While first-person methods are essential for a science of consciousness, it is controversial what form these methods should take and whether any such methods are reliable. I propose that first-person experiments are a reliable method for investigating conscious experience. I outline the history of these methods and describe their characteristics. In particular, a first-person experiment is an intervention on a subject's experience in which independent variables are manipulated, extraneous variables are held fixed, and in which the subject makes a phenomenal (...) judgement about the target experience of the investigation. I examine historical and contemporary examples of first-person experiments: Mariotte’s demonstration of the visual blind spot, Kanizsa’s subjective contours, the Tse Illusion, and investigations of the non-uniform resolution of the visual field. I discuss the role that phenomenal contrast plays in these methods, and how they overcome typical introspective errors. I argue that their intersubjective repeatability is an important factor in their scientific status, however, it is not the only factor. That they control for extraneous factors and confounds is another factor which sets them apart from pseudoscience (e.g., the perception of auras), and hence another reason for classifying them as genuine experiments. Furthermore, by systematically mapping out the structure of visual experience, these methods make scientific progress. Praises of such first-person experimental approaches may not always be sung by philosophers and psychologists, but they continue to flourish as respectable scientific methods nevertheless. (shrink)

This dissertation defends the reliability of first-person methods for studying consciousness, and applies first-person experiments to two philosophical problems: the experience of size and of the self. In chapter 1, I discuss the motivations for taking a first-person approach to consciousness, the background assumptions of the dissertation and some methodological preliminaries. In chapter 2, I address the claim that phenomenal judgements are far less reliable than perceptual judgements (Schwitzgebel, 2011). I argue that the main errors and limitations in making phenomenal (...) judgements are due to domain-general factors, which are shared in the formation of perceptual judgements. Phenomenal judgements may still be statistically less reliable than perceptual judgements, though I provide reasons for thinking that Schwitzgebel (2011) overstates the case for statistical unreliability. I also provide criteria for distinguishing between reliable and unreliable phenomenal judgements, hence defending phenomenal judgements against general introspective scepticism. Having identified the main errors in making phenomenal judgements, in chapter 3, I discuss how first-person experiments can be used to control for these errors. I provide examples, and discuss how they overcome attentional and conceptual errors, minimise biases, and exhibit high intersubjective reliability. In chapter 4, I investigate size experience. I use first-person experiments and empirical findings to argue that distant things looking smaller cannot be explained as an awareness of instantiated objective properties (visual angle or retinal image size). I also discuss how an awareness of uninstantiated objective properties cannot adequately account for the phenomenal character of size experience. This provides support for a subjectivist account of variance in size experience. In chapter 5, I investigate the sense of self. I distinguish between a weak sense of self (for-me-ness) and a strong sense of self in which there is a polarity between subject and object. I use first-person experiments from Douglas Harding to demonstrate an explicit strong sense of self, specifically when I point at where others see my face. I also argue that this sense of self is not explained by inference, thoughts, feelings, imagination nor the viewpoint. Rather, it is part of the structure of experience that I seem to be looking from here. Even if there is a sense of self, there may be no self. The question of chapter 6 is whether there can be a direct experience of the self. I argue that to function as a bearer of experience the subject must be single and lack sensory qualities in itself. I use Harding’s first-person experiments to investigate the visual gap where I cannot see my head. I argue that it conforms to the above criteria, and hence is a candidate for being the subject. This finding, in conjunction with the fact that I seem to be looking from the same location, provides prima facie evidence for the reality of the subject. I hold then that contrary to Hume and most philosophers since, that there can be a direct self-experience, if one knows which direction to attend. (shrink)

This dissertation examines representationalism about sensory phenomenology—the claim that for a sensory experience to have a particular phenomenal character is a matter of it having a particular representational content. I focus on a particular issue that is central to representationalism: whether reductive versions of the theory should be internalist or externalist. My primary goals are to demonstrate that externalist representationalism fails to provide a reductive explanation for phenomenal qualities, and to present a reductive internalist version of representationalism that utilizes the (...) empirical framework of psychophysics and neuroscience to develop a philosophical theory of content. The bulk of the project is an attempt to provide the outlines of what such an empirically-based representationalist theory would look like. In chapter 2, I argue that reductive externalist representationalism fails because it is vulnerable to the problem of bad structural correlation: the mismatch between the structure of phenomenal qualities and the structure of physical properties “tracked” by our sensory systems with which phenomenal qualities are identified. In chapter 3, I develop the outlines of a reductive internalist version of representationalism that characterizes phenomenal qualities as modes of presentation of sensory representations that can be reductively characterized in terms of a location in a psychophysically-defined quality space, which can in turn be given a neurophysiological interpretation. In addition, I argue that the neural mechanisms responsible for the representation of spatial locations and visual objects serve a referential role in sensory psychosemantics that grounds the intentionality of sensory states. In chapter 5 I provide a detailed account of the representation of spatial locations in sensory experience, and in chapter 6 I examine the “binding problem”, demonstrating how object-based sensory representations function to demonstratively pick out sensory individuals without explicitly representing any of their features. I describe the resulting view as methodological representationalism: an attempt to demonstrate how a particular philosophical theory of sensory phenomenology can be integrated into the empirical framework of cognitive science, and thereby provide an explanatory psychosemantic framework for sensory phenomenology that is valuable to both philosophers and cognitive scientists. (shrink)

Most contemporary philosophers of mind claim to be in search of a 'naturalistic' theory. However, when we look more closely, we find that there are a number of different and even conflicting ideas of what would count as a 'naturalization' of the mind. This article attempts to show what various naturalistic philosophies of mind have in common, and also how they differ from one another. Additionally, it explores the differences between naturalistic philosophies of mind and naturalisms found in ethics, epistemology, (...) and philosophy of science. Section 1 introduces a distinction between two types of project that have been styled 'naturalistic', which I call philosophical naturalism and empirical naturalism . Sections 2 to 6 canvass different strands of philosophical naturalism concerning the mind, followed by a much briefer discussion of attempts to provide empirical naturalizations of the mind in Section 7 . Section 8 concludes the essay with a consideration of the relations between philosophical and empirical naturalism in philosophy of mind, arguing that at least some types of philosophical naturalism are incompatible with empirical naturalism. (shrink)

In this paper the relationship between phenomenology of perception and synthetic phenomenology is discussed. Synthetic phenomenology is presented on the basis of the issues in A.I. and Robotics that required to address the question of what enables artificial agents to have phenomenal access to the environment. Phenomenology of perception is construed as a theory with autonomous structure and domain, which can be embedded in a philosophical as well as a scientific theory. Two attempts at specifying the phenomenal content of artificial (...) agents are discussed. Concepts and experimental evidence on the independence of perception and the coordination of motion and appearances are set out to submit that phenomenology of perception makes a contribution to synthetic phenomenology. (shrink)

This paper examines Fechner’s introduction to experimental psychophysics from a phenomenological perspective. Horst’s analysis is used to demonstrate the phenomenology that is inherent to classical perceptual psychophysics. Horst argues that the psychophysical event of perception can only be understood as an intentional intertwining of subject and object. From this we move to physiological component of psychophysics—that is, the processes that mediate perceptual awareness. Drawing primarily on the work of Rosen, it is argued the phenomenology provides the most appropriate approach for (...) what could be understood as a contemporary psychophysics—one that borrows from recent trends in physics, neuro-physiology, and perception as classical psychophysics had done. This results in a psychiatric neurophenomenology. Examples of the placebo effect and treatment of traumatic brain injury are used to demonstrate the usefulness of a phenomenological psychophysics, one that ultimately meets the demands of Fechner’s original proposal. (shrink)

Experimental phenomenology is the study of appearances in subjective awareness. Its methods and results challenge quite a few aspects of the current debate on consciousness. A robust theoretical framework for understanding consciousness is pending: current empirical research waves on what a phenomenon of consciousness properly is, not least because the question is still open on the observables to be measured and how to measure them. I shall present the basics of experimental phenomenology and discuss the current development of experimental phenomenology, (...) its main features, and the many misunderstandings that have obstructed a fair understanding and evaluation of its otherwise enlightening outcomes. (shrink)

This response to Silberstein's review undertakes two tasks. First, it attempts to clarify aspects of Cognitive Pluralism and its relationship to anti-reductionism. Second, it engages Silberstein's claim that traditional metaphysics of mind is dead, or at least should no longer be pursued.