49 found
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  1. (1 other version)Philosophy of Mind and Cognition.David Braddon-Mitchell & Frank Jackson - 1996 - Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell. Edited by Frank Jackson.
    The philosophy of mind and cognition has been transformed by recent advances in what is loosely called cognitive science. This book is a thoroughly up-to-date introduction to and account of that transformation, in which the many strands in contemporary cognitive science are brought together into a coherent philosophical picture of the mind. The book begins with discussions of the pre-history of contemporary philosophy of mind - dualism, behaviourism, and early versions of the identity theory of mind - and moves through (...)
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  2. Quantum gravity, timelessness, and the contents of thought.David Braddon-Mitchell & Kristie Miller - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (7):1807-1829.
    A number of recent theories of quantum gravity lack a one-dimensional structure of ordered temporal instants. Instead, according to many of these views, our world is either best represented as a single three-dimensional object, or as a configuration space composed of such three-dimensional objects, none of which bear temporal relations to one another. Such theories will be empirically self-refuting unless they can accommodate the existence of conscious beings capable of representation. For if representation itself is impossible in a timeless world, (...)
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  3. Can we turn people into pain pumps?: On the Rationality of Future Bias and Strong Risk Aversion.David Braddon-Mitchell, Andrew J. Latham & Kristie Miller - 2023 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 1:1-32.
    Future-bias is the preference, all else being equal, for negatively valenced events be located in the past rather than the future, and positively valenced ones to be located in the future rather than the past. Strong risk aversion is the preference to pay some cost to mitigate the badness of the worst outcome. People who are both strongly risk averse and future-biased can face a series of choices that will guarantee them more pain, for no compensating benefit: they will be (...)
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  4. How do we know it is now now?David Braddon-Mitchell - 2004 - Analysis 64 (3):199–203.
  5. Conceptual Analysis and Philosophical Naturalism.David Braddon-Mitchell & Robert Nola (eds.) - 2008 - Bradford.
    Many philosophical naturalists eschew analysis in favor of discovering metaphysical truths from the a posteriori, contending that analysis does not lead to philosophical insight. A countercurrent to this approach seeks to reconcile a certain account of conceptual analysis with philosophical naturalism; prominent and influential proponents of this methodology include the late David Lewis, Frank Jackson, Michael Smith, Philip Pettit, and David Armstrong. Naturalistic analysis is a tool for locating in the scientifically given world objects and properties we quantify over in (...)
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  6. Qualia and analytical conditionals.David Braddon-Mitchell - 2003 - Journal of Philosophy 100 (3):111-135.
  7. Lossy laws.David Braddon-Mitchell - 2001 - Noûs 35 (2):260–277.
  8. 10. Fighting the Zombie of the Growing Salami1.David Braddon-Mitchell - 2013 - Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 8:351.
  9. Conativism about personal identity.David Braddon-Mitchell & Kristie Miller - 2020 - In Andrea Sauchelli (ed.), Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons: An Introduction and Critical Inquiry. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 159-269.
    This paper aims to provide an overview of the conceptual terrain of what we call conative accounts of personal identity. These are views according to which the same-person relation in some sense depends on a range of broadly conative phenomena, especially desires, behaviours and conventions. We distinguish views along three dimensions: what role the conations play, what kinds of conations play that role, and whether the conations that play that role are public or private. We then offer a more detailed (...)
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  10. Naturalistic analysis and the a priori.David Braddon-Mitchell - 2008 - In David Braddon-Mitchell & Robert Nola (eds.), Conceptual Analysis and Philosophical Naturalism. Bradford.
     
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  11. Surviving, to some degree.David Braddon-Mitchell & Kristie Miller - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (12):3805-3831.
    In this paper we argue that reflection on the patterns of practical concern that agents like us exhibit strongly suggests that the same person relation comes in continuous degrees rather than being an all or nothing matter. We call this the SP-degree thesis. Though the SP-degree thesis is consistent with a range of views about personal-identity, we argue that combining desire-first approaches to personal-identity with the SP-degree thesis better explains our patterns of practical concern, and hence gives us reason to (...)
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  12. Talking About a Universalist World.David Braddon-Mitchell & Kristie Miller - 2006 - Philosophical Studies 130 (3):499-534.
    The paper defends a combination of perdurantism with mereological universalism by developing semantics of temporary predications of the sort ’some P is/was/will be (a) Q’. We argue that, in addition to the usual application of causal and other restrictions on sortals, the grammatical form of such statements allows for rather different regimentations along three separate dimensions, according to: (a) whether ‘P’ and ‘Q’ are being used as phase or substance sortal terms, (b) whether ‘is’, ‘was’, and ‘will be’ are the (...)
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  13. Temporal phase pluralism.David Braddon-Mitchell & Caroline West - 2001 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62 (1):59–83.
    Some theories of personal identity allow some variation in what it takes for a person to survive from context to context; and sometimes this is determined by the desires of person-stages or the practices of communities.This leads to problems for decision making in contexts where what is chosen will affect personal identity.‘Temporal Phase Pluralism’ solves such problems by allowing that there can be a plurality of persons constituted by a sequence of person stages. This illuminates difficult decision making problems when (...)
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  14. Masters of our meanings.David Braddon-Mitchell - 2004 - Philosophical Studies 118 (1-2):133-52.
    The two-dimensional framework in semantics has the most power and plausibility when combined with a kind of global semantic neo-descriptivism. If neo-descriptivism can be defended on the toughest terrain - the semantics of ordinary proper names - then the other skirmishes should be easier. This paper defends neo-descriptivism against two important objections: that the descriptions may be inaccessibly locked up in sub-personal modules, and thus not accessible a priori, and that in any case all such modules bottom out in purely (...)
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  15. Introducing the Canberra Plan.David Braddon-Mitchell & Robert Nola - 2008 - In David Braddon-Mitchell & Robert Nola (eds.), Conceptual Analysis and Philosophical Naturalism. Bradford. pp. 1--20.
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  16. The teleological theory of content.David Braddon-Mitchell & Frank Jackson - 1997 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 75 (4):474-89.
  17. Electrocortical components of anticipation and consumption in a monetary incentive delay task.Douglas J. Angus, Andrew J. Latham, Eddie Harmon‐Jones, Matthias Deliano, Bernard Balleine & David Braddon-Mitchell - 2017 - Psychophysiology 54 (11):1686-1705.
    In order to improve our understanding of the components that reflect functionally important processes during reward anticipation and consumption, we used principle components analyses (PCA) to separate and quantify averaged ERP data obtained from each stage of a modified monetary incentive delay (MID) task. Although a small number of recent ERP studies have reported that reward and loss cues potentiate ERPs during anticipation, action preparation, and consummatory stages of reward processing, these findings are inconsistent due to temporal and spatial overlap (...)
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  18. The subsumption of reference.David Braddon-Mitchell - 2005 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 56 (1):157-178.
    How can the reference of theoretical terms be stable over changes of theory? I defend an approach to this that does not depend on substantive metasemantic theories of reference. It relies on the idea that in contexts of use, terms may play a role in a theory that in turn points to a further (possibly unknown) theory. Empirical claims are claims about the nature of the further theories, and the falsification of these further theories is understood not as showing that (...)
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  19. Explanation and the language of thought.David Braddon-Mitchell & J. Fitzpatrick - 1990 - Synthese 83 (1):3-29.
    In this paper we argue that the insistence by Fodor et. al. that the Language of Thought hypothesis must be true rests on mistakes about the kinds of explanations that must be provided of cognitive phenomena. After examining the canonical arguments for the LOT, we identify a weak version of the LOT hypothesis which we think accounts for some of the intuitions that there must be a LOT. We then consider what kinds of explanation cognitive phenomena require, and conclude that (...)
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  20. The loneliness of stages.David Braddon-Mitchell & Kristie Miller - 2004 - Analysis 64 (3):235-242.
    Harold Noonan has recently argued (2003) that one of Lewis’s (1983: 76– 77) arguments for the view that objects persist by perduring is flawed. Lewis’s argument can be divided into two main sections, the first of which attempts to show that it is possible that there exists a world of temporal parts or stages, and the second, which attempts to show that our world is such a world. Noonan claims that there is a flaw in each of these two stages.We (...)
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  21. (1 other version)On Metaphysical Analysis.David Braddon-Mitchell & Kristie Miller - 2015 - In Barry Loewer & Jonathan Schaffer (eds.), A companion to David Lewis. Chichester, West Sussex ;: Wiley-Blackwell.
    Metaphysics is largely an a priori business, albeit a business that is sensitive to the findings of the physical sciences. But sometimes what the physical sciences tell us about our own world underdetermines what we should think about the metaphysics of how things actually are, and even how they could be. This chapter has two aims. The first is to defend a particular conception of the methodology of a priori metaphysics by, in part, exemplifying that methodology and revealing its results. (...)
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  22. What is Free Speech?David Braddon-Mitchell & Caroline West - 2004 - Journal of Political Philosophy 12 (4):437-460.
    It is widely held that free speech is a distinctive and privileged social kind. But what is free speech? In particular, is there any unified phenomenon that is both free speech and which is worthy of the special value traditionally attached to free speech? We argue that a descendent of the classic Millian justification of free speech is in fact a justification of a more general social condition; and, via an argument that 'free speech' names whatever natural social kind is (...)
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  23.  67
    Armstrong's Materialist Theory of Mind.Peter R. Anstey & David Braddon-Mitchell (eds.) - 2021 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Armstrong's Materialist Theory of Mind is one of a handful of texts that began the physicalist revolution in the philosophy of mind. In this collection, distinguished philosophers examine what we still owe to it, how to expand it, as well as looking back on how it came about.
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  24. The Validation of Consciousness Meters: The Idiosyncratic and Intransitive Sequence of Conscious Levels.Andrew J. Latham, Cameron Ellis, Lok-Chi Chan & David Braddon-Mitchell - 2017 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 24 (3-4):103-111.
    In this paper we describe a few interrelated issues for validating theories that posit levels of consciousness. First, validating levels of consciousness requires consensus about the ordering of conscious states, which cannot be easily achieved. This problem is particularly severe if we believe conscious states can be irreducibly smeared over time. Second, the relationship between conscious states is probably sometimes intransitive, which means levels of consciousness will not be amenable to a single continuous measure. Finally, even if a multidimensional approach (...)
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  25. A pyrrhic victory for teleonomy.David Braddon-Mitchell & Frank Jackson - 2002 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 80 (3):372-77.
  26. Alien worlds, alien laws, and the Humean conceivability argument.Lok-Chi Chan, David Braddon-Mitchell & Andrew J. Latham - 2019 - Ratio 33 (1):1-13.
    Monism is our name for a range of views according to which the connection between dispositions and their categorical bases is intimate and necessary, or on which there are no categorical bases at all. In contrast, Dualist views hold that the connection between dispositions and their categorical bases is distant and contingent. This paper is a defence of Monism against an influential conceivability argument in favour of Dualism. The argument suggests that the apparent possibility of causal behaviour coming apart from (...)
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  27. (1 other version)On Time and the Varieties of Science.David Braddon-Mitchell & Kristie Miller - 2017 - Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science 326:67-85.
    This paper proffers an account of why interdisciplinary research on, inter alia, the nature of time can be fruitful even if the disciplines in question have different explanatory pro-jects. We suggest that the special sciences perform a subject setting role for lower-level disciplines such as physics. In essence, they tell us where, amongst a theory of the physical world, we should expect to locate phenomena such as temporality; they tell us what it would take for there to be time. Physical (...)
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  28. On Explaining Temporally Asymmetric Experiences.David Braddon-Mitchell & Kristie Miller - 1807–1829 - Australasian Philosophical Review.
    Ismael aims for an understanding of the nature of an embedded perspective of agents in a world. If successful, this would explain a cluster of ways in which from an embedded perspective, we experience the world in an array of temporally asymmetric ways. Moreover, these are ways that have led many philosophers to rather metaphysically inflationary views about the nature of time, according to which time itself really is dynamical, and is characterized by the movement of an objectively (i.e., non-perspectival) (...)
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  29. The microstructural causation hypothesis.David Braddon-Mitchell - 1993 - Erkenntnis 39 (2):257 - 283.
    I argue against a priori objections to the view that causation may be reducible to some micro-structural process in principle discoverable by physics. I distinguish explanation from causation, and argue that the main objections to such a reduction stem from conflating these two notions. Explanation is the collection of pragmatically relevant, possibly counterfactual information about causation; and causation is to be identified in a necessary a posteriori way with whatever physical processes underwrite our explanatory claims.
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  30. There is No Simpliciter Simpliciter.Kristie Miller & David Braddon-Mitchell - 2007 - Philosophical Studies 136 (2):249-278.
    This paper identifies problems with indexicalism and abverbialism about temporary intrinsic properties, and solves them by disentangling two senses in which a particular may possess a property simpliciter. The first sense is the one identified by adverbialists in which a particular possesses at all times the property as a matter of foundational metaphysical fact regardless of whether it is manifest. The second involves building on adverbialism to produce a semantics for property-manifestation according to which different members of a family of (...)
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    Can We Turn People into Pain Pumps? On the Rationality of Future Bias and Strong Risk Aversion.David Braddon-Mitchell, Andrew J. Latham & Kristie Miller - 2023 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 21 (5-6):593-624.
    Future-bias is the preference, all else being equal, for negatively valenced events to be located in the past rather than the future, and positively valenced ones to be located in the future rather than the past. Strong risk aversion is the preference to pay some cost to mitigate the badness of the worst outcome. People who are both strongly risk averse and future-biased can face a series of choices that will guarantee them more pain, for no compensating benefit: they will (...)
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  32. The Philosophy of Mind and Cognition, Second Edition.David Braddon-Mitchell & Frank Jackson - 2007 - Blackwell.
     
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  33. The Divide and Conquer Path to Analytical Functionalism.David Braddon-Mitchell & Frank Jackson - 1999 - Philosophical Topics 26 (1-2):71-88.
  34. Against ontologically emergent consciousness.David Braddon-Mitchell - 2007 - In Brian P. McLaughlin & Jonathan Cohen (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind. Wiley-Blackwell.
     
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  35. Folk theories of the third kind.David Braddon-Mitchell - 2004 - Ratio 17 (3):277-293.
    The idea of a folk theory has played many important roles in much recent philosophy. To do the work they are designed for, they need to be both internal features of agents who possess them, and yet scrutable without the full resources of empirical cognitive science. The worry for the theorist of folk theories, is that only one of these desiderata is met in each plausible conception of a folk theory. This paper outlines a third conception that meets them both.1.
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  36. Conceptual stability and the meaning of natural kind terms.David Braddon-Mitchell - 2005 - Biology and Philosophy 20 (4):859-868.
  37. Ancestor Simulations and the Dangers of Simulation Probes.David Braddon-Mitchell & Andrew J. Latham - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-11.
    Preston Greene (2020) argues that we should not conduct simulation investigations because of the risk that we might be terminated if our world is a simulation designed to research various counterfactuals about the world of the simulators. In response, we propose a sequence of arguments, most of which have the form of an "even if” response to anyone unmoved by our previous arguments. It runs thus: (i) if simulation is possible, then simulators are as likely to care about simulating simulations (...)
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  38. Believing falsely makes it so.David Braddon-Mitchell - 2006 - Mind 115 (460):833-866.
    that there is something rationally or conceptually defective in judging that an act is right without being in any way motivated towards it—is one which has tended to lead either to error theories of ethics on the one hand, or acceptance of the truth of internalism on the other. This paper argues that it does play a kind of subject-setting role, but that our responses to cases can be rationalised without requiring that internalism is true for ethical realism to be (...)
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  39.  11
    Against the illusion theory of temporal phenomenology (Proceedings of the CAPE International Workshops, 2013. Part II: The CAPE International Conference “A Frontier of Philosophy of Time”).David Braddon-Mitchell - 2014 - CAPE Studies in Applied Philosophy and Ethics Series 2:211-222.
    30th Nov. and 1st Dec. 2013 at Kyoto University. Organizer: Takeshi Sakon.
    No categories
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  40. Ramsification and glymour’s counterexample.David Braddon-Mitchell & Robert Nola - 1997 - Analysis 57 (3):167–169.
  41.  88
    Presentism, Continuous Time-Travel and the Phenomenology of Passage.Sam Baron & David Braddon-Mitchell - 2020 - Erkenntnis 87 (2):767-786.
    We argue that a certain variety of presentist time travel ends up significantly undermining the motivational foundations which lead some, but not all, presentists to their view. We suggest that if presentism is motivated by phenomenology, and part of that phenomenology is that it’s an experiential datum that we experience temporal passage, then the basis for believing presentism is less secure than we might have thought.
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  42. Mastering Meaning.David Braddon-Mitchell - forthcoming - Philosophical Studies.
     
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  43. Freedom and binding consequentialism.David Braddon-Mitchell - unknown
    The paper proposes a new version of direct act consequentialism that will provide the same evaluations of the rightness of acts as indirect disposition, motive or character consequentialism, thus reconciling the coherence of direct consequentialism with the plausible results in cases of indirect consequentialism. This is achieved by seeing that adopting certain kinds of moral dispositions causally constrains our future acts, so that the maximizing acts ruled out by the disposition can no longer be chosen. Thus when we act we (...)
     
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  44.  84
    Metarepresentation.David Braddon-Mitchell - 1998 - Mind and Language 13 (1):29-34.
    The paper makes three points about the modularity of folk psychology and the significance of metarepresentation: The hope that metarepresentation may provide a principled divide between intentional and merely representational systems focuses on a divide of mechanism. I suggest that we also look for a divide of task: the difference could be a principled difference in the task performed by the systems, not in how the task is performed. There is no incompatibility between the hypothesis that folk psychology is modular (...)
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  45. Morning, Cabbages.David Braddon-Mitchell - 2003 - Literature & Aesthetics 13 (1).
     
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  46.  16
    Nature's capacities and their measurement.David Braddon-Mitchell - 1991 - Philosophical Books 32 (4):201-209.
  47. The Canberra Plan.David Braddon-Mitchell & Robert Nola (eds.) - 2001 - Oxford University Press.
     
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  48.  39
    Weasels and the A Priori.David Braddon-Mitchell - 2012 - In Dan Ryder, Justine Kingsbury & Kenneth Williford (eds.), Millikan and her critics. Malden, MA: Wiley. pp. 241–258.
    This chapter contains section titles: The Proliferation of Handles Why the Two‐Dimensionalist Needs Millikan's Positive Story Nodding Along to the Positive Story So What is There to Disagree About? When is a Term a Natural Kind Term? What Role Does the Deference to Naturalness Play in Natural Kind Terms and Concepts? The Commonality between Narrowly Similar Agents Some Arguments and Some Diagnoses Two Projects.
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  49. Review of 'An Introduction to Philosophical Methods', by Chris Daly. [REVIEW]David Braddon-Mitchell - 2012 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 90 (3):608 - 611.
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Volume 90, Issue 3, Page 608-611, September 2012.
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