Many contributors of the debate about knowledge by testimony concentrate on the problem of justification. In my paper I will stress a different point – the concept of testimony itself. As a starting point I will use the definitional proposal of Jennifer Lackey. She holds that the concept of testimony should be regarded as entailing two aspects – one corresponding to the speaker, the other one to the hearer. I will adopt the assumption that we need to deal with both (...) aspects. Nevertheless, I will show that her concept – which suggests regarding testimony as an act of communication conveying information – is too broad and, therefore, I will end up with a different twofold definition. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to reinforce anti-physicalism by extending the hard problem to a specific kind of intentional states. For reaching this target, I investigate the mental content of the new intentional states of Jackson’s Mary. I proceed in the following way: I start analyzing the knowledge argument, which highlights the hard problem tied to phenomenal consciousness. In a second step, I investigate a powerful physicalist reply to this argument: the phenomenal concept strategy. In a third step, I (...) propose a constitutional account of phenomenal concepts that captures the Mary scenario adequately, but implies anti-physicalist referents. In a last step, I point at the ramifications constitutional phenomenal concepts have on the constitution of Mary’s new intentional states. Therefore, by focusing the attention on phenomenal concepts, the so-called hard problem of consciousness will be carried over to the alleged easy problem of intentional states as well. (shrink)

In recent publications, Keith Lehrer developed the intriguing idea of a special mental process– exemplarization – and applied it in a sophisticated manner to different phenomena such as intentionality, representation of the self, the knowledge of ineffable content (of art works) and the problem of (phenomenal) consciousness. In this paper I am primarily concerned with the latter issue. The target of this paper is to analyze whether exemplarization, besides explaining epistemic phenomena such as immediate and ineffable knowledge of experiences, can (...) also solve the ontological problem of consciousness. In particular, Lehrer suggests that if we consider exemplarization, zombies cannot provide an argument for anti-physicalism. I argue that exemplarization offers neither a physicalist explanation of the conceivability of zombies nor a physicalist account of their impossibility. Therefore, exemplarization cannot offer a physicalist solution to the “hard problem” of consciousness. (shrink)

For most of the major philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, human cognition was understood as involving the mind’s reflexive grasp of its own contents. But other important figures have described the very idea of a reflexive thought as incoherent. Ryle notably likened the idea of a reflexive thought to an arm that grasps itself. Recent work in philosophy, psychology, and the cognitive sciences has greatly clarified the special epistemic and semantic properties of reflexive thought. This article is an (...) attempt to give an explicit characterization of the structure of reflexive thoughts that explains those properties and avoids the complaints of its critics. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to reinforce anti-physicalism by extending the “hard problem” to a specific kind of intentional states. For reaching this target, I investigate the mental content of the new intentional states of Jackson’s Mary. I proceed in the following way: I start analyzing the knowledge argument, which highlights the “hard problem” tied to phenomenal consciousness. In a second step, I investigate a powerful physicalist reply to this argument: the phenomenal concept strategy. In a third step, I (...) propose a constitutional account of phenomenal concepts that captures the Mary scenario adequately, but implies anti-physicalist referents. In a last step, I point at the ramifications constitutional phenomenal concepts have on the constitution of Mary’s new intentional states. Therefore, by focusing the attention on phenomenal concepts, the so-called “hard problem” of consciousness will be carried over to the alleged “easy problem” of intentional states as well. (shrink)

Keith Lehrer distinguishes three kinds of questions about consciousness: scientific questions, metaphysical questions, and epistemological questions. He leaves the scientific questions to the scientists. He articulates and answers the peculiar epistemological questions posed by consciousness. And he boldly contends that no metaphysical questions about consciousness remain, once the epistemological questions have been answered. This is an astonishing claim. What happened to the metaphysical questions? Were they pseudo-questions? Were they epistemological questions masquerading as metaphysical ones? And isn't it possible that Lehrer's (...) epistemological account of consciousness raises metaphysical questions of its own? I will argue that Lehrer's account of consciousness does leave a metaphysical remainder. To deal with this remainder, Lehrer could try to expand his explanatory framework—but this would involve to a substantial revision of his current views. I end with a speculative proposal that might allow Lehrer acknowledge all the points raised in this paper, but without forcing him to revise his account of consciousness in a substantial way. (shrink)

Lehrer has argued that in having an aesthetic experience of an art work we come to have ineffable knowledge of what the art object is like. This knowledge is made possible by our ability to conceptualize the art object by means of a process Lehrer calls, "exemplarization", that involves using an experience to craft a general representation of that very experience. I suggest that exemplar concepts function as vehicles of ineffable representation only if they have two features: (i) they are (...) directly referential concepts; and (ii) they are what I call, "lucid concepts.". (shrink)

Alexius Meinong's specific use of the term "self-presentation" had a significant influence on modern epistemology and philosophical psychology. To show that there are remarkable parallels between Meinong's account of the self-presentation of experiences and Lehrer's account of the exemplarization of experiences is one of this paper's main objectives. Another objective is to put forward some comments and critical remarks to Lehrer's approach. One of the main problems can be expressed by the following: The process of using a particular experience as (...) a sample, that is, an exemplar that we use to stand for and refer to a plurality of experiences, Lehrer calls "exemplarization". As concrete experiences are multifarious (red and round, for example), how can we single out a specific sort of experiences (the red ones) by the process of exemplarization when we use such a multifarious experience as a sample? (shrink)

Sellars (1963) distinguished in Empiricism and Philosophy of Mind between ordinary discourse, which expressed his “manifest image”, and scientific discourse, which articulated his “scientific image” of man-in-the-world in a way that is both central and problematic to the rest of his philosophy. Our contention is that the problematic feature of the distinction results from Sellars theory of inner episodes as theoretical entities. On the other hand, as Sellars attempted to account for our noninferential knowledge of such states, particularly in correspondence (...) with Castañeda, discussed by Lehrer and Stern (2000), he is lead to account of representation of such states that incorporates the states into what Lehrer has called exemplar representation (2004, 2011a) and Ismael reflexive self-description (2007). What is common to the three accounts, with some differences, is that such states may be function reflexively in selfrepresentation. Our argument is that the elaboration of this account, suggested in Sellars, shows how the discourse of the manifest image can be transformed into the discourse of the scientific image as self-representations of scientific entities. (shrink)