Peter Carruthers (philosopher)
Encyclopedia
Peter Carruthers is a philosopher in the area of philosophy of mind
. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland
, associate member of Neuroscience and Cognitive Science Program and member of the Committee for Philosophy and the Sciences.
in 2001, Carruthers was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield
where he founded and directed the Hang Seng Centre for Cognitive Studies and prior to that was a lecturer at University of Essex
, Queen's University of Belfast
, University of St. Andrews, and University of Oxford
. He was educated at the University of Leeds
before studying for his D.Phil at University of Oxford
under Michael Dummett
.
There is a spectrum of opinions on the role of language in cognition. At one extreme, philosophers like Michael Dummett
have argued that thought is impossible in the absence of language; and social scientists influenced by Benjamin Whorf
have believed that the natural languages that people grow up speaking will have a profound influence on the character of their thoughts. At the other extreme, philosophers like Jerry Fodor
, together with most cognitive scientists, have believed that language is but an input/output device for cognition, playing no significant role in thought itself. Peter Carruthers has steered a path in between these two extremes. In his 1996 book, he allowed that much thought can and does occur in the absence of language, while arguing for a constitutive role for language in conscious thinking, conducted in "inner speech". In his 2006 book, this position is broadened and deepened. Following Antonio Damasio
, he argues that mental rehearsals of action issue in imagery that plays a profound role in human practical reasoning, with inner speech now being seen as a subset of action rehearsal. Carruthers now argues that the serial use of these rehearsals can issue in a whole new level of thinking and reasoning, serving to realize the “dual systems” that psychologists like Daniel Kahneman
believe to be involved in human reasoning processes.
Massive modularity of the human mind:
Evolutionary psychologists (Evolutionary psychology
) like Leda Cosmides
, John Tooby
, and Steven Pinker
have claimed that the mind consists of a great many distinct functionally specialized systems, or modules. Jerry Fodor
has argued, in contrast, that the "central" processes of the mind (judging, reasoning, deciding, and so forth) cannot be modular. In his 2006 book, Peter Carruthers lays out the main case supporting massive modularity, shows how the notion of "module" in this context should properly be understood, and takes up Fodor’s challenge by showing how the distinctive flexibility, creativity, and rationality of the human mind can result from the interactions of massive numbers of modules(the ambiguous "This" does not help anyone understand).
Dispositional higher-order thought theory of consciousness
:
Amongst philosophers who think that consciousness admits of explanation, the most popular approach has been some or other variety of representationalism. Representationalists hold that the distinctive features of consciousness can be explained by appeal to the representational contents (together with the causal roles) of experience. First-order representationalists like Fred Dretske
and Michael Tye (philosopher)
believe that the relevant contents are world-directed ones (colors, sounds, and so forth) of a distinctive sort (non-conceptual, analog, or fine-grained). Higher-order representationalists like William Lycan
, David M. Rosenthal
, and Peter Carruthers, in contrast, maintain that we need to be aware of undergoing these first-order experiences in order for the latter to qualify as conscious. On Carruthers’ view, the awareness in question is dispositional. By virtue of an experience being available to higher-order thought, it is claimed to acquire a higher-order non-conceptual content. Hence, conscious experiences have a dual content: while representing the world to us, they also represent themselves to us. Conscious experiences are thus held to be self-representational ones.
The denial of introspection for thoughts:
Most people (philosophers and non-philosophers alike) assume that they have direct introspective access to their own propositional attitude events of judging, deciding, and so forth. We think of ourselves as knowing our own thought processes immediately, without having to interpret ourselves (in the way that we do need to interpret the behavior and circumstances of other people if we are to know what they are thinking). In a series of recent papers Peter Carruthers has argued that this introspective intuition is illusory. While allowing that we do have introspective access to our own experiences, including imagistic experiences of the sort that occur during "inner speech", he draws on evidence from across the cognitive sciences to argue that our knowledge of our own judgments and decisions results from us turning our interpretative skills upon ourselves. He also argues that while inner speech plays important roles in human cognition, it never plays the right sort of role to constitute a judgment, or a decision. The latter processes always occur below the surface of consciousness, Carruthers claims.
, philosophy of psychology
, and cognitive science
. He has worked especially on theories of consciousness, the role of natural language
in human cognition, and modularity of mind
, but has also published on such issues as: the mentality of animals; the nature and status of our folk psychology
; nativism (innateness); human creativity; theories of intentional content; and defence of a notion of narrow content for psychological explanation. He is presently working on a book project, tentatively entitled Mind-reading and Meta-cognition, which examines the cognitive basis of our understanding of the minds of others and its relationship to our access to our own minds.
Carruthers has also published several monographs on Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
and co-edited seven interdisciplinary books in cognitive science (cf. selected publications). He is the author of numerous articles on consciousness and self-knowledge
cognitive architecture, the role of language in cognition, mental modularity, human creativityanimal mentality, nature, extent and moral significance and miscellaneous papers and book chapters. Furthermore, he has written books on epistemology and ethics, which are areas with which he continues to have interests.
Philosophy of mind
Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind-body problem, i.e...
. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland
University of Maryland, College Park
The University of Maryland, College Park is a top-ranked public research university located in the city of College Park in Prince George's County, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C...
, associate member of Neuroscience and Cognitive Science Program and member of the Committee for Philosophy and the Sciences.
Background
Before he moved to the University of MarylandUniversity of Maryland, College Park
The University of Maryland, College Park is a top-ranked public research university located in the city of College Park in Prince George's County, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C...
in 2001, Carruthers was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield
University of Sheffield
The University of Sheffield is a research university based in the city of Sheffield in South Yorkshire, England. It is one of the original 'red brick' universities and is a member of the Russell Group of leading research intensive universities...
where he founded and directed the Hang Seng Centre for Cognitive Studies and prior to that was a lecturer at University of Essex
University of Essex
The University of Essex is a British campus university whose original and largest campus is near the town of Colchester, England. Established in 1963 and receiving its Royal Charter in 1965...
, Queen's University of Belfast
Queen's University of Belfast
Queen's University Belfast is a public research university in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The university's official title, per its charter, is the Queen's University of Belfast. It is often referred to simply as Queen's, or by the abbreviation QUB...
, University of St. Andrews, and University of Oxford
University of Oxford
The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...
. He was educated at the University of Leeds
University of Leeds
The University of Leeds is a British Redbrick university located in the city of Leeds, West Yorkshire, England...
before studying for his D.Phil at University of Oxford
University of Oxford
The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...
under Michael Dummett
Michael Dummett
Sir Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett FBA D.Litt is a British philosopher. He was, until 1992, Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford...
.
Notable Ideas
The role of language in cognition:There is a spectrum of opinions on the role of language in cognition. At one extreme, philosophers like Michael Dummett
Michael Dummett
Sir Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett FBA D.Litt is a British philosopher. He was, until 1992, Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford...
have argued that thought is impossible in the absence of language; and social scientists influenced by Benjamin Whorf
Benjamin Whorf
In studying the cause of a fire which had started under the conditions just described, Whorf concluded that it was thinking of the "empty" gasoline drums as "empty" in the meaning described in the first definition above, that is as "inert," which led to a fire he investigated...
have believed that the natural languages that people grow up speaking will have a profound influence on the character of their thoughts. At the other extreme, philosophers like Jerry Fodor
Jerry Fodor
Jerry Alan Fodor is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. He holds the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and is the author of many works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, in which he has laid the groundwork for the...
, together with most cognitive scientists, have believed that language is but an input/output device for cognition, playing no significant role in thought itself. Peter Carruthers has steered a path in between these two extremes. In his 1996 book, he allowed that much thought can and does occur in the absence of language, while arguing for a constitutive role for language in conscious thinking, conducted in "inner speech". In his 2006 book, this position is broadened and deepened. Following Antonio Damasio
Antonio Damasio
Antonio Damasio is David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Southern California, where he heads USC's Brain and Creativity Institute and Adjunct Professor at the Salk Institute. Prior to taking up his posts at USC, in 2005, Damasio was M.W...
, he argues that mental rehearsals of action issue in imagery that plays a profound role in human practical reasoning, with inner speech now being seen as a subset of action rehearsal. Carruthers now argues that the serial use of these rehearsals can issue in a whole new level of thinking and reasoning, serving to realize the “dual systems” that psychologists like Daniel Kahneman
Daniel Kahneman
Daniel Kahneman is an Israeli-American psychologist and Nobel laureate. He is notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, behavioral economics and hedonic psychology....
believe to be involved in human reasoning processes.
Massive modularity of the human mind:
Evolutionary psychologists (Evolutionary psychology
Evolutionary psychology
Evolutionary psychology is an approach in the social and natural sciences that examines psychological traits such as memory, perception, and language from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations, that is, the functional...
) like Leda Cosmides
Leda Cosmides
Leda Cosmides, is an American psychologist, who, together with anthropologist husband John Tooby, helped develop the field of evolutionary psychology....
, John Tooby
John Tooby
John Tooby is an American anthropologist, who, together with psychologist wife Leda Cosmides, helped pioneer the field of evolutionary psychology....
, and Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker
Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and popular science author...
have claimed that the mind consists of a great many distinct functionally specialized systems, or modules. Jerry Fodor
Jerry Fodor
Jerry Alan Fodor is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. He holds the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and is the author of many works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, in which he has laid the groundwork for the...
has argued, in contrast, that the "central" processes of the mind (judging, reasoning, deciding, and so forth) cannot be modular. In his 2006 book, Peter Carruthers lays out the main case supporting massive modularity, shows how the notion of "module" in this context should properly be understood, and takes up Fodor’s challenge by showing how the distinctive flexibility, creativity, and rationality of the human mind can result from the interactions of massive numbers of modules(the ambiguous "This" does not help anyone understand).
Dispositional higher-order thought theory of consciousness
Consciousness
Consciousness is a term that refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind...
:
Amongst philosophers who think that consciousness admits of explanation, the most popular approach has been some or other variety of representationalism. Representationalists hold that the distinctive features of consciousness can be explained by appeal to the representational contents (together with the causal roles) of experience. First-order representationalists like Fred Dretske
Fred Dretske
Frederick Irwin Dretske is a philosopher noted for his contributions to epistemology and the philosophy of mind. His more recent work centers on conscious experience and self-knowledge. Additionally, he was awarded the Jean Nicod Prize in 1994...
and Michael Tye (philosopher)
Michael Tye (philosopher)
Michael Tye is a philosopher at the University of Texas at Austin who has made significant contributions to the philosophy of mind. He was educated at Oxford University in England, studying first physics and then physics and philosophy. Before moving to Texas, Tye taught at Temple University in...
believe that the relevant contents are world-directed ones (colors, sounds, and so forth) of a distinctive sort (non-conceptual, analog, or fine-grained). Higher-order representationalists like William Lycan
William Lycan
William G. Lycan is a noted American philosopher teaching at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,where he is the William Rand Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor. He won the Class of 2001 Outstanding Faculty Award and a Distinguished Teaching Award for Post-Baccalaureate Instruction in...
, David M. Rosenthal
David M. Rosenthal
David M. Rosenthal is a philosopher at the City University of New York who has made significant contributions to the philosophy of mind, particularly in the area of consciousness. He was educated at the University of Chicago and then Princeton University...
, and Peter Carruthers, in contrast, maintain that we need to be aware of undergoing these first-order experiences in order for the latter to qualify as conscious. On Carruthers’ view, the awareness in question is dispositional. By virtue of an experience being available to higher-order thought, it is claimed to acquire a higher-order non-conceptual content. Hence, conscious experiences have a dual content: while representing the world to us, they also represent themselves to us. Conscious experiences are thus held to be self-representational ones.
The denial of introspection for thoughts:
Most people (philosophers and non-philosophers alike) assume that they have direct introspective access to their own propositional attitude events of judging, deciding, and so forth. We think of ourselves as knowing our own thought processes immediately, without having to interpret ourselves (in the way that we do need to interpret the behavior and circumstances of other people if we are to know what they are thinking). In a series of recent papers Peter Carruthers has argued that this introspective intuition is illusory. While allowing that we do have introspective access to our own experiences, including imagistic experiences of the sort that occur during "inner speech", he draws on evidence from across the cognitive sciences to argue that our knowledge of our own judgments and decisions results from us turning our interpretative skills upon ourselves. He also argues that while inner speech plays important roles in human cognition, it never plays the right sort of role to constitute a judgment, or a decision. The latter processes always occur below the surface of consciousness, Carruthers claims.
Primary Research Interests
His primary research interests are in philosophy of mindPhilosophy of mind
Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind-body problem, i.e...
, philosophy of psychology
Philosophy of psychology
Philosophy of psychology refers to issues at the theoretical foundations of modern psychology. Some of these issues are epistemological concerns about the methodology of psychological investigation...
, and cognitive science
Cognitive science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...
. He has worked especially on theories of consciousness, the role of natural language
Natural language
In the philosophy of language, a natural language is any language which arises in an unpremeditated fashion as the result of the innate facility for language possessed by the human intellect. A natural language is typically used for communication, and may be spoken, signed, or written...
in human cognition, and modularity of mind
Modularity of mind
Modularity of mind is the notion that a mind may, at least in part, be composed of separate innate structures which have established evolutionarily developed functional purposes...
, but has also published on such issues as: the mentality of animals; the nature and status of our folk psychology
Folk psychology
Folk psychology is the set of assumptions, constructs, and convictions that makes up the everyday language in which people discuss human psychology...
; nativism (innateness); human creativity; theories of intentional content; and defence of a notion of narrow content for psychological explanation. He is presently working on a book project, tentatively entitled Mind-reading and Meta-cognition, which examines the cognitive basis of our understanding of the minds of others and its relationship to our access to our own minds.
Work
He is the author of several books:- The Architecture of the Mind: massive modularity and the flexibility of thought (2006).
- Consciousness: essays from a higher-order perspective (2005).
- The Nature of the Mind: an introduction (2004).
- Phenomenal Consciousness: a naturalistic theory (2000).
- The Philosophy of Psychology (1999).
- Language, Thought and Consciousness: an essay in philosophical psychology (1996) .
Carruthers has also published several monographs on Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is the only book-length philosophical work published by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in his lifetime. It was an ambitious project: to identify the relationship between language and reality and to define the limits of science...
and co-edited seven interdisciplinary books in cognitive science (cf. selected publications). He is the author of numerous articles on consciousness and self-knowledge
cognitive architecture, the role of language in cognition, mental modularity, human creativityanimal mentality, nature, extent and moral significance and miscellaneous papers and book chapters. Furthermore, he has written books on epistemology and ethics, which are areas with which he continues to have interests.
Selected publications
A partial list of publications by Carruthers:- The Architecture of the Mind: massive modularity and the flexibility of thought (2006). Oxford University Press: ISBN 0-19-920707-7
- Consciousness: essays from a higher-order perspective (2005). Oxford University Press.: ISBN 0-19-927736-0
- The Nature of the Mind: an introduction (2004). Routledge: ISBN 0-41-52999-4. ISBN 0-41-529994-7
- Phenomenal Consciousness: a naturalistic theory (2000). Cambridge University Press: ISBN 0-52-154399-6. ISBN 0-52-154399-1
- The Philosophy of Psychology (1999). Cambridge University Press: ISBN 0-52-155915-4. ISBN 0-52-155915-7
- Language, Thought and Consciousness: an essay in philosophical psychology (1996). Cambridge University Press: ISBN 0-52-163999-9. ISBN 0-52-163999-6
- The Innate Mind: volume 3: foundations and the future. Co-editor (with Stephen Laurence and Stephen Stich), (2007). Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-533282-2. ISBN 0-19-533282-7
- The Innate Mind: volume 2: culture and cognition. Co-editor (with Stephen Laurence and Stephen Stich), (2006). Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-531014-4. ISBN 0-19-531014-6
- The Innate Mind: volume 1 structure and contents. Co-editor (with Stephen Laurence and Stephen Stich), (2005). Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-517999-4. ISBN 0-19-517999-6
- The Cognitive Basis of Science. Co-editor (with Stephen Stich and Michael Siegal), (2002). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-52-101177-9 ISBN 0-52-101177-8
- Evolution and the Human Mind: modularity, language and meta-cognition. Co-editor (with Andrew Chamberlain), (2000). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-52-178908-7 ISBN 0-52-178908-0
- Language and Thought: interdisciplinary themes. Co-editor (with Jill Boucher), (1998). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-52-163758-9. ISBN 0-52-163758-9
- Theories of Theories of Mind. Co-editor (with Peter K Smith), (1996). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-52-155916-2. ISBN 0-52-155916-4