•  21
    Begging the question: a reply to Lycan
    Analysis 61 (4): 313-318. 2001.
  •  34
    Is Language Required to Represent Others’ Mental States? Evidence From Beliefs and Other Representations
    with Steven Samuel, Kresimir Durdevic, Edward W. Legg, and Nicola S. Clayton
    Cognitive Science 43 (1). 2019.
    An important part of our Theory of Mind—the ability to reason about other people's unobservable mental states—is the ability to attribute false beliefs to others. We investigated whether processing these false beliefs, as well as similar but nonmental representations, is reliant on language. Participants watched videos in which a protagonist hides a gift and either takes a photo of it or writes a text about its location before a second person inadvertently moves the present to a different locati…Read more
  •  9
    Colin Allen and Marc Bekoff, Species of Mind
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 6 (3): 445-447. 1998.
    . Book Reviews. International Journal of Philosophical Studies: Vol. 6, No. 3, pp. 445-473.
  •  23
    Taking the first-person approach: Two worries for Siewert's sense of 'consciousness'
    PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 7. 2001.
    There are two things about Siewert's project that worry me. First, it's not clear to me that by taking Siewert's first-person approach, we can come to grasp what he means by 'consciousness'. And second, even if we are able to come to grasp what he means by this term, it's not clear to me that all the "consciousness-neglectful theoreticians of mind" - for example, Dennett, Rosenthal, and Tye - have failed to give an account of the property which Siewert's term picks out
  •  57
    Animal Mindreading: A Defense of Optimistic Agnosticism
    with Sharisse Kanet and Carla Krachun
    Mind and Language 29 (4): 428-454. 2014.
    We recommend the attitude of optimistic agnosticism toward animal mindreading: suspending acceptance until tests succeed in overcoming Povinelli's problem, and being optimistic about the feasibility of such tests. Fletcher and Carruthers argue for sufficient reasons to accept animal mindreading; we find their arguments unconvincing. Points they raise against the behavior-reading theory apply equally to mindreading theory, and their claims of greater parsimony are unfounded. Premature acceptance …Read more
  •  111
    The Philosophy of Animal Minds (edited book)
    Cambridge University Press. 2009.
    This volume is a collection of fourteen essays by leading philosophers on issues concerning the nature, existence, and our knowledge of animal minds. The nature of animal minds has been a topic of interest to philosophers since the origins of philosophy, and recent years have seen significant philosophical engagement with the subject. However, there is no volume that represents the current state of play in this important and growing field. The purpose of this volume is to highlight the state of …Read more
  •  30
    How to solve the distinguishability problem: Triangulation without explicit training
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (6): 1142-1143. 2001.
    Heyes's (1998) triangulation approach to distinguishing a “theory” of mind (ToM) from a “theory” of behavior (ToB) in chimpanzees fails. The ToB theorist can appeal to the explicit training sessions and analogical reasoning to explain/predict the chimpanzees' behaviors. An alternative triangulation experiment is sketched, demonstrating how the removal of such training sessions paves the way toward solving the distinguishability problem.
  •  128
    Belief Attribution in Animals: On How to Move Forward Conceptually and Empirically (review)
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 2 (1): 19-59. 2011.
    There is considerable debate in comparative psychology and philosophy over whether nonhuman animals can attribute beliefs. The empirical studies that suggest that they can are shown to be inconclusive, and the main philosophical and empirical arguments that purport to show they cannot are shown to be invalid or weak. What is needed to move the debate and the field forward, it is argued, is a fundamentally new experimental protocol for testing belief attribution in animals, one capable of disting…Read more
  •  85
    Animal consciousness
    Journal of Philosophical Research 24 (January): 149-168. 1999.
    The question of the possibility of conscious experience in animals has had a rebirth recentIy in both philosophy and psychology. I argue that there is an account of consciousness that is perfectly consistent with many animals enjoying conscious experiences. In defending my thesis, I examine a recent account of consciousness by Peter Carruthers which denies animals conscious experiences. I argue that Carruthers’ account should be rejected on the grounds that it is unnecessarily complex, and that …Read more
  •  69
    Neither hot nor cold: An alternative account of consciousness
    PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 9. 2003.
    I identify three dominant positions in the philosophy of mind on the nature and distribution of consciousness: the exclusive HOT position, the inclusive HOT position, and the COLD position. I argue that each of these positions has its own rather counterintuitive consequence and, as a result, is not entirely satisfying. To avoid these consequences, I argue, a common assumption of the dominant positions ought to be rejected -- namely, that to be conscious of one's mental states is to be conscious …Read more
  •  3
    I defend the thesis that it is conceptually possible for non-linguistic creatures to possess second-order beliefs--that is, beliefs about their own beliefs and those of others. I defend this thesis against Donald Davidson and Jonathan Bennett who argue that the thesis is false on the grounds that non-linguistic creatures cannot manifest second-order beliefs. In reply, I present a case that I argue shows a non-linguistic creature manifesting second-order beliefs. Also, I examine and criticize two…Read more
  •  93
    In defense of wordless thoughts about thoughts
    Mind and Language 22 (3). 2007.
    Bermúdez (2003) argues that (T1) nonlinguistic creatures can think thoughts about protocausal conditional states of affairs and engage in rudimentary forms of reasoning, but (T2) they cannot ‘in principle’ think thoughts about thoughts (propositions)—in particular, they cannot have higher-order propositional attitudes (PAs). I reconstruct Bermúdez’s argument for T2 and show that it rests upon an implausible empirical assumption and is, therefore, not a threat to current empirical research into n…Read more
  •  20
    Animal Consciousness
    Journal of Philosophical Research 24 149-168. 1999.
    The question of the possibility of conscious experience in animals has had a rebirth recentIy in both philosophy and psychology. I argue that there is an account of consciousness that is perfectly consistent with many animals enjoying conscious experiences. In defending my thesis, I examine a recent account of consciousness by Peter Carruthers which denies animals conscious experiences. I argue that Carruthers’ account should be rejected on the grounds that it is unnecessarily complex, and that …Read more
  •  99
    Origins of Objectivity
    Philosophical Psychology 25 (5): 775-781. 2012.
    Philosophical Psychology, Volume 0, Issue 0, Page 1-7, Ahead of Print
  •  44
    Feigning introspective blindness for thought
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (2): 153-154. 2009.
    I argue that the very reasons Carruthers gives for why the account should allow introspective access to perceptual/quasi-perceptual states, can be given for thought, as well. I also argue that we have good subjectively accessible grounds for the intuition in introspective thoughts, notwithstanding Carruthers' argument to the contrary and his attempt to explain the intuition away
  •  86
    Advancing the debate between HOT and FO accounts of consciousness
    Journal of Philosophical Research 28 23-44. 2003.
    David Rosenthal and Fred Dretske agree that creature consciousness should be used to give a reductive explanation of state consciousness. They disagree, however, over what type of creature consciousness will do the job. Rosenthal, defending a higher-order thought account, argues that higher-order creature consciousness is what is needed. Dretske, defending a first-order account, argues that first-order creature consciousness is what is needed. I attempt to advance this debate by presenting a cas…Read more
  • I know you see it wrong! Children use others’ false perceptions to predict their behaviors
    with Carla Krachun
    Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 150 380-395. 2016.
    Research on children’s ability to attribute false mental states to others has focused exclusively on false beliefs. We developed a novel paradigm that focuses instead on another type of false mental state: false perceptions. From approximately 4 years of age, children begin to recognize that their perception of an illusory object can be at odds with its true properties. Our question was whether they also recognize that another individual viewing the object will similarly experience a false perce…Read more
  •  38
    There is a persistent methodological problem in primate mindreading research, dubbed the 'logical problem,' over how to determine experimentally whether chimpanzees are mindreaders or just clever behavior-readers of a certain sort. The problem has persisted long enough that some researchers have concluded that it is intractable. The logical problem, I argue, is tractable but only with experimental protocols that are fundamentally different from those that have been currently used or suggested. I…Read more
  •  40
    Metaphors of the mind abound. The mind has been metaphorically described as an aviary, a telephone switchboard, a ghost in a machine, and a computer - to name but a few. Bernard Baars, in his In the theater of consciousness, adds to this venerable list, arguing that the mind can be instructively thought of as a working theater. Baars argues for the aptness of his theater metaphor by showing how it can be used to tell "a unified story" of all the currently available scientific data on consciousne…Read more
  •  59
    A defense of first-order representationalist theories of mental-state consciousness
    PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 6. 2000.
    Recently, Peter Carruthers has advanced the debate over first-order representationalist theories and higher-order representationalist theories of consciousness by offering two innovative arguments in support of dispositionalist HORs. In this article, I offer a limited defense of actualist FORs by showing that Carruthers' two arguments either beg the question against such accounts, equivocate on important concepts, or rest on suspect claims about our abilities to attribute phenomenal consciousnes…Read more
  •  14
    Reducing Consciousness by Making it Hot A Review of Peter Carruthers' Phenomenal Consciousness
    PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 8. 2002.
    Our conscious experiences are said to possess a unique property called phenomenal consciousness. Why these and only these states of us have this property has proved to be an exceedingly difficult question for philosophers and scientists to answer. In fact, some have claimed that this question constitutes the hard problem of the mind-body problem, one which cannot be solved by the standard methods of contemporary science. In his most recent book, Phenomenal Consciousness, Peter Carruthers offers …Read more
  •  119
    A persistent methodological problem in primate social cognition research has been how to determine experimentally whether primates represent the internal goals of other agents or just the external goals of their actions. This is an instance of Daniel Povinelli’s more general challenge that no experimental protocol currently used in the field is capable of distinguishing genuine mindreading animals from their complementary behavior-reading counterparts. We argue that current methods used to test …Read more
  •  13
    Advancing the Debate Between Hot and FO Accounts of Consciousness
    Journal of Philosophical Research 28 23-44. 2003.
    David Rosenthal and Fred Dretske agree that creature consciousness should be used to give a reductive explanation of state consciousness. They disagree, however, over what type of creature consciousness will do the job. Rosenthal, defending a higher-order thought (HOT) account, argues that higher-order creature consciousness is what is needed. Dretske, defending a first-order (FO) account, argues that first-order creature consciousness is what is needed. I attempt to advance this debate by prese…Read more