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Peirce's account of mental activitySynthese 41 (1). 1979.
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How Does Semiosis Effect Renvoi?American Journal of Semiotics 11 (1-2): 11-61. 1994.
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Antecedents to Peirce's Notion of Iconic SignsSemiotics 109-120. 1980.
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Perceptual illusions in brief visual presentationsConsciousness and Cognition 18 (3): 569-577. 2009.We often feel that our perceptual experience is richer than what we can express. For instance, when flashed with a large set of letters, we feel that we can see them all, while we can report only a few. However, the nature of this subjective impression remains highly debated: while many favour a dissociation between two forms of consciousness , others contend that the richness of phenomenal experience is a mere illusion. Here we addressed this question with a classical partial-report paradigm no…Read more
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Poinsot and the Mental Imagery DebateModern Schoolman 72 (1): 1-12. 1994.
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Explaining Consciousness: A (Very) Different Approach to the “Hard Problem”Journal of Mind and Behavior 34 (1): 41-62. 2013.
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The Origins of QualiaIn Tim Crane & Sarah Patterson (eds.), History of the Mind-Body Problem, Routledge. 2000.The mind-body problem in contemporary philosophy has two parts: the problem of mental causation and the problem of consciousness. These two parts are not unrelated; in fact, it can be helpful to see them as two horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, the causal interaction between mental and physical phenomena seems to require that all causally efficacious mental phenomena are physical; but on the other hand, the phenomenon of consciousness seems to entail that not all mental phenomena are physical…Read more
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Peirce's Approach to the Self: A Semiotic Perspective on Human SubjectivityState University of New York Press. 1988.
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The extended mindAnalysis 58 (1): 7-19. 1998.Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? The question invites two standard replies. Some accept the demarcations of skin and skull, and say that what is outside the body is outside the mind. Others are impressed by arguments suggesting that the meaning of our words "just ain't in the head", and hold that this externalism about meaning carries over into an externalism about mind. We propose to pursue a third position. We advocate a very different sort of externalism: an _active e…Read more
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Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive scienceBehavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (3): 181-204. 2013.Brains, it has recently been argued, are essentially prediction machines. They are bundles of cells that support perception and action by constantly attempting to match incoming sensory inputs with top-down expectations or predictions. This is achieved using a hierarchical generative model that aims to minimize prediction error within a bidirectional cascade of cortical processing. Such accounts offer a unifying model of perception and action, illuminate the functional role of attention, and may…Read more
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Matter and ConsciousnessMIT Press. 1985.In _Matter and Consciousness_, Paul Churchland presents a concise and contemporary overview of the philosophical issues surrounding the mind and explains the main theories and philosophical positions that have been proposed to solve them. Making the case for the relevance of theoretical and experimental results in neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence for the philosophy of mind, Churchland reviews current developments in the cognitive sciences and offers a clear and access…Read more
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Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional AttitudesJournal of Philosophy 78 (2): 67-90. 1981.Eliminative materialism is the thesis that our common-sense conception of psychological phenomena constitutes a radically false theory, a theory so fundamentally defective that both the principles and the ontology of that theory will eventually be displaced, rather than smoothly reduced, by completed neuroscience. Our mutual understanding and even our introspection may then be reconstituted within the conceptual framework of completed neuroscience, a theory we may expect to be more powerful by f…Read more
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Consciousness and the Introspection of 'Qualitative Simples'Eidos: Revista de Filosofía de la Universidad Del Norte 15 12-47. 2011.Philosophers have long been familiar with the contrast between predicates privado privado son las únicas características cualitativas realmente simples. Con base en que, después de todo, sus referentes externos admiten un análisis estructural, relacional, causal o funcional de algún tipo. En este artículo quiero adoptar un enfoque más general y más filosófico que los argumentos antireduccionistas evidenciando los problemas que generan con la filosofía de la ciencia; la neurociencia emergente y c…Read more
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The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey into the BrainBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47 (4): 633-635. 1996.
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The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (2nd ed.)Oxford University Press. 1996.The book is an extended study of the problem of consciousness. After setting up the problem, I argue that reductive explanation of consciousness is impossible , and that if one takes consciousness seriously, one has to go beyond a strict materialist framework. In the second half of the book, I move toward a positive theory of consciousness with fundamental laws linking the physical and the experiential in a systematic way. Finally, I use the ideas and arguments developed earlier to defend a form…Read more
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The content and epistemology of phenomenal beliefIn Aleksandar Jokic & Quentin Smith (eds.), Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives, Oxford University Press. pp. 220--72. 2002.
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Facing up to the problem of consciousnessToward a Science of Consciousness 5-28. 1996.
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Phenomenal Consciousness: A Naturalistic TheoryPhilosophical Quarterly 52 (207): 265-268. 2002.
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The origin of conceptsOxford University Press. 2009.Only human beings have a rich conceptual repertoire with concepts like tort, entropy, Abelian group, mannerism, icon and deconstruction. How have humans constructed these concepts? And once they have been constructed by adults, how do children acquire them? While primarily focusing on the second question, in The Origin of Concepts , Susan Carey shows that the answers to both overlap substantially. Carey begins by characterizing the innate starting point for conceptual development, namely systems…Read more
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Color realism and color scienceBehavioral and Brain Sciences 26 (1): 3-21. 2003.The target article is an attempt to make some progress on the problem of color realism. Are objects colored? And what is the nature of the color properties? We defend the view that physical objects (for instance, tomatoes, radishes, and rubies) are colored, and that colors are physical properties, specifically types of reflectance. This is probably a minority opinion, at least among color scientists. Textbooks frequently claim that physical objects are not colored, and that the colors are "subje…Read more
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Some Like It Hot: Consciousness and Higher-Order ThoughtsPhilosophical Studies 86 (2): 103-129. 1997.
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Icon, index, and symbolPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 9 (4): 673-689. 1948.
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A Peircean Reduction Thesis: The Foundations of Topological LogicTexas Tech University Press. 1991.
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Encyclopedia of Semiotics (edited book)Oxford University Press USA. 1998.
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Charles Peirce and scholastic realismUniversity of Washington Press. 1963.
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3 Peirce and Medieval Thought1In Cheryl Misak (ed.), The Cambridge companion to Peirce, Cambridge University Press. pp. 58. 2004.
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The indexicality of 'knowledge'Philosophical Studies 138 (1). 2008.Epistemic contextualism—the view that the content of the predicate ‘know’ can change with the context of utterance—has fallen into considerable disrepute recently. Many theorists have raised doubts as to whether ‘know’ is context-sensitive, typically basing their arguments on data suggesting that ‘know’ behaves semantically and syntactically in a way quite different from recognised indexicals such as ‘I’ and ‘here’ or ‘flat’ and ‘empty’. This paper takes a closer look at three pertinent objectio…Read more
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Ridiculing social constructivism about phenomenal consciousnessBehavioral and Brain Sciences 22 (1): 199-201. 1999.
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On a confusion about a function of consciousnessBrain and Behavioral Sciences 18 (2). 1995.Consciousness is a mongrel concept: there are a number of very different "consciousnesses." Phenomenal consciousness is experience; the phenomenally conscious aspect of a state is what it is like to be in that state. The mark of access-consciousness, by contrast, is availability for use in reasoning and rationally guiding speech and action. These concepts are often partly or totally conflated, with bad results. This target article uses as an example a form of reasoning about a function of "consc…Read more
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Mental paintIn Martin Hahn & Björn T. Ramberg (eds.), Reflections and Replies: Essays on the Philosophy of Tyler Burge, Mit Press. pp. 165--200. 2003.
Surrey, British Columbia, Canada
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Epistemology |
Semiotics |
Philosophy of Technology, Misc |