Gabriel Segal

• Doctor of Philosophy
• King's College London

Background: In 1990, the United States’ Institute of Medicine promoted the principles of outcomes monitoring in the alcohol and other drugs treatment field to improve the evidence synthesis and quality of research. While various national outcome measures have been developed and employed, no global consensus on standard measurement has been agreed f...

The ICHOM Standard Set for Addiction, including disorders related to substance use and addictive behaviours, is the result of hard work by a group of leading physicians, measurement experts, and lived experience experts. It represents the outcomes that matter most to adults and young people with disorders related to substance use and addictive beha...

The foundational literature of Alcoholics Anonymous provides a good example of how ideas from different intellectual paradigms can be woven together to enhance understanding of addiction and recovery. A detailed hypothesis about how the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous work as a program of emotion management is presented. The hypothesis assigns a c...

Debates about wide and narrow content concern the representational contents of psychological states such as beliefs and desires. In the mid-twentieth century, it became common among philosophers to think of the primary kind of content of psychological states as being the things in the world that the states refer to, or as being relations to those t...

This book explores a a range of views from philosophy, neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology and the law on the relationship between addiction and choice

Heather, N., & Segal, G. (2015). Is addiction a myth? Donald Davidson’s solution to the problem of akrasia says not*. The International Journal Of Alcohol And Drug Research, 4(1), 77-83. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.7895/ijadr.v4i1.195An obvious problem for the concept of addiction is its portrayal as involving involuntary behavior in the face of the a...

We criticize attempts to define hope in terms of other psychological states and argue that hope is a primitive mental state whose nature can be illuminated by specifying key aspects of its functional profile.1

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Heather (2013) and Graham (2013), my friends, for their generous help while I was writing the paper and for their commentaries. On close examination, alcoholism looks like a mental disorder. Severe alcoholism certainly does. The alcoholic’s desire- and belief-forming systems are functioning in a most a...

It is argued that alcoholism, and substance addiction generally, is a disease. It is not of its nature chronic or progressive, although it is in serious cases. It is better viewed as a psychological disease than a neurological one. It is argued that each time an alcoholic takes a drink, this is the result of choice; however, in cases of serious aff...

The aims of this article are threefold: (i) to show how the work of American philosopher, Donald Davidson can throw light on the concept of addiction; (ii) to argue thereby that addiction is not a myth; and (iii) to help understand the addicted person's experience of feeling compelled to behave repeatedly in ways she does not want. Addictive behavi...

In a number works Jerry Fodor has defended a reductive, causal and referential theory of cognitive content. I argue against this, defending a quasi-Fregean notion of cognitive content, and arguing also that the cognitive content of non-singular concepts is narrow, rather than wide.

We discuss the challenge to truth-conditional semantics presented by apparent shifts in extension of predicates such as ‘red’. We propose an explicit indexical semantics for ‘red’ and argue that our account is preferable to the alternatives on conceptual and empirical grounds.

The paper begins with the assumption that psychological event tokens are identical to or constituted from physical events. It then articulates a familiar apparent problem concerning the causal role of psychological properties. If they do not reduce to physical properties, then either they must be epiphenomenal or any effects they cause must also be...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1987. Includes bibliographical references. Photocopy.

This article says something about previous work related to truth and meaning, goes on to discuss Davidson (1967) and related papers of his, and then discusses some issues arising. It begins with the work of Gottlob Frege. Much work in the twentieth century developed Frege's ideas. A great deal of that work continued with the assumption that semanti...

This chapter focuses on comparing and contrasting poverty of stimulus arguments for innate cognitive apparatus in relation to language and to folk psychology. It shows that many of the data needed to construct a parallel argument for mind reading aren't available. For example, in connection with mind reading there seems to be nothing comparable to...

This article begins with a sketchy historical introduction to the topic, which will help bring into focus some of the pressing issues for philosophy in the twenty-first century. 'Intentionality' as it is typically used in analytic philosophy, meaning, roughly representationor 'aboutness', derives from the work of Franz Brentano. For Brentano mental...

The notion of narrow content arises from Hilary Putnam's well-known article 'The Meaning of "Meaning" '. Putnam raised the question of whether the meaning of a word in a given subject's mouth is fixed by the subject's psychological states in (what he termed) 'the narrow sense'. According to Putnam, a psychological state is narrow if a subject's bei...

Philosophers of language (and semanticists) do not agree on much, but few have felt reason to doubt that there are at least two kinds of descriptions in natural language: de finite descriptions (e.g. of the form ‘the F ’), used in sentences which say that there is a unique satisfier of F, and indefinite descriptions (e.g. of the form ‘an F ’), used...

What must linguistic knowledge be like if it is to explain our capacity to use language? All linguists and philosophers of language presuppose some answer to this critical question, but all too often the presupposition is tacit. In this collection of sixteen previously unpublished essays, a distinguished international line-up of philosophers and li...

Much contemporary philosophical debate centres on the topics of logic, thought and language, and on the connections between these topics. This collection of articles is based on the Royal Institute of Philosophy's annual lecture series for 2000–2001. Its contributors include a number of those working at the forefront of the field, and in their pape...

The aim of this paper is to assess the relative merits of two accounts of the semantics of proper names. The enterprise is of particular interest because the theories are very similar in fundamental respects. In particular, they can agree on three major features of names: names are rigid designators; different co-extensive names can have different...

Two semantic theories of proper names are explained and assessed. The theories are Burge's treatment of proper names as complex demonstratives and Larson and Segal's quasi-descriptivist account of names. The two theories are evaluated for empirical plausibility. Data from deficits, processing models, developmental studies and syntax are all discuss...

L'A. se pose la question de la relation qui existe entre deux capacites propres a l'etre humain : le langage et l'intelligence. D. Bickerton (1996) postule l'existence d'un systeme cognitif unique a l'origine de ces deux types de capacites. L'A., d'une part, expose la theorie de celui-ci : ce qui fait la particularite de l'intelligence humaine et c...

Donald Davidson was among the most important philosophers of mind and language of the of the 20th Century. His articulation of the position he called "anomalous monism" and his ideas for unifying the general theory of linguistic meaning with semantics for natural language both set new agendas in the field. This book collects original essays on his...

A good understanding of the nature of a property requires knowing whether that property is relational or intrinsic. Gabriel Segal's concern is whether certain psychological properties—specifically, those that make up what might be called the "cognitive content" of psychological states—are relational or intrinsic. He claims that content supervenes o...

W.V. Quine’s thesis of the indeterminacy of translation has attracted a great deal of attention in the philosophical literature from both supporters and critics. It is intriguing, deep and important. To my mind it is also a thesis that presents a bleak prospect. If it is correct, then we must jettison mentalistic semantics, eliminating locutions li...

What is the place of language in human cognition? Do we sometimes think in natural language? Or is language for purposes of interpersonal communication only? Although these questions have been much debated in the past, they have almost dropped from sight in recent decades amongst those interested in the cognitive sciences. Language and Thought is i...

Methodological individualism (MI) is the thesis that certain psychological properties are intrinsic properties, such as ‘being made out of iron’, rather than externally relational properties, such as ‘being an aunt’. It has been challenged by influential ‘anti-individualist’ claims of, for example, Putnam and Burge, according to which the content o...

Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 4.4 (1997) 269-272 A certain conception of mental representation lies at the core of computational psychology and various other branches of cognitive psychology, linguistics, ethology, and neurophysiology, a conception that does indeed see the brain as an ensemble of cognitive, representational systems. Philosop...

It is argued that the problem of explaining why one cannot intersubsti- Tute co-extensive expressions within propositional attitude reports (PARs), salva veritate, should be addressed within the context of empirical enquiry. It is claimed that two main areas of enquiry will be involved: (i) an enquiry into why people make the judgements they do abo...

Current textbooks in formal semantics are all versions of, or introductions to, the same paradigm in semantic theory: Montague Grammar. Knowledge of Meaning is based on different assumptions and a different history. It provides the only introduction to truth- theoretic semantics for natural languages, fully integrating semantic theory into the mode...

In Frege’s account of reference we find that the referent of a singular term is the object that it applies to, the referent of a sentence is its truth value and the referent of a predicate is a function that maps referents of singular terms onto truth values. It is attractive and natural to think of a Tarskian truth- theory (“T-theory”) for a parti...

"Belief in Psychology "tackles the knotty problem of how to treat the propositional attitudes states such as beliefs, desires, hopes and fears within cognitive science. Jay Garfield asserts that the propositional attitudes can and must play useful theoretical roles in the science of the mind and stresses the importance of their social context in th...