Attention is cognitive unison : an essay in philosophical psychology /
Some psychological phenomena can be explained by identifying and describing the processes that constitute them. Others cannot be explained in that way. In this book, Christopher Mole gives a precise account of the metaphysical difference that divides these two categories.
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
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Oxford ; New York :
Oxford University Press,
©2011.
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| Series: | Philosophy of mind series.
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
Table of Contents:
- Highlights of a difficult history
- The preliminary identification of our topic
- Approaches
- Bradley's protest
- James's disjunctive theory
- The source of Bradley's dissatisfaction
- Behaviourism and after
- Heirs of Bradley in the twentieth century
- The underlying metaphysical issue
- Explanatory tactics
- The basic distinction
- Metaphysical categories and taxonomies
- Adverbialism, multiple realizability, and natural kinds
- Adverbialism and levels of explanation
- Taxonomies and supervenience relations
- Rejecting the process : first view
- Supervenience-failure
- The modal commitments of the process : first view
- The interference argument : a putative problem for adverbialist accounts
- Cognitive unison
- The problem with attitude based adverbialism
- Gilbert Ryle and Alan White
- White's argument against disposition-based adverbialism
- The cognitive unison theory
- Tasks
- Cognitive processes
- Potential service of a task
- Superordinate tasks
- Some features of the theory
- Divided attention
- Degrees of attention and merely partial attention
- The causal life of attention
- Mental causation
- How to respond to mental causation objections
- The causal role of attention
- Attention as an enabling condition
- Counterfactuals
- The causal relevance of attention per se
- Counterfactuals and causally relevant properties
- Objections to counterfactual analysis of causation and of causal relevance
- The extrinsicness of unison
- The privative character of unison and the problem of absence causation
- Causal exclusion
- Consequences for cognitive psychology
- Psychology and metaphysics
- The metaphysical commitments of the process-identifying project
- The diverse explanatory construals of current psychological results
- Reasons for deflation
- Inductively unreliable properties
- Questions without answers
- The positive payoff
- Philosophical work for the theory of attention
- Putting attention to philosophical work
- Attention and reference
- Attention and consciousness
- Prospects for optimism.