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  1. Can Science Explain consciousness? Toward a solution to the 'hard problem'.Dan J. Bruiger - manuscript
    For diverse reasons, the problem of phenomenal consciousness is persistently challenging. Mental terms are characteristically ambiguous, researchers have philosophical biases, secondary qualities are excluded from objective description, and philosophers love to argue. Adhering to a regime of efficient causes and third-person descriptions, science as it has been defined has no place for subjectivity or teleology. A solution to the “hard problem” of consciousness will require a radical approach: to take the point of view of the cognitive system itself. To facilitate (...)
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  2. Idealist Panpsychism and Spacetime Structure.Damian Aleksiev - forthcoming - Journal of the American Philosophical Association:1-22.
    This paper presents a novel argument against one theoretically attractive form of panpsychism. I argue that “idealist panpsychism” is false since it cannot account for spacetime’s structure. Idealist panpsychists posit that fundamental reality is purely experiential. Moreover, they posit that the consciousness at the fundamental level metaphysically grounds and explains both the facts of physics and the facts of human consciousness. I argue that if idealist panpsychism is true, human consciousness and the consciousness at the fundamental level will have the (...)
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  3. Ontology without hierarchy.Kristie Miller, Michael J. Duncan & James Norton - forthcoming - In Javier Cumpa (ed.), The Question of Ontology: The Contemporary Debate. Oxford University Press.
    It has recently become popular to suggest that questions of ontology ought be settled by determining, first, which fundamental things exist, and second, which derivative things depend on, or are grounded by, those fundamental things. This methodology typically leads to a hierarchical view of ontology according to which there are chains of entities, each dependent on the next, all the way down to a fundamental base. In this paper we defend an alternative ontological picture according to which there is no (...)
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  4. Blocking Kripke’s Argument Against the Type-Identity Theory of Mind.Simone Gozzano - 2023 - Acta Analytica 38 (3):371-391.
    In this paper, I present a two-pronged argument devoted to defending the type-identity theory of mind against the argument presented by Kripke in _Naming and Necessity_. In the first part, the interpersonal case, I show that since it is not possible to establish the metaphysical conditions for phenomenal identity, it is not possible to argue that there can be physical differences between two subjects despite their phenomenal identity. In the second part, the intrapersonal case, I consider the possibility of imagining (...)
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  5. Ground first: against the proof-theoretic definition of ground.Jon Erling Litland - 2023 - Synthese 201 (1):1-26.
    This paper evaluates the proof-theoretic definition of ground developed by Poggiolesi in a range of recent publications and argues that her proposed definition fails. The paper then outlines an alternative approach where logical consequence relations and the logical operations are defined in terms of ground.
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  6. Lightweight and Heavyweight Anti-physicalism.Damian Aleksiev - 2022 - Synthese 200 (112):1-23.
    I define two metaphysical positions that anti-physicalists can take in response to Jonathan Schaffer’s ground functionalism. Ground functionalism is a version of physicalism where explanatory gaps are everywhere. If ground functionalism is true, arguments against physicalism based on the explanatory gap between the physical and experiential facts fail. In response, first, I argue that some anti-physicalists are already safe from Schaffer’s challenge. These anti-physicalists reject an underlying assumption of ground functionalism: the assumption that macrophysical entities are something over and above (...)
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  7. Metafísica para Juristas.Samuele Chilovi - 2022 - In Guillermo Lariguet & D. Lagier (eds.), Filosofía para Juristas. Una Introducción.
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  8. Multi-Descriptional Physicalism, Level(s) of Being, and the Mind-Body Problem.Savvas Ioannou - 2022 - Dissertation, University of St. Andrews
    The main idea of this thesis is multi-descriptional physicalism. According to it, only physical entities are elements of our ontology, and there are different ways to describe them. Higher-level vocabularies (e.g., mental, neurological, biological) truly describe reality. Sentences about higher-level entities are made true by physical entities. Every chapter will develop multi-descriptional physicalism or defend it from objections. In chapter 1, I will propose a new conceptual reductive account that conceptually reduces higher-level entities to physical entities. This conceptual reductive account (...)
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  9. Modality.David Mark Kovacs - 2020 - In Michael J. Raven (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Metaphysical Grounding. New York, USA: Routledge. pp. 348-360.
    A survey of the connection between grounding and modality, in particular supervenience. The survey explores three possible connections between grounding and supervenience: (1) supervenience can be analyzed in terms of grounding, (2) grounded facts supervene on their grounds, and (3) grounding and supervenience overlap in their theoretical roles.
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  10. Grounding, Analysis, and Russellian Monism.Philip Goff - 2019 - In Sam Coleman (ed.), The Knowledge Argument. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 198-222.
    Few these days dispute that the knowledge argument demonstrates an epistemic gap between the physical facts and the facts about experience. It is much more contentious whether that epistemic gap can be used to demonstrate a metaphysical gap of a kind that is inconsistent with physicalism. In this paper I will explore two attempts to block the inference from an epistemic gap to a metaphysical gap – the first from the phenomenal concept strategy, the second from Russellian monism – and (...)
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  11. A psychologistic theory of metaphysical explanation.Kristie Miller & James Norton - 2019 - Synthese 196 (7):2777-2802.
    Many think that sentences about what metaphysically explains what are true iff there exist grounding relations. This suggests that sceptics about grounding should be error theorists about metaphysical explanation. We think there is a better option: a theory of metaphysical explanation which offers truth conditions for claims about what metaphysically explains what that are not couched in terms of grounding relations, but are instead couched in terms of, inter alia, psychological facts. We do not argue that our account is superior (...)
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  12. The Deflationary Theory of Ontological Dependence.David Mark Kovacs - 2018 - Philosophical Quarterly 68 (272):481-502.
    When an entity ontologically depends on another entity, the former ‘presupposes’ or ‘requires’ the latter in some metaphysical sense. This paper defends a novel view, Dependence Deflationism, according to which ontological dependence is what I call an aggregative cluster concept: a concept which can be understood, but not fully analysed, as a ‘weighted total’ of constructive and modal relations. The view has several benefits: it accounts for clear cases of ontological dependence as well as the source of disagreement in controversial (...)
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  13. On a Confusion About Which Intuitions to Trust: From the Hard Problem to a Not Easy One.Miguel Ángel Sebastián - 2017 - Topoi 36 (1):31-40.
    Alleged self-evidence aside, conceivability arguments are one of the main reasons in favor of the claim that there is a Hard Problem. These arguments depend on the appealing Kripkean intuition that there is no difference between appearances and reality in the case of consciousness. I will argue that this intuition rests on overlooking a distinction between cognitive access and consciousness, which has received recently important empirical support. I will show that there are good reasons to believe that the intuition is (...)
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  14. Four-Dimensional Consciousness.Richard Allen Sieb - 2017 - Activitas Nervosa Superior 59 (2):(43-60).
    Conscious experience is the direct observation of conscious events. Human conscious experience is four-dimensional. Conscious events are linked (associated) by spacetime intervals to produce a coherent conscious experience. This explains why conscious experience appears to us the way it does. Conscious experience is an orientation in space and time, an understanding of the position of the observer in space and time. Causality, past-future relations, learning, memory, cognitive processing, and goal-directed actions all evolve from four-dimensional conscious experience. A neural correlate for (...)
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  15. Another cartoon portrait of the mind from the reductionist metaphysicians--a Review of Peter Carruthers ‘The Opacity of Mind’ (2011).Michael Starks - 2017 - Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization -- Articles and Reviews 2006-2017 3rd Ed 686p(2017).
    Materialism, reductionism, behaviorism, functionalism, dynamic systems theory and computationalism are popular views, but they were shown by Wittgenstein to be incoherent. The study of behavior encompasses all of human life but behavior is largely automatic and unconscious and even the conscious part, mostly expressed in language (which Wittgenstein equates with the mind), is not perspicuous, so it is critical to have a framework which Searle calls the Logical Structure of Rationality (LSR) and I call the Descriptive Psychology of Higher Order (...)
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  16. Review of Wittgenstein Rethinking the Inner by Paul Johnston (1993).Michael Starks - 2017 - Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization Michael Starks 3rd Ed. (2017).
    Overall Johnston has done a phenomenal job and this book should be required reading for all those interested in behavior. It is quite striking that although W’s observations are fundamental to all study of behavior—linguistics, philosophy, psychology, history, anthropology, politics, sociology, and art, he is not even mentioned in most books and articles, with even the exceptions having little to say, and most of that distorted or flat wrong. There is a flurry of recent interest, at least in philosophy, and (...)
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  17. Review of Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Psychology by Malcolm Budd (1989).Michael Starks - 2017 - Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization Michael Starks 3rd Ed. (2017).
    A superb effort but in my view Wittgenstein is not completely understood by anyone, so we can hardly expect Budd, writing in the mid 80’s, without the modern dual systems of thought view and no comprehensive logical structure of rationality to have grasped him completely. Like everyone, he does not get that W’s use of the word ‘grammar’ refers to our innate Evolutionary Psychology and the general framework of Wittgenstein’s and Searle’s work since laid out (e.g., in my recent articles) (...)
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  18. Blocking the A Priori Passage.Andreas Elpidorou - 2014 - Acta Analytica 29 (3):285-307.
    I defend the claim that physicalism is not committed to the view that non-phenomenal macrophysical truths are a priori entailed by the conjunction of microphysical truths , basic indexical facts , and a 'that's all' claim . I do so by showing that Chalmers and Jackson's most popular and influential argument in support of the claim that PIT ⊃ M is a priori, where 'M' stands for any ordinary, non-phenomenal, macroscopic truth, falls short of establishing its conclusion. My objection to (...)
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  19. ‘The Conceptual Link from Physical to Mental’, by Kirk, Robert: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. xii + 228, £35 (hardback). [REVIEW]Andrew Melnyk - 2014 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 92 (3):596-599.
    Review of Robert Kirk's The Conceptual Link From Physical To Mental (Oxford University Press, 2013).
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  20. Pereboom’s Robust Non-reductive Physicalism.Andrew Melnyk - 2014 - Erkenntnis 79 (5):1191-1207.
    Derk Pereboom has recently elaborated a formulation of non-reductive physicalism in which supervenience does not play the central role and realization plays no role at all; he calls his formulation “robust non-reductive physicalism”. This paper argues that for several reasons robust non-reductive physicalism is inadequate as a formulation of physicalism: it can only rule out fundamental laws of physical-to-mental emergence by stipulating that there are no such laws; it fails to entail the supervenience of the mental on the physical; it (...)
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  21. Chalmers' Blueprint of the World.Panu Raatikainen - 2014 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 22 (1):113-128.
    A critical notice of David J. Chalmers, Constructing the World (Oxford University Press,2012).
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  22. A Priori Scrutability and That’s All.Justin Tiehen - 2014 - Journal of Philosophy 111 (12):649-666.
    In his recent book Constructing the World, David Chalmers defends A Priori Scrutability, the thesis that there is a compact class of truths such that for any truth p, a Laplacian intellect could know a priori that if the truths in that class hold, then p. In this paper, I develop an objection to Chalmers’ thesis that focuses on his treatment of a so-called that’s-all truth. My objection draws on Theodore Sider’s discussion of border-sensitive properties, and also on the causal (...)
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  23. Having it Both Ways: Consciousness, Unique Not Otherworldly.Andreas Elpidorou - 2013 - Philosophia 41 (4):1181-1203.
    I respond to Chalmers’ (2006, 2010) objection to the Phenomenal Concept Strategy (PCS) by showing that his objection is faced with a dilemma that ultimately undercuts its force. Chalmers argues that no version of PCS can posit psychological features that are both physically explicable and capable of explaining our epistemic situation. In response, I show that what Chalmers calls ‘our epistemic situation’ admits either of a phenomenal or of a topic-neutral characterization, neither of which supports Chalmers’ objection. On the one (...)
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  24. Editorial: Standing on the Verge: Lessons and Limits from the Empirical Study of Consciousness.Richard Brown - 2012 - Consciousness and Cognition 21 (2):597-599.
    The papers in this special issue are all descended from papers presented at the second Online Consciousness Conference. I founded the Online Consciousness Conference at Consciousness Online (http:// consciousnessonline. wordpress. com) in 2008 mostly because no one else would. Being inspired by the Online Philosophy Conference, I mentioned to several people that it would be great if we had something like that in Consciousness Studies. People I talked to were very enthusiastic but no one seemed like they wanted to initiate (...)
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  25. Constructing the World.David John Chalmers (ed.) - 2012 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Inspired by Rudolf Carnap's Der Logische Aufbau Der Welt, David J. Chalmers argues that the world can be constructed from a few basic elements. He develops a scrutability thesis saying that all truths about the world can be derived from basic truths and ideal reasoning. This thesis leads to many philosophical consequences: a broadly Fregean approach to meaning, an internalist approach to the contents of thought, and a reply to W. V. Quine's arguments against the analytic and the a priori. (...)
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  26. Cosmic Hermeneutics vs. Emergence: The Challenge of the Explanatory Gap.Tim Crane - 2010 - In Cynthia Macdonald & Graham Macdonald (eds.), Emergence in Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 22-34.
    This chapter defends Terence Horgan's claim that any genuinely physicalist position must distinguish itself from (what has been traditionally known as) emergentism. It argues that physicalism is necessarily reductive in character — it must either give a reductive account of apparently non‐physical entities, or a reductive explanation of why there are non‐physical entities. It contends that many recent ‘non‐reductive’ physicalists do not do this, and that because of this they cannot adequately distinguish their view from emergentism. The conclusion is that (...)
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  27. Let’s be Realistic about Serious Metaphysics.Paul Bloomfield - 2005 - Synthese 144 (1):69-90.
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  28. Thinking about Consciousness. [REVIEW]Katalin Balog - 2004 - Mind 113 (452):774-778.
    Papineau in his book provides a detailed defense of physicalism via what has recently been dubbed the “phenomenal concept strategy”. I share his enthusiasm for this approach. But I disagree with his account of how a physicalist should respond to the conceivability arguments. Also I argue that his appeal to teleosemantics in explaining mental quotation is more like a promissory note than an actual theory.
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  29. Commentary on Frank Jackson’s From Metaphysics to Ethics.Katalin Balog - 2001 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62 (3):645–652.
    Frank Jackson uses the a priori entailment thesis to connect metaphysics and conceptual analysis. In the book he develops this thesis within the two-dimensional framework and also proposes a formal argument for it. I argue that the two-dimensional framework doesn’t provide independent support for the a priori entailment thesis since one has to build into the framework assumptions as strong as the thesis itself.
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  30. Physicalism unfalsified: Chalmers' inconclusive argument for dualism.Andrew Melnyk - 2001 - In Carl Gillett & Barry M. Loewer (eds.), Physicalism and its Discontents. Cambridge University Press. pp. 331-349.
    This paper aims to show that David Chalmers' conceivability argument against physicalism, as presented in his 1996 book, The Conscious Mind, is inconclusive. The key point is that, while the argument seems to assume that someone competent with a given concept thereby has access to the primary intension of the concept, there are physicalist-friendly views of conceptual competence which imply that this assumption is not true.
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  31. Conceivability Arguments.Katalin Balog - 1998 - Dissertation, Rutgers University
    The dissertation addresses the mind-body problem, and in particular, the problem of how to fit phenomenal consciousness into the rest of reality. Phenomenal consciousness - the what it’s like feature of experience - can appear to the scientifically inclined philosopher to be deeply mysterious. It is difficult to understand how the swirl of atoms in the void, the oscillation of field values, the firing of synapses, or anything physical can add up to the smells, tastes, feelings, moods, and so forth (...)
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