•  18
    Hume and the fiction of the self
    European Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    In the Treatise, Hume attempts to explain why we all believe that the self is a single unified entity that persists over time, a belief which Hume calls a fiction. In this paper, I demonstrate how Hume uses a type of functional explanation to account for this belief. After explicating Hume's view, I shall argue that it faces two related problems, which constitute a sort of dilemma. In the final section, I show how one of the horns of this dilemma is plausibly what troubles Hume in the famous App…Read more
  • Enquiries concerning the minds of others
    In Anita Avramides & Matthew Parrott (eds.), Knowing Other Minds, Oxford University Press. 2019.
  •  253
    On Being Internally the Same
    with Anil Gomes
    In Uriah Kriegel (ed.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind Volume 1, Oxford University Press. 2021.
    Internalism and externalism disagree about whether agents who are internally the same can differ in their mental states. But what is it for two agents to be internally the same? Standard formulations take agents to be internally the same in virtue of some metaphysical fact, for example, that they share intrinsic physical properties. Our aim in this chapter is to argue that such formulations should be rejected. We provide the outlines of an alternative formulation on which agents are internally t…Read more
  •  8
    Spatial and Temporal Distribution of Information Processing in the Human Dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex
    with Conor Keogh, Alceste Deli, Amir Puyan Divanbeighi Zand, Mark Jernej Zorman, Sandra G. Boccard-Binet, Charalampos Sigalas, Alexander R. Weiss, John Frederick Stein, James J. FitzGerald, Tipu Z. Aziz, Alexander L. Green, and Martin John Gillies
    Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 16. 2022.
    The dorsal anterior cingulate cortex is a key node in the human salience network. It has been ascribed motor, pain-processing and affective functions. However, the dynamics of information flow in this complex region and how it responds to inputs remain unclear and are difficult to study using non-invasive electrophysiology. The area is targeted by neurosurgery to treat neuropathic pain. During deep brain stimulation surgery, we recorded local field potentials from this region in humans during a …Read more
  •  35
    Knowing Other Minds (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2019.
    How do we acquire knowledge of the thoughts and feelings of others? Knowing Other Minds brings together ten original essays that address various questions in philosophy and in empirical cognitive science which arise from our everyday social interaction with other people.
  •  68
    Delusional Predictions and Explanations
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 72 (1): 325-353. 2021.
    In both cognitive science and philosophy, many theorists have recently appealed to a predictive processing framework to offer explanations of why certain individuals form delusional beliefs. One aim of this essay will be to illustrate how one could plausibly develop a predictive processing account in different ways to account for the onset of different kinds of delusions. However, the second aim of this essay will be to discuss two significant limitations of the predictive processing framework. …Read more
  •  71
    Self-Blindness and Self-Knowledge
    Philosophers' Imprint 17. 2017.
    Many philosophers hold constitutive theories of self-knowledge in the sense that they think either that a person’s psychological states depend upon her having true beliefs about them, or that a person’s believing that she is in a particular psychological state depends upon her actually being in that state. One way to support this type of view can be found in Shoemaker’s well-known argument that an absurd condition, which he calls “self-blindness”, would be possible if a subject’s psychological s…Read more
  •  643
    In a recent paper, Gray, Knickman, and Wegner present three experiments which they take to show that people perceive patients in a persistent vegetative state to have less mentality than the dead. Following on from Gomes and Parrott, we provide evidence to show that participants' responses in the initial experiments are an artifact of the questions posed. Results from two experiments show that, once the questions have been clarified, people do not ascribe more mental capacity to the dead than to…Read more
  •  491
    Bayesian Models, Delusional Beliefs, and Epistemic Possibilities
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 67 (1): 271-296. 2016.
    The Capgras delusion is a condition in which a person believes that an imposter has replaced some close friend or relative. Recent theorists have appealed to Bayesianism to help explain both why a subject with the Capgras delusion adopts this delusional belief and why it persists despite counter-evidence. The Bayesian approach is useful for addressing these questions; however, the main proposal of this essay is that Capgras subjects also have a delusional conception of epistemic possibility, mor…Read more
  •  736
    Expressing first-person authority
    Philosophical Studies 172 (8): 2215-2237. 2015.
    Ordinarily when someone tells us something about her beliefs, desires or intentions, we presume she is right. According to standard views, this deferential trust is justified on the basis of certain epistemic properties of her assertion. In this paper, I offer a non-epistemic account of deference. I first motivate the account by noting two asymmetries between the kind of deference we show psychological self-ascriptions and the kind we grant to epistemic experts more generally. I then propose a n…Read more
  •  463
    Epicurean aspects of mental state attributions
    with Anil Gomes
    Philosophical Psychology 28 (7): 1001-1011. 2015.
    In a recent paper, Gray, Knickman, and Wegner present three experiments which they take to show that people judge patients in a persistent vegetative state to have less mental capacity than the dead. They explain this result by claiming that people have implicit dualist or afterlife beliefs. This essay critically evaluates their experimental findings and their proposed explanation. We argue first that the experiments do not support the conclusion that people intuitively think PVS patients have l…Read more
  •  16
    Explaining Inserted Thoughts
    Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 22 (3): 239-242. 2015.
    It seems to be impossible for a person to have introspective access to thoughts that are not her own. Yet, although first-personal conscious awareness of a particular thought is normally sufficient for being its owner, some schizophrenic subjects report being conscious of thoughts that are not theirs. This suggests that, contrary to philosophical orthodoxy, thought ownership is not a necessary condition for consciously experiencing a thought. Because what schizophrenics report is thus rather dif…Read more