It has long been widely agreed that some concepts can be possessed only by those who have undergone a certain type of phenomenal experience. Orthodoxy among contemporary philosophers of mind has it that these phenomenal concepts provide the key to understanding many disputes between physicalists and their opponents, and in particular offer an explanation of Mary’s predicament in the situation e...

Active externalism (also known as the extended mind hypothesis) says that we use objects and situations in the world as external memory stores that we consult as needs dictate. This gives us economies of storage: We do not need to remember that Bill has blue eyes and wavy hair if we can acquire this information by looking at Bill. I argue for a corollary to this position, which I call 'internal...

Much of the recent literature on reasons is focused on a common range of issues, concerning, for example, the relation between reasons and motivation, desires, and values, the issue of internalism versus externalism in the theory of reasons, or the objectivity or reasons. This paper is concerned with a different, and orthogonal, set of questions: What are reasons, and how do they support action...

The present study has a cognitive approach to empathy and character engagement in cinema. In discussing how through empathy and engagement with real and fictional characters, we extend our minds and enhance our cognitive abilities, the present paper studies Bahram Tavakkoli’s Wandering in the Fog (2010), to show how Andy Clark and David Chalmers’s idea of the extended mind as joined with ...

I argue that the debate concerning nature of first-person moral judgment, namely, whether such judgments are inherently motivating (internalism) or can be made in absence motivation (externalism), may founded on a faulty assumption: form distinct kind must have some shared, essential features regards to act. there is little reason suppose homogenous class this respect by considering an ordinary...

The purpose of this paper is to motivate and defend a recognizable version of N. L. Wilson’s “Principle of Charity.” Doing so will involve: (1) distinguishing it from the significantly different versions of the Principle familiar through the work of Quine and Davidson; (2) showing that it is compatible with, among other things, both semantic externalism and “simulation” accounts of interpretati...

In the next three chapters I apply the general conclusions of the previous Part to the problem of brains and minds; i.e. the relationship between individual psychology and the neurologi-cal mechanisms that underly it. I concentrate in particular on intentionality; i.e. the way in which our thoughts can be about the outside world, and how this enables us to interact with that world in meaningful...

The widespread use of brain imaging techniques encourages conceiving of neuroscience as the forthcoming “mindscience.” Perhaps surprisingly for many, this conclusion is still largely unwarranted. The present paper surveys various shortcomings of neuroscience as a putative “mindscience.” The analysis shows that the scope of mind (both cognitive and phenomenal) falls outside that of neuroscience....

It is widely thought that in fallible reasoning potential error necessarily increases with every additional step, whether inferences or premises, in the same way that the probability of a lengthening conjunction shrinks. However, this has the absurd consequence that consulting an expert, proof-checking, filling gaps in proofs, and gathering more evidence for a given conclusion necessarily make ...