dummett (1925-2011)
    Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 31 (1): 163-169. 2012.
    Michael Dummett's Obituary
  •  191
    It is sometimes said that humans are unlike other animals in at least one crucial respect. We do not simply form beliefs, desires and other mental states, but are capable of caring about our mental states in a distinctive way. We can care about the justification of our beliefs, and about the desirability of our desires. This kind of observation is usually made in discussions of free will and moral responsibility. But it has profound consequences, or so I shall argue, for our conception of the ve…Read more
  •  179
    Nonconceptual content
    Philosophy Compass 2 (3). 2007.
    Nonconceptualists maintain that there are ways of representing the world that do not reflect the concepts a creature possesses. They claim that the content of these representational states is genuine content because it is subject to correctness conditions, but it is nonconceptual because the creature to which we attribute it need not possess any of the concepts involved in the specification of that content. Appeals to nonconceptual content have seemed especially useful in attempts to capture the…Read more
  •  178
    Semantic responsibility
    Philosophical Explorations 5 (1): 39-58. 2002.
    In this paper I attempt to develop a notion of responsibility (semantic responsibility) that is to the notion of belief what epistemic responsibility is to the notion of justification. 'Being semantically responsible' is shown to involve the fulfilment of cognitive duties which allow the agent to engage in the kind of reason-laden discourses which render her beliefs appropriately sensitive to correction. The concept of semantic responsibility suggests that the notion of belief found in contempor…Read more
  •  166
    Meaning, dispositions, and normativity
    Minds and Machines 9 (3): 399-413. 1999.
    In a recent paper, Paul Coates defends a sophisticated dispositional account which allegedly resolves the sceptical paradox developed by Kripke in his monograph on Wittgenstein's treatment of following a rule (Kripke, 1982). Coates' account appeals to a notion of 'homeostasis', unpacked as a subject's second-order disposition to maintain a consistent pattern of extended first-order dispositions regarding her linguistic behavior. This kind of account, Coates contends, provides a naturalistic mode…Read more
  •  157
    It has recently been pointed out that perceptual nonconceptualism admits of two different and logically independent interpretations. On the first (content) view, perceptual nonconceptualism is a thesis about the kind of content perceptual experiences have. On the second (state) view, perceptual nonconceptualism is a thesis about the relation that holds between a subject undergoing a perceptual experience and its content. For the state nonconceptualist, it thus seems consistent to hold that both …Read more
  •  156
    Visual experience: rich but impenetrable
    Synthese 195 (8): 3389-3406. 2018.
    According to so-called “thin” views about the content of experience, we can only visually experience low-level features such as colour, shape, texture or motion. According to so-called “rich” views, we can also visually experience some high-level properties, such as being a pine tree or being threatening. One of the standard objections against rich views is that high-level properties can only be represented at the level of judgment. In this paper, I first challenge this objection by relying on s…Read more
  •  150
    How do we know how?
    Philosophical Explorations 11 (1). 2007.
    I raise some doubts about the plausibility of Stanley and Williamson's view that all knowledge-how is just a species of propositional knowledge. By tackling the question of what is involved in entertaining a proposition, I try to show that Stanley and Williamson's position leads to an uncomfortable dilemma. Depending on how we understand the notion of contemplating a proposition, either intuitively central cases of knowing-how cannot be thus classified or we lose our grip on the very idea of pro…Read more
  •  146
    Implicit Bias: From Social Structure to Representational Format
    Theoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 33 (1): 41-60. 2018.
    In this paper, I argue against the view that the representational structure of the implicit attitudes responsible for implicitly biased behaviour is propositional—as opposed to associationist. The proposal under criticism moves from the claim that implicit biased behaviour can occasionally be modulated by logical and evidential considerations to the view that the structure of the implicit attitudes responsible for such biased behaviour is propositional. I argue, in particular, against the truth …Read more
  •  133
    Free belief
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 2 (4): 327-36. 2003.
    The main goal of this paper is to show that Pettit and Smith’s (1996) argument concerning the nature of free belief is importantly incomplete. I accept Pettit and Smith’s emphasis upon normative constraints governing responsible believing and desiring, and their claim that the responsibly believing agent needs to possess an ability to believe (or desire) otherwise when believing (desiring) wrongly. But I argue that their characterization of these constraints does not do justice to one crucial fa…Read more
  •  131
    What We Do When We Judge
    Dialectica 65 (3): 345-367. 2011.
    In this paper I argue on two fronts. First, I press for the view that judging is a type of mental action, as opposed to those who think that judging is involuntary and hence not an action. Second, I argue that judging is specifically a type of non-voluntary mental action. My account of the non-voluntary nature of the mental act of judging differs, however, from standard non-voluntarist views, according to which ‘non-voluntary’ just means regulated by epistemic reasons. In addition, judging is no…Read more
  •  127
    Twin Pleas
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 57 (4): 871-889. 1997.
    Dual factor theories of meaning are fatally flawed in at least two ways. First. their very duality constitutes a problem: the two dimensions of meaning (reference and conceptual role) cannot be treated as totally orthogonal without compromising the intuition that much of our linguistic and non linguistic behavior is based on the cognizer’s interaction with the world. Second, Conceptual Role Semantics is not adequate for explaining a crucial feature of linguistic representation, viz., the special…Read more
  •  125
    Sensorimotor chauvinism?
    with Andy Clark
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (5): 979-980. 2001.
    O'Regan and Noe present a wonderfully detailed and comprehensive defense of a position whose broad outline we absolutely and unreservedly endorse. They are right, it seems to us, to stress the intimacy of conscious content and embodied action, and to counter the idea of a Grand Illusion with the image of an agent genuinely in touch, via active exploration, with the rich and varied visual scene. This is an enormously impressive achievement, and we hope that the comments that follow will be taken …Read more
  •  96
    Ecological content
    Pragmatics and Cognition 5 (2): 253-281. 1997.
    The paper has a negative and a positive side. The negative side argues that the classical notions of narrow and wide content are not suitable for the purposes of psychological explanation. The positive side shows how to characterize an alternative notion of content that is suitable for those purposes. This account is supported by a way of conceptualizing computation that is constitutively dependent upon properties external to the system and empirical research in developmental psychology. My main…Read more
  •  94
    The study of perception and the role of the senses have recently risen to prominence in philosophy and are now a major area of study and research. However, the philosophical history of the senses remains a relatively neglected subject. Moving beyond the current philosophical canon, this outstanding collection offers a wide-ranging and diverse philosophical exploration of the senses, from the classical period to the present day. Written by a team of international contributors, it is divided into …Read more
  •  93
    Implicit conception of implicit conceptions
    Philosophical Issues 9 115-120. 1998.
    A commentary on Peacocke's notion of implicit conceptions.
  •  78
    Perceptual experience and its contents
    Journal of Mind and Behavior 23 (4): 375-392. 2002.
    The contents of perceptual experience, it has been argued, often include a characteristic “non-conceptual” component (Evans, 1982). Rejecting such views, McDowell (1994) claims that such contents are conceptual in every respect. It will be shown that this debate is compromised by the failure of both sides to mark a further, and crucial, distinction in cognitive space. This is the distinction between what is doubted here as mindful and mindless modes of perceiving: a distinction which cross-class…Read more
  •  78
    Nonconceptualism and the cognitive impenetrability of early vision
    Philosophical Psychology 27 (5): 621-642. 2014.
    (2014). Nonconceptualism and the cognitive impenetrability of early vision. Philosophical Psychology: Vol. 27, No. 5, pp. 621-642. doi: 10.1080/09515089.2014.893386
  •  70
    Compositionality, iconicity, and perceptual nonconceptualism
    Philosophical Psychology 24 (2): 177-193. 2011.
    This paper concerns the role of the structural properties of representations in determining the nature of their content. I take as a starting point Fodor's (2007) and Heck's (2007) recent arguments making the iconic structure of perceptual representations essential in establishing their content as content of a different (nonconceptual) kind. I argue that the prima facie state?content error this strategy seems to display is nothing but a case of ?state?content error error,? i.e., the mistake of c…Read more
  •  61
    While applauding the bulk of the account on offer, we question one apparent implication viz, that every difference in sensorimotor contingencies corresponds to a difference in conscious visual experience.
  •  56
    We continuously form perceptual beliefs about the world based on how things appear to us in our perceptual experiences. I see that the ripe tomato in front of me is red and I form the belief that this tomato is red based on my seeing it, i.e. based on my veridical perceptual experience of this red tomato. Perceptual experiences and beliefs are representational mental states. Both are defined not by what they are, i.e. their physical properties, but by what they are about, what they represent, by…Read more
  •  50
    Social Vision: Breaking a Philosophical Impasse?
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 6 (4): 611-615. 2015.
    I argue that findings in support of Adams and Kveraga’s functional forecast model of emotion expression processing help settle the debate between rich and sparse views of the content of perceptual experience. In particular, I argue that these results in social vision suggest that the distinctive phenomenal character of experiences involving high-level properties such as emotions and social traits is best explained by their being visually experienced as opposed to being brought about by perceptua…Read more