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Most cited Anglophone *articles* in philosophy of mind since WWII (according to Google Scholar) (CORRECTED)

Brian Leiter

Following up on this list of books, here is a revised list of Anglophone articles in philosophy of mind (with thanks to commenters, below). Comments are still open, so please feel free to add others with at least 2,500 citations (and please include a link to the Google Scholar page with the citation data).

  1. Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” 32,300
  2. Thomas Nagel, “What is like to be a bat?”, 15,900
  3. John Searle, “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” 13,100
  4. Andy Clark & David Chalmers, “The Extended Mind,” 11,000
  5. Hilary Putnam, “The Meaning of ‘Meaning,’” 10,500
  6. Andy Clark, “Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science,” 7,800
  7. David Chalmers, “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,” 7,300
  8. Jerry Fodor & Zenon Pylyshyn, “Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture,” 7,000
  9. Frank Jackson, “Epiphenomenal Qualia,” 5,300
  10. J. Kevin O’Regan & Alva Noe, “A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness,” 5,100
  11. Ned Block, “On a Confusion about a Function of Consciousness,” 4,900
  12. Tyler Burge, “Individualism and the Mental,” 4,100
  13. Paul Churchland, “Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes,” 3,900
  14. Donald Davidson, “Mental Events,” 3,500
  15. Joseph Levine, “Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap,” 3,400
  16. Jerry Fodor, “Special Sciences (or the disunity of science as a working hypothesis),” 3,200
  17. Hilary Putnam, “The Nature of Mental States” (“Psychological Predicates”), 2,900
  18. J.J.C. Smart, “Sensations and Brain Processes,” 2,800
  19. Ned Block, “Troubles with Functionalism,” 2,700
  20. Frank Jackson, “What Mary Didn’t Know,” 2,600
  21. David Lewis, “Attitudes de dicto and de se,” 2600.

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17 responses to “Most cited Anglophone *articles* in philosophy of mind since WWII (according to Google Scholar) (CORRECTED)”

  1. Anon

    Two of Frank Jackson’s papers – ‘Epiphenomenal qualia’, with almost 5,300 citations, and ‘What Mary didn’t know’, with over 2600.

    https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=yM_v6ZwAAAAJ

    Reply
  2. Hsiao-Sai

    A. M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” 32,300

    The Scholar article appears a bit messed up for this one. Below are links to Turing’s Scholar page, the top-listed article on that page (from which I take the citation number), and a link to the original publication in Mind.

    https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=VWCHlwkAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra

    https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=VWCHlwkAAAAJ&citation_for_view=VWCHlwkAAAAJ:UeHWp8X0CEIC

    https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/LIX.236.433

    Reply
  3. Leo

    Chalmers: Facing up to the problem of consciousness
    7300 citations

    https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=de&user=o8AfF3MAAAAJ&citation_for_view=o8AfF3MAAAAJ:u-x6o8ySG0sC

    Reply
  4. Ian Phillips

    A bunch more, depending on exactly the inclusion criteria:
    Donald Davidson, Mental Events (cited: 3534)
    JJC Smart, Sensations and Brain Processes (cited: 2850)
    Hilary Putnam, The Meaning of ‘Meaning’ (cited: 10470)
    Joe Levine, Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap (cited: 3425)
    David Chalmers, Facing up to the problem of consciousness (cited: 7260)
    Andy Clark, Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science (cited: 7816)
    Jerry Fodor, Special sciences (or: The disunity of science as a working hypothesis) (cited: 3176)

    Reply
  5. Ernest Davis

    David Lewis, “Attitudes de dicto and de se” has 2637.
    https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C33&q=david+lewis+attitudes+de+dicto+and+de+se&btnG=

    Reply
  6. Ernest Davis

    David Chalmers points out that Wilfrid Sellars “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (the 1956 article) has 4798.
    https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C33&q=sellars+empiricism+and+philosophy+of+mind+1956&btnG=

    Reply
    1. Brian Leiter

      Sellars was included in the most cited epistemology listing. Despite its title, very little of this paper has to do with philosophy of mind, except the “inner eye” stuff (I may be misremembering the terminology). Is that wrong? I’m open to an argument otherwise.

      Reply
      1. David Chalmers

        take a look at the TOC: https://www.ditext.com/sellars/epm.html. EPM contains a substantial amount of epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science, but the dominant focus is philosophy of mind. of the most influential passages, the opening critique of sense-datum theories (e.g. the myth of the given) is perhaps equal parts mind and epistemology, while the analysis of thought and the theory of mind in the final third (e.g. the myth of jones) is mostly mind.

      2. David Chalmers

        one other addition: shaun gallagher, “philosophical conceptions of the self: implications for cognitive science” (4500 citations).

  7. Daniel Nagase

    Does Pitts and McCulloch’s paper count? It has 35773 citations according to Google Scholar and it’s a founding document of artificial intelligence, the computational theory of mind, and connectionism.

    https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=pitts+mcculloch&oq=pitts+mccu#d=gs_qabs&t=1770938699730&u=%23p%3D9uicaRyqAjgJ

    Reply
    1. Brian Leiter

      I would think not, as the place of publication might also suggest. Lots of work in many fields is relevant to philosophy of mind without being a contribution to it.

      Reply
      1. Charles Anthony Bakker

        The distinction between philosophy of mind and the brain/mind sciences is both highly blurred and highly contentious. From my vantage point, if you are going to include Turing’s paper, then you should include Pitts and McCulloch’s paper.

        Also, for what it is worth, you really should specify that these are Anglophone articles on *Western* philosophy of mind since Kant. While I am not suggesting that Anglophone articles on other culture’s philosophies of mind would be nearly as highly cited as the ones you have listed, it is notable that the articles you do list tend not to discuss the psychological experiences and theories of “mind” of non-Western conspecifics. Instead, they tend to make species-wide generalizations on the basis of just our own intellectual tradition.

  8. Panu Raatikainen

    I would have expected that Putnam’s classic 1967 paper would have been in this.
    However, it has been published with two different titles, as “The Nature of Mental States” and, originally, as “Psychological Predicates.” If you add their citations, 1 366 + 1 565 = 2 931, it would indeed get to the list.

    https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=fi&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=putnam+mental+states&btnG=

    Reply
    1. Brian Leiter

      Good catch, thanks.

      Reply
  9. Brian Leiter

    A brief reply to Mr. Bakker. Turing’s paper appeared in Mind, a philosophy journal, not a journal of mathematical biophysics. That is already telling. I do not know what you have in mind by non-Western Anglophone philosophy of mind, but if there are highly cited articles you have in mind, please post Google Scholar links.

    Reply
    1. Daniel Nagase

      But Pitts and McCulloch’s paper is arguably the founding paper in modern computational theory of mind. Thus, Margaret Boden, in her introduction to *The Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence*, claims that the two main branches of CTM (“good old-fashioned AI” and connectionism) arose “from the same root, with common ancestry in a seminal paper co-authored by the neurophysiologist/psychiatrist Warren McCulloch and the mathematician Walter Pitts” (p. 2). Unsurprisingly, it is the first text of her anthology. And Piccini, in his recent book *Neurocognitive Mechanisms: Explaining Biological Cognition*, devotes a whole chapter to that paper, claiming that “Modern CTC [computational theory of cognition] began when Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts (1943) connected three things: Turing’s work on computation, the explanation of cognitive capacities, and the mathematical study of neural networks” (p. 107).

      Given the dominance of CTM/CTC in philosophy of mind, being the first to clearly articulate it in the modern form doesn’t seem like being just relevant, it seems like a key contribution…

      Reply
    2. Charles Bakker

      Just to be clear, I do *not* expect to find that Anglophone articles written about, say, the Thai Theravada Buddhist philosophy of “citta,” (mind) or the Akan people’s philosophy of “adwene” (mind) are likely to be cited very highly. The point here is just that there are a number of different culturally-contingent philosophies of “mind,” so if a particular literature focuses primarily on just one culturally-contingent philosophical tradition, then that ought really to be specified i.e., the philosophy of Western minds. What makes this more than just a technical point is that we in the West have a long tradition of generalizing about the universal nature of “minds” on the basis of only our own experiences as Westerners, but psychologically we are an unrepresentative sample of the human species in many respects. Therefore, many of our generalizations are not (yet) warranted by the evidence.

      As for the McCulloch and Pitts paper, I happen to be of the opinion that neither this paper nor Turing’s work has proven all that useful, in the end, for guiding further empirical inquiry into minds. (I am one of those radicals in the 4E cognition camp.) Nevertheless, even I would readily acknowledge the importance that both Turing and McCulloch and Pitts have had in the philosophy of Western minds.

      While I can appreciate that there is a difference between listing papers which are explicitly philosophical and listing explicitly scientific papers which have been cited by philosophers, the natural philosophy of Western minds has always been a mix of philosophical reasoning and empirical observation.

      We might think here of the way in which Kant’s influence on Helmholtz can now be seen in the Active Inference literature. Is this a philosophical research program? Is it scientific? Based on where the Active Inference folks are publishing, one would think it is scientific. Nevertheless, if Kant, Helmholtz and Friston are right, then we can only ever form guesses about what it is we are sensing. From this it follows that insofar as scientists must rely on their senses to perceive data as data, then what scientists are really doing is just guessing that what they are perceiving is in fact data which supports their prior Neo-Kantian theory of Western minds. For my own part, as an ecological psychologist, this isn’t science, it is philosophizing from behind some putative “veil of perception.”

      Going the other way, William James’ Radical Empiricism was an explicitly philosophical program which eventually paved the way for James and Eleanor Gibson to begin studying perception scientifically at the level of the organism-environment system. Arguably, the Gibson’s research program – ecological psychology – has been quite successful in studying the way in which organisms and their environments become coupled through the pickup of dynamical structures in the various media which surround the organism. Nevertheless, the majority of philosophers of Western minds, being cognitivists/computationalists of some version or other, would likely argue that this scientific research program is predicated on a faulty philosophical understanding of what (Western) minds are.

      I am not weighing in here on which research programs are most promising. (Though clearly I have an opinion.) I am pointing out that both active inference and ecological psychology stem from philosophical research programs, and, depending on whom you ask, they have either stayed primarily philosophical in the sense of not being well supported by empirical evidence, or they have made tremendous progress in fleshing out the empirical details of philosophical theses. Hence my earlier claim that the boundary between philosophy and science is blurred and contentious.

      Reply

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