According to Sparse views of perceptual content, the phenomenal character of perceptual experience is exhausted by the experiential presentation of ‘low-level’ properties such as (in the case of vision) shapes, colors, and textures Whereas, according to Rich views of perceptual content, the phenomenal character of perceptual experience can also sometimes involve experiencing ‘high-level’ properties such as natural kinds, artefactual kinds, causal relations, linguistic meanings, and moral properties. An important dialectical tool in the debate between Rich and Sparse theorists is the (...) so-called ‘method of phenomenal contrast’. I explore how this method of phenomenal contrast interacts with the sort of content-externalism made familiar by Putnam. I show that the possibility of Twin Earth style cases places important restrictions on the range of properties that the method of phenomenal contrast could plausibly apply to. Moreover, these restrictions would apply to some paradigmatically low-level properties as well as to some of the frequently advanced high-level properties. I also draw some general lessons about the different ways one might conceive of the relation between phenomenal character and representational content. (shrink)

Though the divide between reason-based and causal-explanatory approaches in psychiatry and psychopathology is old and deeply rooted, current trends involving multi-factorial explanatory models and evidence-based approaches to interpersonal psychotherapy, show that it has already been implicitly bridged. These trends require a philosophical reconsideration of how reasons can be causes. This paper contributes to that trajectory by arguing that Donald Davidson’s classic paradigm of 1963 is still a valid option.

I argue that physicalists have been too conciliatory in granting that certain classic thought experiments about consciousness like Mary the colour scientist, colour spectrum inversion, and zombies provide strong prima facie support for epiphenomenal anti-physicalism. While these thought experiments may suggest that we are intuitive epiphenomenal anti-physicalists when taken individually, when they are appropriately combined, they suggest that epiphenomenal anti-physicalism leads to a version of phenomenal scepticism according to which (i) we cannot know how our states of phenomenal consciousness compare (...) and contrast and (ii) we cannot know how our first-order beliefs about our states of consciousness compare and contrast. Insofar as comparative phenomenal scepticism is a deeply counter-intuitive view, our intuitions about consciousness are far more equivocal than they are widely thought to be. There simply may be no one metaphysical view that should qualify as their obvious champion. (shrink)