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97Connectionism and the Philosophy of PsychologyMIT Press. 1996.In Connectionism and the Philosophy of Psychology, Horgan and Tienson articulate and defend a new view of cognition.
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54Evidentially embedded epistemic entitlementSynthese 197 (11): 4907-4926. 2020.Some hold that beliefs arising out of certain sources such as perceptual experience enjoy a kind of entitlement—as one is entitled to believe what is thereby presented as true, at least unless further evidence undermines that entitlement. This is commonly understood to require that default epistemic entitlement is a non-evidential kind of epistemic warrant. Our project here is to challenge this common, non-evidential, conception of epistemic entitlement. We will argue that although there are ind…Read more
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213What does it take to be a true believer? Against the opulent ideology of eliminative materialismIn Christina E. Erneling & David Martel Johnson (eds.), Mind As a Scientific Object, Oxford University Press. 2005.
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86How to be realistic about folk psychologyPhilosophical Psychology 1 (1): 69-81. 1988.Folk psychological realism is the view that folk psychology is true and that people really do have propositional attitudes, whereas anti-realism is the view that folk psychology is false and people really do not have propositional attitudes. We argue that anti-realism is not worthy of acceptance and that realism is eminently worthy of acceptance. However, it is plainly epistemically possible to favor either of two forms of folk realism: scientific or non-scientific. We argue that non-scientific …Read more
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67Supervenient bridge lawsPhilosophy of Science 45 (2): 227-249. 1978.I invoke the conceptual machinery of contemporary possible-world semantics to provide an account of the metaphysical status of "bridge laws" in intertheoretic reductions. I argue that although bridge laws are not definitions, and although they do not necessarily reflect attribute-identities, they are supervenient. I.e., they are true in all possible worlds in which the reducing theory is true
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28Modelling the noncomputational mind: Reply to LitchPhilosophical Psychology 10 (3): 365-371. 1997.I explain why, within the nonclassical framework for cognitive science we describe in the book, cognitive-state transitions can fail to be tractably computable even if they are subserved by a discrete dynamical system whose mathematical-state transitions are tractably computable. I distinguish two ways that cognitive processing might conform to programmable rules in which all operations that apply to representation-level structure are primitive, and two corresponding constraints on models of cog…Read more
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62Sensations and grain processesIn Gregory R. Mulhauser (ed.), Evolving Consciousness, John Benjamins. 1998.
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121Consciousness and intentionalityIn Max Velmans & Susan Schneider (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 468--484. 2007.
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103Themes in my philosophical workIn Johannes L. Brandl (ed.), Essays on the Philosophy of Terence Horgan, Atlanta: Rodopi. pp. 1-26. 2002.I invoked the notion of supervenience in my doctoral disseration, Microreduction and the Mind-Body Problem, completed at the University of Michigan in 1974 under the direction of Jaegwon Kim. I had been struck by the appeal to supervenience in Hare (1952), a classic work in twentieth century metaethics that I studied at Michigan in a course on metaethics taught by William Frankena; and I also had been struck by the brief appeal to supervenience in Davidson (1970). Kim was already, in effect, con…Read more
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7Simulation and epistemic competenceIn H. Kobler & K. Steuber (eds.), Empathy and Agency: The Problem of Understanding in the Social Sciences, Westview. 2000.Epistemology has recently come to more and more take the articulate form of an investigation into how we do, and perhaps might better, manage the cognitive chores of producing, modifying, and generally maintaining belief-sets with a view to having a true and systematic understanding of the world. While this approach has continuities with earlier philosophy, it admittedly makes a departure from the tradition of epistemology as first philosophy
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143The phenomenology of first-person agencyIn Sven Walter & Heinz-Dieter Heckmann (eds.), Physicalism and Mental Causation: The Metaphysics of Mind and Action, Imprint Academic. pp. 323. 2003.
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51Austere Realism: Contextual Semantics Meets Minimal OntologyMIT Press. 2008.The authors of Austere Realism describe and defend a provocative ontological-cum-semantic position, asserting that the right ontology is minimal or austere, in that it excludes numerous common-sense posits, and that statements employing such posits are nonetheless true, when truth is understood to be semantic correctness under contextually operative semantic standards. Terence Horgan and Matjaz [hacek over z] Potrc [hacek over c] argue that austere realism emerges naturally from consideration of…Read more
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144Cognition needs syntax but not rulesIn Robert J. Stainton (ed.), Contemporary Debates in Cognitive Science, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 147--158. 2006.Human cognition is rich, varied, and complex. In this Chapter we argue that because of the richness of human cognition (and human mental life generally), there must be a syntax of cognitive states, but because of this very richness, cognitive processes cannot be describable by exceptionless rules. The argument for syntax, in Section 1, has to do with being able to get around in any number of possible environments in a complex world. Since nature did not know where in the world humans would find …Read more
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392Phenomenal intentionality and the brain in a vatIn Richard Schantz (ed.), The Externalist Challenge, De Gruyter. 2004.
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52Connectionism and the Philosophy of Mind (edited book)Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1991."A third of the papers in this volume originated at the 1987 Spindel Conference ... at Memphis State University"--Pref.
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4Essays on ParadoxesOup Usa. 2016.This volume brings together Terence Horgan's essays on paradoxes, both published and new. A common theme unifying these essays is that philosophically interesting paradoxes typically resist either easy solutions or solutions that are formally/mathematically highly technical. Another unifying theme is that such paradoxes often have deep-sometimes disturbing-philosophical morals.
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86Practicing safe epistemologyPhilosophical Studies 102 (3). 2001.Reliablists have argued that the important evaluative epistemic concept of being justified in holding a belief, at least to the extent that that concept is associated with knowledge, is best understood as concerned with the objective appropriateness of the processes by which a given belief is generated and sustained. In particular, they hold that a belief is justified only when it is fostered by processes that are reliable (at least minimally so) in the believer’s actual world.[1] Of course, rel…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Mind |
Meta-Ethics |