•  156
    Thought Insertion as a Persecutory Delusion
    In P. López-Silva & T. McClelland (eds.), Intruders in The Mind: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Thought Insertion, Oxford University Press. 2013.
    Popular two-factor accounts of thought insertion hold that this symptom of psychosis is caused by two elements working in tandem: an anomalous experience of some kind (the first factor) and a reasoning deficit or bias (the second factor). This chapter develops a very different alternative to explaining and treating thought insertion—one that views thought insertion as a form persecutory delusion. If this thesis is correct, clinical interventions for persecutory delusions may be successful for th…Read more
  •  74
    Imagining What You Intend
    Philosophy and the Mind Sciences. forthcoming.
    If we are free to imagine what we choose, this is likely because our intentions determine what we are imagining. However, in a recent article, Munro and Strohminger (2021) argue that, in some cases of imagistic imagining, our intentions do not determine what we are imagining. They offer examples where, intuitively, a person intends to imagine one thing but, due to the causal source of the image used, imagine another. This paper acknowledges the challenge posed by these cases while arguing on …Read more
  •  145
    It is often observed that images—including mental images—are in some sense representationally ambiguous. Some, including Jerry Fodor, have added that mental images only come to have determinate contents through the contribution of non-imagistic representations that accompany them. This paper agrees that a kind of ambiguity holds with respect to mental imagery, while arguing (pace Fodor) that this does not prevent imagery from having determinate contents in the absence of other, non-imagistic r…Read more
  •  48
    Inner Speech
    The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2023.
    Inner speech is known as the “little voice in the head” or “thinking in words.” It attracts philosophical attention in part because it is a phenomenon where several topics of perennial interest intersect: language, consciousness, thought, imagery, communication, imagination, and self-knowledge all appear to connect in some way or other to the little voice in the head. Specific questions about inner speech that have exercised philosophers include its similarities to, and differences from, outer s…Read more
  •  247
    Measuring Inner Speech Objectively and Subjectively in Aphasia
    with Julianne Alexander and Brielle Stark
    Aphasiology. 2023.
    Background: Many people with aphasia and people without brain injury talk to themselves in their heads, i.e., have “inner speech.” Inner speech may be more preserved compared with spoken speech for some people with aphasia and may serve a variety of functions (e.g., emotion regulation), which motivates us to provide a high-fidelity characterization of it. Researchers have used multiple methods to measure this internal phenomenon in the past, which we combine here for the first time in a single s…Read more
  •  368
    A Context-Sensitive and Non-Linguistic Approach to Abstract Concepts
    Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 378. 2022.
    Despite the recent upsurge in research on abstract concepts, there remain puzzles at the foundation of their empirical study. These are most evident when we consider what is required to assess a person’s abstract conceptual abilities without using language as a prompt or requiring it as a response—as in classic non-verbal categorization tasks, which are standardly considered tests of conceptual understanding. After distinguishing two divergent strands in the most common conception of what it i…Read more
  •  248
    Secret charades: reply to Hutto
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 21 (5): 1183-1187. 2022.
    In reply to Daniel Hutto’s “Getting Real About Pretense,“ I defend my theory of pretense against his claim that it is subject to counterexamples by clarifying wherein the value of the analysis lies. Then I argue that the central challenge still facing Hutto’s “primacy of practice” approach, as well as other 4E approaches to pretense, is to explain the link between pretense and deception.
  •  398
    Propping up the causal theory
    Synthese 200 (2): 1-27. 2022.
    Martin and Deutscher’s causal theory of remembering holds that a memory trace serves as a necessary causal link between any genuine episode of remembering and the event it enables one to recall. In recent years, the causal theory has come under fire from researchers across philosophy and cognitive science, who argue that results from the scientific study of memory are incompatible with the kinds of memory traces that Martin and Deutscher hold essential to remembering. Of special note, these crit…Read more
  •  299
    Remembering and Imagining: The Attitudinal Continuity
    In Anja Berninger & Íngrid Vendrell Ferran (eds.), Philosophical Perspectives on Memory and Imagination, Routledge. forthcoming.
    Cats and dogs are the same kind of thing in being mammals, even if cats are not a kind of dog. In the same way, remembering and imagining might be the same kind of mental state, even if remembering is not a kind of imagining. This chapter explores whether episodic remembering, on the one hand, and future and counter-factual directed imagistic imagining, on the other, may be the same kind of mental state in being instances of the same cognitive attitude. I outline a continuist position where a…Read more
  •  339
    Remembering, Imagining, and Memory Traces: Toward a Continuist Causal Theory
    In Christopher McCarroll, Kourken Michaelian & Andre Sant'Anna (eds.), Current Controversies in Philosophy of Memory, Routledge. forthcoming.
    The (dis)continuism debate in the philosophy and cognitive science of memory concerns whether remembering is continuous with episodic future thought and episodic counterfactual thought in being a form of constructive imagining. I argue that settling that dispute will hinge on whether the memory traces (or “engrams”) that support remembering impose arational, perception-like constraints that are too strong for remembering to constitute a kind of constructive imagining. In exploring that questio…Read more
  •  538
    Imagining Experiences
    Noûs 561-586. 2016.
    It is often held that in imagining experiences we exploit a special imagistic way of representing mentality—one that enables us to think about mental states in terms of what it is like to have them. According to some, when this way of thinking about the mind is paired with more objective means, an explanatory gap between the phenomenal and physical features of mental states arises. This paper advances a view along those lines, but with a twist. What many take for a special imagistic way of think…Read more
  •  117
    Book Review -- Belief: A Pragmatic Picture (review)
    Philosophical Review 130 (2): 326-330. 2021.
  •  247
    The chapter considers the “paradox of fiction,” understood as the claim that it is in some sense irrational or inappropriate to respond emotionally to mere fictions. Several theorists have held that special features of imagination, or other “arational” mental reflexes, play a role in its resolution. I argue, to the contrary, that imagination need not enter into the solution, and that the paradox can be resolved in a way that shows our responses to fictions to be reasonable and warranted, even …Read more
  •  57
    Why pretense poses a problem for 4E cognition (and how to move forward)
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 21 (5): 1003-1021. 2022.
    Whether a person is pretending, or not, is a function of their beliefs and intentions. This poses a challenge to 4E accounts of pretense, which typically seek to exclude such cognitive states from their explanations of psychological phenomena. Resulting tensions are explored within three recent accounts of imagination and pretense offered by theorists working in the 4E tradition. A path forward is then charted, through considering ways in which explanations can invoke beliefs and intentions whil…Read more
  •  728
    In recent years, language has been shown to play a number of important cognitive roles over and above the communication of thoughts. One hypothesis gaining support is that language facilitates thought about abstract categories, such as democracy or prediction. To test this proposal, a novel set of semantic memory task trials, designed for assessing abstract thought non-linguistically, were normed for levels of abstractness. The trials were rated as more or less abstract to the degree that ans…Read more
  •  139
    Book Review: A. Zimmerman's "Belief: A Pragmatic Picture" (review)
    The Philosophical Review. forthcoming.
    Faced with the live, forced, and momentous option of whether to accept some form of theism, William James had the will to believe in God. Moved by similar pragmatic principles, Aaron Zimmerman advises self-professed egalitarians to believe they lack racist beliefs—even in the face of less explicit indices that, for some, point in the opposite direction.
  •  303
    Currie’s (2010) argument that “i-desires” must be posited to explain our responses to fiction is critically discussed. It is argued that beliefs and desires featuring ‘in the fiction’ operators—and not sui generis imaginings (or "i-beliefs" or "i-desires")—are the crucial states involved in generating fiction-directed affect. A defense of the “Operator Claim” is mounted, according to which ‘in the fiction’ operators would be also be required within fiction-directed sui generis imaginings (or "…Read more
  •  352
    Creativity
    In Explaining Imagination, Oxford University Press. pp. 262-296. 2020.
    Comparatively easy questions we might ask about creativity are distinguished from the hard question of explaining transformative creativity. Many have focused on the easy questions, offering no reason to think that the imagining relied upon in creative cognition cannot be reduced to more basic folk psychological states. The relevance of associative thought processes to songwriting is then explored as a means for understanding the nature of transformative creativity. Productive artificial neur…Read more
  •  957
    Explaining Imagination
    Oxford University Press. 2020.
    ​Imagination will remain a mystery—we will not be able to explain imagination—until we can break it into parts we already understand. Explaining Imagination is a guidebook for doing just that, where the parts are other ordinary mental states like beliefs, desires, judgments, and decisions. In different combinations and contexts, these states constitute cases of imagining. This reductive approach to imagination is at direct odds with the current orthodoxy, according to which imagination is a …Read more
  •  646
    Inner Speech
    WIREs Cognitive Science. forthcoming.
    Inner speech travels under many aliases: the inner voice, verbal thought, thinking in words, internal verbalization, “talking in your head,” the “little voice in the head,” and so on. It is both a familiar element of first-person experience and a psychological phenomenon whose complex cognitive components and distributed neural bases are increasingly well understood. There is evidence that inner speech plays a variety of cognitive roles, from enabling abstract thought, to supporting metacogni…Read more
  •  617
    What Sort of Imagining Might Remembering Be?
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association 7 (2): 231-251. 2021.
    This essay unites current philosophical thinking on imagination with a burgeoning debate in the philosophy of memory over whether episodic remembering is simply a kind of imagining. So far, this debate has been hampered by a lack of clarity in the notion of imagining at issue. Several options are considered and constructive imagining is identified as the relevant kind. Next, a functionalist account of episodic remembering is defended as a means to establishing two key points: first, one need not…Read more
  •  49
    Creating Time: Social Collaboration in Music Improvisation
    with Ashley E. Walton, Auriel Washburn, Anthony Chemero, Heidi Kloos, and Michael J. Richardson
    Topics in Cognitive Science 10 (1): 95-119. 2018.
    Musical improvisation is a natural case of human pattern formation, and Walton and colleagues investigate the way that different contextual constraints affect patterns of improvisation and their aesthetic quality. The authors find that coordination patterns are more diversified between two musicians when the musical space in which to improvise is relatively more constrained. They also find that listeners experience more diversified, complementary patterns between musicians as more enjoyable and …Read more
  •  69
    Inner Speech: New Voices (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2018.
    Much of what we say is never said aloud. It occurs only silently, as inner speech. We chastise, congratulate, joke and cajole, all without making a sound. This distinctively human ability to create public language in the privacy of our own minds is no less remarkable for its familiarity. And yet, until recently, inner speech remained at the periphery of philosophical and psychological theorizing. This essay collection, from an interdisciplinary group of leading philosophers, psychologists, …Read more
  •  687
    Inner Speech: New Voices -- Introduction
    In Peter Langland-Hassan & Agustin Vicente (eds.), Inner Speech: New Voices, Oxford University Press. 2018.
    This is the introductory chapter to the anthology: Inner Speech: New Voices, to be published in fall 2018 by OUP. It gives an overview of current debates in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience concerning inner speech, and situates the chapters of the volume with respect to those debates.
  •  526
    Metacognitive deficits in categorization tasks in a population with impaired inner speech
    with Christopher Gauker, Michael J. Richardson, Aimee Deitz, and Frank F. Faries
    Acta Psychologica 181 62-74. 2017.
    This study examines the relation of language use to a person’s ability to perform categorization tasks and to assess their own abilities in those categorization tasks. A silent rhyming task was used to confirm that a group of people with post-stroke aphasia (PWA) had corresponding covert language production (or “inner speech”) impairments. The performance of the PWA was then compared to that of age- and education-matched healthy controls on three kinds of categorization tasks and on metacognit…Read more
  •  481
    From Introspection to Essence: The Auditory Nature of Inner Speech
    In Peter Langland-Hassan & Agustin Vicente (eds.), Inner Speech: New Voices, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
    To some it is a shallow platitude that inner speech always has an auditory-phonological component. To others, it is an empirical hypothesis with accumulating support. To yet others it is a false dogma. In this chapter, I defend the claim that inner speech always has an auditory-phonological component, confining the claim to adults with ordinary speech and hearing. It is one thing, I emphasize, to assert that inner speech often, or even typically, has an auditory-phonological component—quite…Read more
  •  1029
    Inner Speech and Metacognition: In Search of a Connection
    Mind and Language 29 (5): 511-533. 2014.
    Many theorists claim that inner speech is importantly linked to human metacognition (thinking about one's own thinking). However, their proposals all rely upon unworkable conceptions of the content and structure of inner speech episodes. The core problem is that they require inner speech episodes to have both auditory-phonological contents and propositional/semantic content. Difficulties for the views emerge when we look closely at how such contents might be integrated into one or more states or…Read more
  •  499
    Inner speech deficits in people with aphasia
    with Frank R. Faries, Michael J. Richardson, and Aimee Dietz
    Frontiers in Psychology 6 1-10. 2015.
    Despite the ubiquity of inner speech in our mental lives, methods for objectively assessing inner speech capacities remain underdeveloped. The most common means of assessing inner speech is to present participants with tasks requiring them to silently judge whether two words rhyme. We developed a version of this task to assess the inner speech of a population of patients with aphasia and corresponding language production deficits. As expected, patients’ performance on the silent rhyming task …Read more
  •  629
    Unwitting Self‐Awareness?
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (3): 719-726. 2014.
    This is a contribution to a book symposium on Joelle Proust’s The Philosophy of Metacognition: Mental Agency and Self-Awareness (OUP). While there is much to admire in Proust’s book, the legitimacy of her distinction between “procedural” and “analytic” metacognition can be questioned. Doing so may help us better understand the relevance of animal metacognition studies to human self-knowledge.
  •  858
    Imaginative Attitudes
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 90 (3): 664-686. 2015.
    The point of this paper is to reveal a dogma in the ordinary conception of sensory imagination, and to suggest another way forward. The dogma springs from two main sources: a too close comparison of mental imagery to perceptual experience, and a too strong division between mental imagery and the traditional propositional attitudes (such as belief and desire). The result is an unworkable conception of the correctness conditions of sensory imaginings—one lacking any link between the conditions und…Read more