Considerable debate in philosophy of psychology has recently focussed upon two central themes. One concerns the ontological status of propositional attitudes like beliefs and desires, the other on the proper computational account of cognitive architecture. In the ontological debate, the two most prominent positions are eliminativism, which claims that commonsense psychology is false because there are no such things as beliefs and desires; and versions of intentional realism, which counters that beliefs and desires actually do exist in the mind/brain. In (...) the cognitive architecture debate, there are again two outstanding views: classical cognitivism, which holds that cognition is something closely akin to symbol manipulation; and parallel distributed processing, which roughly maintains that cognition is the distributed activation of several simple, non-symbolic processing units. Furthermore, in spite of their different topics, the two debates have been linked by a number of authors who suggest that where you stand in the cognitive architecture debate should help determine where you stand in the debate over prepositional attitudes. So, for example, writers like Jerry Fodor have used the plausibility of classical cognitivism to defend a realist interpretation of propositional attitudes, while writers like Steve Stich and myself have argued that certain forms of connectionism support eliminativism. (shrink)

Unpleasant experiences include backaches, moments of nausea, moments of nervousness, phantom pains, and so on. What does their unpleasantness consist in? The unpleasantness of an experience has been thought to consist in: (1) its representing bodily damage; (2) its inclining the subject to fight its continuation; (3) the subject's disliking it; (4) features intrinsic to it. I offer compelling objections to (1) and (2) and less compelling objections to (3). I defend (4) against five challenging objections and offer two reasons (...) to believe it. Hence, I advocate "Intrinsic Nature," the idea that unpleasantness is intrinsic to unpleasant experiences. (shrink)

In Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit cannot find a theory of well-being that solves the Non-Identity Problem, the Repugnant Conclusion, the Absurd Conclusion, and all forms of the Mere Addition Paradox. I describe a “Quasi-Maximizing” theory that solves them. This theory includes (i) the denial that being better than is transitive and (ii) the “Conflation Principle,” according to which alternative B is hedonically better than alternative C if it would be better for someone to have all the B-experiences. (i) entails (...) that Quasi-Maximization is not a maximizing theory, but (ii) ensures that its evaluations will often coincide with such theories. (shrink)

The issue of downward causation (and mental causation in particular), and the exclusion problem is discussed by taking into account some recent advances in the philosophy of science. The problem is viewed from the perspective of the new interventionist theory of causation developed by Woodward. It is argued that from this viewpoint, a higher-level (e.g., mental) state can sometimes truly be causally relevant, and moreover, that the underlying physical state which realizes it may fail to be such.

Supposons qu'il soit possible de transplanter les centres de Ia douleur de Jones dans le cerveau de Smith. A mi-chemin pendant!'operation, on teste ces centres de Ia douleur en les stimulant électriquement in vitro. Y aurait-il de Ia douleur? L'argument de cet article est qu'il n'y en aurait pas, parce que Ia douleur doit avoir un possesseur. Sinon, il ne peut arriver que les centres de Ia douleur se déchargeant dans un cerveau soient en eux-mêmes Ia douleur. On peut logiquement (...) transférer le mécanisms de Ia douleur, mais non Ia douleur elle-mêmes. Ainsi le materialisme est faux.Suppose we live in a very advanced age of neurosurgical skills. We have a patient, Jones, with intractable pain. We have a second patient, Smith, with a long history of unintentional self-injury due to congenital absence of pain centres. So we decide to do double service by transplanting Jones's pain centres into Smith's brain. (shrink)

Supposons qu'il soit possible de transplanter les centres de Ia douleur de Jones dans le cerveau de Smith. A mi-chemin pendant!'operation, on teste ces centres de Ia douleur en les stimulant électriquement in vitro. Y aurait-il de Ia douleur? L'argument de cet article est qu'il n'y en aurait pas, parce que Ia douleur doit avoir un possesseur. Sinon, il ne peut arriver que les centres de Ia douleur se déchargeant dans un cerveau soient en eux-mêmes Ia douleur. On peut logiquement (...) transférer le mécanisms de Ia douleur, mais non Ia douleur elle-mêmes. Ainsi le materialisme est faux.Suppose we live in a very advanced age of neurosurgical skills. We have a patient, Jones, with intractable pain. We have a second patient, Smith, with a long history of unintentional self-injury due to congenital absence of pain centres. So we decide to do double service by transplanting Jones's pain centres into Smith's brain. (shrink)

What is a person, and how can a person come to know that she is a person identical to herself over time ? The article defends the view that the sense of being oneself in this sense consists in the ability to consciously affect oneself : in the memory of having affected oneself, joint to the consciousness of being able to affect oneself again. In other words, being a self requires a capacity for metacognition (control and monitoring of one's own (...) internal states). This view is compatible with the hypothesis that the self is a dynamic representation emerging out of a higher level control system, - valuation control - whose articulation with control of plans and perceptual/motor control is discussed in the context of normal and pertrubed agency. (shrink)

Fifty years ago J. J. C. Smart published his pioneering paper, “Sensations and Brain Processes.” It is appropriate to mark the golden anniversary of Smart’s publication by considering how well his article has stood up, and how well the identity theory itself has fared. In this paper I first revisit Smart’s text, reflecting on how it has weathered the years. Then I consider the status of the identity theory in current philosophical thinking, taking into account the objections and replies that (...) Smart discussed as well as some that he did not anticipate. Finally, I offer a brief manifesto for the identity theory, providing a small list of the claims that I believe contemporary identity theorist should accept. As it turns out, these are more or less the ones that Smart defended fifty years ago. (shrink)

A number of philosophers endorse, without argument, the view that there’s something it’s like consciously to think that p, which is distinct from what it’s like consciously to think that q. This thesis, if true, would have important consequences for philosophy of mind and cognitive science. In this paper I offer an argument for it, and attempt to induce examples of it in the reader. The argument claims it would be impossible introspectively to distinguish conscious thoughts with respect to their (...) content if there weren’t something it’s like to think them. This argument is defended against several objections. Then I use what I call “minimal pair” experiences—sentences read without and with understanding—to induce in the reader an experience of the kind I claim exists. Further objections are considered and rebutted. (shrink)

Some causal explanations are non-committal in that mention of a property in the explanans conveys information about the causal origin of the explanandum even if the property in question plays no causal role for the explanandum . Programme explanations are a variety of non-committal causal (NCC) explanations. Yet their interest is very limited since, as I will argue in this paper, their range of applicability is in fact quite narrow. However there is at least another variety of NCC explanations, causal (...) orientation explanations, which offer a plausible model for many explanations in the special sciences. (shrink)

According to the standard argument from targetless higher-order representations, the possibility of such representations presents a dilemma for higher-order theorists. In this article I argue that there are two theoretically well-motivated replies to the standard argument. Consequently, the standard argument against higher-order theories fails. I then go on to argue that while certain versions of higher-order theory can adequately respond to the standard argument, they both, nevertheless, fail to explain the fineness-of-grain that phenomenally conscious experience appears to have.

Most contemporary theorists regard the traditional thesis that perception is essentially conscious as just another armchair edict to be abandoned in the wake of empirical discovery. Here I reconsider this dramatic departure from tradition. My aim is not to recapture our prelapsarian confidence that perception is inevitably conscious (though much I say might be recruited to that cause). Instead, I want to problematize the now ubiquitous belief in unconscious perception. The paper divides into two parts. Part One is more purely (...) philosophical. It explains how standard arguments for unconscious perception rely on contentious background assumptions concerning the relation between ordinary perception and the explanatory constructs of scientific psychology. Part Two, in contrast, offers detailed engagement with relevant empirical work. It exposes how, even setting aside the concerns identified in Part One, a dilemma confronts the believer in unconscious perception. This dilemma arises because ordinary perception is an individual-level state or occurrence, yet criteria sufficiently stringent to guarantee that a putatively perceptual state is unconscious vitiate the grounds for its attribution to the individual. The dilemma foments a hypothesis, namely that the conditions for genuine, individual-level perception are sufficient conditions for perceptual consciousness. The viability of this hypothesis should unnerve anyone who thinks unconscious perception is simply an empirical given. (shrink)

Cognition is not, and could not possibly be, entirely representational in character. There is also a phenomenal form of cognitive expression that registers the intrinsic properties of mental states themselves. Arguments against the reality of this intrinsic phenomenal dimension to mental experience have focused either on its supposed impossibility, or secondly, the non-appearance of any such qualities to introspection. This paper argues to the contrary, that the registration of cognitive state properties does take place independently of representational content; and necessarily (...) so, since it supports an independent function—self-management. Given the fact that unlike a computer, the brain must, of necessity, operate itself, it needs to be in touch with itself to do so. Intrinsic phenomenal forms of cognitive expression allow the brain to do just that by registering characteristics of the cognitive states themselves. Self-management might well prove to constitute the prime reason for the emergence of subjectivity itself. (shrink)

When do children become consciously aware of events in the world? Five possible strategies are considered for their usefulness in determining the age in question. Three of these strategies ask when children show signs of engaging in activities for which conscious awareness seems necessary in adults , and two of the strategies consider when children have the ability to have the minimal form of higher-order thought necessary for access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness, respectively. The tentative answer to the guiding question (...) is that children become consciously aware between 12 and 15 months. (shrink)

A core commitment of the reflexive theory of consciousness is that conscious states are themselves necessarily the contents of mental states. The strongest argument for this claim—the necessity of inner-content for consciousness—is the argument from unconscious perception. According to this argument, we find evidence for the necessity claim from cases of alleged unconscious perception, the most well-known and widely discussed of these being blindsight. However, the reflexive theory cannot partake in this argument and therefore, must rely on at least one (...) of the other arguments for the necessity claim. These arguments are significantly less convincing than the argument from unconscious perception, and thus the reflexive theory is left in a dialectically weak position. (shrink)

The Significance Argument (SA) for the irreducibility of consciousness is based on a series of new puzzle-cases that I call multiple candidate cases. In these cases, there is a multiplicity of physical-functional properties or relations that are candidates to be identified with the sensible qualities and our consciousness of them, where those candidates are not significantly different. I will argue that these cases show that reductive materialists cannot accommodate the various ways in which consciousness is significant and must allow massive (...) vagueness in conscious experience. I also will argue that a nonreductive theory of the conscious-of relation can easily provide a very satisfying, unified explanation of the ways in which this relation is significant. (shrink)

Central-state materialism is a very strong, but also very exciting theory of mind according to which each mental state is identical with a state of the central nervous system. CSM thus goes considerably beyond early versions of the identity theory of mind, since those early accounts held only that sensations are to be identified with neural events. CSM, by contrast, is a thesis about all mental states; every mental state is held to be a state of the central nervous system. (...) In fact, as we will see shortly, CSM is an even more sweeping thesis than this formulation of it suggests, since it is not concerned simply with mental states.One prominent defender of CSM, David Armstrong, has maintained that CSM can be established by means of a two-step argument. (shrink)

The logical connection argument claims that since the relation between a want and the supposedly resultant action is " logical " in nature, Whereas the relation between any cause and its effect must be contingent in nature, A want therefore cannot be the cause of an action. I consider four classical formulations of the lca, And review various objections that have been brought against them. Then I present my own formulation of the lca, Which is immune to such objections. I (...) conclude that we must abandon the idea that a person's wants cause his actions. (shrink)

Higher-order theories of consciousness, such as those of Armstrong, Rosenthal and Lycan, typically distinguish sharply between consciousness and phenomenal character, or qualia. The higher-order states posited by these theories are intended only as explanations of consciousness, and not of qualia. In this paper I argue that the positing of higher-order perceptions may help to explain qualia. If we are realists about qualia, conceived as those intrinsic properties of our experience of which we are introspectibly aware, then higher-order perception might have (...) an explanatory role as the means by which we are aware of these properties. This would also allow us to treat qualia as the inner appearances resulting from inner perceptions, and therefore to treat them as intentional objects. (shrink)

The idea that we have special access to our own mental states has a distinguished philosophical history. Philosophers as different as Descartes and Locke agreed that we know our own minds in a way that is quite different from the way in which we know other minds. In the latter half of the twentieth century, however, this idea carne under serious attack, first from philosophy and more recently from developmental psychology. The attack from developmental psychology arises from the growing body (...) of work on “mindreading,” the process of attributing mental states to people. During the last fifteen years, the processes underlying rnindreading have been a major focus of attention in cognitive and developmental psychology. Most of this work has been concerned with the processes underlying the attribution of mental states toother people.However, a number of psychologists and philosophers have also proposed accounts of the mechanisms underlying the attribution of mental states tooneself.This process ofreading one's own mindorbecoming self-awarewill be our primary concern in this paper. (shrink)

Might something I do now make something have happened earlier? This paper is about an argument which concludes that I might. Some arguments about “backward causation” conclude that the world could have been the kind of place in which actions make things have happened earlier. The present argument says that it is that kind of place: that we actually are continually doing things that really make earlier things have happened. The argument is not new. It sees temporal direction as logically (...) independent of any direction which necessary and sufficient conditions may have and it sees causal direction as properly deriving from the latter. Thus the directions of time and of making things happen need not coincide and, as it turns out, do not actually coincide in fact. There are examples of events which are sufficient, in a suitably rich sense, for the occurrence of earlier events; hence they make the earlier events happen. My purpose in this paper is to lend support to the argument by filling in some details which ‘backward sufficient conditions’ may lay claim to. (shrink)

A-consciousness may be regarded as the visibility of information that is the output of a process within a community of other processes. The most prominent function of “public” dissemination of information is giving access to it to processes whose relevance is not clear at the moment of dissemination. The function of P-consciousness may be outside the realm of cognition.

In response to the objection that his “access-consciousness” is not really consciousness but a matter of the availability of certain information for certain kinds of processing, Block will probably have to argue that consciousness in a more basic, familiar, traditional sense is an essential component of any instance of access-consciousness and thus justifies the name.

Higher-order theories account for intransitive consciousness by using the transitive notion ‘awareness-of.’ I argue that this notion implies a form of ‘seeming’ that the higher-order approach requires, yet cannot account for. I show that, if the relevant kind of seeming is declared to be present in all representational states, the seeming in question is objectionably trivialized; while using the higher-order strategy to capture not only intransitive consciousness but also the relevant kind of seeming results in an infinite regress. Finally, highlighting (...) distinctive features of representations that explain why they display seeming amounts to abandoning the higher-order approach altogether. (shrink)

Perceptual Confidence is the view that perceptual experiences assign degrees of confidence. After introducing, clarifying, and motivating Perceptual Confidence, I catalogue some of its more interesting consequences, such as the way it blurs the distinction between veridical and illusory experiences, a distinction that is sometimes said to carry a lot of metaphysical weight. I also explain how Perceptual Confidence fills a hole in our best scientific theories of perception and why it implies that experiences don't have objective accuracy conditions.

In common sense consciousness has a fairly determinate content – the (single) way an experience feels, the (single) line of thought being consciously followed. The determinacy of the object may be achieved by linking Block's two concepts, so that as long as we hold on to the determinacy of content we are unable to separate P and A.

I will develop a new problem for almost all realist theories of colour. The problem involves fluctuations in our colour experiences that are due to visual noise rather than changes in the objects we are looking at.

_ Source: _Volume 94, Issue 3, pp 359 - 380 In this paper the author discusses and defends a theory of consciousness inspired by Franz Brentano, according to which every conscious experience involves a certain kind of immediate awareness of itself. All conscious experience is in a certain fundamental sense ‘self-intimating’—it constitutively involves awareness of that very awareness. The author calls this ‘the awareness of awareness thesis’, and she calls the phenomenon that it concerns ‘awareness of awareness’. The author attempts (...) to give a substantive description of what AOA consists in in two ways, first, by listing some of its positive features, and second, by comparing it and contrasting it with introspection. The idea is that there are many different ways we can be aware of our experiences, introspection being one way, AOA being another, distinct way. By clarifying the distinction between AOA and introspection, we can get a better grasp of both phenomena. (shrink)

In The Concept of Mind, Gilbert Ryle argued that a more sophisticated understanding of the dispositional nature of ‘intelligent capacities’ could bolster philosophical resistance to the tempting view that the human mind is possessed of metaphysically ‘occult’ powers and properties. This temptation is powerful in the context of accounting for the special qualities of responsible agency. Incompatibilists indulge the temptation; compatibilists resist it, using a variety of strategies. One recent strategy, reminiscent of Ryle’s, is to exploit a more sophisticated understanding (...) of dispositional properties to account for these qualities. But ‘new dispositionalists’ run up against a ‘hard problem’ that threatens the approach. This paper argues that the threat may be averted by embracing a yet more radical ‘Rylean’ view of the distinctive dispositional nature of ‘intelligent capacities’. (shrink)

It is often claimed in parts of the psychiatric literature that neuroscientific research into the biological basis of mental disorder undermines dualism in the philosophy of mind. This paper shows that such a claim does not apply to all forms of dualism. Focusing on Kenneth Kendler’s discussion of the mind–body problem in biological psychiatry, I argue that such criticism of dualism often conflates the psychological and phenomenal concepts of the mental. Moreover, it fails to acknowledge that there are different varieties (...) of dualism, and so overlooks the important metaphysical insights of contemporary dualist philosophers. I argue that while the neuroscientific research underpinning biological psychiatry challenges the traditional dualism of René Descartes, it does not pose any problem for the more modern dualism of David Chalmers. It is possible to take seriously the scientific claims of biological psychiatry while holding that this latter form of dualism is true. This has implications for the positioning of the mind–body problem in psychiatry. While the “easy” problem of explaining psychological processes is relevant to the aims of biological psychiatry, psychiatrists need not worry about the “hard” problem of consciousness. (shrink)

Working memory, an important posit in cognitive science, allows one to temporarily store and manipulate information in the service of ongoing tasks. Working memory has been traditionally classified as an explicit memory system – that is, as operating on and maintaining only consciously perceived information. Recently, however, several studies have questioned this assumption, purporting to provide evidence for unconscious working memory. In this paper, we focus on visual working memory and critically examine these studies as well as studies of unconscious (...) perception that seem to provide indirect evidence for unconscious working memory. Our analysis indicates that current evidence does not support an unconscious working memory store, though we offer independent reasons to think that working memory may operate on unconsciously perceived information. (shrink)

A common objection to sense-datum theories of perception is that they cannot give an adequate account of the fact that introspection indicates that our sensory experiences are directed on, or are about, the mind-independent entities in the world around us, that our sense experience is transparent to the world. In this paper I point out that the main force of this claim is to point out an explanatory challenge to sense-datum theories.

Qualia are phenomenal properties of sensations and perceptual states: they are whatever it is that gives such states their “felt,” qualitative character. (In speaking of sensations, I speak of course not of mental objects or mental contents, but of mental events—of sensings, not sensa.).

Block contends that the concept of consciousness is a mongrel concept and that researchers go astray by conflating different notions of “consciousness.” This is certainly true. In fact, it is truer than Block acknowledges, because his own notion of P-consciousness runs together two, or arguably three, quite different and separable features of a sensory state.

The information processing that constitutes accessconsciousness is not sufficient to make a representational state conscious in any sense. Standard examples of computation without consciousness undermine A-consciousness, and Block's cases seem to derive their plausibility from a lurking phenomenal awareness. That is, people and other minded systems seem to have access-consciousness only insofar as the state accessed is a phenomenal one, or the state resulting from access is phenomenal, or both.

Basically agreeing with Block regarding the need for a distinction between P- and A-consciousness, I characterize the problem somewhat diflerently, relating it more directly to the explanatory gap. I also speculate on the relation between the two forms of consciousness, arguing that some notion of access is essentially involved in phenomenal experience.

It is common to find depictions of behaviorist approaches to the mind as approaches according to which mental events are “dispositions for behavior.” Moreover, it is sometimes said that for these approaches the dispositions are for publicly observable behaviors, or even “purely physical movements,” thereby excluding from being constitutive of mental events any internal bodily happening, besides any movement not taken as “purely physical.” In this paper I aim to pinpoint problems in such widespread depictions of behaviorism about the mind, (...) by arguing that they turn out to be too restrictive or too broad, as the case may be. In addition, I put forward an alternative, more balanced characterization, which wards off such problems. Based upon this alternative characterization, I attempt to classify some of the embodied mind theories as behavioral, non-behavioral, or borderline cases between behavioral and non-behavioral perspectives. (shrink)

This paper addresses several objections that have been leveled against a behavioral approach to psychological categories. It reconstructs and critically assesses the so-called causal objection; alleged counterexamples whereby one can exhibit the typical behaviors associated with a psychological phenomenon without exhibiting the latter, including Lewis’ “perfect actor” case and Kirk’s “zombie”; alleged counterexamples whereby organisms can exemplify psychological phenomena without exhibiting any behavior associated with them, including Armstrong’s imagined brain in a vat, Putnam’s “super-super-spartans” scenario, and related cases; and the (...) holistic objection. Mistaken assumptions in each of these objections are pinpointed. The paper starts with a brief characterization of behaviorism about psychological categories and a summary of the particular version thereof supported here, which draws upon Ryle and Skinner, among others. (shrink)