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7.3. Philosophy of Psychology (Philosophy of Psychology on PhilPapers)

• Movements in Psychology [2]
• Psychological Behaviorism [1]
• Cognitivism in Psychology [1]
• Movements in Psychology, Misc [0]
• Theory of Mind and Folk Psychology [155]
• The Nature of Folk Psychology [34]
• The Theory Theory [12]
• The Simulation Theory [41]
• Theory of Mind and Folk Psychology, Misc [40]
• Folk Concepts and Folk Intuitions [28]
• Issues in Psychology [40]
• Parapsychology [5]
• Psychological Laws [14]
• Psychological Explanation [21]
• Philosophy of Psychology, Misc [22]

• Joseph Cruz (ms). Philosophy of psychology.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: There is a long tradition in philosophy where philosophers attend to the nature, limits, and aspirations of science in general. The increased specialization of scientists themselves, however, has precipitated a parallel development in the philosophy of science. Thus, in addition to general philosophy of science research, it is now common to find philosophers investigating the foundations of particular sciences. Three sciences — physics, biology, and psychology — have received the most attention, as the philosophical issues within these fields have crystallized in a particularly challenging and intriguing way. This is a course in the philosophy of psychology. The aim is not to tell psychologists how to conduct their research, but rather to situate psychology within the wider fabric of intellectual inquiry
• P. M. S. Hacker, The relevance of Wittgenstein's philosophy of psychology to the psychological sciences.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: P. M. S. Hacker 1. The ‘confusion of psychology’ On the concluding page of what is now called ‘Part II’ of the Investigations, Wittgenstein wrote..
• Jack Lyons (ms). Philosophy of psychology Phil 4093/PSYC 409v science engineering 408, TR 9:30–10:50am.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The philosophy of psychology is concerned primarily with philosophical issues involving the foundations and methodology of psychology. Some of these issues are strictly philosophical (e.g., what is psychology? how can it be constrained by, yet independent of, neuroscience?), though some are actually high level theoretical issues in empirical psychology (e.g., to what extent are mental capacities the product of natural selection? what are the mechanisms by which humans form judgments about the mental states of others?). We will address both kinds of questions here
• Eduoard Machery (online). Philosophy of psychology.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In F. Allhoff (Ed.), Philosophy of the Special Sciences. SUNY Press
• Graham MacDonald (2003). Review of Andrew Ariew, Robert Cummins (eds.), Mark Perlman (eds.), Functions: New Essays in Philosophy of Psychology and Biology.   (More)
• Kelby Mason, Chandra Sripada & Stephen P. Stich (forthcoming). The philosophy of psychology.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The 20^th century has been a tumultuous time in psychology – a century in which the discipline struggled with basic questions about its intellectual identity, but nonetheless managed to achieve spectacular growth and maturation. It’s not surprising, then, that psychology has attracted sustained philosophical attention and stimulated rich philosophical debate. Some of this debate was aimed at understanding, and sometimes criticizing, the assumptions, concepts and explanatory strategies prevailing in the psychology of the time. But much philosophical work has also been devoted to exploring the implications of psychological findings and theories for broader philosophical questions like: Are humans really rational animals? How malleable is human nature? and Do we have any innate knowledge or innate ideas? One particularly noteworthy fact about philosophy of psychology in the 20^th century is that, in the last quarter of the century, the distinction between psychology and the philosophy of psychology began to dissolve as philosophers played an increasingly active role in articulating and testing empirical theories about the mind and psychologists became increasingly interested in the philosophical underpinnings and implications of their work. Our survey is divided into five sections, each focusing on an important theme in 20^th century psychology which has been the focus of philosophical attention and has benefited from philosophical scrutiny
• Wayne Christensen, Doris McIlwain, John Sutton & Andrew Geeves (2008). Critical review of 'Practicing Perfection: memory & piano performance'.   (More)

Movements in Psychology

Psychological Behaviorism

• Nigel J. T. Thomas (1989). Experience and theory as determinants of attitudes toward mental representation: The case of Knight Dunlap and the vanishing images of J.b. Watson.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Galton and subsequent investigators find wide divergences in people's subjective reports of mental imagery. Such individual differences might be taken to explain the peculiarly irreconcilable disputes over the nature and cognitive significance of imagery which have periodically broken out among psychologists and philosophers. However, to so explain these disputes is itself to take a substantive and questionable position on the cognitive role of imagery. This article distinguishes three separable issues over which people can be "for" or "against" mental images. Conflation of these issues can lead to theoretical differences being mistaken for experiential differences, even by theorists themselves. This is applied to the case of John B. Watson, who inaugurated a half-century of neglect of image psychology. Watson originally claimed to have vivid imagery; by 1913 he was denying the existence of images. This strange reversal, which made his behaviorism possible, is explicable as a "creative misconstrual" of Dunlap's "motor" theory of imagination
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://cogprints.org/5019/1/dun-wat-cp.htm
  http://cogprints.org/3750/1/dun%2Dwat%2Dcp.htm
  http://cogprints.org/5019/1/dun%2Dwat%2Dcp.htm
  

Cognitivism in Psychology

• Horst Pfeiffle (2008). On the psychogenesis of the a priori: Jean Piaget's critique of Kant.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The seal of the a priori is imprinted on the reception of Kant's philosophy. Piaget's epistemological argumentation seems to ascribe knowledge a more fruitful constructiveness than Kant, seeing the a priori as rooted in unvarying reason. Yet, it seems, he failed to recognize the complexity of Kant's theory, which does not always follow a quid iuris line. Moments of experience, analysis and self-observation played more than a marginal role in his discovery of the a priori. Indeed, Kant himself raises the question of ontogenetic category assimilation in a review which pre-empts Piaget, borrowing the category of `original acquisition' from the doctrine of the laws of natural right. And although Kant should not be elevated to the harbinger of the knowledge on development issues delivered thus far by the history of science and experiments, he did recognize the temporal reference of their categories in principle without resolving their validity in psychogenetic terms. Key Words: a priori • categories • genetic epistemology • Geneva School • neo-Kantianism • original acquisition • Jean Piaget • psychogenesis • self-observation

Movements in Psychology, Misc

Theory of Mind and Folk Psychology

The Nature of Folk Psychology

• Kristin Andrews (online). It's in your nature: A pluralistic folk psychology.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: I suggest a pluralistic account of folk psychology according to which not all predictions or explanations rely on the attribution of mental states, and not all intentional actions are explained by mental states. This view of folk psychology is supported by research in developmental and social psychology. It is well known that people use personality traits to predict behavior. I argue that trait attribution is not shorthand for mental state attributions, since traits are not identical to beliefs or desires, and an understanding of belief or desire is not necessary for using trait attributions. In addition, we sometimes predict and explain behavior through appeal to personality traits that the target wouldn’t endorse, and so could not serve as the target’s reasons. I conclude by suggesting that our folk psychology includes the notion that some behavior is explained by personality traits–who the person is–rather than by beliefs and desires–what the person thinks. Consequences of this view for the debate between simulation theory and theory theory, as well as the debate on chimpanzee theory of mind are discussed
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/0260052g076urj17/fulltext.pdf
  
• Kristin Andrews (online). The functions of folk psychology.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The debates about the form of folk psychology and the potential eliminability of folk psychology rest on a particular view about how humans understand other minds. That is, though folk psychology is described as --œour commonsense conception of psychological phenomena--� (Churchland 1981, p. 67), there have been implicit assumptions regarding the nature of that commonsense conception. It has been assumed that folk psychology involves two practices, the prediction and explanation of behavior. And it has been assumed that one cognitive mechanism subsumes both these practices
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.yorku.ca/andrewsk/documents/TheFunctionsofFolkPsychology.pdf
  
• John A. Barker (2002). Computer modeling and the fate of folk psychology.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/118908635/PDFSTART
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/1467-9973.00215
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9973.00215
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/meta/2002/00000033/F0020001/art00215
  
• Jonathan Bennett (1991). Folk-psychological explanations.   (More)
• Jose Luis Bermudez (2003). The domain of folk psychology.   (More)
• Radu J. Bogdan (1993). The architectural nonchalance of commonsense psychology.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Eliminativism assumes that commonsense psychology describes and explains the mind in terms of the internal design and operation of the mind. If this assumption is invalidated, so is eliminativism. The same conditional is true of intentional realism. Elsewhere (Bogdan 1991) I have argued against this 'folk- theory-theory' assumption by showing that commonsense psychology is not an empirical prototheory of the mind but a biosocially motivated practice of coding, utilizing, and sharing information from and about conspecifics. Here, without presupposing a specific analysis of commonsense psychology, I want to challenge a key implication of the 'folk-theory-theory' assumption to the effect that commonsense psychology is committed to a definite architecture of the mind
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-0017.1993.tb00279.x
  
• Richard Breheny (2006). Communication and folk psychology.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Prominent accounts of language use (those of Grice, Lewis, Stalnaker, Sperber and Wilson among others) have viewed basic communicative acts as essentially involving the attitudes of the participating agents. Developmental data poses a dilemma for these accounts, since it suggests children below age four are competent communicators but would lack the ability to conceptualise communication if philosophers and linguists are right about what communication is. This paper argues that this dilemma is quite serious and that these prominent accounts would be undermined if an adequate more minimal alternative were available. Just such a minimalist account of communication is offered, drawing on ideas from relevance theory and situation theory
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/richardb/comm & folk psy.pdf
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-0017.2006.00307.x
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/mila/2006/00000021/00000001/art00007
  
• Andy Clark (1987). From folk psychology to naive psychology.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.leaonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15516709cog1102_1
  http://www.leaonline.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1207/s15516709cog1102_1
  http://www.cogsci.rpi.edu/CSJarchive/1987v11/i02/p0139p0154/MAIN.PDF
  
• Henk de bij Weg (2001). The commonsense conception and its relation to scientific theory.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In studying what people do two points of view can be distinguished: We can choose the perspective of the actors themselves (the actor’s perspective), or we can look at what is going on from the outside, from a distance (the researcher’s perspective). Regarding the relation between both points of view three standpoints have been defended
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://home.hetnet.nl/~wegweeda/Summarydissertatie.htm
  
• Daniel C. Dennett (1991). Two contrasts: Folk craft vs folk science and belief vs opinion.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Let us begin with what all of us here agree on: folk psychology is not immune to revision. It has a certain vulnerability in principle. Any particular part of it might be overthrown and replaced by some other doctrine. Yet we disagree about how likely it is that that vulnerability in principle will turn into the actual demise of large portions--or all--of folk psychology. I am of the view that folk psychology is here for the long haul, and for some very good reasons. But I am not going to concentrate on that in my remarks. What nobody has bothered saying here yet, but is probably worth saying, is that for all of its blemishes, warts and perplexities, folk psychology is an extraordinarily powerful source of prediction. It is not just prodigiously powerful but remarkably easy for human beings to use. We are virtuoso exploiters of not so much a theory as a craft. That is, we might better call it a folk craft rather than a folk theory. The theory of folk psychology is the ideology about the craft, and there is lots of room, as anthropologists will remind us, for false ideology
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/citations?id=oai:cogprints.soton.ac.uk:261
  http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/citations?archiveID=oai:cogprints.soton.ac.uk:261
  http://cogprints.org/261/1/twocontr.htm
  http://cogprints.org/261/0/twocontr.htm
  
• Christopher Gauker (2005). The belief-desire law.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Many philosophers hold that for various reasons there must be psychological laws governing beliefs and desires. One of the few serious examples that they offer is the _belief-desire law_, which states, roughly, that _ceteris paribus_ people do what they believe will satisfy their desires. This paper argues that, in fact, there is no such law. In particular, decision theory does not support the contention that there is such a law
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://peterlang.metapress.com/index/NU24X048863H865P.pdf
  
• Peter Godfrey-Smith (2005). Folk psychology as a model.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: <b>1. Introduction</b> <b>2. One sense of "model"</b> <b>3. Folk psychology as a model</b> <b>4. Versions and construals</b> <b>5. Folk psychology in cognitive science and analytic philosophy</b>
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~pgs/OnlinePapers/FPasModel-PGS-Imprint.pdf
  
• Peter Godfrey-Smith (2005). Folk psychology as a model.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: I argue that everyday folk-psychological skill might best be explained in terms of the deployment of something like a model, in a specific sense drawn from recent philosophy of science. Theoretical models in this sense do not make definite commitments about the systems they are used to understand; they are employed with a particular kind of flexibility. This analysis is used to dissolve the eliminativism debate of the 1980s, and to transform a number of other questions about the status and role of folk psychology
• A. Goldman (1993). The psychology of folk psychology.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The central mission of cognitive science is to reveal the real nature of the mind, however familiar or foreign that nature may be to naive preconceptions. The existence of naive conceptions is also important, however. Prescientific thought and language contain concepts of the mental, and these concepts deserve attention from cognitive science. Just as scientific psychology studies folk physics (McCloskey 1983, Hayes 1985), viz., the common understanding (or misunderstanding) of physical phenomena, so it must study folk psychology, the common understanding of mental states. This subfield of scientific psychology is what I mean by the phrase 'the psychology of folk psychology'
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Py104/goldman.psyc.html
  
• Jonathan Knowles (2001). Does intentional psychology need vindicating by cognitive science?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract:   I argue that intentional psychology does not stand in need of vindication by a lower-level implementation theory from cognitive science, in particular the representational theory of mind (RTM), as most famously Jerry Fodor has argued. The stance of the paper is novel in that I claim this holds even if one, in line with Fodor, views intentional psychology as an empirical theory, and its theoretical posits as as real as those of other sciences. I consider four metaphysical arguments for the idea that intentional psychological states, such as beliefs, must be seen as requiring in-the-head mental representations for us to be able to understand their characteristic causal powers and argue that none of them validly generate their desired conclusions. I go on to argue that RTM, or some computational version thereof, is not motivated by appeal to the nature of cognitive science research either. I conclude that intentional psychology, though an empirical theory, is autonomous from details of lower level mechanism in a way that renders RTM unwarranted
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/x224722x684r3540/fulltext.pdf
  http://www.kluweronline.com/article.asp?PIPS=281197&PDF=1
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/X224722X684R3540.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/mind/2001/00000011/00000003/00281197
  
• Joshua Knobe (2007). Reason explanation in folk psychology.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Consider the following explanation: (1) George took his umbrella because it was just about to rain. This is an explanation of a quite distinctive sort. It is profoundly different from the sort of explanation we might use to explain, say, the movements of a bouncing ball or the gradual rise of the tide on a beach. Unlike these other types of explanations, it explains an agent’s behavior by describing the agent’s own _reasons_ for performing that behavior. Explanations that work in this way have a number of distinctive and important properties, and we will refer to them here as _reason explanations_. Looking at the use of reason explanations with a philosophical eye, one is apt to experience a certain puzzlement. One wants to know precisely what makes a given reason explanation true or false. So, for example, the explanation given above seems to be saying that George’s reason for taking his umbrella was that it was just about to rain. But what exactly makes it the case that this is George’s reason? Does he have to actually be
• Joshua Knobe & Bertram Malle (ms). Self and other in the explanation of behavior: 30 years later.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: It has been hypothesized that actors tend to attribute behavior to the situation whereas observers tend to attribute behavior to the person (Jones & Nisbett 1972). The authors argue that this simple hypothesis fails to capture the complexity of actual actor-observer differences in people’s behavioral explanations. A new framework is proposed in which reason explanations are distinguished from explanations that cite causes, especially stable traits. With this framework in place, it becomes possible to show that there are a number of distinct actorobserver asymmetries in explanation, each stemming from a distinct psychological process by which explanations are generated
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://pantheon.yale.edu/~jk762/PsyBel.pdf
  
• David Landy (2005). Inside doubt: On the non-identity of the theory of mind and propositional attitude psychology.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Eliminative materialism is a popular view of the mind which holds that propositional attitudes, the typical units of our traditional understanding, are unsupported by modern connectionist psychology and neuroscience, and consequently that propositional attitudes are a poor scientific postulate, and do not exist. Since our traditional folk psychology employs propositional attitudes, the usual argument runs, it too represents a poor theory, and may in the future be replaced by a more successful neurologically grounded theory, resulting in a drastic improvement in our interpersonal relationships. I contend that these eliminativist arguments typically run together two distinct capacities: the folk psychological mechanisms which we use to understand one another, and scientific and philosophical guesses about the structure of those understandings. Both capacities are ontologically committed and therefore empirical. However, the commitments whose prospects look so dismal to the eliminativist, in particular the causal and logical image of propositional attitudes, belong to the guesses, and not necessarily to the underlying mechanisms. It is the commitments of traditional philosophical perspectives about the operation of our folk psychology which are contradicted by?new evidence and modeling methods in connectionist psychology. Our actual folk psychology was not clearly committed to causal, sentential propositional attitudes, and thus is not directly threatened by connectionist psychology
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/f4m04131105x8rx4/fulltext.pdf
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/F4M04131105X8RX4.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/mind/2005/00000015/F0020003/00009004
  
• Edouard Machery (2006). The folk concept of intentional action: Philosophical and experimental issues.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: ^? Thanks for helpful comments to Gregory Currie, Josh Knobe, Ron Mallon, Thomas Nadelhoffer, Shaun Nichols, Steve Stich, Liane Young, the readers of the blog Experimental Philosophy (http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/) as well as two anonymous reviewers. Thanks also to my research assistant on this project, Julie Sokolow, for her help and her comments
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.pitt.edu/~machery/papers/The folk concept of intentionality_machery.pdf
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-0017.2007.00336.x
  http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/119401017/PDFSTART
  
• Joseph Margolis (1991). The autonomy of folk psychology.   (More)
• Richard M. McDonough (1991). A culturalist account of folk psychology.   (More)
• Adam Morton (1991). The inevitability of folk psychology.   (More)
• Shaun Nichols & Stephen P. Stich (1994). Folk psychology.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: For the last 25 years discussions and debates about commonsense psychology (or “folk psychology,” as it is often called) have been center stage in the philosophy of mind. There have been heated disagreements both about what folk psychology is and about how it is related to the scientific understanding of the mind/brain that is emerging in psychology and the neurosciences. In this chapter we will begin by explaining why folk psychology plays such an important role in the philosophy of mind. Doing that will require a quick look at a bit of the history of philosophical discussions about the mind. We’ll then turn our attention to the lively contemporary discussions aimed at clarifying the philosophical role that folk psychology is expected to play and at using findings in the cognitive sciences to get a clearer understanding of the exact nature of folk psychology
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.blutner.de/philom/Texte/folkpsych5.pdf
  http://www.blutner.de/NeuralNets/Texts/folkpsych5.pdf
  http://amor.rz.hu-berlin.de/~h0998dgh/philos/Texte/folkpsych5.pdf
  http://amor.cms.hu-berlin.de/~h0998dgh/philos/Texte/folkpsych5.pdf
  http://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~snichols/Papers/FolkPsychologyECS.pdf
  http://amor.rz.hu-berlin.de/~h0998dgh/NeuralNets/Texts/folkpsych5.pdf
  http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~stich/Publications/Papers/FolkPsychology.pdf
  http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~stich/Publications/Papers/FolkPsychology.pdf
  http://www-personal.umich.edu/~lormand/phil/teach/mmm/readings/Stich - Cognitive Science and the Appeal to Tacit Theory.rtf
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=8039374&dopt=Citation
  
• Matthew Nudds (2001). Common-sense and scientific psychology.   (More)
• Gerard O'Brien (1993). A conflation of folk psychologies.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Stich begins his paper "What is a Theory of Mental Representation?" (1992) by noting that while there is a dizzying range of theories of mental representation in today's philosophical market place, there is very little self-conscious reflection about what a theory of mental representation is supposed to do. This is quite remarkable, he thinks, because if we bother to engage in such reflection, some very surprising conclusions begin to emerge. The most surprising conclusion of all, according to Stich, is that most of the philosophers in this field are undertaking work that is quite futile:

  It is my contention that most of the players in this very crowded field have _no_ coherent project
  that could possibly be pursued successfully with the methods they are using. (p.244)

  Stich readily admits that this is a startling conclusion; so startling, he thinks, that some may even take it as an indication that he has simply "failed to figure out what those who are searching for a theory of mental representation are up to" (p.244). But it is a conclusion that he is willing to stand by, and he sets about it defending it in the body of his paper
• Ian Pratt (1996). Encoding psychological knowledge.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=g_CkMCuU9yIC&oi=fnd&pg=PT2&ots=JNPHOeryTq&sig=tEZ0mwA7InsUTr9hZ7ahMmEtKTI
  
• Lynne Rudder Baker (1999). Folk psychology.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In recent years, folk psychology has become a topic of debate not just among philosophers, but among development psychologists and primatologists as well
• Lynne Rudder Baker (1999). What is this thing called 'commonsense psychology'?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: What is this thing called ‘Commonsense Psychology’? The first matter to settle is what the issue is here. By ‘commonsense psychology,’ I mean primarily the systems of describing, explaining and predicting human thought and action in terms of beliefs, desires, hopes, fears, expectations, intentions and other so-called propositional attitudes. Although commonsense psychology encompasses more than propositional attitudes--e.g., emotions, traits and abilities are also within its purview--belief-desire reasoning forms the core of commonsense psychology. Commonsense psychology is what we use to explain intentional action as ordinarily described--e.g., Jack went to the store because he wanted some ice cream. Commonsense psychology also is used to explain mental states--e.g., Jill feared that she would be late because she thought that the meeting began at 4:00. Commonsense psychology is the province of everyone; we all use it all the time
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~lrb/work/presentations/baker_what_is_this_thing_called_commonsense_psychology.pdf
  http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/./ftinterface~content=a780184264~fulltext=713240930
  http://www.informaworld.com/index/780184264.pdf
  
• Mark Sharlow (online). As true as "you think": Preserving the core of folk psychology.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In this paper I argue in defense of an important fragment of folk psychology. Specifically, I argue that many propositions about the ontology of mental states and about mental causation are true largely because of certain observable features of human linguistic behavior. I conclude that these propositions are immune to common avenues of eliminativist criticism. I compare and contrast this argument with some previous arguments about the truth of folk psychology
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00003763/01/folk_psychology.pdf
  
• R. A. Sharpe (1987). The very idea of a folk psychology.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=k9SWKieq6-gC&oi=fnd&pg=PA188&ots=p8s3lLWA5A&sig=wOApxVMClK0QYtBqUxFySbfmi08
  
• Stephen P. Stich & Shaun Nichols (2002). Folk psychology.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: For the last 25 years discussions and debates about commonsense psychology (or “folk psychology,” as it is often called) have been center stage in the philosophy of mind. There have been heated disagreements both about what folk psychology is and about how it is related to the scientific understanding of the mind/brain that is emerging in psychology and the neurosciences. In this chapter we will begin by explaining why folk psychology plays such an important role in the philosophy of mind. Doing that will require a quick look at a bit of the history of philosophical discussions about the mind. We’ll then turn our attention to the lively contemporary discussions aimed at clarifying the philosophical role that folk psychology is expected to play and at using findings in the cognitive sciences to get a clearer understanding of the exact nature of folk psychology
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/ArchiveFolder/Research Group/Publications/Sim1/sim1.html
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-0017.1992.tb00196.x
  http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1533-6077(1993)3<225:FPSOTT>2.0.CO;2-H
  
• Stephen P. Stich & R. Ravenscroft (1994). What is folk psychology?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: For the last two decades a doctrine called ‘‘eliminative materialism’’ (or sometimes just ‘‘eliminativism’’) has been a major focus of discussion in the philosophy of mind. It is easy to understand why eliminativism has attracted so much attention, for it is hard to imagine a more radical and provocative doctrine. What eliminativism claims is that the intentional states and processes that are alluded to in our everyday descriptions and explanations of people’s mental lives and their actions are _myths_. Like the gods that Homer invoked to explain the outcome of battles, or the witches that Inquisitors invoked to explain local catastrophes, they _do not exist_. According to eliminativists, there are no such things as beliefs or desires or hopes or fears or thoughts. These putative states and processes are the badly misguided posits of a seriously mistaken theory, just like phlogiston and caloric fluid and the luminiferous ether.¹
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/pub/papers/folkpsych5.ps
  http://www.blutner.de/NeuralNets/Texts/folkpsych5.pdf
  http://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~snichols/Papers/FolkPsychologyECS.pdf
  http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~stich/Publications/Papers/FolkPsychology.pdf
  http://www-personal.umich.edu/~lormand/phil/teach/mmm/readings/Stich - Cognitive Science and the Appeal to Tacit Theory.rtf
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=8039374&dopt=Citation
  
• Kathleen V. Wilkes (1991). The long past and the short history.   (More)

The Theory Theory

• Michael A. Bishop (2002). The theory theory thrice over: The child as scientist, superscientist, or social institution?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Alison Gopnik and Andrew Meltzoff have argued for a view they call the ‘theory theory’: theory change in science and children are similar. While their version of the theory theory has been criticized for depending on a number of disputed claims, we argue that there is a fundamental problem which is much more basic: the theory theory is multiply ambiguous. We show that it might be claiming that a similarity holds between theory change in children and (i) individual scientists, (ii) a rational reconstruction of a Superscientist, or (iii) the scientific community. We argue that (i) is false, (ii) is non-empirical (which is problematic since the theory theory is supposed to be a bold empirical hypothesis), and (iii) is either false or doesn’t make enough sense to have a truth-value. We conclude that the theory theory is an interesting failure. Its failure points the way to a full, empirical picture of scientific development, one that marries a concern with the social dynamics of science to a psychological theory of scientific cognition.  2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0039368101000292
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/els/00393681/2002/00000033/00000001/art00029
  
• Nick Bostrom (online). Cortical integration: Possible solutions to the binding and linking problems in perception, reasoning and long term memory.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The problem of cortical integration is described and various proposed solutions, including grandmother cells, cell assemblies, feed-forward structures, RAAM and synchronization, are reviewed. One method, involving complex attractors, that has received little attention in the literature, is explained and developed. I call this binding through annexation. A simulation study is then presented which suggests ways in which complex attractors could underlie our capacity to reason. The paper ends with a discussion of the efficiency and biological plausibility of the proposals as integration mechanisms for different regions and functions of the brain
• Christopher Gauker (2005). The belief-desire law.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Many philosophers hold that for various reasons there must be psychological laws governing beliefs and desires. One of the few serious examples that they offer is the _belief-desire law_, which states, roughly, that _ceteris paribus_ people do what they believe will satisfy their desires. This paper argues that, in fact, there is no such law. In particular, decision theory does not support the contention that there is such a law
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://peterlang.metapress.com/index/NU24X048863H865P.pdf
  
• C. Glymour (2000). Android epistemology for babies.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: _Words_, _Thoughts and Theories _argues that infants and children discover the physical and psychological features of the world by a process akin to scientific inquiry, more or less as conceived by philosophers of science in the 1960s (the theory theory). This essay discusses some of the philosophical background to an alternative, more popular, “modular” or “maturational” account of development, dismisses an array of philosoph- ical objections to the theory theory, suggests that the theory theory offers an undeveloped project for artificial intelligence, and, relying on recent psychological work on causation, offers suggestions about how principles of causal inference may provide a developmental solution to the “frame problem”
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.phil.cmu.edu/faculty/glymour/publications/glymour2000.pdf
  http://www.kluweronline.com/article.asp?PIPS=242118&PDF=1
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/UK0382115258756W.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/synt/2000/00000122/F0020001/00242118
  
• Alison Gopnik (2003). The theory theory as an alternative to the innateness hypothesis.   (More)
• W. P., P. S., S. E. & J. L. (1999). Synchronous change and perception of object unity: Evidence from adults and infants.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Adults and infants display a robust ability to perceive the unity of a center-occluded object when the visible ends of the object undergo common motion (e.g. Kellman, P.J., Spelke, E.S., 1983. Perception of partly occluded objects in infancy. Cognitive Psychology 15, 483±524). Ecologically oriented accounts of this ability focus on the primacy of motion in the perception of segregated objects, but Gestalt theory suggests a broader possibility: observers may perceive object unity by detecting patterns of synchronous change, of which common motion is a special case. We investigated this possibility with observations of adults and 4-month-old infants. Participants viewed a center-occluded object whose visible surfaces were either misaligned or aligned, stationary or moving, and unchanging or synchronously changing in color or bright- ness in various temporal patterns (e.g. ¯ashing). Both alignment and common motion con- tributed to adults' perception of object unity, but synchronous color changes did not. For infants, motion was an important determinant of object unity, but other synchronous changes and edge alignment were not. When a stationary object with aligned edges underwent syn- chronous changes in color or brightness, infants showed high levels of attention to the object, but their perception of its unity appeared to be indeterminate. An inherent preference for fast over slow ¯ash rates, and a novelty preference elicited by a change in rate, both indicated that infants detected the synchronous changes, although they failed to use them as information for object unity. These ®ndings favor ecologically oriented accounts of object perception in which surface motion plays a privileged role. Ó 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/recordDetail?accno=EJ591846
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=10476606&dopt=Citation
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/els/00100277/1999/00000071/00000003/art00026
  
• Heidi Lene Maibom (2003). The mindreader and the scientist.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Among theory theorists, it is commonly thought that folk psychological theory is tacitly known. However, folk psychological knowledge has none of the central features of tacit knowledge. But if it is ordinary knowledge, why is it that we have difficulties expressing anything but a handful of folk psychological generalisations? The reason is that our knowledge is of theoretical models and hypotheses, not of universal generalisations. Adopting this alternative view of (scientific) theories, we come to see that, given time and reflection, we can say what we know
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/1468-0017.00229/abs/
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-0017.00229
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/mila/2003/00000018/00000003/art00007
  
• Daniel Nazer, Aaron Ruby, Shaun Nichols, Jonathan Weinberg, Stephen Stich, Luc Faucher & Ron Mallon (2002). The baby in the lab-coat: Why child development is not an adequate model for understanding the development of science.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Alison Gopnik and her collaborators have recently proposed a bold and intriguing hypothesis about the relationship between scientific cognition and cognitive development in childhood. According to this view, the processes underlying cognitive development in infants and children and the processes underlying scientific cognition are _identical_. We argue that Gopnik’s bold hypothesis is untenable because it, along with much of cognitive science, neglects the many important ways in which human minds are designed to operate within a social environment. This leads to a neglect of _norms_ and the processes of _social_ _transmission_ which have an important effect on scientific cognition and cognition more generally
• Gloria Origgi (online). Theories of theories of mind.   (More)
• Eric Schwitzgebel (1996). Theories in children and the rest of us.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8248(199609)63:32.0.CO;2-I
  http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8248(199609)632.0.CO;2-Q
  http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/188528.pdf
  
• Stephen P. Stich & Shaun Nichols (1998). Theory theory to the Max.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/119119415/PDFSTART
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/1468-0017.00085
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-0017.00085
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/mila/1998/00000013/00000003/art00007
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/mila/1998/00000013/00000003/art00085
  
• Dan Zahavi (2004). The embodied self-awareness of the infant: A challenge to the theory-theory of mind.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This was originally written and presented at the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for College Teachers on Folk Psychology vs. Mental Simulation: How Minds Understand Minds, run by Robert Gordon at the University of Missouri - St. Louis, June-July 1999. It has been only lightly revised since, and should be considered a rough draft. Needless to say, the ideas herein owe a lot to what I learned at the seminar from Robert Gordon and the other participants, particularly Jim Garson. However, any errors are my responsibility alone
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://cfs.ku.dk/staff/zahavi-publications/the_embodied_self-awareness.pdf
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=s38ZIzXth5gC&oi=fnd&pg=PA35&ots=igjyPI_jAV&sig=S_97hshyvz6kf3jI3F6jDIGTQkY
  

The Simulation Theory

• Paul Bernier (2002). From simulation to theory.   (More)
• Emma Borg (2007). If mirror neurons are the answer, what was the question?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Mirror neurons are neurons which fire in two distinct conditions: (i) when an agent performs a specific action, like a precision grasp of an object using fingers, and (ii) when an agent observes that action performed by another. Some theorists have suggested that the existence of such neurons may lend support to the simulation approach to mindreading (e.g. Gallese and Goldman, 1998, 'Mirror neurons and the simulation theory of mind reading'). In this note I critically examine this suggestion, in both its original and a revised form (due to Iacoboni et al., 2005, 'Grasping the intentions of others with one's own mirror neuron system'), and argue that the existence of mirror neurons can in fact tell us very little about how intentional attribution actually proceeds
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.rdg.ac.uk/AcaDepts/ld/Philos/borg/If mirror neurons are the answer_JoCS.rtf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com//content/imp/jcs/2007/00000014/00000008/art00001
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/jcs/2007/00000014/00000008/art00001
  http://www.rdg.ac.uk/AcaDepts/ld/Philos/borg/borg_mirror%20neurons.pdf
  http://www.reading.ac.uk/AcaDepts/ld/Philos/borg/borg_mirror%20neurons.pdf
  
• J. Campbell (2002). Joint attention and simulation.   (More)
• William Child (2002). Reply to Alvin I. Goldman.   (More)
• Joe Cruz (online). A Humean psychological alternative to Kant and Wittgenstein: Comments on Stueber's Importance of Simulation for Understanding Linguistic and Rational Agency.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Let me begin by saying that I am sympathetic to the simulation theory, especially where it is conceived of as a crucial and central addition alongside the theory-theory as the explanation of our capacity to attribute mental states, rather than as an exclusive and exhaustive account by itself.1 I part company with Professor Stueber, however, in that I view the recent simulation theory/theory- theory controversy as subject to resolution primarily through empirical findings. Still, it cannot be denied that Stueber has helped to crystallize elements of the simulation theory/theory-theory debate that have been lurking all along, and has illuminated an important avenue of inquiry into the status of simulation
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.williams.edu/philosophy/fourth_layer/faculty_pages/jcruz/Comments_on_Stueber.pdf
  
• Martin Davies & Tony Stone (1998). Folk psychology and mental simulation.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This paper is about the contemporary debate concerning folk psychology – the debate between the proponents of the theory theory of folk psychology and the friends of the simulation alternative.¹ At the outset, we need to ask: What should we mean by this term ‘folk psychology’?
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/concepts/folkpsychology.html
  
• Martin Davies & Tony Stone (2001). Mental simulation, tacit theory, and the threat of collapse.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: According to the theory theory of folk psychology, our engagement in the folk psychological practices of prediction, interpretation and explanation draws on a rich body of knowledge about psychological matters. According to the simulation theory, in apparent contrast, a fundamental role is played by our ability to identify with another person in imagination and to replicate or re-enact aspects of the other person’s mental life. But amongst theory theorists, and amongst simulation theorists, there are significant differences of approach
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/content/papers/davies.pdf
  
• Martin Davies & Tony Stone (2000). Simulation theory.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Mental simulation is the simulation, replication or re-enactment, usually in imagination, of the thinking, decision-making, emotional responses, or other aspects of the mental life of another person. According to simulation theory, mental simulation in imagination plays a key role in our everyday psychological understanding of other people. The same mental resources that are used in our own thinking, decision-making or emotional responses are redeployed in imagination to provide an understanding of the thoughts, decisions or emotions of another
• Martin Davies (1994). The mental simulation debate.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1533-6077(1994)5<189:TMSD>2.0.CO;2-Q
  http://www.jstor.org/sici?sici=1533-6077(1994)5<189:TMSD>2.0.CO;2-Q
  http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1522880.pdf
  
• J. Decety (2002). Neurophysiological evidence for simulation and action.   (More)
• Vittorio Gallese (2007). Before and below 'theory of mind': Embodied simulation and the neural correlates of social cognition.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://dericbownds.net/uploaded_images/Gallese_PhilTransRSocB_2007.pdf
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=17301027&dopt=Citation
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed&uid=17301027&cmd=showdetailview&indexed=google
  
• Shaun Gallagher (2006). Logical and phenomenological arguments against simulation theory.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Theory theorists conceive of social cognition as a theoretical and observational enterprise rather than a practical and interactive one. According to them, we do our best to explain other people's actions and mental experience by appealing to folk psychology as a kind of rule book that serves to guide our observations through our puzzling encounters with others. Seemingly, for them, most of our encounters count as puzzling, and other people are always in need of explanation. By contrast, simulation theorists do their best to avoid the theoretical stance by using their own experience as the measure of everyone else's. When it comes to explaining how we understand other people some of the very best contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists are simulationists. For example, Vittorio Gallese, Alvin Goldman, Robert Gordon, Jane Heal, Susan Hurley, and Marc Jeannerod. This short list of simulationists, however, already involves some problems. Not everyone on this list understands simulation in the same way. In effect, there are different simulation theories, and although it is important to distinguish them, and I will do so before I go much further, I will in the end argue against all of them. For several reasons I don't think that the concept of simulation explains our primary and pervasive way of understanding others, any more than theory theory does
• Shaun Gallagher (2001). The practice of mind: Theory, simulation or primary interaction?   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/jcs/2001/00000008/F0030005/1207
  
• Vittorio Gallese (2001). The 'shared manifold' hypothesis: From mirror neurons to empathy.   (More)
• Robert M. Gordon & Joe Cruz (2002). Simulation theory.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: What is the simulation theory? Arguments for simulation theory Simulation theory versus theory theory Simulation theory and cognitive science Versions of simulation theory A possible test of the simulation theory
• Pierre Jacob (2002). The scope and limit of mental simulation.   (More)
• Chris Jarrold, Peter Carruthers, Jill Boucher & Peter K. Smith (1994). Pretend play.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Children’s ability to pretend, and the apparent lack of pretence in children with autism, have become important issues in current research on ‘theory of mind’, on the assumption that pretend play may be an early indicator of metarepresentational abilities
• Marc Jeannerod & Elisabeth Pacherie (2004). Agency, simulation and self-identification.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract:   This paper is concerned with the problem of selfidentification in the domain of action. We claim that this problem can arise not just for the self as object, but also for the self as subject in the ascription of agency. We discuss and evaluate some proposals concerning the mechanisms involved in selfidentification and in agencyascription, and their possible impairments in pathological cases. We argue in favor of a simulation hypothesis that claims that actions, whether overt or covert, are centrally simulated by the neural network, and that this simulation provides the basis for action recognition and attribution
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://pacherie.free.fr/papers/Jeannerod-Pacherie_M&L-2004.pdf
  http://hal.ccsd.cnrs.fr/docs/00/05/35/19/PDF/ijn_00000445_00.pdf
  http://jeannicod.ccsd.cnrs.fr/docs/00/05/35/19/PDF/ijn_00000445_00.pdf
  http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/05/35/19/PDF/ijn_00000445_00.pdf
  http://jeannicod.ccsd.cnrs.fr/documents/disk0/00/00/04/45/ijn_00000445_00/ijn_00000445_00.pdf
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0017.2004.00251.x
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-0017.2004.00251.x
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/mila/2004/00000019/00000002/art00001
  
• Theo A. F. Kuipers (2005). Verstehen, einfhlen and mental simulation: Reply to Anne Rugh Mackor.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com//content/rodopi/pozs/2005/00000084/00000001/art00018
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/rodopi/pozs/2005/00000084/00000001/art00018
  
• Barbara Montero (2006). Proprioceiving someone else's movement.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Proprioception - the sense by which we come to know the positions and movements of our bodies - is thought to be necessarily confined to the body of the perceiver. That is, it is thought that while proprioception can inform you as to whether your left knee is bent or straight, it cannot inform you as to whether someone else's knee is bent or straight. But while proprioception certainly provides us with information about the positions and movements of our own bodies, I will argue that it does more than that. Surprising as this may sound, one can proprioceive someone else's movement. To show this, I first present the results of some studies that suggest that in seeing others move, we kinesthetically represent their movement in our bodies. I then argue, by means of an analogy to prosthetic vision, that such 'kinesthetic vision' should count as proprioceiving others move
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/./ftinterface~content=a747861419~fulltext=713240930
  http://taylorandfrancis.metapress.com/index/VXK356N167164725.pdf
  http://www.informaworld.com/index/747861419.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/routledg/rpex/2006/00000009/00000002/art00001
  
• Shaun Nichols, Stephen P. Stich & Alan M. Leslie (1995). Choice effects and the ineffectiveness of simulation.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-0017.1995.tb00023.x
  http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/119246199/PDFSTART
  
• Shaun Nichols & Stephen P. Stich (1998). Rethinking co-cognition: A reply to Heal.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/119119420/PDFSTART
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-0017.00089
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/mila/1998/00000013/00000004/art00089
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/mila/1998/00000013/00000004/art00003
  
• Shaun Nichols, Stephen P. Stich, Alan M. Leslie & David B. Klein (1996). Varieties of off-line simulation.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The debate over off-line simulation has largely focussed on the capacity to predict behavior, but the basic idea of off-line simulation can be cast in a much broader framework. The central claim of the off-line account of behavior prediction is that the practical reasoning mechanism is taken off-line and used for predicting behavior. However, there's no reason to suppose that the idea of off-line simulation can't be extended to mechanisms other than the practical reasoning system. In principle, any cognitive component can be taken off-line and used to perform some other function. On this view of off-line simulation, such accounts differ radically from traditional information-based accounts of cognitive capacities. And cognitive penetrability provides a wedge for empirically determining whether a capacity requires an information-based account or an off-line simulation account. Stich and Nichols (1992) argued that the simulation theory of behavior prediction was inadequate because behavior prediction seemed to be cognitively penetrable. We present empirical evidence that supports the claim that the behavior prediction is cognitively penetrable. As a result, the simulation account of behavior prediction still seems unpromising. However, off-line simulation might provide accounts of other cognitive capacities. Indeed, off- line simulation accounts have recently been offered for a strikingly diverse set of capacities including counterfactual reasoning, empathy and mental imagery. Goldman, for instance, maintains that counterfactual reasoning and empathy clearly demand off-line simulation accounts. We argue that there are alternative information-based explanations of these phenomena. Nonetheless, the off-line accounts of these phenomena are interesting and clearly worthy of further exploration
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/03/76/
  http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/citations?archiveID=oai:cogprints.soton.ac.uk:376
  http://cogprints.org/376/1/sim3.html
  http://cogprints.org/376/0/sim3.html
  
• Alva Noë & Evan Thompson (2004). Are there neural correlates of consciousness?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In the past decade, the notion of a neural correlate of consciousness (or NCC) has become a focal point for scientific research on consciousness (Metzinger, 2000a). A growing number of investigators believe that the first step toward a science of consciousness is to discover the neural correlates of consciousness. Indeed, Francis Crick has gone so far as to proclaim that ‘we … need to discover the neural correlates of consciousness.… For this task the primate visual system seems especially attractive.… No longer need one spend time attempting … to endure the tedium of philosophers perpetually disagreeing with each other. Con- sciousness is now largely a scientific problem’ (Crick, 1996, p. 486).2 Yet the question of what it means to be a neural correlate of consciousness is actually far from straightforward, for it involves fundamental empirical, methodological, and _philosophical _issues about the nature of consciousness and its relationship to the brain. Even if one assumes, as we do, that states of consciousness causally depend on states of the brain, one can nevertheless wonder in what sense there is, or could be, such a thing as a neural correlate of consciousness
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://people.ucsc.edu/~anoe/NCC.pdf
  http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~noe/NCC.pdf
  http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~noe/NCC.pdf
  http://individual.utoronto.ca/evant/NCC.pdf
  http://srsc.ulb.ac.be/cogsci/papers/NCC.pdf
  
• Alva Noë & Evan Thompson (2004). Sorting out the neural basis of consciousness.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Correspondence: Alva Noë, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley CA 94720-2390, USA. _Email: noe@socrates.berkeley.edu_ Evan Thompson, Philosophy Department, York University, 4700 Keele Street, North York, Ontario, M3J 1P3, Canada. _Email: evant@yorku.ca_
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://individual.utoronto.ca/evant/NCCreply.pdf
  http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~noe/NCCReply.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/jcs/2004/00000011/00000001/1414
  
• David Ohreen (2008). Empathy, Folk Psychology, and Explaining Behaviour.   (More)
• Donald M. Peterson (2002). Mental simulation, dialogical processing and the syndrome of autism.   (More)
• Joëlle Proust (2002). Can 'radical' simulation theories explain psychological concept acquisition?   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://jeannicod.ccsd.cnrs.fr/ijn_00000632/en/
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=JJeNqwW2A8kC&oi=fnd&pg=PA201&ots=HcTTFvzJp-&sig=YhcaGR0zDiZAIfiuaty1Hs0EtUs
  
• François Recanati (2002). Varieties of simulation.   (More)
• Anna Christina Ribeiro (online). Do mirror neurons support a simulation theory of mind-reading?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Both macaque monkeys and humans have been shown to have what are called ‘mirror neurons’, a class of neurons that respond to goal-related motor-actions, both when these actions are performed by the subject and when they are performed by another individual observed by the subject. Gallese and Goldman (1998) contend that mirror neurons may be seen as ‘a part of, or a precursor to, a more general mind- reading ability’, and that of the two competing theories of mind-reading, mirror neurons lend support to simulation theory. I here offer four reasons why I think mirror neurons do not provide support for simulation theory over its contender, theory theory
• R. Saxe (2005). Against simulation: The argument from error.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://webscript.princeton.edu/~psych/psychology/related/socneuconf/pdf/Saxe_TICS_05.pdf
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15808499&dopt=Citation
  http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S1364661305000318
  
• Eric Schwitzgebel (ms). A difficulty for simulation theory due to the close connection of pretense and action in early childhood.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/Sim000803.pdf
  
• Theodore R. Schatzki (2000). Simulation theory and the verstehen school: A Wittgensteinian approach.   (More)
• Stephen P. Stich & Shaun Nichols (1997). Cognitive penetrability, rationality, and restricted simulation.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-0017.1997.tb00076.x
  http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/119154908/PDFSTART
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-0017.00050
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/mila/1997/00000012/00000003/art00050
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/mila/1997/00000012/F0020003/art00004
  
• Stephen P. Stich & Shaun Nichols (1993). Folk psychology: Simulation or tacit theory?   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-0017.1992.tb00196.x
  http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1533-6077(1993)3<225:FPSOTT>2.0.CO;2-H
  http://www.jstor.org/sici?sici=1533-6077(1993)3<225:FPSOTT>2.0.CO;2-H
  http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1522947.pdf
  
• Stephen P. Stich & Shaun Nichols (1995). Second thoughts on simulation.   (More)
• Tony Stone & Martin Davies (1996). The mental simulation debate: A progress report.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: 1. Introduction For philosophers, the current phase of the debate with which this volume is concerned can be taken to have begun in 1986, when Jane Heal and Robert Gordon published their seminal papers (Heal, 1986; Gordon, 1986; though see also, for example, Stich, 1981; Dennett, 1981). They raised a dissenting voice against what was becoming a philosophical orthodoxy: that our everyday, or folk, understanding of the mind should be thought of as theoretical. In opposition to this picture, Gordon and Heal argued that we are not theorists but simulators. For psychologists, the debate had begun somewhat earlier when Heider (1958) produced his work on lay psychology; and in more recent times the psychological debate had continued in developmental psychology and in work on animal cognition
• Karsten R. Stueber (2000). Understanding other minds and the problem of rationality.   (More)
• Nigel J. T. Thomas (online). Attitude and image, or, what will simulation theory let us eliminate?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Stich & Ravenscroft (1994) have argued that (contrary to most people's initial assumptions) a simulation account of folk psychology may be consistent with eliminative materialism, but they fail to bring out the full complexity or the potential significance of the relationship. Contemporary eliminativism (particularly in the Churchland version) makes two major claims: the first is a rejection of the orthodox assumption that realistically construed propositional attitudes are fundamental to human cognition; the second is the suggestion that with the advancement of scientific understanding of the mind it will be possible to entirely eliminate the mentalistic and intentional from our ontology, thus dissolving the mind-body problem. The first claim (which has been argued in detail) supplies the principal grounds for accepting the second, much more ambitious and significant, claim. Robert Gordon's (1995, 1996, 2000) radical simulation theory of "folk psychology", proposed initially (Gordon, 1986) as an alternative to "theory theory" accounts of self and interpersonal understanding, but subsequently developing into a quite general challenge to symbolic computational accounts of mind, is not merely consistent with, but actually provides considerable additional support for, the first eliminativist claim. However, although radical simulationism has no use for reified propositional attitudes, it relies on another family of mentalistic and intentional notions, including perspective taking, "seeing as", pretending, imagery, and, most centrally, imagination. It is thus inconsistent with eliminativist metaphysical ambitions. Nevertheless, from this perspective the mind-body problem is transformed. Its solution no longer depends on accounting directly for the intentionality of the attitudes, but rather on accounting for the intentionality of imagination. Although standard accounts of imagination derive its intentionality from that of the attitudes, the recently proposed "perceptual activity" theory of imagery and imagination (Thomas, 1999) can provide a direct account of the intentionality of imagination that is consistent with physicalism..
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://Attitude and image, or, What will simulation theory let us eliminate?
  
• Nigel J. T. Thomas (2003). Imagining minds.   (More)
• Daniel A. Weiskopf (2005). Mental mirroring as the origin of attributions.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: A ‘Radical Simulationist’ account of how folk psychology functions has been developed by Robert Gordon. I argue that Radical Simulationism is false. In its simplest form it is not sufficient to explain our attribution of mental states to subjects whose desires and preferences differ from our own. Modifying the theory to capture these attributions invariably generates innumerable other false attributions. Further, the theory predicts that deficits in mentalizing ought to co-occur with certain deficits in imagining perceptually-based scenarios. I present evidence suggesting that this prediction is false, and outline further possible empirical tests of the theory
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www2.gsu.edu/~phldaw/papers/mental-mirroring.pdf
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.0268-1064.2005.00297.x
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/mila/2005/00000020/00000005/art00002
  

Theory of Mind and Folk Psychology, Misc

• Colin Allen (ms). Macaque mirror neurons.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Primatologists generally agree that monkeys lack higher-order intentional capacities related to theory of mind. Yet the discovery of the so-called “mirror neurons” in monkeys suggests to many neuroscientists that they have the rudiments of intentional understanding. Given a standard philosophical view about intentional understanding, which requires higher-order intentionality, a paradox arises. Different ways of resolving the paradox are assessed, using evidence from neural, cognitive, and behavioral studies of humans and monkeys. A decisive resolution to the paradox requires substantial additional empirical work and perhaps a rejection of the standard philosophical view
• Kristin Andrews (2003). Knowing mental states: The asymmetry of psychological prediction and explanation.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Perhaps because both explanation and prediction are key components to understanding, philosophers and psychologists often portray these two abilities as though they arise from the same competence, and sometimes they are taken to be the same competence. When explanation and prediction are associated in this way, they are taken to be two expressions of a single cognitive capacity that differ from one another only pragmatically. If the difference between prediction and explanation of human behavior is merely pragmatic, then anytime I predict someone’s future behavior, I would at that moment also have an explanation of the behavior. I argue that advocates of both the theory theory and the simulation theory accept the symmetry of psychological prediction and explanation. However, there is very good reason to believe that this hypothesis is false. Just as we can predict the occurrence of some physical phenomena that we have no explanation for, we are also able to make accurate predictions of intentional behavior without having an explanation. Rather than requiring mental state attribution, I argue that the prediction of human behavior is most often accomplished by statistical induction rather than through an appeal to mental states. However, explanations are not given in these terms
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.yorku.ca/andrewsk/andrews/CONSCIOUSNESS%20-%20OCR.pdf
  
• Kristin Andrews (online). The need to explain behavior: Predicting, explaining, and the social function of mental state attribution.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: According to both the traditional model of folk psychology and the social intelligence hypothesis, our folk psychological notions of belief and desire developed in order to make better predictions of behavior, and the fundamental role for our folk psychological notions of belief and desire are for making more accurate predictions of behavior (than predictions made without appeal to folk psychological notions). My strategy in this paper is to show that these claims are false. I argue that we need not appeal to mental states to make predictions of many behaviors, and I will offer a positive account of how we might go about predicting intentional behavior. Finally, I suggest that taken together, the critique of traditional folk psychology along with the alternative account of our predictive practices leads to a new hypothesis. While it may be true that mental state concepts developed in response to social-environmental pressures, I suggest that this pressure was more likely the need to explain behavior, rather than the need to predict it
• Angela Arkway (online). Folk psychological explanation, and causal laws.   (More)
• Angela Arkway (online). The simulation theory and explanations that 'make sense of behavior'.   (More)
• Allison Barnes & Paul R. Thagard (1997). Empathy and analogy.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: We contend that empathy is best viewed as a kind of analogical thinking of the sort described in the multiconstraint theory of analogy proposed by Keith Holyoak and Paul Thagard (1995). Our account of empathy reveals the Theory-theory/Simulation theory debate to be based on a false assumption and formulated in terms too simple to capture the nature of mental state ascription. Empathy is always simulation, but may simultaneously include theory-application. By properly specifying the analogical processes of empathy and their constraints, we are able to show how the amount of theory needed to empathize is determined
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://cogsci.uwaterloo.ca/Articles/Pages/Empathy.html
  http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00000620/00/Empathy.html
  http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/citations?archiveID=oai:cogprints.soton.ac.uk:620
  http://cogprints.org/620/1/Empathy.html
  http://cogprints.org/620/0/Empathy.html
  
• John Barresi (online). The neuroscience of social understanding.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In J. Zlatev, T. Racine, C. Sinha and E. Itkonen (Eds.) The Shared Mind: Perspectives on Intersubjectivity, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, in press
• Paul Bloom (2006). My brain made me do it.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Shaun Nichols (this issue) correctly points out that current theories of the development of mindreading say nothing about children's intuitions concerning indeterminist choice. That is, there are numerous theories of how children make sense of belief, desire, and action, but none that appeal to any notion of free will. Nichols suggests two alternatives for why this is the case. It could either be (a) an --outrageous oversight-- on the part of developmental psychologists or (b) a principled omission, reflecting a consensus that the notion of indeterminist choice is absent from children's mindreading processes. Nichols charitably favors the sec- ond alternative
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/UR611255767V6308.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/brill/jocc/2006/00000006/F0020001/art00011
  
• Radu J. Bogdan (2001). Developing mental abilities by representing intentionality.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract:   Communication by shared meaning, themastery of word semantics,metarepresentation and metamentation aremental abilities, uniquely human, that share a sense ofintentionality or reference. The latteris developed by a naive psychology or interpretation – acompetence dedicated to representingintentional relations between conspecifics and the world. Theidea that interpretation builds new mentalabilities around a sense of reference is based on three linesof analysis – conceptual, psychological andevolutionary. The conceptual analysis reveals that a senseof reference is at the heart of the abilitiesin question. Psychological data track tight developmentalcorrelations between interpretation and theabilities it designs. Finally, an evolutionary hypothesislooks at why interpretation designed thosenew abilities around a sense of reference
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/k48xm0j332453018/fulltext.pdf
  http://www.kluweronline.com/article.asp?PIPS=322208&PDF=1
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/K48XM0J332453018.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/synt/2001/00000129/00000002/00322208
  
• Radu J. Bogdan (2005). Why self-ascriptions are difficult and develop late.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Many philosophers and a few psychologists think that we understand our own minds before we understand those of others. Most developmental psychologists think that children understand their own minds at about the same time they understand other minds, by using the same cognitive abilities. I disagree with both views. I think that children understand other minds before they understand their own. Their self-understanding depends on some cognitive abilities that develop later than, and independently of, the abilities involved in understanding other minds. This is the general theme of this chapter
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.guilford.com/cgi-bin/cartscript.cgi?page=pr/malle.htm&dir=pp/sapp&cart_id=36604.15755
  
• Radu J. Bogdan (2003). Watch your metastep: The first-order limits of early intentional attributions.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: There is a wide and puzzleful gap between the child’s mastery of first- and recursive or higher-order attributions of attitudes, measured not only in years but also in the cognitive resources involved. Some accounts explain the gap in terms of the maturation of the competencies involved, others invoke the slow development of enabling resources, such as short-term memory, the syntax of sentence embedding or sequential reasoning. All these accounts assume a continuity of competence between first- and higher-order attributions. I disagree and argue, with psychological and neuroscientific support, that there are two distinct (though developmentally overlapping and interacting) competencies, one metaintentional and the other metarepresentational. I focus below on the former and argue that it is egocentric, situated, nonpropositional and thus intrinsically limited to first-order attributions, even when all the enabling resources are in place
• Peter Carruthers (1996). Autism as mindblindness: An elaboration and partial defence.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In this chapter I defend the mind-blindness theory of autism, by showing how it can accommodate data which might otherwise appear problematic for it. Specifically, I show how it can explain the fact that autistic children rarely engage in spontaneous pretend-play, and also how it can explain the executive-function deficits which are characteristic of the syndrome. I do this by emphasising what I take to be an entailment of the mind-blindness theory, that autistic subjects have difficulties of access to their own mental states, as well as to the mental states of other people
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://cogprints.org/1193/00/autism.htm
  http://www.philosophy.umd.edu/Faculty/pcarruthers/Autism.htm
  http://cogprints.org/1193/1/autism.htm
  http://cogprints.org/1193/0/autism.htm
  
• Peter Carruthers (1996). Simulation and self-knowledge: A defence of the theory-theory.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In this chapter I attempt to curb the pretensions of simulationism. I argue that it is, at best, an epistemological doctrine of limited scope. It may explain how we go about attributing beliefs and desires to others, and perhaps to ourselves, in some cases. But simulation cannot provide the fundamental basis of our conception of, or knowledge of, minded agency
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://cogprints.org/1194/0/Simula~1.htm
  http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00001194/
  http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/11/94/
  http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/citations?archiveID=oai:cogprints.soton.ac.uk:1194
  http://cogprints.org/1194/1/Simula~1.htm
  
• Joseph L. H. Cruz (1998). Mindreading: Mental state ascription and cognitive architecture.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The debate between the theory-theory and simulation has largely ignored issues of cognitive architecture. In the philosophy of psychology, cognition as symbol manipulation is the orthodoxy. The challenge from connectionism, however, has attracted vigorous and renewed interest. In this paper I adopt connectionism as the antecedent of a conditional: If connectionism is the correct account of cognitive architecture, then the simulation theory should be preferred over the theory-theory. I use both developmental evidence and constraints on explanation in psychology to support this claim
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/1468-0017.00079
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-0017.00079
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/mila/1998/00000013/00000003/art00079
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/mila/1998/00000013/00000003/art00001
  
• Martin Davies & Tony Stone (2003). Psychological understanding and social skills.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In B. Repacholi and V. Slaughter (eds), _Individual Differences in Theory of Mind: Implications for Typical and Atypical_ _Development_. Macquarie Monographs in Cognitive Science. Hove, E. Sussex: Psychology Press, 2003.
• Marc Egeth (2009). Representing Metarepresentations: Is there Theory of Mind-specific cognition?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: What cognitive mechanisms do people use to represent other people's mental states? Do children who have difficulty processing other people's higher-level mental states such as beliefs also have difficulty processing higher-level non-mental representations such as meta-photographs? See the preprint here or find the final version in print or on the journal website.
• Naomi M. Eilan (2005). Joint Attention, Communication, and Mind.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Sometime around their first birthday most infants begin to engage in relatively sustained bouts of attending together with their caretakers to objects in their environment. By the age of 18 months, on most accounts, they are engaging in full-blown episodes of joint attention. As developmental psychologists (usually) use the term, for such joint attention to be in play, it is not sufficient that the infant and the adult are in fact attending to the same object, nor that the one’s attention cause the other’s. The latter can and does happen much earlier, whenever the adult follows the baby’s gaze and homes in on the same object as the baby is attending to; or, from the age of six months, when babies begin to follow the gaze of an adult. We have the relevant sense of joint attention in play only when the fact that both child and adult are attending to the same object is, to use Sperber and Wilson’s (1986) phrase, ‘mutually manifest’. Psychologists sometimes speak of such jointness as a case of attention being ‘shared’ by infant and adult, or of a ‘meeting of minds’ between infant and adult, all phrases intended to capture the idea that when joint attention occurs everything about the fact that both subjects are attending to the same object is out in the open, manifest to both participants
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=Pj-Tlf_MvKMC&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&ots=G_tnmf8Pm7&sig=-e5_GNR0_zBWgGdpHIxz0GEqfnw
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=DTJMtuAXH6QC&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&ots=4N0eM5eQ5H&sig=6YQcuoLQRN5JSYUfWjx_RPGnbwc
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=Pj-Tlf_MvKMC&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&ots=G_tnmf8Pjg&sig=jQnV2tGdLIasX58LveGlc38WwjU
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=DTJMtuAXH6QC&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&ots=4N0eM5eQ2Q&sig=1w0cVUSuECcWbfUe99rL8ulQfxM
  
• Michael S. Gazzaniga & Shaun Gallagher (1998). The neuronal platonist.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Psychology is dead. The self is a fiction invented by the brain. Brain plasticity isn?t all it?s cracked up to be. Our conscious learning is an observation post factum, a recollection of something already accomplished by the brain. We don?t learn to speak; speech is generated when the brain is ready to say something. False memories are more prevalent than one might think, and they aren?t all that bad. We think we?re in charge of our lives, but actually we are not. On top of all this, the common belief that reading to a young child will make her brain more attuned to reading is simply untrue
• Tamar Szabó Gendler (2003). On the relation between pretense and belief.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: By the age of two, children are able to engage in highly elaborate games of symbolic pretense, in which objects and actions in the actual world are taken to stand for objects and actions in a realm of make-believe. These games of pretense are marked by the presence of two central features, which I will call quarantining and mirroring (see also Leslie 1987; Perner 1991). Quarantining is manifest to the extent that events within the pretense-episode are taken to have effects only within that pretense-episode (e.g. the child does not expect that ‘spilling’ ( pretend) ‘tea’1 will result in the table really being wet), or more generally, to the extent that proto-beliefs and proto-attitudes concerning the pretended state of affairs are not treated as beliefs and attitudes relevant to guiding action in the actual world. Mirroring is manifest to the extent that features of the imaginary situation that have not been explicitly stipulated are derivable via features of their real-world analogues (e.g. the child does expect that if she up-ends the teapot above the table, then the table will become wet in the pretense), or, more generally to the extent that imaginative content is taken to be governed by the same sorts of restrictions that govern believed content
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=YI5T-5sOm1EC&oi=fnd&pg=PA125&dq=On+the+relation+between+pretense+and+belief+Gendler&ots=rc-yF5fAMh&sig=_Hpv9w2F4VoLnlOkWneVUv8-hw8
  
• Philip Gerrans (1998). The norms of cognitive development.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.arts.adelaide.edu.au/humanities/people/philosophy/gerrans_preprints/ml1998.pdf
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-0017.00065
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/mila/1998/00000013/00000001/art00006
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/mila/1998/00000013/00000001/art00065
  
• Daniel D. Hutto (2004). Folk psychological narratives and the case of autism.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ajol.info/viewarticle.php?id=14007&jid=190
  http://www.ajol.info/viewarticle.php?id=14007&jid=190&layout=abstract
  
• Joshua Knobe (2005). Theory of mind and moral cognition: Exploring the connections.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: An extremely brief (3 page) review of recent work on the ways in which people's moral judgments can influence their use of folk-psychological concepts
• Robyn Langdon, Martin Davies & Max Coltheart (2002). Understanding minds and understanding communicated meanings in schizophrenia.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Cognitive neuropsychology is that branch of cognitive psychology that investi- gates people with acquired or developmental disorders of cognition. The aim is to learn more about how cognitive systems normally operate or about how they are normally acquired by studying selective patterns of cognitive break- down after brain damage or selective dif?culties in acquiring particular cogni- tive abilities. In the early days of modern cognitive neuropsychology, research focused on rather basic cognitive abilities such as speech comprehension or production at the single-word level, reading and spelling, object and face recognition, and short-term memory. More recently the cognitive-neuro- psychological approach has been applied to the study of rather more complex domains of cognition such as belief ?xation (e.g. Coltheart and Davies, 2000; Langdon and Coltheart, 2000) and pragmatic aspects of communication (e.g. McDonald and Van Sommers, 1993). Our paper concerns the investigation of pragmatic disorders in one clinical group in which such disorders are common, patients with schizophrenia, and what the study of such people can tell us about the normal processes of communication
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/1468-0017.00190
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-0017.00190
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/mila/2002/00000017/F0020001/art00190
  
• Heidi L. Maibom (2007). Social systems.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: It used to be thought that folk psychology is the only game in town. Focusing merely on what people do will not allow you to predict what they are likely to do next. For that, you must consider their beliefs, desires, intentions, etc. Recent evidence from developmental psychology and fMRI studies indicates that this conclusion was premature. We parse motion in an environment as behavior of a particular type, and behavior thus construed can feature in systematizations that we know. Building on the view that folk psychological knowledge is knowledge of theoretical models, I argue that social knowledge is best understood as lying on a continuum between behavioral and full-blown psychological models. Between the two extremes, we have what I call social models. Social models represent social structures in terms of their overall purpose and circumscribe individuals' roles within them. These models help us predict what others will do or plan what we should do without providing information about what agents think or want. Thinking about social knowledge this way gives us a more nuanced picture of what capacities are engaged in social planning and interaction, and gives us a better tool with which to think about the social knowledge of animals and young children
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/./ftinterface~content=a782007306~fulltext=713240930
  http://www.informaworld.com/index/782007306.pdf
  
• Bertram F. Malle (2005). Folk Theory of Mind: Conceptual Foundations of Human Social Cognition.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00003315/
  
• Shaun Nichols (2001). Mindreading and the cognitive architecture underlying altruistic motivation.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In recent attempts to characterize the cognitive mechanisms underlying altruistic motivation, one central question is the extent to which the capacity for altruism depends on the capacity for understanding other minds, or ‘mindreading’. Some theorists maintain that the capacity for altruism is independent of any capacity for mindreading; others maintain that the capacity for altruism depends on fairly sophisticated mindreading skills. I argue that none of the prevailing accounts is adequate. Rather, I argue that altruistic motivation depends on a basic affective system, a ‘Concern Mechanism’, which requires only a minimal capacity for mindreading
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/1468-0017.00178/abs/
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-0017.00178
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/mila/2001/00000016/00000004/art00004
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/mila/2001/00000016/00000004/art00178
  
• Shaun Nichols (web). Mindreading and the philosophy of mind.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In J. Prinz (ed.) The Oxford Handbook on Philosophy of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press
• Anna Papafragou (2002). Mindreading and verbal communication.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The idea that verbal communication involves a species of mindreading is not new. Among linguists and philosophers, largely as a result of Grice’s (1957, 1967) influence, it has long been recognized that the act of communicating involves on the part of the communicator and the addressee mutual metarepresentations of each others’ mental states. In psychology, the coordination of common ground and attention in conversation has been pursued in a variety of studies (e.g. Clark and Marshall, 1981; Bruner, 1983)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://papafragou.psych.udel.edu/papers/mind.pdf
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/1468-0017.00189
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-0017.00189
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/mila/2002/00000017/F0020001/art00189
  
• Christopher Peacocke (2005). Joint attention: Its nature, reflexivity, and relation to common knowledge.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Two parents are watching their son take his first upright steps in learning to walk. Here we have a paradigm of joint attention. The two parents are attending to their son; they are aware of each other’s attention to their son; and all this attention is wholly overt. Everything is in the open, nothing is hidden. In what does this openness consist? Can we characterize it explicitly, without using metaphors?
• Johannes Roessler (2005). Joint attention and the problem of other minds.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=Pj-Tlf_MvKMC&oi=fnd&pg=PA230&ots=G_tnmg-Tm8&sig=piysg_rhpVSOMI25FMBtAiG4GA0
  
• Eric Schwitzgebel (1999). Children's theories and the drive to explain.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/ChsThs.htm
  http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/recordDetail?accno=EJ593848
  http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/ChsThs.pdf
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/R3V812R1GP32166T.pdf
  
• Eric Schwitzgebel (1999). Gradual belief change in children.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.karger.com/doi/10.1159/000022637
  http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/GradBel.htm
  http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/GradBel.pdf
  http://content.karger.com/ProdukteDB/produkte.asp?Aktion=ShowPDF&ProduktNr=224249&Ausgabe=225903&ArtikelNr=22637
  http://content.karger.com/ProdukteDB/produkte.asp?Aktion=ShowPDF&ProduktNr=224249&Ausgabe=225903&ArtikelNr=22637&filename=22637.pdf
  http://content.karger.com/ProdukteDB/produkte.asp?Aktion=ShowPDF&ArtikelNr=22637&ProduktNr=224249&Ausgabe=225903&filename=22637.pdf
  
• Brian J. Scholl & Alan M. Leslie (1999). Modularity, development and "theory of mind".   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Psychologists and philosophers have recently been exploring whether the mechanisms which underlie the acquisition of ‘theory of mind’ (ToM) are best charac- terized as cognitive modules or as developing theories. In this paper, we attempt to clarify what a modular account of ToM entails, and why it is an attractive type of explanation. Intuitions and arguments in this debate often turn on the role of _develop-_ _ment_: traditional research on ToM focuses on various developmental sequences, whereas cognitive modules are thought to be static and ‘anti-developmental’. We suggest that this mistaken view relies on an overly limited notion of modularity, and we explore how ToM might be grounded in a cognitive module and yet still afford development. Modules must ‘come on-line’, and even fully developed modules may still develop _internally_, based on their constrained input. We make these points con- crete by focusing on a recent proposal to capture the development of ToM in a module via _parameterization_
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~ctg/classes/lib/cogsci/scholl.pdf
  http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~aleslie/99-Scholl-Leslie-MindLang.pdf
  http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~duck/ctg/classes/lib/cogsci/scholl.pdf
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-0017.00106?favorite=add
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/1468-0017.00106
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-0017.00106
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/mila/1999/00000014/00000001/art00106
  
• Eric Schwitzgebel (1997). Words About Young Minds: The Concepts of Theory, Representation, and Belief in Philosophy and Developmental Psychology.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In this dissertation, I examine three philosophically important concepts that play a foundational role in developmental psychology: theory, representation, and belief. I describe different ways in which the concepts have been understood and present reasons why a developmental psychologist, or a philosopher attuned to cognitive development, should prefer one understanding of these concepts over another
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/Diss.pdf
  http://webspace.utexas.edu/deverj/personal/test/youngminds.pdf
  
• Shannon Spaulding (2010). Embodied cognition and mindreading.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Recently, philosophers and psychologists defending the embodied cognition research program have offered arguments against mindreading as a general model of our social understanding. The embodied cognition arguments are of two kinds: those that challenge the developmental picture of mindreading and those that challenge the alleged ubiquity of mindreading. Together, these two kinds of arguments, if successful, would present a serious challenge to the standard account of human social understanding. In this paper, I examine the strongest of these embodied cognition arguments and argue that mindreading approaches can withstand the best of these arguments from embodied cognition
• Kim Sterelny (2004). The triumph of a reasonable man: Stich, mindreading, and nativism.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Humans interpret others. We are able to anticipate both the actions and intentional states of other agents. We do not do so perfectly, but since we are complex and flexible creatures even limited success needs explanation. For some years now Steve Stich (frequently in collaboration with Shaun Nichols) has been both participant in, and observer of, debates about the foundation of these capacities (Stich and Nichols 1992; Stich and Nichols 1995). As a commentator on this debate, Stich (with Nichols) gave explicit and fair-minded sketches of the cognitive architectures presupposed by the various theories of mindreading. As a participant, Stich has mostly been a defender of the theory-theory, the view that normal human agents have an internally represented theory of other agents and they use that theory in interpreting other agents. The main recent rival to this position, simulationism, claims that agents use their own decision-making mechanisms as a model of those of other agents, and derive their predictions by modelling others in something like the way aeronautical engineers derive predictions from the use of scale models in wind-tunnels. Stich has been sceptical about this alternative, for on his view simulation theory makes mistaken predictions about both the development of interpretive competence and about the pattern of interpretive success and failure
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.vuw.ac.nz/phil/staff/documents/sterelny-papers/stich.pdf
  
• Stephen P. Stich & Shaun Nichols (2000). A cognitive theory of pretense.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Recent accounts of pretense have been underdescribed in a number of ways. In this paper, we present a much more explicit cognitive account of pretense. We begin by describing a number of real examples of pretense in children and adults. These examples bring out several features of pretense that any adequate theory of pretense must accommodate, and we use these features to develop our theory of pretense. On our theory, pretense representations are contained in a separate mental workspace, a Possible World Box which is part of the basic architecture of the human mind. The representations in the Possible World Box can have the same content as beliefs. Indeed, we suggest that pretense representations are in the same representational ``code'' as beliefs and that the representations in the Possible World Box are processed by the same inference and UpDating mechanisms that operate over real beliefs. Our model also posits a Script Elaborator which is implicated in the embellishment that occurs in pretense. Finally, we claim that the behavior that is seen in pretend play is motivated not from a ``pretend desire'', but from a real desire to act in a way that ®ts the description being constructed in the Possible World Box. We maintain that this account can accommodate the central features of pretense exhibited in the examples of pretense, and we argue that the alternative accounts either can't accommodate or fail to address entirely some of the central features of pretense. q 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/ArchiveFolder/Research Group/Publications/Rethink/rethink.html
  
• Thomas Suddendorf & Claire Fletcher-Flinn (1997). Theory of mind and the origins of divergent thinking.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The development of a `theory of mind' may not only be important for understanding the minds of others but also for using one's own mind. To investigate this supposition, forty children between the ages of three and four were given false-belief and creativity tasks. The numbers of appropriate and of original responses in the creativity test were found to correlate positively with performance on false-belief tasks. This association was robust, as it continued to be strong and significant even when age and verbal intelligence were partialled out. The results support the hypothesis that the metarepresentational skills involved in theory of mind also affect the way children can access and scan their own mental repertoire beyond the areas of currently activated content (i.e. divergent thinking). With the advent of theory of mind a basic cognitive shift takes place in human development, and possibly took place in cognitive evolution
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://cogprints.org/727/00/TOM.txt
  http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00000727/
  http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/07/27/
  http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/recordDetail?accno=EJ555526
  http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/citations?archiveID=oai:cogprints.soton.ac.uk:727
  
• Michael Tomasello & Hannes Rakoczy (2003). What makes human cognition unique? From individual to shared to collective intentionality.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://email.eva.mpg.de/~rakoczy/pdf/uniquely_human_M&L.pdf
  http://psych.colorado.edu/~colunga/langprosem/Readings/Tomasello+Rakocszy03.pdf
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-0017.00217
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/mila/2003/00000018/00000002/art00001
  
• Daniel Wegner, H. Gray & K. Gray (2007). Dimensions of mind perception.   (More)

Folk Concepts and Folk Intuitions

• Annie Adams, Frederick R. & Steadman (online). Folk concepts, surveys and intentional action.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In a recent paper, Al Mele (2003) suggests that the Simple View of intentional action is “fiction” because it is “wholly unconstrained” by a widely shared (folk) concept of intentional action. The Simple View (Adams, 1986, McCann, 1986) states that an action is intentional only if intended. As evidence that the Simple View is not in accord with the folk notion of intentional action, Mele appeals to recent surveys of folk judgments by Joshua Knobe (2003, 2004a, 2004b). Knobe’s surveys appear to show that the folk judge unintended but known side effects of actions to be performed intentionally. In this paper we will reject Mele’s suggestion that the Simple View is “fiction.” We will also discuss the relationship between surveys and philosophical theories, and the abilities of surveys to access folk core concepts. We will argue that considerations of both fail to support Mele’s suggestion
• Jesse M. Bering (2006). The folk psychology of souls.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The present article examines how people’s belief in an afterlife, as well as closely related supernatural beliefs, may open an empirical backdoor to our understanding of the evolution of human social cognition. Recent findings and logic from the cognitive sciences contribute to a novel theory of existential psychology, one that is grounded in the tenets of Darwinian natural selection. Many of the predominant questions of existential psychology strike at the heart of cognitive science. They involve: causal attribution (why is mortal behavior represented as being causally related to one’s afterlife? how are dead agents envisaged as communicating messages to the living?), moral judgment (why are certain social behaviors, i.e., transgressions, believed to have ultimate repercussions after death or to reap the punishment of disgruntled ancestors?), theory of mind (how can we know what it is “like” to be dead? what social-cognitive strategies do people use to reason about the minds of the dead?), concept acquisition (how does a common-sense dualism interact with a formalized socio-religious indoctrination in childhood? how are supernatural properties of the dead conceptualized by young minds?), and teleological reasoning (why do people so often see their lives as being designed for a purpose that must be accomplished before they perish? how do various life events affect people’s interpretation of this purpose?), among others. The central thesis of the present article is that an organized cognitive “system” dedicated to forming illusory representations of (1) psychological immortality, (2) the intelligent design of the self, and (3) the symbolic meaning of natural events evolved in response to the unique selective pressures of the human social environment
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Bering-11302004/Referees/Bering-11302004_preprint.pdf
  http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Bering-11302004/Referees/Bering-11302004_preprint.doc
  http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=1&fid=587572&jid=BBS&volumeId=29&issueId=05&aid=587568
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=17156519&dopt=Citation
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed&uid=17156519&cmd=showdetailview&indexed=google
  http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0140525X06009101
  
• Adam Feltz & Edward Cokely (2007). An anomaly in intentional action ascription: More evidence of folk diversity.   (More)
• Chad Gonnerman (2008). Reading conflicted minds: An empirical follow-up to Knobe and roedder.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Recently Joshua Knobe and Erica Roedder found that folk attributions of valuing tend to vary according to the perceived moral goodness of the object of value. This is an interesting finding, but it remains unclear what, precisely, it means. Knobe and Roedder argue that it indicates that the concept MORAL GOODNESS is a feature of the concept VALUING. In this article, I present a study of folk attributions of desires and moral beliefs that undermines this conclusion. I then propose the beginnings of an alternative interpretation of the data that appeals to intrinsic biases in our third-person mindreading mechanisms
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/./ftinterface~content=a792191310~fulltext=713240930
  http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/./ftinterface~db=all~content=a792191310~fulltext=713240930
  
• Henry Jackman (2009). Semantic intuitions, conceptual analysis, and cross-cultural variation.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: While philosophers of language have traditionally relied upon their intuitions about cases when developing theories of reference, this methodology has recently been attacked on the grounds that intuitions about reference, far from being universal, show significant cultural variation, thus undermining their relevance for semantic theory. I’ll attempt to demonstrate that (1) such criticisms do not, in fact, undermine the traditional philosophical methodology, and (2) our underlying intuitions about the nature of reference may be more universal than the authors suppose
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.yorku.ca/hjackman/papers/Intutions_and_analysis.pdf
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/rh127r02nv39338l/fulltext.pdf
  
• Joshua Knobe, B. F. Malle & S. Nelson (2007). Actor-observer asymmetries in explanations of behavior: New answers to an old question.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: A long series of studies in social psychology have shown that the explanations people give for their own behaviors are fundamentally different from the explanations they give for the behaviors of others. Still, a great deal of uncertainty remains about precisely what sorts of differences one finds here. We offer a new approach to addressing the problem. Specifically, we distinguish between two levels of representation ─ the level of linguistic structure (which consists of the actual series of words used in the explanation) and the level of conceptual structure (which consists of the concepts these words are used to express). We then formulate and test hypotheses both about self-other differences in conceptual structure and about self-other differences in the mapping from conceptual structure to linguistic structure.
• Adam Morton (ms). But are they right? The prospects for empirical conceptology.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This is exciting stuff. Philosophers have long explored the structure of human concepts from the inside, by manipulating their skills as users of those concepts. And since Quine most reasonable philosophers have accepted that the structure is a contingent matter – we or not too different creatures could have thought differently – which in principle can be..
• Joshua Knobe & Arudra Burra (2006). Experimental philosophy and folk concepts: Methodological considerations.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Experimental philosophy is a comparatively new field of research, and it is only natural that many of the key methodological questions have not even been asked, much less answered. In responding to the comments of our critics, we therefore find ourselves brushing up against difficult questions about the aims and techniques of our whole enterprise. We will do our best to address these issues here, but the field is progressing at a rapid clip, and we suspect that it will be possible to provide more adequate answers a few years down the line
• Joshua Knobe (2003). Intentional action and side effects in ordinary language.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: There has been a long-standing dispute in the philosophical literature about the conditions under which a behavior counts as 'intentional.' Much of the debate turns on questions about the use of certain words and phrases in ordinary language. The present paper investigates these questions empirically, using experimental techniques to investigate people's use of the relevant words and phrases. g
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-8284.00419
  http://pantheon.yale.edu/~jk762/Side-Effect.pdf
  
• Joshua Knobe (2003). Intentional action in folk psychology: An experimental investigation.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Four experiments examined people’s folk-psychological concept of intentional action. The chief question was whether or not _evaluative _considerations — considerations of good and bad, right and wrong, praise and blame — played any role in that concept. The results indicated that the moral qualities of a behavior strongly influence people’s judgements as to whether or not that behavior should be considered ‘intentional.’ After eliminating a number of alternative explanations, the author concludes that this effect is best explained by the hypothesis that evaluative considerations do play some role in people’s concept of intentional action.
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://cogprints.org/2922/1/IntentionSkill.pdf
  http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00001342/
  http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00002922/
  http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00001342/01/IntentionalAction.pdf
  http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/citations?archiveID=oai:cogprints.soton.ac.uk:2922
  http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/./ftinterface~content=a713690627~fulltext=713240930
  http://taylorandfrancis.metapress.com/index/WW6WYBWP2QHT4K5A.pdf
  http://www.informaworld.com/index/WW6WYBWP2QHT4K5A.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/routledg/cphp/2003/00000016/00000002/art00006
  http://pantheon.yale.edu/~jk762/IntentionSkill.pdf
  http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/./ftinterface~db=all~content=a713690627~fulltext=713240930
  
• Joshua Knobe (2006). The concept of intentional action: A case study in the uses of folk psychology.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: It is widely believed that the primary function of folk psychology lies in the prediction, explanation and control of behavior. A question arises, however, as to whether folk psychology has also been shaped in fundamental ways by the various other roles it plays in people’s lives. Here I approach that question by considering one particular aspect of folk psychology – the distinction between intentional and unintentional behaviors. The aim is to determine whether this distinction is best understood as a tool used in prediction, explanation and control or whether it has been shaped in fundamental ways by some other aspect of its use
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/5524x26021515413/fulltext.pdf
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/5524X26021515413.pdf
  http://pantheon.yale.edu/~jk762/PhilStudies.pdf
  
• Joshua Knobe & Bertram Malle (1997). The folk concept of intentionality.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: When perceiving, explaining, or criticizing human behavior, people distinguish between intentional and unintentional actions. To do so, they rely on a shared folk concept of intentionality. In contrast to past speculative models, this article provides an empirically-based model of this concept. Study 1 demonstrates that people agree substantially in their judgments of intentionality, suggesting a shared underlying concept. Study 2 reveals that when asked to directly define the term intentional, people mention four components of intentionality: desire, belief, intention, and awareness. Study 3 confirms the importance of a fifth component, namely, skill. In light of these findings, the authors propose a model of the folk concept of intentionality and provide a further test in Study 4. The discussion compares the proposed model to past ones and examines its implications for social perception, attribution, and cognitive development
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~bfmalle/Folk_concept_intentionality.pdf
  
• Joshua Knobe (2006). The folk concepts of intention and intentional action: A cross-cultural study.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Recent studies point to a surprising divergence between people's use of the concept of _intention_ and their use of the concept of _acting intentionally_. It seems that people's application of the concept of intention is determined by their beliefs about the agent's psychological states whereas their use of the concept of acting intentionally is determined at least in part by their beliefs about the moral status of the behavior itself (i.e., by their beliefs about whether the behavior is morally good or morally bad). These findings raise a number of difficult questions about the relationship between the concept of intention and the concept of acting intentionally. The present paper addresses those questions using a variety of different methods, including conceptual analysis, psychological experimentation, and an examination of people's use of certain expressions in other languages
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/10HNU87827680459.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/brill/jocc/2006/00000006/F0020001/art00005
  
• Joshua Knobe & Gabriel Mendlow (2004). The good, the bad and the blameworthy: Understanding the role of evaluative reasoning in folk psychology.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: People ordinarily make sense of their own behavior and that of others by invoking concepts like belief, desire, and intention. Philosophers refer to this network of concepts and related principles as 'folk psychology.' The prevailing view of folk psychology among philosophers of mind and psychologists is that it is a proto-scientific theory whose function is to explain and predict behavior
• Daniel Z. Korman (2008). Review of Terence E. Horgan, matjaž potrč, Austere Realism: Contextual Semantics Meets Minimal Ontology.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: You could say that Horgan and Potrč aren't big on commitment. As they would have it, an ordinary utterance of 'there is a brown chair in the corner' is strictly and literally true, and yet there are no such things as chairs or corners, nor is there any such thing as being brown. Their project in Austere Realism is to supply a semantic framework in which this and other such sentences of ordinary discourse (as well as scientific discourse) are unambiguously true, despite the fact that the sorts of items that would ordinarily be taken to answer to their quantifiers, referring expressions, and predicates do not exist. The conciliatory strategy that they develop is designed to be compatible with a variety of different austere ontologies, though they ultimately come down in favor of a monist ontology on which there exists exactly one concrete particular: "the blobject," that is, the whole cosmos. Although I cannot hope to do justice to all of the intricacies of their ontological-cum-semantic theory in this review, I will do my best to touch on all of the main themes of the book, and I will try to indicate why I was not persuaded.
• Eduoard Machery, Mallon, R., Nichols, S. & S. Stich (web). Against arguments from reference.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: in D. Chalmers, D. Manley and R. Wasserman (eds.), Metametaphysics, Oxford University Press
• Edouard Machery (2006). The folk concept of intentional action: Philosophical and experimental issues.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: ^? Thanks for helpful comments to Gregory Currie, Josh Knobe, Ron Mallon, Thomas Nadelhoffer, Shaun Nichols, Steve Stich, Liane Young, the readers of the blog Experimental Philosophy (http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/) as well as two anonymous reviewers. Thanks also to my research assistant on this project, Julie Sokolow, for her help and her comments
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.pitt.edu/~machery/papers/The folk concept of intentionality_machery.pdf
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-0017.2007.00336.x
  http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/119401017/PDFSTART
  
• Eduoard Machery & J. Livengood (2007). The folk probably don't think what you think they think: Experiments on causation by absence.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Folk theories—untutored people’s (often implicit) theories about various features of the world—have been fashionable objects of inquiry in psychology for almost two decades now (e.g., Hirschfeld and Gelman 1994), and more recently they have been of interest in experimental philosophy (Nichols 2004). Folk theories of psy- chology, physics, biology, and ethics have all come under investigation. Folk meta- physics, however, has not been as extensively studied. That so little is known about folk metaphysics is unfortunate for (at least) two reasons. First, folk metaphysics is almost certainly implicit, and it is likely to be our default way of thinking about metaphysical problems. Moreover, one’s metaphysical commitments can have pro- found consequences—in scientific, religious, and ethical contexts, for example. Thus, folk metaphysics ought to be dragged out into the open and exposed to criticism. As Peirce eloquently remarked (1994, 1.129; see also 1994, 7.579)
• Bertram F. Malle (2006). Of windmills and straw men: Folk assumptions of mind and action.   (More)
• Bertram F. Malle (2006). The relation between judgments of intentionality and morality.   (More)
• Roblin R. Meeks (2004). Unintentionally biasing the data: Reply to Knobe.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Knobe (2003) wants to help adjudicate the philosophical debate concerning whether and under what conditions we normally judge that some side effect x was brought about intentionally. His proposal for doing so is perhaps an obvious one—simply elicit the intuitions of “The Folk” directly on the matter and record the results. His findings were a bit less obvious, however. When Knobe presented New York parkgoers with scenarios including either good or bad side effects, they tended to judge that the bad side effect was brought about intentionally and that the good side effect was not. In light of these responses, Knobe concludes that

  [p]eople’s judgments depend in a crucial way on what x happens to be. In
  particular, it makes a great deal of difference whether they think that x is
  something good or something bad. (2003: 191)

  He further explains this conclusion in terms of an underlying normative asymmetry, for according to Knobe the data suggests that “people are considerably more willing to blame the agent for bad side effects than to praise the agent for good side effects” (2003: 193). Hence, people’s judgment that a side effect was brought about intentionally apparently rests, at least in part, upon how blameworthy they find the agent responsible for it
• Alfred R. Mele (2003). Intentional action: Controversies, data, and core hypotheses.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This article reviews some recent empirical work on lay judgments about what agents do intentionally and what they intend in various stories and explores its bearing on the philosophical project of providing a conceptual analysis of intentional action. The article is a case study of the potential bearing of empirical studies of a variety of folk concepts on philosophical efforts to analyze those concepts and vice versa. Topics examined include double effect; the influence of moral considerations on judgments about what is done intentionally and about what is intended; the influence of considerations of luck, skill, and causal deviance on judgments about what agents do intentionally; what interesting properties all cases of intentional action might share; and the debate between proponents of, respectively, "the Simple View" of the connection between intentional action and intention and "the Single Phenomenon View" of that connection. A substantial body of literature is devoted to the project of analyzing intentional action [1] . In this article, I explore the bearing on that project of some recent empirical work on lay judgments about what is done intentionally and about what is intended. This article may reasonably be regarded as a case study of the potential bearing of empirical studies of a range of folk concepts on philosophical efforts to analyze those concepts and, likewise, of the potential bearing of attempted philosophical analyses of folk concepts on empirical studies of those concepts
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/./ftinterface~content=a713690628~fulltext=713240930
  http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0029-4624(199403)28:1<39:IA>2.0.CO;2-K
  http://taylorandfrancis.metapress.com/index/WGYG0ELAKRJ09QQ6.pdf
  http://www.informaworld.com/index/WGYG0ELAKRJ09QQ6.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/routledg/cphp/2003/00000016/00000002/art00007
  http://pantheon.yale.edu/~jk762/responses/Mele.pdf
  http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/./ftinterface~db=all~content=a713690628~fulltext=713240930
  
• Thomas Nadelhoffer (2004). On praise, side effects, and folk ascriptions of intentionality.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In everyday discourse, we often draw a distinction between actions that are performed intentionally (e.g. opening your car door) and those that are performed unintentionally (e.g. shutting a car door on your finger). This distinction has interested philosophers working in a number of different areas. Indeed, intentional actions are not only the primary focus of those concerned with understanding and explaining human behavior, but they often occupy center stage in philosophical discussions of free will and moral and legal responsibility as well. And while most philosophers agree that the distinction between intentional and unintentional action plays an important role in our folk psychology, there is still wide-scale disagreement about the precise nature of this role. Until recently, there has been a lack of empirical data about the folk concept of intentional action and as a result the debate among philosophers has been mostly
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://users.dickinson.edu/~nadelhth/Online Papers/praise, side effects, and folk ascriptions of intentionality.pdf
  
• Mark T. Phelan & Hagop Sarkissian (2008). The folk strike back; or, why you didn't do it intentionally, though it was bad and you knew it.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Recent and puzzling experimental results suggest that people’s judgments as to whether or not an action was performed intentionally are sensitive to moral considerations. In this paper, we outline these results and evaluate two accounts which purport to explain them. We then describe a recent experiment that allegedly vindicates one of these accounts and present our own findings to show that it fails to do so. Finally, we present additional data suggesting no such vindication could be in the offing and that, in fact, both accounts fail to explain the initial, puzzling results they were purported to explain
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/m7v376170g66900n/fulltext.pdf
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/m7v376170g66900n.pdf
  
• Jonathan Phillips & Joshua Knobe (2009). Moral judgments and intuitions about freedom.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Reeder’s article offers a new and intriguing approach to the study of people’s ordinary understanding of freedom and constraint. On this approach, people use information about freedom and constraint as part of a quasi-scientific effort to make accurate inferences about an agent’s motives. Their beliefs about the agent’s motives then affect a wide variety of further psychological processes, including the process whereby they arrive at moral judgments. In illustrating this new approach, Reeder cites an elegant study he conducted a number of years ago (Reeder & Spores, 1983). All subjects were given a vignette about a man who goes with his date to a pizza parlor and happens to come across a box that has been designated for charitable donations. In one condition, the man’s date then requests that he make a donation; in the other, she requests that he steal the money that is already in the box. In both conditions, the man chooses to comply with this request. The key question is how subjects will use his behavior to make inferences about whether he is a morally good or morally bad person. The results revealed a marked difference between conditions. When the man donated to charity, subjects were generally disinclined to conclude that he must have been a morally good person. It is as though they were thinking: ‘He didn’t just do this out of the goodness of his heart
• Steven Sverdlik (2004). Intentionality and moral judgments in commonsense thought about action.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The concept of intentional action occupies a central place in commonsense or folk psychological thought. Philosophers of action, psychologists and moral philosophers all have taken an interest in understanding this important concept. One issue that has been discussed by philosophers is whether the concept of intentional action is purely ‘naturalistic’, that is, whether it is entirely a descriptive concept that can be used to explain and predict behavior. (Of course, judgments using such a concept could be used to support moral or evaluative judgments about responsibility, praise and blame.) A related question is whether speakers’ views about moral and evaluative issues at least affect their judgments about intentionality, even if their explicit concept of intentional action is not itself evaluative
• Jason Turner (2004). Folk intuitions, asymmetry, and intentional side effects.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: An agent _S_ wants to _A_ and knows that if she _A_-s she will also bring about _B_. _S_ does not care at all about _B_. _S_ then _A_-s, also bringing about _B_. Did she _intentionally_ bring _B_ about?

Issues in Psychology

Parapsychology

• John Beloff (1990). Parapsychology and radical dualism.   (More)
• Stephen Braude, Guest column: Terminological reform in parapsychology: A giant step backwards.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Parapsychologists have never been entirely satisfied with their technical vo- cabulary, and occasionally their discontent leads to attempts at terminological reform.1 Recently, a number of prominent parapsychologists, led by Ed May, have regularly abandoned some of parapsychology’s traditional and central categories in favor of some novel alternatives (see, e.g., May, Utts, and Spot- tiswoode, 1995a, 1995b; May, Spottiswood, Utts, and James, 1995). They rec- ommend replacing the term ª ESPº with ª anomalous cognitionº (or AC) and ª psychokinesis (PK)º with ª anomalous perturbationº (or AP). Advocates of these new terms also propose replacing the term ª psiº or ª psi phenomenaº with ª anomalous mental phenomena.º Superf icially at least, these proposals seem merely to be modest extensions of parapsychology’s increasingly fre- quent use of the term ª anomalousº as a substitute for ª paranormal,º a practice which (although controversial) is not without merit, and which Palmer has vigorously defended (1986, 1987, 1992). But in my view, the proposed new terminology creates more problems than it solves
• Peter King (2003). Parapsychology without the 'para' (or the psychology).   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: possible, your investigation is unlikely ever to get off the ground), there’s no such excuse for philosophers. The philosopher should be unrestricted by fashions in thought, including the unquestioning acceptance of whatever scientific theories are currently dominant. The fact is, however, that in this field and in the philosophy of mind, many
• Peter Lloyd (ms). Application of mental monism to parapsychology.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This short essay is a follow-on to Mental Monism Considered as a Solution to the Mind- Body Problem, in ‘Mind and its Place in the World: Non-Reductionist Approaches to the Ontology of Consciousness’, edited by Alexander Batthyany and Avshalom Elitzur, published by Ontos Verlag, Frankfurt, December 2005. It was originally planned as a final section of that essay but, at forty-four pages the latter was already oversize, so the parapsychology section was dropped from that publication
• Stephen Palmquist (online). Kant’s criticism of swedenborg: Parapsychology and the origin of the copernican hypothesis.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Parapsychology, Philosophy and the Mind: A Festschrift in Honour of John Beloff’s 80th Birthday, ed. Fiona Steinkamp (McFarland Press, 2002)

Psychological Laws

• Axel Cleeremans (1994). Attention and awareness in sequence learning.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: referred to as implicit learning (Reber, 1989). Implicit learning contrasts with explicit learning (exhibited for
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/77398.html
  http://srsc.ulb.ac.be/axcWWW/papers/pdf/93-Cogsci.pdf
  http://srsc.ulb.ac.be/axcwww/papers/pdf/93-Cogsci.pdf
  http://srsc.ulb.ac.be/axcWWW/papers/pdf/93-Cogsci.pdf
  http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/cleeremans93attention.html
  http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/cleeremans93attention.html
  http://srsc-mac1.ulb.ac.be/axcWWW/papers/pdf/93-Cogsci.pdf
  
• Axel Cleeremans (1998). Implicit learning.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Implicit learning is the process through which we become sensitive to certain regularities in the environment (1) in the absence of intention to learn about those regularities (2) in the absence of awareness that one is learning, and (3) in such a way that the resulting knowledge is difficult to express
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://srsc.ulb.ac.be/axcWWW/papers/98-TiCS.html
  http://srsc.ulb.ac.be/axcWWW/papers/pdf/03-ECS.pdf
  http://srsc.ulb.ac.be/axcWWW/papers/pdf/03-ECS.pdf
  http://srsc.ulb.ac.be/axcWWW/papers/pdf/98-TiCS.pdf
  http://srsc.ulb.ac.be/axcwww/papers/pdf/98-TiCS.pdf
  http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/cleeremans98implicit.html
  http://srsc-mac1.ulb.ac.be/axcWWW/papers/pdf/98-TiCS.pdf
  http://m0134.fmg.uva.nl/edu/STUDENT_RESEARCH/OP42/98-TiCS.pdf
  http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~mozer/courses/3702/readings/CleeremansDestrebecqzBoyer1998.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/els/13646613/1998/00000002/00000010/art01232
  
• Axel Cleeremans & Luis Jimenez (2002). Implicit Learning and Consciousness: A Graded, Dynamic Perspective.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: While the study of implicit learning is nothing new, the field as a whole has come to embody — over the last decade or so — ongoing questioning about three of the most fundamental debates in the cognitive sciences: The nature of consciousness, the nature of mental representation (in particular the difficult issue of abstraction), and the role of experience in shaping the cognitive system. Our main goal in this chapter is to offer a framework that attempts to integrate current thinking about these three issues in a way that specifically links consciousness with adaptation and learning. Our assumptions about this relationship are rooted in further assumptions about the nature of processing and of representation in cognitive systems. When considered together, we believe that these assumptions offer a new perspective on the relationships between conscious and unconscious processing and on the function of consciousness in cognitive systems
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://srsc.ulb.ac.be/cogsci/papers/axclj01.pdf
  http://srsc.ulb.ac.be/axcWWW/papers/pdf/01-AXCLJ.pdf
  http://srsc.ulb.ac.be/axcWWW/papers/pdf/01-AXCLJ.pdf
  http://srsc-mac1.ulb.ac.be/axcWWW/papers/pdf/01-AXCLJ.pdf
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=I8clvKRjea4C&oi=fnd&pg=PR8&dq=+Implicit+learning+and+consciousness+Cleeremans&ots=6aPGD4ai8L&sig=EeM36KI_3TPTXEs9tGT0UQiWjHI
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=I8clvKRjea4C&oi=fnd&pg=PR8&dq=+Implicit+learning+and+consciousness+Cleeremans&ots=6aQDE1cf-R&sig=oaSL-PZf_kAozOio6iwjSMfHPxA
  
• Axel Cleeremans & Arnaud Destrebecqz (2005). Real rules are conscious.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: 68 words Main Text: 1256 words References: 192 words Total Text: 1516 words
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://srsc.ulb.ac.be/axcWWW/papers/pdf/04-Pothos.pdf
  http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=1&fid=312598&jid=BBS&volumeId=28&issueId=01&aid=312597
  http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0140525X05280019
  
• Axel Cleeremans & Arnaud Destrebecqz (2003). The self-organizing conundrum. (Commentary on perruchet & vinter on The Self-Organizing Conundrum.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: 59 words Main Text: 1108 words References: 114 words Total Text: 1281 words
• Arnaud Destrebecqz, Philippe Peigneux, Steven Laureys, Christian Degueldre, Guy Del Fiore, Joel Aerts, Andre Luxen, Martial van der Linden, Axel Cleeremans & Pierre Maquet (2003). Cerebral correlates of explicit sequence learning.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Using positron emission tomography (PET) and regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) measurements, we investigated the cerebral correlates of consciousness in a sequence learning task through a novel application of the Process Dissociation Procedure, a behavioral paradigm that makes it possible to separately assess conscious and unconscious contributions to performance. Results show that the metabolic response in the anterior cingulate / mesial prefrontal cortex (ACC / MPFC) is exclusively and specifically correlated with the explicit component of performance during recollection of a learned sequence. This suggests a significant role for the ACC / MPFC in the explicit processing of sequential material.  2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://srsc.ulb.ac.be/axcWWW/papers/pdf/03-CBR.pdf
  http://srsc.ulb.ac.be/axcWWW/papers/pdf/03-CBR.pdf
  http://srsc-mac1.ulb.ac.be/axcWWW/papers/pdf/03-CBR.pdf
  http://srsc-mac1.ulb.ac.be/axcWWW/papers/pdf/03-CBR.pdf
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12706219&dopt=Abstract
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12706219&dopt=Abstract
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12706219&dopt=Citation
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/els/09266410/2003/00000016/00000003/art00053
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/els/09266410/2003/00000016/00000003/art00053
  
• Arnaud Destrebecqz & Axel Cleeremans (2001). Can sequence learning be implicit? New evidence with the process dissociation procedure.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Running head: Implicit sequence learning ABSTRACT Can we learn without awareness? Although this issue has been extensively explored through studies of implicit learning, there is currently no agreement about the extent to which knowledge can be acquired and projected onto performance in an unconscious way. The controversy, like that surrounding implicit memory, seems to be at least in part attributable to unquestioned acceptance of the unrealistic assumption that tasks are process-pure, that is, that a given task exclusively involves either implicit or explicit knowledge
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://srsc.ulb.ac.be/axcWWW/papers/pdf/01-PBR.pdf
  http://srsc.ulb.ac.be/axcWWW/papers/pdf/01-PBR.pdf
  http://srsc-mac1.ulb.ac.be/axcWWW/papers/pdf/01-PBR.pdf
  http://srsc-mac1.ulb.ac.be/axcWWW/papers/pdf/01-PBR.pdf
  http://psy.plymouth.ac.uk/research/fparm/projects/Destrebecqz & Cleeremans (2001) Can sequence learning be implicit _ process dissociation.pdf
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11495124&dopt=Citation
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11495124&dopt=Citation
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/psocpubs/pbr/2001/00000008/00000002/art00016
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/psocpubs/pbr/2001/00000008/00000002/art00016
  
• Arnaud Destrebecqz, Philippe Peigneux, Steven Laureys, Christian Degueldre, Guy Del Fiore, Joel Aerts, Andre Luxen, Martia Van Der Linden, Axel Cleeremans & Pierre Maquet (2005). The neural correlates of implicit and explicit sequence learning: Interacting networks revealed by the process dissociation procedure.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In cognitive neuroscience, dissociating the brain networks that ing—has thus become one of the best empirical situations subtend conscious and nonconscious memories constitutes a through which to study the mechanisms of implicit learning, very complex issue, both conceptually and methodologically
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/lm.95605
  http://srsc.ulb.ac.be/axcWWW/papers/pdf/05-LM.pdf
  http://srsc.ulb.ac.be/axcWWW/papers/pdf/05-LM.pdf
  http://www.learnmem.org/cgi/content/abstract/12/5/480
  http://www.learnmem.org/cgi/content/abstract/12/5/480
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=16166397&dopt=Citation
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=16166397&dopt=Citation
  http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1240060
  
• Vincian Gaillard, Muriel Vandenberghe, Arnaud Destrebecqz & Axel Cleeremans (2006). First and third-person approaches in implicit learning research.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: How do we find out whether someone is conscious of some information or not? A simple answer is “We just ask them”! However, things are not so simple. Here, we review recent developments in the use of subjective and objective methods in implicit learning research and discuss the highly complex methodological problems that their use raises in the domain
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://srsc.ulb.ac.be/axcWWW/papers/pdf/06-CC.pdf
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=17027297&dopt=Citation
  
• Luis Jimenez, Castor Mendez & Axel Cleeremans (1996). Comparing direct and indirect measures of sequence learning.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Comparing the relative sensitivity of direct and indirect measures of learning is proposed as the best way to provide evidence for unconscious learning when both conceptual and operative definitions of awareness are lacking. This approach was first proposed by Reingold & Merikle (1988) in the context of subliminal perception. In this paper, we apply it to a choice reaction time task in which the material is generated based on a probabilistic finite-state grammar (Cleeremans, 1993). We show (1) that participants progressively learn about the statistical structure of the stimulus material over training with the choice reaction time task, and (2) that they can use some of this knowledge to predict the location of the next stimulus in a subsequent “generation” task. However, detailed partial correlational analyses of the correspondence between performance during the reaction time task and the statistical structure of the training material showed that large effects remained even when controlling for explicit knowledge as assessed by the generation task. Hence we conclude (1) that at least some of the knowledge expressed through reaction time performance can not be characterized as conscious, and (2) that even when associations are found at a global level of analysis, dissociations can still be obtained when more detailed analyses are conducted. Finally, we also show that participants are limited in the depth of the contingencies they can learn about, and that these limitations are shared by the Simple Recurrent Network model of Cleeremans & McClelland (1991)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://dx.doi.org/10.1037//0278-7393.22.4.948
  http://srsc.ulb.ac.be/axcwww/papers/pdf/95-JEPLMC.pdf
  http://srsc.ulb.ac.be/axcWWW/papers/pdf/95-JEPLMC.pdf
  http://srsc-mac1.ulb.ac.be/axcWWW/papers/pdf/95-JEPLMC.pdf
  
• Richard F. Kitchener (1976). Are there molar psychological laws?   (More)
• Pierre Maquet, Steven Laureys, Philippe Peigneux, Sonia Fuchs, Christophe Petiau, Christophe Phillips, Joel Aerts, Guy Del Fiore, Christian Degueldre, Thierry Meulemans, Andre Luxen, Georges Franck, Martial Van Der Linden, Carlyle Smith & Axel Cleeremans (2000). Experience-dependent changes in cerebral activation during human Rem sleep.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Pierre Maquet1,2,6, Steven Laureys1,2, Philippe Peigneux1,2,3, Sonia Fuchs1, Christophe Petiau1, Christophe Phillips1,6, Joel Aerts1, Guy Del Fiore1, Christian Degueldre1, Thierry Meulemans3, André Luxen1, Georges Franck1,2, Martial Van Der Linden3, Carlyle Smith4 and Axel Cleeremans5
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://srsc.ulb.ac.be/axcwww/papers/pdf/learn_while_you_rest.pdf
  http://srsc.ulb.ac.be/axcWWW/papers/pdf/learn_while_you_rest.pdf
  http://srsc.ulb.ac.be/axcWWW/papers/pdf/learn_while_you_rest.pdf
  http://srsc-mac1.ulb.ac.be/axcWWW/papers/pdf/learn_while_you_rest.pdf
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=10903578&dopt=Citation
  
• Wolfgang Spohn (2002). Laws, ceteris paribus conditions, and the dynamics of belief.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract:   The characteristic difference between laws and accidental generalizations lies in our epistemic or inductive attitude towards them. This idea has taken various forms and dominated the discussion about lawlikeness in the last decades. Likewise, the issue about ceteris paribus conditions is essentially about how we epistemically deal with exceptions. Hence, ranking theory with its resources of defeasible reasoning seems ideally suited to explicate these points in a formal way. This is what the paper attempts to do. Thus it will turn out that a law is simply the deterministic analogue of a sequence of independent, identically distributed random variables. This entails that de Finetti's representation theorems can be directly transformed into an account of confirmation of laws thus conceived
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/xg41u208p1836553/fulltext.pdf
  http://www.kluweronline.com/article.asp?PIPS=5096271&PDF=1
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/XG41U208P1836553.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/erke/2002/00000057/00000003/05096271
  
• Karsten Stueber, Intentional explanation, psychological laws, and the irreducibility of the first person perspective.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: 1. Introduction: Naturalism and Psychological Explanations To a large extent, contemporary philosophical debate takes place within a framework of naturalistic assumptions. From the perspective of the history of philosophy, naturalism is the legacy of positivism without its empiricist epistemology and empiricist conception of meaning and cognitive significance. Systematically, it is best to characterize naturalism as the philosophical articulation of the underlying presuppositions of a reductive scientific research program that was rather successful in the last few centuries and, equally important, promises to be so in the future particularly in the biological sciences and the neurosciences. It seems as if the secrets of human life and behavior and the mysteries of the mind will be cracked on the molecular level of the genes or the brain, or at least so we are told. Viewed in this manner it is understandable why philosophical naturalism tends to be committed to monism, both as a metaphysical or ontological claim and as a methodological position in the philosophy of social science. Naturalists are inclined to adopt a physicalist ontology that rejects free floating Cartesian substances and they view higher order macroscopic facts and properties as being dependent or supervenient on basic micro-physical facts. Naturalists, furthermore, expect that any scientific explanation of higher order properties has to provide an account of why and how these lower order facts give rise to higher order ones. These ontological and epistemic commitments also underpin a position of methodological monism in regard to the social sciences and the explanation of human agency. If the above ontological picture is correct then there is no reason to expect that the structure of the sciences dealing with higher order properties on the social level should fundamentally differ in their methodology from the natural sciences. In both domains of investigation, scientists will develop and make explanatory use of comprehensive and empirically well supported theories with adequate predictive powers that describe....

Psychological Explanation

• Angela Arkway (online). Folk psychological explanation, and causal laws.   (More)
• William Bechtel & Cory Wright (2009). What is psychological explanation?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Due to the wide array of phenomena that are of interest to them, psychologists offer highly diverse and heterogeneous types of explanations. Initially, this suggests that the question "What is psychological explanation?" has no single answer. To provide appreciation of this diversity, we begin by noting some of the more common types of explanations that psychologists provide, with particular focus on classical examples of explanations advanced in three different areas of psychology: psychophysics, physiological psychology, and information-processing psychology. To analyze what is involved in these types of explanations, we consider the ways in which law-like representations of regularities and representations of mechanisms factor in psychological explanations. This consideration directs us to certain fundamental questions, e.g., "To what extent are laws necessary for psychological explanations?" and "What do psychologists have in mind when they appeal to mechanisms in explanation?" In answering such questions, it appears that laws do play important roles in psychological explanations, although most explanations in psychology appeal to accounts of mechanisms. Consequently, we provide a unifying account of what psychological explanation is.
• Jose Luis Bermudez (2002). Rationality and psychological explanation without language.   (More)
• Jason Bridges (2006). Teleofunctionalism and psychological explanation.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-0114.2006.00269.x
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/papq/2006/00000087/00000004/art00002
  
• Jonathan Cohen (ms). Williamson on knowledge and psychological explanation.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: According to many philosophers, psychological explanation can legit- imately be given in terms of belief and desire, but not in terms of knowl- edge. To explain why someone does what they do (so the common wisdom holds) you can appeal to what they think or what they want, but not what they know. Timothy Williamson has recently argued against this view. Knowledge, Williamson insists, plays an essential role in ordinary psycho- logical explanation. Williamson’s argument works on two fronts. First, he argues against the claim that, unlike knowledge, belief is “composite” (rep- resentable as a conjunction of a narrow and a broad condition). Belief’s failure to be composite, Williamson thinks, undermines the usual motiva- tions for psychological explanation in terms of belief rather than knowl- edge. Unfortunately, we claim, the motivations Williamson argues against do not depend on the claim that belief is composite, so what he says leaves the case for a psychology of belief unscathed. Second, Williamson argues that knowledge can sometimes provide a better explanation of action than belief can. We argue that, in the cases considered, explanations that cite beliefs (but not knowledge) are no less successful than explanations that cite knowledge. Thus, we conclude that Williamson’s arguments fail both coming and going: they fail to undermine a psychology of belief, and they fail to motivate a psychology of knowledge
• Joe Cruz (online). Psychological explanation and noise in modeling. Comments on Whit Schonbein's "cognition and the power of continuous dynamical systems".   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: I find myself ambivalent with respect to the line of argument that Schonbein offers. I certainly want to acknowledge and emphasize at the outset that Schonbein’s discussion has brought to the fore a number of central, compelling and intriguing issues regarding the nature of the dynamical approach to cognition. Though there is much that seems right in this essay, perhaps my view is that the paper invites more questions than it answers. My remarks here then are in the spirit of scouting some of the surrounding terrain in order to see just what Schonbein’s claim is and what arguments or options may be open to the dynamicist
• Robert E. Cummins (2000). "How does it work" versus "what are the laws?": Two conceptions of psychological explanation.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In the beginning, there was the DN (Deductive Nomological) model of explanation, articulated by Hempel and Oppenheim (1948). According to DN, scientific explanation is subsumption under natural law. Individual events are explained by deducing them from laws together with initial conditions (or boundary conditions), and laws are explained by deriving them from other more fundamental laws, as, for example, the simple pendulum law is derived from Newton's laws of motion
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://cognet.mit.edu/library/books/mitpress/0262112493/cache/chap5.pdf
  
• Maurice A. Finocchiaro (1979). The psychological explanation of reasoning: Logical and methodological problems.   (More)
• Christopher Hitchcock & Joshua Knobe (2009). Cause and Norm.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.journalofphilosophy.org/articles/../issues/106/11/1.pdf
  
• Eduoard Machery & J. Livengood (2007). The folk probably don't think what you think they think: Experiments on causation by absence.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Folk theories—untutored people’s (often implicit) theories about various features of the world—have been fashionable objects of inquiry in psychology for almost two decades now (e.g., Hirschfeld and Gelman 1994), and more recently they have been of interest in experimental philosophy (Nichols 2004). Folk theories of psy- chology, physics, biology, and ethics have all come under investigation. Folk meta- physics, however, has not been as extensively studied. That so little is known about folk metaphysics is unfortunate for (at least) two reasons. First, folk metaphysics is almost certainly implicit, and it is likely to be our default way of thinking about metaphysical problems. Moreover, one’s metaphysical commitments can have pro- found consequences—in scientific, religious, and ethical contexts, for example. Thus, folk metaphysics ought to be dragged out into the open and exposed to criticism. As Peirce eloquently remarked (1994, 1.129; see also 1994, 7.579)
• Cynthia Macdonald (2006). 'The Metaphysics of Mental Causation'.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: A debate has been raging in the philosophy of mind for at least the past two decades. It concerns whether the mental can make a causal difference to the world. Suppose that I am reading the newspaper and it is getting dark. I switch on the light, and continue with my reading. One explanation of why my switching on of the light occurred is that a desiring with a particular content (that I continue reading), a noticing with a particular content (that it is getting dark), and a believing with a particular content (that by switching on the light I could continue reading) occurred in me, and these events caused my switching on of the light. This explanation works by citing the intentional contents of mental phenomena as causes of that action. It is because the intentional causes have the contents that they do, and because those contents play a causal role in bringing about my action, that my action is causally explained
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.journalofphilosophy.org/articles/../issues/103/11/1.pdf
  http://beta.philosophyonline.org/xtf/data/jph/103-11/jph_0103_0011_0539_0576.pdf
  
• Michael Martin (1971). Neurophysiological reduction and psychological explanation.   (More)
• Ron McClamrock (1993). Functional analysis and etiology.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract:   Cummins (1982) argues that etiological considerations are not onlyinsufficient butirrelevant for the determination offunction. I argue that his claim of irrelevance rests on a misrepresentation of the use of functions in evolutionary explanations. I go on to suggest how accepting anetiological constraint on functional analysis might help resolve some problems involving the use of functional explanations
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/v61108l632573p46/fulltext.pdf
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/V61108L632573P46.pdf
  
• Laurence F. Mucciolo (1975). Neurophysiological reduction, psychological explanation and neuropsychology.   (More)
• John Perry & David J. Israel (1991). Fodor and psychological explanation.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: [In Meaning in Mind, edited by Barry Loewer and Georges Rey. Oxford: Basil Black- well, 1991, 165
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~john/PHILPAPERS/fodor.pdf
  http://www-csli.stanford.edu/users/john/PHILPAPERS/fodor.pdf
  
• Sarah Sawyer (2006). The role of object-dependent content in psychological explanation.   (More)
• Geoffrey Sayre-McCord (1989). Functional explanations and reasons as causes.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: If we assume that a conceptual connection does hold between reasons and action, the arguments for both theses are strikingly simple. In defense of the first thesis, all that need be added is Hume's Principle: between cause and effect only a (logically) contingent relation holds. For given Hume's Principle, and the conceptual connection (which after all is not a contingent one), it follows that no causal connection holds. In defense of the second thesis, all that need be added is one assumption and one observation. The assumption is that the covering-law model of explanation is adequate to the natural sciences; the observation is that if a conceptual connection does hold, then covering-laws are not required to explain a person's action given the presence of the relevant beliefs and desires (because the presence of the latter entail the performance of the former). Together the assumption and the observation undermine the view that one model of explanation will fit both natural science and human psychology
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1520-8583(1989)3<137:FEARAC>2.0.CO;2-B
  http://www.jstor.org/sici?sici=1520-8583(1989)3<137:FEARAC>2.0.CO;2-B
  http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2214266.pdf
  
• Susan Schneider (2005). Direct reference, psychological explanation, and Frege cases.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In this essay I defend a theory of psychological explanation that is based on the joint commitment to direct reference and computationalism. I offer a new solution to the problem of Frege Cases. Frege Cases involve agents who are unaware that certain expressions corefer (e.g. that 'Cicero' and 'Tully' corefer), where such knowledge is relevant to the success of their behavior, leading to cases in which the agents fail to behave as the intentional laws predict. It is generally agreed that Frege Cases are a major problem, if not the major problem, that this sort of theory faces. In this essay, I hope to show that the theory can surmount the Frege Cases
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.0268-1064.2005.00294.x
  
• Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen (2005). Williamson on Knowledge, Action, and Causation.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In his Knowledge and its Limits (2000) Timothy Williamson argues that knowledge can be causally efficacious and as such figure in psychological explanation. His argument for this claim figures as a response to a key objection to his overall thesis that knowing is a mental state. In this paper I argue that although Williamson succeeds in establishing that knowledge in some cases is essential to the power of certain causal explanations of actions, he fails to do this in a way that establishes knowledge itself as a causal factor. The argument thus fails to support his overall claim that knowledge should be conceived as a state of mind.
• Cory Wright (2007). Is psychological explanation going extinct?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Psychoneural reductionists sometimes claim that sufficient amounts of lower-level explanatory achievement preclude further contributions from higher-level psychological research. Ostensibly, with nothing left to do, the effect of such preclusion on psychological explanation is extinction. Reductionist arguments for preclusion have recently involved a reorientation within the philosophical foundations of neuroscience---namely, away from the philosophical foundations and toward the neuroscience. In this chapter, I review a successful reductive explanation of an aspect of reward function in terms of dopaminergic operations of the mesocorticolimbic system in order to demonstrate why preclusion/extinction claims are dubious.
• Cory D. Wright & William P. Bechtel (2007). Mechanisms and psychological explanation.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: As much as assumptions about mechanisms and mechanistic explanation have deeply affected psychology, they have received disproportionately little analysis in philosophy. After a historical survey of the influences of mechanistic approaches to explanation of psychological phenomena, we specify the nature of mechanisms and mechanistic explanation. Contrary to some treatments of mechanistic explanation, we maintain that explanation is an epistemic activity that involves representing and reasoning about mechanisms. We discuss the manner in which mechanistic approaches serve to bridge levels rather than reduce them, as well as the different ways in which mechanisms are discovered. Finally, we offer a more detailed example of an important psychological phenomenon for which mechanistic explanation has provided the main source of scientific understanding

Philosophy of Psychology, Misc

• James Rowland Angell (1907). The province of functional psychology.   (More)
• Stewart Candlish (online). Testing Wittgenstein's dismissal of experimental psychology against examples.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: One of the most notorious — and dismissive — passages in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations is Part II section xiv, which begins like this: The confusion and barrenness of psychology is not to be explained by calling it a “young science”; its state is not comparable with that of physics, for instance, in its beginnings. (Rather with that of certain branches of mathematics. Set theory.) For in psychology there are experimental methods and conceptual confusion. (As in the other case conceptual confusion and methods of proof.) The existence of the experimental method makes us think we have the means of solving the problems which trouble us; though problem and method pass one another by. Strong words. But we know that at one stage in his life Wittgenstein’s interest in psychology was sufficient for him to have done some experimental research, and that he was well acquainted with the work of at least some of the prominent psychologists active in his own lifetime. That is, his quoted remarks were not made from ignorance; and we should accordingly take them seriously enough to consider why he made them, what he had in mind, and to what extent — if any — they may have been (and, though this was all a long time ago, may still be) justified
• Peter Carruthers (2002). Human creativity: Its evolution, its cognitive basis, and its connections with childhood pretence.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This paper defends two initial claims. First, it argues that essentially the same cognitive resources are shared by adult creative thinking and problem-solving, on the one hand, and by childhood pretend play, on the other¾namely, capacities to generate and to reason with suppositions (or imagined possibilities). Second, it argues that the evolutionary function of childhood pretence is to practice and enhance adult forms of creativity. The paper goes on to show how these proposals can provide a smooth and evolutionarily-plausible explanation of the gap between the first appearance of our species in Southern Africa some 100,000 years ago, and the 'creative explosion' of cultural, technological and artistic change which took place within dispersed human populations some 60,000 years later. The intention of the paper is to sketch a proposal which might serve as a guide for future interdisciplinary research
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.philosophy.umd.edu/Faculty/pcarruthers/Creative-thinking.htm
  http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00002237/00/Creative-thinking.htm
  http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/citations?archiveID=oai:cogprints.soton.ac.uk:2237
  http://www.bjps.oupjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/53/2/225
  http://bjps.oupjournals.org/cgi/reprint/53/2/225
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/oup/phisci/2002/00000053/00000002/art00225
  http://cogprints.org/2237/1/Creative%2Dthinking.htm
  http://cogprints.org/2237/0/Creative-thinking.htm
  http://cogprints.org/2237/0/Creative%2Dthinking.htm
  
• Simone Duca (2009). Rationality and the Wason Selection Task: a Logical Account.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The main goal of the paper is to investigate the relation between indicative conditionals and rationality. We wil l do this by consider- ing several interpretations of a very wel l-known example of reasoning involving conditionals, that is the Wason selection task, and showing how those interpretations have different bearings on the notion of ra- tionality. In particular, in the first part of the paper, after having briefly presented the selection task, we wil l take a look at two prag- matic responses to the chal lenge posed by the task, through Wason’s notion of confirmation bias and Grice’s theory of conversational im- plicature. The second part wil l introduce Adams’ probabilistic view of indicative conditionals and wil l give reasons for preferring his account to those aforementioned. The conclusion wil l evaluate the question of human rationality in the light of the new standpoint acquired.
• U. Feest (2003). Functional analysis and the autonomy of psychology.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This paper examines the notion that psychology is autonomous. It is argued that we need to distinguish between (a) the question of whether psychological explanations are autonomous, and (b) the question of whether the process of psychological discovery is autonomous. The issue is approached by providing a reinterpretation of Robert Cummins's notion of functional analysis (FA). A distinction is drawn between FA as an explanatory strategy and FA as an investigative strategy. It is argued that the identification of functional components of the cognitive system may draw on knowledge about brain structure, without thereby jeopardizing the explanatory autonomy of psychology
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00001065/00/Feest.doc
  http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/resolve?id=doi:10.1086/377379
  http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/377379
  
• Jerry A. Fodor (2003). Hume's program (and ours).   (More)
• Tamar Szabó Gendler (2008). Alief and belief.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Forthcoming, Journal of Philosophy [pdf manuscript]
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://pantheon.yale.edu/~tgendler/alief belief gendler to send.pdf
  http://pantheon.yale.edu/~tgendler/alief%20belief%20gendler%20to%20send.pdf
  http://www.journalofphilosophy.org/articles/issues/105/10/4.pdf
  http://www.journalofphilosophy.org/articles/../issues/105/10/4.pdf
  
• Tamar Gendler (2009). Alief in action (and reaction).   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: I introduce and argue for the importance of a cognitive state that I call alief. An alief is, to a reasonable approximation, an innate or habitual propensity to respond to an apparent stimulus in a particular way. Recognizing the role that alief plays in our cognitive repertoire provides a framework for understanding reactions that are governed by nonconscious or automatic mechanisms, which in turn brings into proper relief the role played by reactions that are subject to conscious regulation and deliberate control
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://pantheon.yale.edu/~tgendler/alief2 mind and language.pdf
  
• Tamar Szabó Gendler (2004). Thought experiments rethought—and reperceived.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Contemplating imaginary scenarios that evoke certain sorts of quasi‐sensory intuitions may bring us to new beliefs about contingent features of the natural world. These beliefs may be produced quasi‐observationally; the presence of a mental image may play a crucial cognitive role in the formation of the belief in question. And this albeit fallible quasi‐observational belief‐forming mechanism may, in certain contexts, be sufficiently reliable to count as a source of justification. This sheds light on the central puzzle surrounding scientific thought experiment, which is how contemplation of an imaginary scenario can lead to new knowledge about contingent features of the natural world
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://pantheon.yale.edu/~tgendler/psathoughtexperiments.pdf
  http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/425239
  
• Alison Gopnik & Eric Schwitzgebel (1998). Whose concepts are they, anyway? The role of philosophical intuition in empirical psychology.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This chapter examines several ways in which philosophical attention to intuition can contribute to empirical scientific psychology. The authors then discuss one prevalent misuse of intuition. An unspoken assumption of much argumentation in the philosophy of mind has been that to articulate our folk psychological intuitions, our ordinary concepts of belief, truth, meaning, and so forth, is itself sufficient to give a theoretical account of what belief, truth, meaning, and so forth, actually are. It is believed that this assumption rests on an inadequate understanding of the nature of intuition and its appropriate applications, and that it results in errors. Three notable examples of this sort of misuse of intuition in philosophy are briefly discussed. Finally, the authors provide developmental evidence for the mutability and fallibility of everyday intuitions about the mind, evidence that undermines arguments, that depend on taking such intuitions as a final authority for substantive claims about what the mind is like.
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/WhoseConcepts.pdf
  
• Gary Hatfield (2002). Psychology, philosophy, and cognitive science: Reflections on the history and philosophy of experimental psychology.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This article critically examines the views that psychology ?rst came into existence as a discipline ca. 1879, that philosophy and psychology were estranged in the ensuing decades, that psychology ?nally became scienti?c through the in?uence of logical empiricism, and that it should now disappear in favor of cognitive science and neuroscience. It argues that psychology had a natural philosophical phase (from antiquity) that waxed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that this psychology transformed into experimental psychology ca. 1900, that philosophers and psychologists collaboratively discussed the subject matter and methods of psychology in the ?rst two decades of the twentieth century, that the neobehaviorists were not substantively in?uenced by the Vienna Circle, that the study of perception and cognition in psy- chology did not disappear in the behaviorist period and so did not reemerge as a result of arti?cial intelligence, linguistics, and the computer analogy, that although some psychologists adopted the language-of-thought approach of traditional cognitive science, many did not, and that psychology will not go away because it contributes independently of cognitive science and neuroscience
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://cogsci.bme.hu/DoCS/oktatas/kurzusok/kogtudtort/Hatfield.pdf
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-0017.00196
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/mila/2002/00000017/00000003/art00196
  
• Gary Hatfield (1995). Remaking the science of mind: Psychology as a natural science.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In Inventing Human Science, ed. by Christopher Fox, Roy Porter, and Robert Wokler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 184–231. Key words: Wolff, Bonnet, Godart, Krüger, Hartley, Priestley, history of psychology in the 17th and 18th centuries, history of experiment in psychology, psychology as a natural science, idea of a natural science
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~hatfield/HatRemakeSciMind.pdf
  
• K. Mitch Hodge (2008). Descartes Mistake: How Afterlife Beliefs Challenge the Assumption that Humans are Intuitive Cartesian Dualists.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This article presents arguments and evidence that run counter to the widespread assumption among scholars that humans are intuitive Cartesian substance dualists. With regard to afterlife beliefs, the hypothesis of Cartesian substance dualism as the intuitive folk position fails to have the explanatory power with which its proponents endow it. It is argued that the embedded corollary assumptions of the intuitive Cartesian substance dualist position (that the mind and body are different substances, that the mind and soul are intensionally identical, and that the mind is the sole source of identity) are not compatible with cultural representations such as mythologies, funerary rites, iconography and doctrine as well as empirical evidence concerning intuitive folk reasoning about the mind and body concerning the afterlife. Finally, the article
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  suggests an alternative and more parsimonious explanation for understanding intuitive folk representations of the afterlife.
• Anthony I. Jack & Andreas Roepstorff (2004). Trust or interaction? Editorial introduction.   (More)
• Gregory Johnson (2008). LeDoux's Fear Circuit and the Status of Emotion as a Non-cognitive Process.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: LeDoux (1996) has identified a sub-cortical neural circuit that mediates fear responses in rats. The existence of this neural circuit has been used to support the claim that emotion is a non-cognitive process. In this paper I argue that this sub-cortical circuit cannot have a role in the explanation of emotions in humans. This worry is raised by looking at the properties of this neural pathway, which does not have the capacity to respond to the types of stimuli that are generally taken to trigger emotion responses. In particular, the neurons in this pathway cannot represent the stimulus as a complete object or event, rather they represent the simple information that is encoded at the periphery. If it is assumed that an object or event in the world is what, even in simple cases, causes an emotion, then this sub-cortical pathway has limited use in a theory of emotion.
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/./ftinterface~db=all~content=a906069006~fulltext=713240930
  
• Fernando Martínez Manrique & Agustín Vicente (2005). Overhearing a Sentence: Recanati and the Cognitive View of Language.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Many pragmaticians have distinguished three levels of meaning involved in the comprehension of utterances, and there is an ongoing debate about how to characterize the intermediate level. Recanati has called it the level of ‘what is said’ and has opposed the idea that it can be determined semantically — a position that he labels ‘pragmatic minimalism’. To this end he has offered two chief arguments: semantic underdeterminacy and the Availability Principle. This paper exposes a tension between both arguments, relating this discussion with Carruthers’s cognitive view of language, according to which some thoughts are, literally, sentences of our natural language. First we explain how this view entails minimalism, and we construct an argument based on semantic underdeterminacy that shows that natural language sentences do not have the compositional properties required to constitute thoughts. Then we analyze the example of a subject’s overhearing a sentence without an interpretive context, arguing that in the light of the Availability Principle the corresponding thought can be regarded as a natural language sentence. Thus, semantic underdeterminacy and availability pull in different directions, and we claim that there is no characterization of the latter that can relieve this tension. We contend that Recanati’s availability shares with Carruthers’s introspectivism an overreliance on intuitions about what appears consciously in one’s mind. We conclude, therefore, that the Availability Principle ought to be abandoned.
• Teed Rockwell (ms). The effects of atomistic ontology on the history of psychology.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: _This article articulates the presuppositions that psychology inherited from logical positivism, and how_ _those presuppositions effected the interpretation of data and research procedures. Despite the efforts of_ _Wundt, his most well known disciples, Titchener and Külpe, embraced an atomistic view of experience which_ _was at_ _least partly responsible for many of their failures. When the behaviorists rejected the_ _introspectionism of Titchener and Külpe, they kept their atomism, using the reflex_
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.california.com/~mcmf/psych.html
  http://users.california.com/~mcmf/psych.html
  
• Joel Smith (2006). Review of Joint Attention: Communication and Other Minds. Edited by N. Eilan, C. Hoerl, T. McCormack and J. Roessler.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.joelsmith.net/documents/Review%20of%20Eilan.pdf
  
• Shannon Spaulding (2010). Embodied cognition and mindreading.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Recently, philosophers and psychologists defending the embodied cognition research program have offered arguments against mindreading as a general model of our social understanding. The embodied cognition arguments are of two kinds: those that challenge the developmental picture of mindreading and those that challenge the alleged ubiquity of mindreading. Together, these two kinds of arguments, if successful, would present a serious challenge to the standard account of human social understanding. In this paper, I examine the strongest of these embodied cognition arguments and argue that mindreading approaches can withstand the best of these arguments from embodied cognition
• Edward Bradford Titchener (1899). Structural and functional psychology.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8108(189905)8:3<290:SAFP>2.0.CO;2-5
  http://www.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8108(189905)8:3<290:SAFP>2.0.CO;2-5
  http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2176244.pdf
  
• Edward Bradford Titchener (1898). The postulates of a structural psychology.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8108(189809)7:5<449:TPOASP>2.0.CO;2-3
  http://www.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8108(189809)7:5<449:TPOASP>2.0.CO;2-3
  http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2177110.pdf
  
• Robert A. Wilson (2005). Philosophy of psychology.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In the good old days, when general philosophy of science ruled the Earth, a simple division was often invoked to talk about philosophical issues specific to particular kinds of science: that between the natural sciences and the social sciences. Over the last 20 years, philosophical studies shaped around this dichotomy have given way to those organized by more fine-grained categories, corresponding to specific disciplines, as the literatures on the philosophy of physics, biology, economics and psychology--to take the most prominent four examples--have blossomed. In general terms, work in each of these areas has become increasingly enmeshed with that in the corresponding science itself, increasingly naturalistic (in at least one sense of that term), and in my view, increasingly interesting
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ualberta.ca/~philosop/faculty/wilson/philofpsych.pdf