Papers
Notions of Cause: Russell's thesis revisited
Co-authored with Don Ross, published in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science in 2007
We discuss Russell's 1913 essay arguing for the irrelevance of the idea of causation to science and its elimination from metaphysics as a precursor to contemporary philosophical naturalism. We show how Russell's application raises issues now receiving much attention in debates about the adequacy of such naturalism, in particular, problems related to the relationship between folk and scientific conceptual influences on metaphysics, and to the unification of a scientifically inspired worldview. In showing how to recover an approximation to Russell's conclusion while explaining scientists' continuing appeal to causal ideas (without violating naturalism by philosophically correcting scientists) we illustrate a general naturalist strategy for handling problems around the unification of sciences that assume different levels of naïveté with respect to folk conceptual frameworks. We do this despite rejecting one of the premises of Russell's argument, a version of reductionism that was scientifically plausible in 1913 but is not so now.
What to Say to a Sceptical Metaphysician: a Defense Manual for Cognitive and Behavioral Scientists
Co-authored with Don Ross, published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in 2004
A wave of recent work in metaphysics seeks to undermine the anti-reductionist, functionalist consensus of the past few decades in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. That consensus apparently legitimated a focus on what systems do, without necessarily and always requiring attention to the details of how systems are constituted. The new metaphysical challenge contends that many states and processes referred to by functionalist cognitive scientists are epiphenomenal. It further contends that the problem lies in functionalism itself, and that, to save the causal significance of mind, it is necessary to re-embrace reductionism.
We argue that the prescribed return to reductionism would be disastrous for the cognitive and behavioral sciences, requiring the dismantling of most existing achievements and placing intolerable restrictions on further work. However, this argument fails to answer the metaphysical challenge on its own terms. We meet that challenge by going on to argue that the new metaphysical skepticism about functionalist cognitive science depends on reifying two distinct notions of causality (one primarily scientific, the other metaphysical), then equivocating between them. When the different notions of causality are properly distinguished, it is clear that functionalism is in no serious philosophical trouble, and that we need not choose between reducing minds or finding them causally impotent. The metaphysical challenge to functionalism relies, in particular, on a naïve and inaccurate conception of the practice of physics, and the relationship between physics and metaphysics.
How to do things without words: infants, utterance-activity and distributed cognition
Co-authored with Stephen Cowley, published in Language Sciences in 2004.
Clark and Chalmers [Analysis 58(1998) 7] defend the hypothesis of an 'extended mind', maintaining that beliefs and other paradigmatic mental states can be implemented outside the central nervous system or body. Aspects of the problem of 'language acquisition' are considered in the light of the extended mind hypothesis. Rather than 'language' as typically understood, the object of study is something called 'utterance-activity', a term of art intended to refer to the full range of kinetic and prosodic features of the on-line behaviour of interacting humans. It is argued that utterance-activity is plausibly regarded as jointly controlled by the embodied activity of interacting people, and that it contributes to the control of their behaviour. By means of specific examples it is suggested that this complex joint control facilitates easier learning of at least some features of language. This in turn suggests a striking form of the extended mind, in which infants' cognitive powers are augmented by those of the people with whom they interact.
What Physical Properties Are
Published in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 82, Number 2, June 2001 , pp. 201-225(25)
This paper concerns the question of how to specify what is to count as physical for the purposes of debates concerning either physicalism or the completeness of physics. I argue that what is needed from an account of the physical depends primarily on the particular issue at stake, and that the demand for a general a priori specification of the physical is misplaced. A number of attempts to say what should be counted as physical are defended from recent attacks by Chris Daly, and a specific proposal due to David Papineau developed and extended. I argue that this approach is more than suitable for the debates for which it is intended.
A note on the completeness of ‘physics’
Co-authored with David Papineau, published in Analysis in 1999
No abstract.
How to semanticize science and sell it short
Published in Language Sciences Volume 31, Issue 1, January 2009, Pages 97-110
No abstract - this is the first paragraph: The Semantics of Science is, we are told, about ‘the assumptions about language that scientists make in their work’ (SS, pp. vii–viii). Here, then, is a book purportedly about the work of science on the one hand, and what presuppositions about language scientists make as they do their work on the other. It turns out that this early announcement does not mean that Harris discusses the activities of scientists as they design and conduct experiments, work in laboratories and the field, keep records, collect, analyse and interpret data, and interact in a multitude of other ways as they divide epistemic labour. More specifically Harris claims to consider two questions: ‘What does science require of language?’ and ‘What does language require of science?’ Harris’s engagement with these questions is an exercise in developing integrationism, his own approach to the field of linguistics. Actually, that characterisation is too narrow – it would be better to say that integrationism is an approach to all of human intellectual endeavour, since the argument Harris makes also ranges over issues in areas including epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of mathematics, and because this book complements recent ones on language and art (Harris, 2003) and language and history (Harris, 2004).
Philosophy Enough: Inaugural Lecture
Published in the South African Journal of Philosophy, 28(1), pp 47-69.
This inaugural lecture was delivered at the Howard College Campus of UKZN on 2 April 2008. In it I do three things. First I sketch some arguments in favour of a naturalist conception of philosophy. The conclusions that I’m after are that philosophy is not an autonomous enterprise, so that it had better be continuous with scientific enquiry if it is to get anywhere. A supplementary claim I defend briefly is that the natural and social sciences should be viewed as more integrated than they usually are. Second, I offer some reasons for rejecting all identifiable forms of social constructivism about knowledge. Finally, I say something about what ‘African Scholarship’ might mean, given the preceding considerations. There I briefly defend the claim that there is no epistemically interesting sense in which there is such a thing as African knowledge.
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Why I am not an analytic philosopher
Published in the South African Journal of Philosophy, 27(2), pp153-163
From a certain simplistic and inaccurate, although regrettably popular, perspective philosophy, at least for the past few decades, is available only in two main flavours – analytic and continental. Some self-identified members of both camps are apt to endorse uncharitable caricatures of what the others are up to. Among the many lines of criticism that can be directed against this false dichotomy, I wish to focus on discussion of a broadly naturalistic orientation that rejects many of the commitments both of paradigmatic analytic philosophy and paradigmatic continental philosophy. For the committed naturalist, the enterprise of philosophy is continuous with that of systematic empirical enquiry into the workings of the world (science). From a naturalistic perspective many of the standard moves of analytic philosophy, such as testing a proposal against ‘intuitions’, are as preposterous as the claims of ‘continental’ and ‘analytic’ philosophers sometimes appear to one another.
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