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Philosophy Books
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NEW 7/19/04 --Laws, Mind and Freedom
- If natural laws make universal claims about the real-world behavior of objects, this seems to present several problems for philosophy of psychology and philosophy of mind. (1) The sciences of cognition seem to have only ceteris paribus laws, whereas the physical sciences have strict and exceptionless laws. (2) A commitment with laws seems to be incompatible with a commitment to free will. These problems, I argue, arise not as a consequence of a commitment to the truth of scientific laws, but due to a particular philosophical interpretation of laws as universal claims about the real-world behavior of objects. This view of laws has received withering attack, particularly by Nancy Cartwright. I offer a kindred account of what laws express -- partial and potential contributions to the overall causal situation -- and argue that, thus understood, laws no longer present these traditional problems for psychology.
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Book manuscript draft. Under 100 pp. About ready to submit to press. Seeking feedback. |
| Symbols, Computation and Intentionality |
Published from University of California Press. See summary, chapters, ordering information. |
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Philosophy Papers
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NEW 7/19/04 -- New Semantics, Physicalism and a posteriori Necessity
- The New Semantics (NS) introduced by Kripke and Putnam is often thought to block anti-physicalist arguments that involve an inference from an explanatory gap to a failure of supervenience. But this “NS Rebuttal” depends upon two assumptions that are shown to be dubious. First, it assumes that mental-kind terms are among the kinds of terms to which NS analysis is properly applied. However, there are important differences in this regard between the behavior of notions like ‘pain’ and notions like ‘water’, as Kripke himself has argued. Second, even on the assumption that NS analysis is appropriate to mental-kind terms, it is further assumed that this would block the anti-physicalist premise that an abiding and principled explanatory gap would entail a failure of metaphysical supervenience. But the paradigm examples of NS analysis show nothing of the sort. What they show is that there are a posteriori necessities (e.g., “water contains hydrogen”) that cannot be inferred from the sense of natural kind terms. But they do not show that such necessities cannot be derived from an adequate scientific understanding of the phenomena in question. Indeed, such derivations are often available with kinds like water, but seem unavailable with mental kinds like ‘pain’ and ‘belief’.
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Draft. Not yet submitted. Seeking comments. |
NEW 7/19/04 -- Beyond Reduction: The Explanatory Gap and Post-Reductionist Philosophy of Mind
- Recent debates about the metaphysics of mind have tended to assume that inter-theoretic reductions are the norm in the natural sciences. With this assumption in place, the apparent explanatory gaps surrounding consciousness and intentionality seem unique, fascinating, and perhaps metaphysically significant. Over the past several decades, however, philosophers of science have largely rejected the notions that inter-theoretic reduction is either widespread in the natural sciences or a litmus for the legitimacy of the special sciences. If we adopt a post-reductionist philosophy of science, with a commitment to theory pluralism, the epistemic statuses of the standard positions in philosophy of mind (reductionism, non-reductive physicalism, dualism) are all significantly changed. Moreover, central problems of recent philosophy of mind – reducibility and the explanatory gap – seem themselves to be in need of rethinking if reductions are rare and the sciences have “explanatory gaps all the way down.” This article examines the prospects of the standard metaphysical positions, plus two types of pluralism, in light of post-reductionist philosophy of science
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Draft. Submitted to a journal, but still seeking comments. |
| Phenomenology and Psychophysics |
Forthcoming in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences |
| Our Animal Bodies (no longer online because of publication) |
This paper was published in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Volume XXII: The Philosophy of the Emotions. University of Notre Dame Press, 1997. (ISBN 0-268-01444-2) |
| Notions of 'Representation' and the Diverging Interests of Philosophy and Psychology |
Presented at the Conference on Cognition and Representation, SUNY Buffalo, April 3—5, 1992 |
| Symbols and Computation (Sample copy from journal at Kluwer Journals) |
Published in Minds and Machines, Volume 9, No. 3, pages 347-381. (ISSN 0924-6495.) An article-length summary of Symbols, Computation and Intentionality. |
| Evolutionary Explanation and the 'Hard Problems' of Consciousness (no longer online due to publication) |
Published in Journal of Consciousness Studies. Vol. 6, No. 1 , pp. 39-48. |
| How (not) to Explain Concepts (pdf) |
A draft version of a paper related to Mind and the World of Nature. |
| How (not) to Explain Concepts (Power Point presentation--different from paper) |
Talk version of the same paper, in the form of PowerPoint slides. Delivered at University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT. November 11, 1999. |
| Laws, Idealization and the Status of Psychology |
Working Presented at the 2000 Meetings of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology |
| Cognitive Pluralism (NEW 4/19/02) |
Working draft -- do not cite |
| Goldilocks and the Three Accounts of Concepts (New 6/02) |
Working draft -- do not cite!! |