Frances Egan
Biographic Data
| ID | 270608 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Frances Egan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Frances |
| FAMILY NAME | Egan |
| SIGNATURE | EGAN F |
| AFFILIATIONS | Monash University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3239-6033 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 50 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Whose lived experience: Embracing, dismissing, and contesting lived experience as a form of knowledge in higher education
Lived experience plays a critical role in decentring and reshaping bodies of knowledge that have produced epistemic violence while proclaiming objectivity. Anchored in critical and feminist pedagogies, this article explores how lived experience as a form of knowledge can function as a practice of freedom, disrupting rather than reinforcing unjust forms of knowledge production. This article investigates how undergraduate students in a Global Studi…
The abaya ban, hegemonic feminism, and the conditional visibility of intersectionality in France’s public sphere
How Muslim women dress in public is a divisive issue in France and in French feminist thinking. Existing literature illustrates the relation between a highly visible secular feminism and the exclusion of Muslim and racialised women from the French universal—yet the role of increasingly popular intersectional and anti-racist discourse requires further theorisation. This article employs a feminist critical discourse analysis of the mainstream media…
Deflating Mental Representation
A novel account of the explanatory role of representation in both the cognitive sciences and commonsense practice that preserves the virtues without the defects of the prevailing two views about mental representation. Philosophers of mind tend to hold one of two broad views about mental representation: they are either robustly realist about mental representations, taking them to have determinate, objective content independent of attributors' expl…
Rewriting French Feminisms: Muslim Women and Intersectional Storytelling with Fatima Daas and Faïza Guène
As intersectionality has burgeoned into a buzzword, it has not always retained its origins in black women’s lives and standpoints. Unfortunately, criticisms of the concept can further marginalise longstanding histories of resistance to overlapping systems of oppression. This article examines the value of an intersectional lens on transnational French-Algerian feminisms. It analyses the stories that circulate about intersectionality and feminism i…
Making Space for Queer Muslim Women: (Dis)orientation in Fatima Daas’s La Petite Dernière
While public French discourse at times depends on a binary rhetoric between French and the Other, and a premise of assimilation/transgression, Franco-Maghrebi writers frequently realize a more complex (un)belonging in their work. This article centres on Fatima Daas’s 2020 debut novel La Petite Dernière and the strategies it presents for resisting the intersecting ideals of Frenchness, straightness and femininity. Its critical framework is based i…
Reading behind the Smile: Gendered and National Scripts for Happiness in Faïza Guène’s Millénium Blues
Is happiness always a good thing? In Faïza Guène’s 2018 novel Millénium blues, protagonist Zouzou’s efforts to be happy paradoxically infuse the text with its titular blues; while her smile sometimes appeases others, confirming an unjust status quo, it increasingly leads to a sense of alienation in herself. This article adopts a cultural-studies approach and analyzes the relation between a societal promise of happiness, as determined by gendered …
Teaching gender in and through uncertainty
Where higher education classrooms can be sites of both cultural contestation and epistemic violence, this article examines the critical and ethical value of building uncertainty into our teaching of gender. The reflective piece draws on my own experience in a new subject at Monash University, and situates this one very small site of knowledge production within the wider processes that shape the (neoliberal) Australian university, and the discipli…
The elusive role of normal‐proper function in cognitive science
The main goal of Karen Neander's important book is to defend a particular version of teleosemantics, which holds that the norms necessary for the semantic evaluation of intentional mental states in cognitive science are grounded (at least in part) in the normal-proper functions of cognitive systems. The account aims to be naturalistic, explaining how intentionality is derived from non-intentional and non-semantic properties already recognized by …
Resisting Confinement Through Translation: Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains
Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains gives a horrifying yet poetic account of the torture he endured on Manus Island in immigration detention. His work, written in Farsi and translated into English from thousands of text messages, was first published in English so as to give voice to Australia’s dehumanizing treatment of refugees in both a national and global discourse. This essay presents No Friend as the expression of a translating|tr…
Content is pragmatic: Comments on Nicholas Shea's Representation in cognitive science
Nicholas Shea offers what he takes to be a naturalistic account of representational content in cognitive science. I argue that the account secures determinate content only by appeal to pragmatic considerations, and so it fails to respect naturalism. But that is fine, because representational content is not, strictly speaking, necessary for explanation in cognitive science. Even in Shea's own account, content serves only a variety of heuristic fun…
Computational models: A modest role for content
The Content of Color Experience
Doing cognitive neuroscience: A third way
The Moon Illusion
Ever since Berkeley discussed the problem at length in his Essay Toward a New Theory of Vision , theorists of vision have attempted to explain why the moon appears larger on the horizon than it does at the zenith. Prevailing opinion has it that the contemporary perceptual psychologists Kaufman and Rock have finally explained the illusion. This paper argues that Kaufman and Rock have not refuted a Berkeleyan account of the illusion, and have over-…
Representations, Targets, and Attitudes
Folk Psychology and Cognitive Architecture
It has recently been argued that the success of the connectionist program in cognitive science would threaten folk psychology. I articulate and defend a “minimalist” construal of folk psychology that comports well with empirical evidence on the folk understanding of belief and is compatible with even the most radical developments in cognitive science
Computation and Content
The dominant program in cognitive psychology since the demise of behaviorism in the 1960s has been computationalism. Computational theories treat human cognitive processes as a species of information processing, and the systems that implement such processing as symbol-manipulating systems. Describing a device as a symbol manipulator implies that it is possible to treat some of its internal states as representations of properties or objects in a p…
Must Psychology Be Individualistic
Discussion de l'individualisme en psychologie, a travers un examen critique des arguments de J. Fodor et T. Burge. L'A. soutient que l'argument en faveur de l'individualisme psychologique echoue pour des raisons metaphysiques, et que l'argument contre l'individualisme echoue aussi pour des raisons metaphysiques. La conclusion de l'A. est qu'il est probable que la psychologie doit etre individualiste. L'individualisme est defini en termes de surve…
Computational models: A modest role for content
Must Psychology Be Individualistic
Discussion de l'individualisme en psychologie, a travers un examen critique des arguments de J. Fodor et T. Burge. L'A. soutient que l'argument en faveur de l'individualisme psychologique echoue pour des raisons metaphysiques, et que l'argument contre l'individualisme echoue aussi pour des raisons metaphysiques. La conclusion de l'A. est qu'il est probable que la psychologie doit etre individualiste. L'individualisme est defini en termes de surve…
Computation and Content
The dominant program in cognitive psychology since the demise of behaviorism in the 1960s has been computationalism. Computational theories treat human cognitive processes as a species of information processing, and the systems that implement such processing as symbol-manipulating systems. Describing a device as a symbol manipulator implies that it is possible to treat some of its internal states as representations of properties or objects in a p…
Doing cognitive neuroscience: A third way
Folk Psychology and Cognitive Architecture
It has recently been argued that the success of the connectionist program in cognitive science would threaten folk psychology. I articulate and defend a “minimalist” construal of folk psychology that comports well with empirical evidence on the folk understanding of belief and is compatible with even the most radical developments in cognitive science
Making Space for Queer Muslim Women: (Dis)orientation in Fatima Daas’s La Petite Dernière
While public French discourse at times depends on a binary rhetoric between French and the Other, and a premise of assimilation/transgression, Franco-Maghrebi writers frequently realize a more complex (un)belonging in their work. This article centres on Fatima Daas’s 2020 debut novel La Petite Dernière and the strategies it presents for resisting the intersecting ideals of Frenchness, straightness and femininity. Its critical framework is based i…
The Content of Color Experience
Must Psychology Be Individualistic
Discussion de l'individualisme en psychologie, a travers un examen critique des arguments de J. Fodor et T. Burge. L'A. soutient que l'argument en faveur de l'individualisme psychologique echoue pour des raisons metaphysiques, et que l'argument contre l'individualisme echoue aussi pour des raisons metaphysiques. La conclusion de l'A. est qu'il est probable que la psychologie doit etre individualiste. L'individualisme est defini en termes de surve…
Folk Psychology and Cognitive Architecture
It has recently been argued that the success of the connectionist program in cognitive science would threaten folk psychology. I articulate and defend a “minimalist” construal of folk psychology that comports well with empirical evidence on the folk understanding of belief and is compatible with even the most radical developments in cognitive science
Computation and Content
The dominant program in cognitive psychology since the demise of behaviorism in the 1960s has been computationalism. Computational theories treat human cognitive processes as a species of information processing, and the systems that implement such processing as symbol-manipulating systems. Describing a device as a symbol manipulator implies that it is possible to treat some of its internal states as representations of properties or objects in a p…
The Moon Illusion
Ever since Berkeley discussed the problem at length in his Essay Toward a New Theory of Vision , theorists of vision have attempted to explain why the moon appears larger on the horizon than it does at the zenith. Prevailing opinion has it that the contemporary perceptual psychologists Kaufman and Rock have finally explained the illusion. This paper argues that Kaufman and Rock have not refuted a Berkeleyan account of the illusion, and have over-…
Representations, Targets, and Attitudes
Doing cognitive neuroscience: A third way
The Content of Color Experience
Computational models: A modest role for content
Content is pragmatic: Comments on Nicholas Shea's Representation in cognitive science
Nicholas Shea offers what he takes to be a naturalistic account of representational content in cognitive science. I argue that the account secures determinate content only by appeal to pragmatic considerations, and so it fails to respect naturalism. But that is fine, because representational content is not, strictly speaking, necessary for explanation in cognitive science. Even in Shea's own account, content serves only a variety of heuristic fun…
Resisting Confinement Through Translation: Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains
Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains gives a horrifying yet poetic account of the torture he endured on Manus Island in immigration detention. His work, written in Farsi and translated into English from thousands of text messages, was first published in English so as to give voice to Australia’s dehumanizing treatment of refugees in both a national and global discourse. This essay presents No Friend as the expression of a translating|tr…
Teaching gender in and through uncertainty
Where higher education classrooms can be sites of both cultural contestation and epistemic violence, this article examines the critical and ethical value of building uncertainty into our teaching of gender. The reflective piece draws on my own experience in a new subject at Monash University, and situates this one very small site of knowledge production within the wider processes that shape the (neoliberal) Australian university, and the discipli…
The elusive role of normal‐proper function in cognitive science
The main goal of Karen Neander's important book is to defend a particular version of teleosemantics, which holds that the norms necessary for the semantic evaluation of intentional mental states in cognitive science are grounded (at least in part) in the normal-proper functions of cognitive systems. The account aims to be naturalistic, explaining how intentionality is derived from non-intentional and non-semantic properties already recognized by …
Making Space for Queer Muslim Women: (Dis)orientation in Fatima Daas’s La Petite Dernière
While public French discourse at times depends on a binary rhetoric between French and the Other, and a premise of assimilation/transgression, Franco-Maghrebi writers frequently realize a more complex (un)belonging in their work. This article centres on Fatima Daas’s 2020 debut novel La Petite Dernière and the strategies it presents for resisting the intersecting ideals of Frenchness, straightness and femininity. Its critical framework is based i…
Reading behind the Smile: Gendered and National Scripts for Happiness in Faïza Guène’s Millénium Blues
Is happiness always a good thing? In Faïza Guène’s 2018 novel Millénium blues, protagonist Zouzou’s efforts to be happy paradoxically infuse the text with its titular blues; while her smile sometimes appeases others, confirming an unjust status quo, it increasingly leads to a sense of alienation in herself. This article adopts a cultural-studies approach and analyzes the relation between a societal promise of happiness, as determined by gendered …
Rewriting French Feminisms: Muslim Women and Intersectional Storytelling with Fatima Daas and Faïza Guène
As intersectionality has burgeoned into a buzzword, it has not always retained its origins in black women’s lives and standpoints. Unfortunately, criticisms of the concept can further marginalise longstanding histories of resistance to overlapping systems of oppression. This article examines the value of an intersectional lens on transnational French-Algerian feminisms. It analyses the stories that circulate about intersectionality and feminism i…
Deflating Mental Representation
A novel account of the explanatory role of representation in both the cognitive sciences and commonsense practice that preserves the virtues without the defects of the prevailing two views about mental representation. Philosophers of mind tend to hold one of two broad views about mental representation: they are either robustly realist about mental representations, taking them to have determinate, objective content independent of attributors' expl…
Whose lived experience: Embracing, dismissing, and contesting lived experience as a form of knowledge in higher education
Lived experience plays a critical role in decentring and reshaping bodies of knowledge that have produced epistemic violence while proclaiming objectivity. Anchored in critical and feminist pedagogies, this article explores how lived experience as a form of knowledge can function as a practice of freedom, disrupting rather than reinforcing unjust forms of knowledge production. This article investigates how undergraduate students in a Global Studi…
The abaya ban, hegemonic feminism, and the conditional visibility of intersectionality in France’s public sphere
How Muslim women dress in public is a divisive issue in France and in French feminist thinking. Existing literature illustrates the relation between a highly visible secular feminism and the exclusion of Muslim and racialised women from the French universal—yet the role of increasingly popular intersectional and anti-racist discourse requires further theorisation. This article employs a feminist critical discourse analysis of the mainstream media…
Philosophy (11 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Cognition (5 works) · Computer Science (5 works) · Philosophy and History of Science (5 works) · Philosophy and Theoretical Science (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Art (4 works) · Cognitive science (4 works)