ISSN 0268-1064
19 papers in the library · 242 citations · publishing 2000-2026
Mind & Language June 16, 2026 Robert D. Rupert
This essay argues for a mixed‐resource approach to scientific modeling and applies it to questions in philosophy of mind. A mixed‐resource approach makes use of whatever resources—at whatever scale, from whatever academic discipline—seem useful, freely combining such varied resources in individual models. The success of mixed‐resource modeling challenges the widely shared commitment to a...
Mind & Language April 25, 2026 S. Rappe, S. Wilkinson
The idea that cognition involves dialogic interchange between mutually influencing “voices” has long featured in psychology and philosophy. While dialogic structure is most explicit in inner speech, some authors have argued that other types of mental activity can be (or always are) dialogic. We introduce two dimensions of dialogism, strength and depth, and characterize a particularly deep form...
Mind & Language January 22, 2026 Adriana Alcaraz-Sánchez
While most research on sleep mentation focuses on dream reports, sleep experiences can also include reports lacking content, such as white dreaming —the feeling of knowing one dreamt but being unable to recall its contents. I claim that white dreaming is a metacognitive feeling, akin to tip‐of‐the‐tongue and déjà experiences. Conceiving it this way allows for a more nuanced understanding of its...
Mind & Language May 26, 2025 James D. Grayot 2 citations
The rapid growth of 4E‐cognition has led to increased skepticism about the role of internal representations in understanding complex cognitive tasks. Critics challenge the idea of representation‐hungry cognition (RHC), rejecting the notion that thinking about absent or abstract objects requires internal representations. Despite criticisms, I argue that RHC remains relevant to understanding what...
Mind & Language November 17, 2024 Leonard Dung, Luke Kersten 4 citations
Implementationalism maintains that conventional, silicon‐based artificial systems are not conscious because they fail to satisfy certain substantive constraints on computational implementation. In this article, we argue that several recently proposed substantive constraints are implausible, or at least are not well‐supported, insofar as they conflate intuitions about computational...
Mind & Language January 4, 2024 Kristin Andrews
The marker approach is taken as best practice for answering the distribution question: Which animals are conscious? However, the methodology can be used to increase confidence in animals many presume to be unconscious, including C. elegans, leading to a trilemma: accept the worms as conscious; reject the specific markers; or reject the marker methodology for answering the distribution question....
Mind & Language November 1, 2022 Benjamin Kozuch
Proponents of the higher‐order (HO) theory of consciousness (e.g., Lau and Rosenthal) have recently appealed to brain lesion evidence to support their thesis that mental states are conscious when and only when represented by other mental states. This article argues that this evidence fails to support HO theory, doing this by first determining what kinds of conscious deficit should result when...
Mind & Language November 1, 2022 Matthias Michel, Adrien Doerig
Local theories of consciousness state that one is conscious of a feature if it is adequately represented and processed in sensory brain areas, given some background conditions. We challenge the core prediction of local theories based on long‐lasting postdictive effects demonstrating that features can be represented for hundreds of milliseconds in perceptual areas without being consciously...
Mind & Language October 19, 2022 Paweł Gładziejewski 4 citations
Perceptual experience usually comes with “phenomenal force”, a strong sense that it reflects reality as it is. Some philosophers have argued that it is in virtue of possessing phenomenal force that perceptual experiences are able to non‐inferentially justify beliefs. In this article, I introduce an alternative, inferentialist take on the epistemic role of phenomenal force. Drawing on Bayesian...
Mind & Language September 1, 2022 Richard Heersmink
In this paper, I describe how artifacts and autobiographical memory are integrated into new systemic wholes, allowing us to remember our personal past in a more reliable and detailed manner. After discussing some empirical work on lifelogging technology, I elaborate on the dimension of autobiographical dependency, which is the degree to which we depend on an object to be able to remember a...
Mind & Language June 1, 2022 Axel Constant, Andy Clark, Michael D Kirchhoff et al.
Cognitive niche construction is the process whereby organisms create and maintain cause-effect models of their niche as guides for fitness influencing behavior. Extended mind theory claims that cognitive processes extend beyond the brain to include predictable states of the world. Active inference and predictive processing in cognitive science assume that organisms embody predictive (i.e.,...
Mind & Language April 7, 2022 Henry Taylor 46 citations
A new research programme conceives of consciousness as a natural kind. One proposed virtue of this approach is that it can help resolve the methodological puzzle of consciousness, which involves distinguishing consciousness from cognitive access. The present article raises a novel problem for this approach. The problem is rooted in the fact that there may be episodes of conscious experience...
Mind & Language March 2, 2020 Jakob Hohwy
: Predictive processing (PP) is now a prominent theoretical framework in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. This review focuses on PP research with a but and proofreading relatively philosophical focus, taking stock of the framework and discussing new directions. The review contains an introduction that describes the full PP toolbox; an exploration of areas where PP has advanced...
Mind & Language August 31, 2018 Benjamin Kozuch 10 citations
The idea that attention is necessary for consciousness (the “Necessity Thesis”) is frequently advocated by philosophers and psychologists alike. Experiments involving inattentional and change blindness are thought to support the Necessity Thesis, but they do so only if subjects failing to notice the target stimulus are also not conscious of it. This article uses commonsense phenomenological...
Mind & Language June 1, 2015 Joshua Shepherd
The extensive involvement of nonconscious processes in human behaviour has led some to suggest that consciousness is much less important for the control of action than we might think. In this article I push against this trend, developing an understanding of conscious control that is sensitive to our best models of overt (that is, bodily) action control. Further, I assess the cogency of various...
Mind & Language September 1, 2011 Ian Phillips 176 citations
Philosophers have lately seized upon Sperling's partial report technique and subsequent work on iconic memory in support of controversial claims about perceptual experience, in particular that phenomenology overflows cognitive access. Drawing on mounting evidence concerning postdictive perception, I offer an interpretation of Sperling's data in terms of cue-sensitive experience which fails to...
Mind & Language February 1, 2010 Shannon Spaulding
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,...
Mind & Language March 1, 2001 Andy Clark
A suitable project for the new Millenium is to radically reconfigure our image of human rationality. Such a project is already underway, within the Cognitive Sciences, under the umbrellas of work in Situated Cognition, Distributed and De‐centralized Cognition, Real‐world Robotics and Artificial Life. Such approaches, however, are often criticized for giving certain aspects of rationality too...
Mind & Language November 1, 2000 Mark McCullagh
I offer a philosophically well‐motivated work‐around for a problem that George Bealer (‘Self‐consciousness’, Philosophical Review v. 106, 1997) has identified, which he claims is fatal to functionalism. The problem concerns how to generate a satisfactory Ramsey sentence of a psychological theory in which mental predicates occur within the scopes of other mental predicates. My central claim is...