Ralph’s theoretical approach embodies the assumptions of the classical view, and are generally consistent with a cherished (Western) theory of human nature (Barrett, 2017). These assumptions allow the classical view to ‘ring true’—to appear ob15 vious and therefore pleasing—when compared to the seemingly complex and counter-intuitive constructionist approach. As an approach to understanding emo...

Emergence—macro-level effects from micro-level causes—illustrates the fundamental dilemma of science and is at the heart of the conflict between reductionism and functionalism: how can there be autonomous higher level laws of nature (the functionalist claim) if everything can be reduced to the fundamental forces of physics (the reductionist position)? In this, the first of two papers, we conclu...

Some philosophers have regarded the connection between hues and certain arousal or affective qualities as so intimate as to make them inseparable, and this “necessary concomitance view” has been invoked to defend functionalism against arguments based on inverted spectra. Support for the necessary concomitance view has sometimes been thought to accrue from experiments in psychology. This paper e...

This article focuses on the problem of representational content. Accounting for representational content is the central issue in contemporary naturalism: it is the major remaining task facing a naturalistic conception of the world. Representational content is also the central barrier to contemporary cognitive science and artificial intelligence: it is not possible to understand representation i...

This paper explores the relationship between several ideas about the mind and cognition. The hypothesis of extended cognition claims that cognitive processes can and do extend outside the head, that elements of the world around us can actually become parts of our cognitive systems. It has recently been suggested that the hypothesis of extended cognition is entailed by one of the foremost philos...

In recent work, Sarah Robins, Gerardo Viera and Steven James have provided some insightful objections to the ideas offered in my book, Memory: A Self-Referential Account. this paper, I put forward responses those objections. Robins challenges idea that being a memory could be matter of having particular functional role within subject’s cognitive economy. content explain its phenomenological pro...