•  2112
    Representation in Cognitive Science
    Oxford University Press. 2018.
    How can we think about things in the outside world? There is still no widely accepted theory of how mental representations get their meaning. In light of pioneering research, Nicholas Shea develops a naturalistic account of the nature of mental representation with a firm focus on the subpersonal representations that pervade the cognitive sciences.
  •  729
    Methodological Encounters with the Phenomenal Kind
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 84 (2): 307-344. 2011.
    Block’s well-known distinction between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness has generated a large philosophical literature about putative conceptual connections between the two. The scientific literature about whether they come apart in any actual cases is rather smaller. Empirical evidence gathered to date has not settled the issue. Some put this down to a fundamental methodological obstacle to the empirical study of the relation between phenomenal consciousness and access consciou…Read more
  •  715
    Metacognitive Development and Conceptual Change in Children
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 11 (4): 745-763. 2020.
    There has been little investigation to date of the way metacognition is involved in conceptual change. It has been recognised that analytic metacognition is important to the way older children acquire more sophisticated scientific and mathematical concepts at school. But there has been barely any examination of the role of metacognition in earlier stages of concept acquisition, at the ages that have been the major focus of the developmental psychology of concepts. The growing evidence that even …Read more
  •  574
    The Vegetative State and the Science of Consciousness
    with Tim Bayne
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 61 (3): 459-484. 2010.
    Consciousness in experimental subjects is typically inferred from reports and other forms of voluntary behaviour. A wealth of everyday experience confirms that healthy subjects do not ordinarily behave in these ways unless they are conscious. Investigation of consciousness in vegetative state patients has been based on the search for neural evidence that such broad functional capacities are preserved in some vegetative state patients. We call this the standard approach. To date, the results of t…Read more
  •  429
    Naturalising Representational Content
    Philosophy Compass 8 (5): 496-509. 2013.
    This paper sets out a view about the explanatory role of representational content and advocates one approach to naturalising content – to giving a naturalistic account of what makes an entity a representation and in virtue of what it has the content it does. It argues for pluralism about the metaphysics of content and suggests that a good strategy is to ask the content question with respect to a variety of predictively successful information processing models in experimental psychology and cogni…Read more
  •  300
    Content in Simple Signalling Systems
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 69 (4): 1009-1035. 2018.
    Our understanding of communication and its evolution has advanced significantly through the study of simple models involving interacting senders and receivers of signals. Many theorists have thought that the resources of mathematical information theory are all that are needed to capture the meaning or content that is being communicated in these systems. However, the way theorists routinely talk about the models implicitly draws on a conception of content that is richer than bare informational co…Read more
  •  286
    Inherited representations are read in development
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 64 (1): 1-31. 2013.
    Recent theoretical work has identified a tightly-constrained sense in which genes carry representational content. Representational properties of the genome are founded in the transmission of DNA over phylogenetic time and its role in natural selection. However, genetic representation is not just relevant to questions of selection and evolution. This paper goes beyond existing treatments and argues for the heterodox view that information generated by a process of selection over phylogenetic ti…Read more
  •  275
    Exploitable Isomorphism and Structural Representation
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 114 (2pt2): 123-144. 2014.
    An interesting feature of some sets of representations is that their structure mirrors the structure of the items they represent. Founding an account of representational content on isomorphism, homomorphism or structural resemblance has proven elusive, however, largely because these relations are too liberal when the candidate structure over representational vehicles is unconstrained. Furthermore, in many cases where there is a clear isomorphism, it is not relied on in the way the representation…Read more
  •  272
    Getting Clear about Equivocal Concepts (review)
    Disputatio 1 (13). 2002.
    Just how far can externalism go? In this exciting new book Ruth Millikan explores a radically externalist treatment of empirical concepts (Millikan 2000). For the last thirty years philosophy of mind’s ties to meaning internalism have been loosened. The theory of content has swung uncomfortably on its moorings in a fickle current, straining against opposing ties to mind and world. In this book Millikan casts conceptual content adrift from the thinker: what determines the content of a concept is …Read more
  •  266
    Distinguishing Top-Down From Bottom-Up Effects
    In D. Stokes, M. Matthen & S. Biggs (eds.), Perception and Its Modalities, Oxford University Press. pp. 73-91. 2015.
    The distinction between top-down and bottom-up effects is widely relied on in experimental psychology. However, there is an important problem with the way it is normally defined. Top-down effects are effects of previously-stored information on processing the current input. But on the face of it that includes the information that is implicit in the operation of any psychological process – in its dispositions to transition from some types of representational state to others. This paper suggest…Read more
  •  231
    Consumers Need Information: supplementing teleosemantics with an input condition
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 (2): 404-435. 2007.
    The success of a piece of behaviour is often explained by its being caused by a true representation (similarly, failure falsity). In some simple organisms, success is just survival and reproduction. Scientists explain why a piece of behaviour helped the organism to survive and reproduce by adverting to the behaviour’s having been caused by a true representation. That usage should, if possible, be vindicated by an adequate naturalistic theory of content. Teleosemantics cannot do so, when it is ap…Read more
  •  218
    Content and Its vehicles in connectionist systems
    Mind and Language 22 (3). 2007.
    This paper advocates explicitness about the type of entity to be considered as content- bearing in connectionist systems; it makes a positive proposal about how vehicles of content should be individuated; and it deploys that proposal to argue in favour of representation in connectionist systems. The proposal is that the vehicles of content in some connectionist systems are clusters in the state space of a hidden layer. Attributing content to such vehicles is required to vindicate the standard ex…Read more
  •  217
    1. Introduction 2. Reward-Guided Decision Making 3. Content in the Model 4. How to Deflate a Metarepresentational Reading Proust and Carruthers on metacognitive feelings 5. A Deflationary Treatment of RPEs? 5.1 Dispensing with prediction errors 5.2 What is use of the RPE focused on? 5.3 Alternative explanations—worldly correlates 5.4 Contrast cases 6. Conclusion Appendix: Temporal Difference Learning Algorithms
  •  217
    The question of whether non-human animals are conscious is of fundamental importance. There are already good reasons to think that many are, based on evolutionary continuity and other considerations. However, the hypothesis is notoriously resistant to direct empirical test. Numerous studies have shown behaviour in animals analogous to consciously-produced human behaviour. Fewer probe whether the same mechanisms are in use. One promising line of evidence about consciousness in other animals deriv…Read more
  •  184
    Many have doubted whether the transition to genuinely new representational resources is susceptible to psychological explanation. In The Origin of Concepts (O.U.P. 2009), Susan Carey makes a strong empirical case for the existence of discontinuities in conceptual development. Carey also offers a plausible psychological explanation of some of these transitions, in particular of the child’s acquisition of the ability to represent natural numbers. The combination amounts to a forceful answer to puz…Read more
  •  175
    Representation in the genome and in other inheritance systems
    Biology and Philosophy 22 (3): 313-331. 2007.
    There is ongoing controversy as to whether the genome is a representing system. Although it is widely recognised that DNA carries information, both correlating with and coding for various outcomes, neither of these implies that the genome has semantic properties like correctness or satisfaction conditions, In the Scope of Logic, Methodology, and the Philosophy of Sciences, Vol. II. Kluwer, Dordrecht, pp. 387–400). Here a modified version of teleosemantics is applied to the genome to show that it…Read more
  •  156
    The Biological Basis of Cultural Transmission (review)
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 57 (1): 259-266. 2006.
    Review of: Kim Sterelny: Thought in a Hostile World. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.
  •  154
    Fodor’s radical concept nativism flowed from his view that hypothesis testing is the only route to concept acquisition. Many have successfully objected to the overly-narrow restriction to learning by hypothesis testing. Existing representations can be connected to a new representational vehicle so as to constitute a sustaining mechanism for a new representation, without the new representation thereby being constituted by or structured out of the old. This paper argues that there is also a deeper…Read more
  •  153
    Concept‐metacognition
    Mind and Language 35 (5): 565-582. 2019.
    Concepts are our tools for thinking. They enable us to engage in explicit reasoning about things in the world. Like physical tools, they can be more or less good, given the ways we use them – more or less dependable for categorisation, learning, induction, action-planning, and so on. Do concept users appreciate, explicitly or implicitly, that concepts vary in dependability? Do they feel that some concepts are in some way defective? If so, we metacognize our concepts. One example that has been st…Read more
  •  150
    Using phenomenal concepts to explain away the intuition of contingency
    Philosophical Psychology 27 (4): 553-570. 2014.
    Humans can think about their conscious experiences using a special class of ?phenomenal? concepts. Psychophysical identity statements formulated using phenomenal concepts appear to be contingent. Kripke argued that this intuited contingency could not be explained away, in contrast to ordinary theoretical identities where it can. If the contingency is real, property dualism follows. Physicalists have attempted to answer this challenge by pointing to special features of phenomenal concepts that ex…Read more
  •  149
    Short review of Varieties of Meaning, R. G. Millikan (review)
    Philosophical Review 118 (1): 127-130. 2009.
  •  147
    Neural signalling of probabilistic vectors
    Philosophy of Science 81 (5): 902-913. 2014.
    Recent work combining cognitive neuroscience with computational modelling suggests that distributed patterns of neural firing may represent probability distributions. This paper asks: what makes it the case that distributed patterns of firing, as well as carrying information about (correlating with) probability distributions over worldly parameters, represent such distributions? In examples of probabilistic population coding, it is the way information is used in downstream processing so as to le…Read more
  •  140
    Homology across inheritance systems
    Biology and Philosophy 29 (6): 781-806. 2014.
    Recent work on inheritance systems can be divided into inclusive conceptions, according to which genetic and non-genetic inheritance are both involved in the development and transmission of nearly all animal behavioral traits, and more demanding conceptions of what it takes for non-genetic resources involved in development to qualify as a distinct inheritance system. It might be thought that, if a more stringent conception is adopted, homologies could not subsist across two distinct inheritance …Read more
  •  133
    Does externalism entail the anomalism of the mental?
    Philosophical Quarterly 53 (211): 201-213. 2003.
    In ‘Mental Events’ Donald Davidson argued for the anomalism of the mental on the basis of the operation of incompatible constitutive principles in the mental and physical domains. Many years later, he has suggested that externalism provides further support for the anomalism of the mental. I examine the basis for that claim. The answer to the question in the title will be a qualified ‘Yes’. That is an important result in the metaphysics of mind and an interesting consequence of externalism.
  •  131
    Millikan’s Isomorphism Requirement
    In Dan Ryder, Justine Kingsbury & Kenneth Williford (eds.), Millikan and Her Critics, Wiley-blackwell. 2013.
    Millikan’s theory of content purports to rely heavily on the existence of isomorphisms between a system of representations and the things in the world which they represent — “the mapping requirement for being intentional signs” (Millikan 2004, p. 106). This paper asks whether those isomorphisms are doing any substantive explanatory work. Millikan’s isomorphism requirement is deployed for two main purposes. First, she claims that the existence of an isomorphism is the basic representing relati…Read more
  •  128
    Neural mechanisms of decision-making and the personal level
    In K. W. M. Fulford, M. Davies, G. Graham, J. Sadler, G. Stanghellini & T. Thornton (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry, Oxford University Press. pp. 1063-1082. 2013.
    Can findings from psychology and cognitive neuroscience about the neural mechanisms involved in decision-making can tell us anything useful about the commonly-understood mental phenomenon of making voluntary choices? Two philosophical objections are considered. First, that the neural data is subpersonal, and so cannot enter into illuminating explanations of personal level phenomena like voluntary action. Secondly, that mental properties are multiply realized in the brain in such a way as to m…Read more
  •  127
    Consciousness, Concepts and Natural Kinds
    with Tim Bayne
    Philosophical Topics 48 (1): 65-83. 2020.
    We have various everyday measures for identifying the presence of consciousness, such as the capacity for verbal report and the intentional control of behavior. However, there are many contexts in which these measures are difficult to apply, and even when they can be applied one might have doubts as to their validity in determining the presence/absence of consciousness. Everyday measures for identifying consciousness are particularly problematic when it comes to ‘challenging cases’—human infants…Read more
  •  124
    The concept of innateness is used to make inferences between various better-understood properties, like developmental canalization, evolutionary adaptation, heritability, species-typicality, and so on (‘innateness-related properties’). This article uses a recently-developed account of the representational content carried by inheritance systems like the genome to explain why innateness-related properties cluster together, especially in non-human organisms. Although inferences between innateness-r…Read more
  •  117
    Although predictive coding may offer a computational principle that unifies perception and action, states with different directions of fit are involved (with indicative and imperative contents, respectively). Predictive states are adjusted to fit the world in the course of perception, but in the case of action, the corresponding states act as a fixed target towards which the agent adjusts the world. This well-recognised distinction helps side-step some problems discussed in the target article
  •  110
    Metacognition and Abstract Concepts
    Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 373. 2018.
    The problem of how concepts can refer to or be about the non-mental world is particularly puzzling for abstract concepts. There is growing evidence that many characteristics beyond the perceptual are involved in grounding different kinds of abstract concept. A resource that has been suggested, but little explored, is introspection. This paper develops that suggestion by focusing specifically on metacognition—on the thoughts and feelings that thinkers have about a concept. One example of metacogn…Read more