Carruthers (2000; 2005) provides a general defence of reductive representationalism about phenomenal consciousness while critiquing first-order theories of the sort proposed by Baars (1988), Tye (1995), Dennett (2001), and others (thereby motivating a form of higher-order account). The present paper defends first-order theories against that attack.

This is the first of three volumes on the subject of innateness. The extent to which the mind is innate is one of the central questions in the human sciences, with important implications for many surrounding debates. This book along with the following two volumes provide assess of nativist thought and a definitive reference point for future nativist inquiry. This book is concerned with the fundamental architecture of the mind, addressing such question as: what capacities, processes, representations, biases, and connections (...) are innate? How do these innate elements feed into a story about the development of our mature cognitive capacities, and which of them are shared with other members of the animal kingdom? The book includes an introduction giving some of the background to debates about innateness and introducing each of the subsequent chapters, as well as a consolidated bibliography. (shrink)

This book is the second of a three-volume set on the subject of innateness. The book is highly interdisciplinary, and addresses such question as: to what extent are mature cognitive capacities a reflection of particular cultures and to what extent are they a product of innate elements? How do innate elements interact with culture to achieve mature cognitive capacities? How do minds generate and shape cultures? How are cultures processed by minds?Concerned with the fundamental architecture of the mind, this text (...) addresses questions about the existence & extent of human innate abilities, how these inate abilities affect the development of the mature mind, & which of them is shared with other species. (shrink)

The Cognitive Basis of Science concerns the question 'What makes science possible?' Specifically, what features of the human mind and of human culture and cognitive development permit and facilitate the conduct of science? The essays in this volume address these questions, which are inherently interdisciplinary, requiring co-operation between philosophers, psychologists, and others in the social and cognitive sciences. They concern the cognitive, social, and motivational underpinnings of scientific reasoning in children and lay persons as well as in professional scientists. The (...) editors' introduction lays out the background to the debates, and the volume includes a consolidated bibliography that will be a valuable reference resource for all those interested in this area. The volume will be of great importance to all researchers and students interested in the philosophy or psychology of scientific reasoning, as well as those, more generally, who are interested in the nature of the human mind. (shrink)

This article explores three ways in which a cognitively entrenched mindreading (or 'theory of mind') system may bias our thinking as cognitive scientists. One issues in a form of tacit dualism, impacting scientific debates about phenomenal consciousness. Another leads us to think that our own minds are easier to know than they really are, influencing debates about self-knowledge, and about mindreading itself. And the third results in a bias in favour of empiricist over nativist accounts of cognitive development. The discussion (...) throughout is tentative and speculative, and can be regarded as an appeal for caution, as well as a call for further research. (shrink)

This paper argues that episodic thoughts are always unconscious. Whether consciousness is understood in terms of global broadcasting/widespread accessibility or in terms of non-interpretive higher-order awareness, the conclusion is the same: there is no such thing as conscious thought. Arguments for this conclusion are reviewed. The challenge of explaining why we should all be under the illusion that our thoughts are often conscious is then taken up.

This is an elegant and clear tour through many of the issues in philosophy of mind that have occupied philosophers of this century. The topics covered include the problem of other minds, arguments for and against the existence of the soul, a discussion of the bundle theory of the mind, behaviorism, functionalism, mind/brain identity, the argument against the possibility of private language, personal identity and the possibility of after-life, and the question of whether animals and computers can have minds. (...) class='Hi'>Carruthers emphasizes arguments for and against the various theories considered, and encourages readers to actively evaluate these approaches as well. Written with clarity and directness, Introducing Persons will prove a useful text for the beginner while simultaneously providing original material of interest to the advanced student and professional philosopher. (shrink)

One powerful argument for dualism is provided by Chalmers: the ‘zombie’ or conceivability argument. This paper aims to establish that if one adopts the ‘Powerful Qualities’ account of properties developed by Martin and Heil, this argument can be resisted at the first premise: the claim that zombies are conceivable is, by the lights of Chalmers’ own account of conceivability, false. The Powerful Qualities account is outlined. Chalmers’ argument, and several distinctions which underlie it, are explained. It is argued that to (...) make sense of the claim that zombies are conceivable, some account of properties must be given. The paper’s central claim is presented and defended from potential responses: given the Powerful Qualities view, zombies are in fact inconceivable. Finally, an error theory is presented, which offers an explanation of why so many have taken the conceivability of zombies to be unproblematic, and the view is briefly contrasted with Russellian monism. (shrink)

In P. Carruthers, S. Laurence, & S. Stich (Eds.). The innate mind: Structure and content. (pp. 305-337). New York: Oxford University Press.

This book is the third of a three-volume set on the innate mind. It provides an assessment of nativist thought and definitive reference point for future inquiry. Nativists have long been interested in a variety of foundational topics relating to the study of cognitive development and the historical opposition between nativism and empiricism. Among the issues here are questions about what it is for something to be innate in the first place; how innateness is related to such things as heritability, (...) genetic information, and theories of cognitive development; the status of arguments both for and against nativism; and how best to understand the role of genes in development and inheritance. These issues are all explored in one way or another in this book. But the book also looks to the future. Alongside state-of-the-art discussions of such established nativist concerns as language, number, spatial cognition, and social cognition, this book examines nativist work in a variety of areas where detailed nativist exploration is relatively new, including cultural learning, creativity, economic choice, culture, and morality. The expansion of nativist theorizing into all these new areas shows both the power and the promise of nativist approaches, and points the way to the future. (shrink)

In a pair of recent papers and his new book, Christopher Peacocke (2007, 2008a, 2008b) takes up and defends the claim that our awareness of our own actions is immediate and not perceptually based, and extends it into the domain of mental action.1 He aims to provide an account of action-awareness that will generalize to explain how we have immediate awareness of our own judgments, decisions, imaginings, and so forth. These claims form an important component in a much larger philosophical (...) edifice, with many implications for the philosophy of mind and for epistemology. The present paper advances multiple criticisms of Peacocke's account. In particular, it shows that he has given insufficient grounds for thinking that we have non-perceptual awareness of our own actions; and it shows that the account of action-awareness that he provides does not, in any case, generalize to mental actions of the sort that he intends. (shrink)

Berent (this issue) critiques one of the three main proposals put forward by Carruthers (this issue), who suggests that cognitive scientists are biased against innateness-claims by the tacit assumptions of the mentalizing faculty. Berent proposes, instead, that the bias results from dissonance produced by a conflict between our innate dualism and our innate essentialism. The present response raises a number of difficulties for her argument.

The present paper elucidates, elaborates, and defends the main thesis advanced in the target article: namely, that natural-language sentences play a constitutive role in some human thought processes, and that they are responsible for some of the distinctive flexibility of human thinking, serving to integrate the outputs of a variety of conceptual modules. Section R1 clarifies and elaborates this main thesis, responding to a number of objections and misunderstandings. R2 considers three contrasting accounts of the mechanism of inter-modular integration. R3 (...) discusses objections to some of the empirical data supporting my main thesis. R4 criticizes some competing theories of the role of language in cognition. And R5 considers some proposed supplementary cognitive roles which language might play. (shrink)

The sense of embodiment is vital for self recognition. An examination of anosognosia for hemiplegia—the inability to recognise that one is paralysed down one side of one’s body—suggests the existence of ‘online’ and ‘offline’ representations of the body. Online representations of the body are representations of the body as it is currently, are newly constructed moment by moment and are directly “plugged into” current perception of the body. In contrast, offline representations of the body are representations of what the body (...) is usually like, are relatively stable and are constructed from online representations. This distinction is supported by an analysis of phantom limb—the feeling that an amputated limb is still present—phenomena. Initially it seems that the sense of embodiment may arise from either of these types of representation; however, an integrated representation of the body seems to be required. It is suggested information from vision and emotions is involved in generating these representations. A lack of access to online representations of the body does not necessarily lead to a loss in the sense of embodiment. An integrated offline representation of the body could account for the sense of embodiment and perform the functions attributed to this sense. (shrink)

The paper examines the potentialities-centred interpretation of quantum theory developed by David Bohm in his 1951 book Quantum Theory and aims to situate it within a general ontological framework, focusing on Charlie Martin's views.

The prolepsis in Denis Villeneuve's Arrival emphasises the cyclical nature of the film's narrative and anchors human reproduction as a central theme. Pregnancy, the pregnant body, and the physical, experiential nature of birth, commonly heavily gendered in film, are misleading focal points in the narrative. The presence of the unborn as a subtext in the film problematises Iris Marion Young's notion of pregnant embodiment as a subjective lived-body experience. The viewer is encouraged to empathise with the complexity of birth, life, (...) and death as part of Louise's lived-body experience, but is finally confronted with the uncertainty of maternity, pregnancy and the unborn. When Barbara Duden calls the unborn foetus a “not-yet”, she describes the process by which the foetus achieves a legal status, and the precarious nature of ascribing life or personhood. The prolepsis, which punctuates the main narrative, emphasises the reversibility and irreversibility of life that does “not-yet” exist. Import... (shrink)

This book is a comprehensive development and defense of one of the guiding assumptions of evolutionary psychology: that the human mind is composed of a large number of semi-independent modules. The Architecture of the Mind has three main goals. One is to argue for massive mental modularity. Another is to answer a 'How possibly?' challenge to any such approach. The first part of the book lays out the positive case supporting massive modularity. It also outlines how the thesis should best (...) be developed, and articulates the notion of 'module' that is in question. Then the second part of the book takes up the challenge of explaining how the sorts of flexibility and creativity that are distinctive of the human mind could possibly be grounded in the operations of a massive number of modules.Peter Carruthers's third aim is to show how the various components of the mind are likely to be linked and interact with one another - indeed, this is crucial to demonstrating how the human mind, together with its familiar capacities, can be underpinned by a massively modular set of mechanisms. He outlines and defends the basic framework of a perception / belief / desire / planning / motor-control architecture, as well as detailing the likely components and their modes of connectivity. Many specific claims about the place within this architecture of natural language, of a mind-reading system, and others are explained and motivated. A number of novel proposals are made in the course of these discussions, one of which is that creative human thought depends upon a prior kind of creativity of action.Written with unusual clarity and directness, and surveying an extensive range of research in cognitive science, this book will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in the nature and organization of the mind. (shrink)

Peter Carruthers's essays on consciousness and related issues have had a substantial impact on the field, and many of his best are now collected here in revised form. The first half of the volume is devoted to developing, elaborating, and defending against competitors one particular sort of reductive explanation of phenomenal consciousness, which Carruthers now refers to as 'dual-content theory'. Phenomenal consciousness - the feel of experience - is supposed to constitute the 'hard problem' for a scientific world (...) view, and many have claimed that it is an irredeemable mystery. But Carruthers here claims to have explained it. He argues that phenomenally conscious states are ones that possess both an 'analog' intentional content and a corresponding higher-order analog content, representing the first-order content of the experience. It is the higher-order analog content that enables our phenomenally conscious experiences to present themselves to us, and that constitutes their distinctive subjective aspect, or feel.The next two chapters explore some of the differences between conscious experience and conscious thought, and argue for the plausibility of some kind of eliminativism about conscious thinking. Then the final four chapters focus on the minds of non-human animals. Carruthers argues that even if the experiences of animals aren't phenomenally conscious, this needn't prevent the frustrations and sufferings of animals from being appropriate objects of sympathy and concern. Nor need it mean that there is any sort of radical 'Cartesian divide' between our minds and theirs of deep significance for comparative psychology. In the final chapter, he argues provocatively that even insects have minds that include a belief/desire/perception psychology much like our own. So mindedness and phenomenal consciousness couldn't be further apart.Carruthers's writing throughout is distinctively clear and direct. The collection will be of great interest to anyone working in philosophy of mind or cognitive science. (shrink)

This paper argues that two of my critics (Cowie and Wilson) have become fixated on Fodor’s notion of modularity, both to their own detriment and to the detriment of their understanding of Carruthers, 2006. The paper then focuses on the supposed inadequacies of the latter’s explanations of both content flexibility and human uniqueness, alleged by Machery and Cowie respectively.

Dans cet article, nous présentons et discutons de notre méthodologie pour la constitution d’un « petit corpus » comparatif de narration orale en occitan. Il s’agit d’un « petit corpus » nouveau et unique, dans une langue minorisée, ce qui soulève un certain nombre de défis particuliers : la complexité des rapports entre l’écrit et l’oral dans la pratique du conte d’une part, et d’autre part, de nombreuses difficultés méthodologiques (variations diatopique, diachronique et sociolinguistique ; absence de données numérisées ; (...) outils de traitement automatique des langues en cours de développement). Cet article propose non seulement une méthodologie pour la constitution d’un corpus permettant d’explorer divers degrés d’oralité, mais contribue aussi plus globalement au débat sur la problématique des « petits corpus » pour les langues minorisées. (shrink)

The sense of agency over bodily actions is the feeling that one is the agent of one's actions. In this paper I examine the prospects of Frith and colleagues' influential comparator account of how the sense of agency over one's bodily actions is elicited, in comparison to the multifactorial weighting model advocated by Synofzik and colleagues in response to some problems with this account. I examine two problems for the comparator model. I consider the common objection that the actual sensory (...) consequences of action aren't needed to elicit the sense of agency with a look at the data which most strongly suggests this, namely the preserved sense of agency over phantom limb movements. I consider a problem for the comparator model in the behaviour of normal subjects placed in unusual circumstances, in particular I consider the 'wheel of fortune' studies which some take to be problematic for the comparator model. I argue that neither of these objections are devastating for the comparator model and that the comparator model plus some plausible assumptions can explain these data. However, these assumptions are not part of the original comparator model. In the end we get a version of the comparator model modified to deal with problematic cases in a manner that could be seen as somewhat ad hoc. To deal with this the multifactorial weighting model of Synofzik and colleagues is introduced. Although this model is incomplete a single version can be offered which is naturally constrained by the cases which are problematic for the comparator model. However, it is not clear what, if anything, could count as evidence against the multifactorial weighting model. Despite being generated with the data in mind it may be untestable. I conclude that currently the comparator model has stronger support than the multifactorial weighting model. (shrink)

This article challenges Block's ‘overflow argument’ for the conclusion that phenomenal consciousness and access-consciousness are distinct. It shows that the data can be explained just as well in terms of a distinction between contents that are made globally accessible through bottom–up sensory stimulation and those that are sustained and made available in working memory through top-down attention.

After decades of deregulation and innovation, contemporary financial markets remain firmly anchored in law and legal institutions. The idea that private financial actors simply want to escape government oversight and regulation is simplistic as private interests find the coercive powers of the state too useful to forgo. Instead, such actors engage law selectively to create a more certain environment for themselves and their profit-seeking activities. Contract law adds certainty to financial transactions; law shapes how financial actors use information and exploit (...) information technology; law constitutes financial values; and law allows financial institutions to be turned into assets. Law’s application is shaped by changing conceptions of risk, as well as by new business models for financial institutions. (shrink)

De Vignemont argues that the sense of ownership comes from the localization of bodily sensation on a map of the body that is part of the body schema. This model should be taken as a model of the sense of embodiment. I argue that the body schema lacks the theoretical resources needed to explain this phenomenology. Furthermore, there is some reason to think that a deficient sense of embodiment is not associated with a deficient body schema. The data de Vignemont (...) uses to argue that the body image does not underlie the sense of embodiment does not rule out the possibility that part of the body image I call 'offline representations' underlies the sense of embodiment. An alternative model of the sense of embodiment in terms of offline representations of the body is presented. (shrink)

“Spousal revenge” killers murder their child apparently out of a desire to cause harm to their ex-partner, the child’s other parent. Standard explanations of these killings fail to provide an adequate solution to what I call the problem of spousal revenge filicide. This is the problem of how a killer comes to take their rage at their former partner out on their own child and how that child can be dehumanized to the point of murder. Although the dehumanization of the (...) victim is acknowledged to occur, why it occurs is not well understood. Here, I offer an hypothesis that the killer fails to represent their child as a moral subject with a mind of their own. This is due to a deficit in the killer’s capacity for person perception which is, by hypothesis, pathological. As such, the killer experiences the child as an object, rather than a person, which is of significant emotional value to the other parent. The specificity of this disorder explains why the ex-partner themselves is not targeted, and it explains how the killer is able to understand that killing the child will harm the other parent. (shrink)

Pretense is generally thought to constitutively involve imagination. We argue that this is a mistake. Although pretense often involves imagination, it need not; nor is it a kind of imagination. The core nature of pretense is closer to imitation than it is to imagination, and likely shares some of its motivation with the former. Three main strands of argument are presented. One is from the best explanation of cross‐cultural data. Another is from task‐analysis of instances of pretend play. And the (...) third concerns the different ways in which pretense (especially childhood pretense) and imagination impact one's evaluative/affective systems. (shrink)

Introduction. The sense of agency over thoughts is the experience of oneself qua agent of mental action. Those suffering certain psychotic symptoms are thought to have a deficient sense of agency. Here I seek to explain this sense of agency in terms of metacognition. Method. I start with the proposal that the sense of agency is elicited by metacognitive monitoring representations that are used in the intentional inhibition of thoughts. I apply this model to verbal hallucinations and the like and (...) examine the plausibility of this model explaining deficits associated with these symptoms. Results. By tying the sense of agency to metacognitive inhibition I propose that the loss of a sense of agency in certain psychotic symptoms is accompanied by a particular deficit in the patient’s ability to control their own thinking. This is consistent with the experiences of those at high risk of developing hallucinations, who report more intrusive thoughts than controls. The model I present is able to explain why those at risk of developing verbal hallucinations and those suffering from verbal hallucinations have deficits in the intentional inhibition of thought. I defend this account from a possible objection by distinguishing the form of the intentional inhibition deficit displayed by those suffering verbal hallucination from that displayed by those suffering from orbital-frontal cortex lesions and posttraumatic stress disorder. Conclusion. A plausible hypothesis is that the sense of agency over thoughts is elicited by the metacognitive monitoring representation used to intentionally inhibit. (shrink)

Four different accounts of the relationship between third-person mindreading and first-person metacognition are compared and evaluated. While three of them endorse the existence of introspection for propositional attitudes, the fourth (defended here) claims that our knowledge of our own attitudes results from turning our mindreading capacities upon ourselves. Section 1 of this target article introduces the four accounts. Section 2 develops the “mindreading is prior” model in more detail, showing how it predicts introspection for perceptual and quasi-perceptual (e.g., imagistic) mental (...) events while claiming that metacognitive access to our own attitudes always results from swift unconscious self-interpretation. This section also considers the model's relationship to the expression of attitudes in speech. Section 3 argues that the commonsense belief in the existence of introspection should be given no weight. Section 4 argues briefly that data from childhood development are of no help in resolving this debate. Section 5 considers the evolutionary claims to which the different accounts are committed, and argues that the three introspective views make predictions that are not borne out by the data. Section 6 examines the extensive evidence that people often confabulate when self-attributing attitudes. Section 7 considers “two systems” accounts of human thinking and reasoning, arguing that although there are introspectableeventswithin System 2, there are no introspectableattitudes. Section 8 examines alleged evidence of “unsymbolized thinking”. Section 9 considers the claim that schizophrenia exhibits a dissociation between mindreading and metacognition. Finally, section 10 evaluates the claim that autism presents a dissociation in the opposite direction, of metacognition without mindreading. (shrink)

I thank Tsakiris and Fotopoulou for their insightful commentary on my target article. In particular I welcome the opportunity to revisit how the online /offline representation of the body distinction is drawn. Tsakiris and Fotopoulou raise three major points of concern with my model. First they argue that the sense of embodiment is not sufficient for self recognition. Second they show that the relationship between online and offline representations of the body cannot be the simple ‘serial construction’ relationship I advocate (...) in the target article. Third they claim that my model makes a false prediction. I agree with the first two lines of criticism. As to the first I will clarify and tone down the claims made about the role of the sense of embodiment in self recognition tasks. However, I will argue that the sense of embodiment is measured in van den Bos and Jeannerod’s study. I strongly welcome the second line of criticism Tsakiris and Fotopoulou offer. I will add some reasons to agree that the ‘serial construction’ account of the relationship between online and offline representations cannot be true. I maintain, however, that this does not affect the central thesis of target article, namely that it is an offline representation of the body that underlies the sense of embodiment. Finally, I will defend the model by arguing that it does not make the false prediction Tsakiris and Fotopoulou attribute to it. (shrink)

Theories of Theories of Mind brings together contributions by a distinguished international team of philosophers, psychologists, and primatologists, who between them address such questions as: what is it to understand the thoughts, feelings, and intentions of other people? How does such an understanding develop in the normal child? Why, unusually, does it fail to develop? And is any such mentalistic understanding shared by members of other species? The volume's four parts together offer a state of the art survey of the (...) major topics in the theory-theory/simulationism debate within philosophy of mind, developmental psychology, the aetiology of autism and primatology. The volume will be of great interest to researchers and students in all areas interested in the 'theory of mind' debate. (shrink)

Drawing on resources from debates concerning the metaphysics of powers, this essay introduces a novel approach to the relationship between the more- and less-complex. Flat Holism preserves some key reductionist commitments, as it involves no radical ontological novelty, for instance, and is consistent with a one- or no-level ontology. It also, however, adopts the emergentist idea that the whole or context plays a crucial, metaphysically determinative role. The commitments of Flat Holism are explored and delimited through comparison with two ‘nearby (...) neighbour’ accounts: Sydney Shoemaker’s Micro-latency account and Carl Gillett’s Mutualism. Some potential advantages of Flat Holism are discussed in the final section of the essay. (shrink)

This is a Festschrift in honour of Valtteri Arstila, a professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Turku. The book is structured in three sections. The first two—‘Mind and Action’ and ‘Time and Temporal Experience’—include papers focussed on issues particularly close to Arstila's own research specialisation. The final section contains papers on various further philosophical issues. The first section, ‘Mind and Action’, collects together contributions on a variety of topics such as consciousness, content, agency and normativity; encompassing approaches from (...) within analytic philosophy, phenomenology and the history of philosophy. The second section, ‘Time and Temporal Experience’, collects together papers on topics including the nature of time itself; of our experience of time and of historicity and temporality more broadly; approaching these issues from a variety of perspectives including historical approaches. The final section brings together papers that touch on issues within philosophy of science, logic, philosophy of language, political philosophy and more besides. (shrink)

This article focuses on, and critiques, Goldman’s view that third-person mind-reading is grounded in first-person introspection. It argues, on the contrary, that first-person awareness of propositional attitude events is always interpretative, resulting from us turning our mind-reading abilities upon ourselves.