About

Peter Carruthers is a professor whose primary research interests lie in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, and cognitive science. His work has focused extensively on theories of consciousness, knowledge of our own propositional attitudes, the role of natural language in human cognition, and the modularity of mind. Beyond these core areas, he has also published on a variety of related topics including the mentality of animals, the nature and status of folk psychology, nativism or innateness, human creativity, theories of intentional content, and the defense of a notion of narrow content for psychological explanation. Prior to his current position at the University of Maryland, Carruthers was at the University of Sheffield in the UK, where he founded and directed the Hang Seng Centre for Cognitive Studies, an initiative that produced several edited volumes of interdisciplinary essays. His academic training includes a DPhil from Oxford University, where he worked with Michael Dummett, and earlier studies at the University of Leeds as a Wittgensteinian. He has published monographs on Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and has also authored books on epistemology and ethics, maintaining ongoing interests in these areas. Additionally, he serves on the organizing committee for the University of Maryland Cognitive Science Colloquium.

Research topics

• Social psychology
• Psychology
• Cognitive psychology
• Cognitive science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Neuroscience
• Computer Science
• Philosophy
• Epistemology
• History
• Developmental psychology
• Psychoanalysis

Selected publications

• A content-general adaptation for tribal value-acquisition

  Evolution and Human Behavior · 2025-10-23

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• What makes a theory of consciousness unscientific?

  Nature Neuroscience · 2025-03-10 · 31 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The New Hedonism

  2024-01-18

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter shows how the science of affect (especially the literatures on prospection and neuroeconomics) can be used to support a new and more sophisticated kind of motivational hedonism, which can evade all previous critiques of hedonism (as Chapter 4 will show). It discusses the role of valence (pleasure and displeasure) in decision-making, and considers whether there are forms of decision-making that don’t rely upon valence. It also addresses the challenge that not all decision-making relies on conscious valence. Throughout the chapter the valences are treated as intrinsic properties attaching to experiences, providing a sort of “hedonic gloss” on those experiences when conscious. The result in a form of motivational hedonism, but one in which pleasure attaching to future-directed representations makes those future outcomes or events seem attractive. The goal of the chapter is to use the steel-man strategy to build the strongest hedonist theory possible. Other views of the nature of valence are considered in later chapters.

  PublisherDOI

• The Science of Affect

  2024-01-18

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Affective states form a broad class, encompassing emotions, desires and repulsions, sensory pleasures and displeasures (pains), and moods. This chapter focusses on their commonalities, outlining for the non-specialist what the sciences of psychology and affective neuroscience have discovered about their nature in recent decades. All result from appraisals of the personal significance of some object, event, or thought; all issue in automatic motor tendencies; all cause forms of bodily arousal or de-arousal; all issue in positive or negative valence directed at the appraised thing; and all are involved in evaluative learning, contributing to the acquisition of new values and concerns. Moreover, all are subject to powerful top-down influences (placebo and nocebo effects).

  PublisherDOI

• Human Motives

  2024-01-18 · 7 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Motivational hedonism (often called “psychological hedonism”) claims that everything we do is done in pursuit of pleasure (in the widest sense) and to avoid pain and displeasure (again, in the widest sense). Although perennially attractive, many philosophers and experimental psychologists have claimed to refute it. This work shows how decision-science and the recent science of affect can be used to construct a form of motivational hedonism that evades all previous critiques. On this view, we take decisions by anticipating and responding affectively to the alternatives, with the pleasure/displeasure component of affect constituting the common currency of decision-making. But we do not have to believe that the alternatives will bring us pleasure or displeasure in the future. Rather, those feelings get bound into and become parts of the future-directed representation of the options, rendering the latter attractive or repulsive. Much then depends on what pleasure and displeasure really are. If they are intrinsically good or bad properties of experience, for example, then motivational hedonism results. The author argues, in contrast, that the best account is a representational one: pleasure represents its object (nonconceptually, in a perception-like manner) as good, and displeasure represents it (nonconceptually) as bad. The result is pluralism about human motivation, making room for both genuine altruism and intrinsic motives of duty.

  PublisherDOI

• Defining key concepts for mental state attribution

  Communications Psychology · 2024-04-11 · 78 citations

  articleOpen access

  The terminology used in discussions on mental state attribution is extensive and lacks consistency. In the current paper, experts from various disciplines collaborate to introduce a shared set of concepts and make recommendations regarding future use.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Moral Motivation

  2024-01-18

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This final chapter develops the value-representing theory of valence (pleasure and displeasure) into an account of moral motivation, looking especially at the question of how much of moral motivation (if any) is “built in” (innate), as opposed to being culturally constructed via processes of conditioning and affective learning. With hedonism and egoism having been refuted over the course of the previous chapters, the task in this one is to consider whether or not there are human-specific innate foundations for prosociality and altruism, and for motivation by moral norms. The chapter also discusses evidence of an innate sense of fairness, as well as for innate expectations about social groups. Evidence for these claims is reviewed and discussed, focusing especially on evidence of the very early emergence of altruism and norm-based thinking and evaluation in early infancy. Finally, before summarizing the main argument of the book, the sense in which the account of motivation provided here is a kind of Humeanism is discussed.

  PublisherDOI

• Pain

  2024-01-18

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The debates among the intrinsic-feeling, value-representing, and imperative accounts of valence considered in Chapters 5 and 6 also play out (albeit somewhat differently) in theories of the nature of sensory pain. Indeed, pain (and to a lesser extent other sensory pleasures and displeasures) has been thought to provide a decisive counter-example to representational theories of consciousness, thus purporting to under-cut one of the arguments favoring representational accounts of valence. Moreover, one major objection to value-representing theories of pain is that pain and painfulness seem to lack correctness conditions. To feel pain is to be in pain. There seems to be no possibility of error. Even phantom-limb pain is real pain. It has also been objected that awareness of pain is not transparent in the manner required by the value-representing account, and that the latter cannot explain the reason-giving nature of painful experiences. This chapter confronts these objections, while at the same time defending a value-representing account of painfulness.

  PublisherDOI

• Traditional Critiques Critiqued

  2024-01-18

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter shows that the scientifically informed version of motivational hedonism that emerged from the discussion in Chapter 3 is impervious to all of the main arguments that have been advanced previously against hedonism and in support of altruism, by both philosophers and psychologists. These include: evolutionary arguments; arguments from the fact that people sometimes sacrifice themselves for others in full knowledge of the consequences; the argument that pleasure is caused by the satisfaction of desires for things other than pleasure, and so is not itself the object of all desires; the famous “experience machine” argument; and an extensive body experimental evidence concerning the role of empathy in producing altruistic behavior. The final section of the chapter then shows that experience-directed imperative theories of valence (discussed in Chapter 6) can also evade standard critiques.

  PublisherDOI

• Preface

  2024-01-18

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Extract This book has been a while in the making, even if not nearly so long in the writing. I first began to get interested in the science of affective states like desire and emotion around 2009, when I was writing a book on self-knowledge and needed to say something about our knowledge of our own such states (Carruthers 2011). Luckily, since that project was funded by the National Science Foundation, I was able to have Brendan Ritchie working with me as a research assistant for the year. He knew a lot more about the field than I did. (Brendan had worked as an undergraduate research assistant for Tim Schroeder while the latter was writing his book, The Three Faces of Desire.) As a result, he was able to put me right on a lot of points, correcting my many misunderstandings of the field. Thereafter I left the topic aside for the next few years while I worked on other issues, having to do with consciousness, working memory, and conscious thought (Carruthers 2015, 2019). But I then began to do serious work in the area again, focused initially on epistemic emotions like uncertainty (Carruthers 2017) and curiosity (Carruthers 2018d, 2020, 2024). But my reading of the field had led me to think that the nature of positive and negative valence (arguably, pleasure and displeasure by other names), which are described by many as the “common currency” of decision-making, is critical in evaluating the debate between motivational hedonism and its critics. (Motivational hedonism is often called “psychological hedonism” in the philosophical literature; it is the doctrine that all human actions are undertaken to secure good and avoid bad experiences for oneself.) For on some views, it appears that decisions taken to maximize the balance of positive over negative valence are about securing good (and avoiding bad) feelings for oneself; whereas on other views valence is an imperative-like urge to secure or avoid specific types of experience. Both kinds of account seem to lead straight to motivational hedonism. In contrast, I came to feel that valence is best understood representationally, serving to represent actions or outcomes as good or bad. This sort of account would warrant motivational pluralism, allowing that people can have many goals besides their own pleasant experiences and avoidance of their own unpleasant ones. The result was a pair of papers (Carruthers 2018c, 2023) which can be regarded as preliminary studies for the present book. Note that these papers were published after a delay of two and three years, respectively, following final acceptance by the journals in question. (That is, they were completed and accepted in 2016 and 2020, respectively.) So they are not as recent as they may seem. As a result, my views have matured and altered quite a bit since then.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• David Cox

  32 shared

• Paul Das

  32 shared

• H. Kaufmann

  Helmholtz Centre Potsdam - GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences

  32 shared

• W. A. Armstrong

  32 shared

• Gianni Cassinelli

  University of Genoa

  30 shared

• Enrico G. Beltrametti

  University of Genoa

  30 shared

• David M. Williams

  IP Australia

  22 shared

• Sophie E. Lind

  City, University of London

  20 shared

Education

• Other

  Oxford

• Other

  Wittgensteinian