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Future directions for philosophy of mindIn Amy Kind (ed.), Philosophy of Mind in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries: The History of the Philosophy of Mind, Volume 6, Routledge. 2018.
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The majority of contemporary philosophers of mind are physicalists. The majority of physicalists, however, are non-reductive physicalists. As nonreductive physicalists, these philosophers hold that a system's mental properties are different from a system's physical properties, that is, they hold that the sum total of mental facts about some system is a different set of facts than the sum total of physical facts about the same system. As physicalists, however, these nonreductivists hold that ment…Read more
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Objective Subjectivity: Allocentric and Egocentric Representations in Thought and ExperienceDissertation, Washington University. 2000.
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Review of Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain? (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2009 (4). 2009.
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Review of Martin Cohen's Mind Games: 31 Days to Rediscover Your Brain (review)Times Higher Education. 2010.
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Control ConsciousnessTopics in Cognitive Science 2 (4): 643-657. 2010.Control consciousness is the awareness or experience of seeming to be in control of one’s actions. One view, which I will be arguing against in the present paper, is that control consciousness is a form of sensory consciousness. In such a view, control consciousness is exhausted by sensory elements such as tactile and proprioceptive information. An opposing view, which I will be arguing for, is that sensory elements cannot be the whole story and must be supplemented by direct contributions of no…Read more
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Swamp Mary’s revenge: deviant phenomenal knowledge and physicalismPhilosophical Studies 148 (2): 231-247. 2010.Deviant phenomenal knowledge is knowing what it’s like to have experiences of, e.g., red without actually having had experiences of red. Such a knower is a deviant. Some physicalists have argued and some anti-physicalists have denied that the possibility of deviants undermines anti-physicalism and the Knowledge Argument. The current paper presents new arguments defending the deviant-based attacks on anti-physicalism. Central to my arguments are considerations concerning the psychosemantic underp…Read more
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Supervenience and neuroscienceSynthese 180 (3). 2011.The philosophical technical term "supervenience" is frequently used in the philosophy of mind as a concise way of characterizing the core idea of physicalism in a manner that is neutral with respect to debates between reductive physicalists and nonreductive physicalists. I argue against this alleged neutrality and side with reductive physicalists. I am especially interested here in debates between psychoneural reductionists and nonreductive functionalist physicalists. Central to my arguments wil…Read more
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On Whether the Higher-Order Thought Theory of Consciousness Entails Cognitive Phenomenology, or: What is it Like to Think that One Thinks that P?Philosophical Topics 40 (2): 1-12. 2012.Among our conscious states are conscious thoughts. The question at the center of the recent growing literature on cognitive phenomenology is this: In consciously thinking P, is there thereby any phenomenology—is there something it’s like? One way of clarifying the question is to say that it concerns whether there is any proprietary phenomenology associated with conscious thought. Is there any phenomenology due to thinking, as opposed to phenomenology that is due to some co-occurring sensation o…Read more
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Color-Consciousness ConceptualismConsciousness and Cognition 21 (2): 617-631. 2012.The goal of the present paper is to defend against a certain line of attack the view that conscious experience of color is no more fine-grained that the repertoire of non- demonstrative concepts that a perceiver is able to bring to bear in perception. The line of attack in question is an alleged empirical argument - the Diachronic Indistinguishability Argument - based on pairs of colors so similar that they can be discriminated when simultaneously presented but not when presented across a memory…Read more
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Mental Colors, Conceptual Overlap, and Discriminating Knowledge of ParticularsConsciousness and Cognition 21 (2): 641-643. 2012.I respond to the separate commentaries by Jacob Berger, Charlie Pelling, and David Pereplyotchik on my paper, “Color-Consciousness Conceptualism.” I resist Berger’s suggestion that mental colors ever enter consciousness without accompaniment by deployments of concepts of their extra-mental counterparts. I express concerns about Pelling’s proposal that a more uniform conceptualist treatment of phenomenal sorites can be gained by a simple appeal to the partial overlap of the extensions of some con…Read more
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What is Visual and Phenomenal but Concerns neither Hue nor Shade?In Richard Brown (ed.), Consciousness Inside and Out: Phenomenology, Neuroscience, and the Nature of Experience, Springer Studies in Brain and Mind. 2013.Though the following problem is not explicitly raised by her, it seems sufficiently similar to an issue of pertinence to Akins's "Black and White and Color" (this volume) to merit the moniker, Akins's Problem : Can there be a visual experience devoid of both color phenomenology and black-and-white phenomenology? The point of the present paper is to draw from Akins's paper the materials needed to sketch a case for a positive answer to Akins's Problem. I am unsure about how much of what follows Ak…Read more
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Metaphysical Daring as a Posthuman Survival StrategyMidwest Studies in Philosophy 39 (1): 144-157. 2015.I develop an argument that believing in the survivability of a mind uploading procedure conveys value to its believers that is assessable independently of assessing the truth of the belief. Regardless of whether the first-order metaphysical belief is true, believing it conveys a kind of Darwinian fitness to the believer. Of course, a further question remains of whether having that Darwinian property can be a basis—in a rational sense of being a basis—for one’s holding the belief. I’ll also make …Read more
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Meta-Illusionism and Qualia QuietismJournal of Consciousness Studies 23 (11-12): 140-148. 2016.Many so-called problems in contemporary philosophy of mind depend for their expression on a collection of inter-defined technical terms, a few of which are qualia, phenomenal property, and what-it’s-like-ness. I express my scepticism about Keith Frankish’s illusionism, the view that people are generally subject to a systematic illusion that any properties are phenomenal, and scout the relative merits of two alternatives to Frankish’s illusionism. The first is phenomenal meta-illusionism, the vie…Read more
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The Myth of Color Sensations, or How Not to See a Yellow BananaTopics in Cognitive Science 9 (1): 228-240. 2017.I argue against a class of philosophical views of color perception, especially insofar as such views posit the existence of color sensations. I argue against the need to posit such nonconceptual mental intermediaries between the stimulus and the eventual conceptualized perceptual judgment. Central to my arguments are considerations of certain color illusions. Such illusions are best explained by reference to high-level, conceptualized knowledge concerning, for example, object identity, likely li…Read more
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How Philosophy of Mind Can Shape the FutureIn Amy Kind (ed.), Philosophy of Mind in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries: The History of the Philosophy of Mind, Volume 6, Routledge. pp. 303-319. 2018.
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Cognitive Approaches to Phenomenal ConsciousnessIn Dale Jacquette (ed.), The Bloomsbury Companion to the Philosophy of Consciousness, Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 347-370. 2017.
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Philosophy and the Neurosciences: A Reader (edited book)Blackwell. 2001.
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Cognitive Science: An Introduction to Mind and BrainRoutledge. 2006.Cognitive Science is a major new guide to the central theories and problems in the study of the mind and brain. The authors clearly explain how and why cognitive science aims to understand the brain as a computational system that manipulates representations. They identify the roots of cognitive science in Descartes - who argued that all knowledge of the external world is filtered through some sort of representation - and examine the present-day role of Artificial Intelligence, computing, psychol…Read more
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Key Terms in Philosophy of MindContinuum. 2010.
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This is Philosophy of Mind: An IntroductionWiley-Blackwell. 2013.This is Philosophy. In keeping with the mission of the series, This is Philosophy: Philosophy of Mind will be both accessible to the average student and technology oriented, integrating with supplemental online material. Also, while the proposed book will cover all of the topics one would expect in a traditional philosophy of mind course, it will be up to date and cover recent advances that are sadly missing from many competitor volumes. My proposed volume will not be limited to what has become …Read more
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Consciousness |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |