I am a philosopher at the University of Maryland (though I now sometimes describe myself as a theoretical psychologist). For most of my career my main research interests have been in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, and cognitive science, and they have grown increasingly interdisciplinary over the years. I have worked especially on theories of consciousness (with some changes of mind along the way), knowledge of our own mental states, the role of natural language in human cognition (again, with changing views), modularity of mind, the mentality of animals, the nature of conscious thought, the nature and status of our folk psychology, nativism (innateness), human creativity, as well as affect, emotion, and motivation.
In a previous incarnation I trained as a Wittgensteinian (at the University of Leeds), got my DPhil from Oxford (working with Michael Dummett on Wittgenstein’s private language argument), and published a couple of monographs on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. But I came to feel that Wittgenstein’s sharp separation between philosophy and science was a mistake and quite counter-productive. I have also published books on epistemology and on ethics, and continue to have interests in these areas.
I am a member of the organizing committee for the University of Maryland Cognitive Science Colloquium.
E-mail: pcarruth [at] umd [dot] edu