I believe that there is a ubiquitous pre-reflective self-awareness accompanying first-order conscious states. However, I do not think that such self-awareness is itself typically conscious. On my view, conscious self-awareness enters the picture during what is sometimes called “introspection” which is a more sophisticated form of self-consciousness. I argue that there is a very close connection between consciousness and self-consciousness and, more specifically, between the structure of all conscious states and self-consciousness partly based on the higher-order thought theory of consciousness. (...) A plausible notion of self-consciousness is, I think, simply having any degree of higher-order or meta-psychological thought. I argue that the connection between conscious states and self-consciousness is representational but also critically evaluate several different options. I then critique the alternative “acquaintance” theory of self-awareness and address a couple of recent criticisms of HOT theory. There is the potential danger of misrepresentation between self-awareness and conscious states which I also briefly address. (shrink)

Most materialist responses to the zombie argument against materialism take either a “type-A” or “type-B” approach: they either deny the conceivability of zombies or accept their conceivability while denying their possibility. However, a “type-Q” materialist approach, inspired by Quinean suspicions about a priority and modal entailment, rejects the sharp line between empirical and conceptual truths needed for the traditional responses. In this paper, I develop a type-Q response to the zombie argument, one stressing the theory-laden nature of our conceivability and (...) possibility intuitions. I argue that our first-person access to the conscious mind systematically misleads us into thinking that the distinctive qualities of conscious experience—qualia—are nonfunctional. Qualia, I contend, are functional, even though they do not seem to be. To support my claim, I introduce the “meditations” of Rene Descartes’ zombie twin. This establishes the plausibility of an appearance/reality distinction for consciousness and it undermines various anti-materialist objections based on privileged first-person access. I conclude that the best overall theory posits an appearance/reality distinction for qualia, and this, for the type-Q materialist, is decisive. (shrink)

This dissertation may be divided into two parts. The first part is about the Extended Gricean Model of information transmission. This model, introduced here, is meant to better explain how humans communicate and understand each other. It has been developed to apply to cases that were left unexplained by the two main models of communication found in contemporary philosophy and linguistics, i.e. the Gricean (pragmatic) model and the code (semantic) model. In particular, I show that these latter two models cannot (...) apply to cases where one communicate through spontaneous emotional expressions and how the Extended Gricean Model of information transmission does. The second part of the dissertation is about what emotional signs mean, in various senses of the term ‘mean'. I review existing theories of meaning and see how they apply to emotional signs, i.e. signs which give us information about the affective state of the sign producer. (shrink)

To adopt a first-person perspective on consciousness is typically understood as a matter of inwardly engaging one's awareness in such a way as to make one's conscious states and their properties into objects of awareness. When awareness is thus inwardly engaged, experience functions as both act and object of awareness. As objects of awareness, an experience-token and its various properties are items of which a subject is aware. As an act of awareness, an experience-token is that in virtue of which (...) items - in this case, other experience-tokens and their properties - can appear, to a subject, as objects of awareness. The precise nature of the relation between experience functioning as act and as object is a matter of dispute. However, two broad possibilities can be distinguished: (1) as acts of awareness, experiences reveal other experiences to subjects by way of a form of direct, unmediated, acquaintance, (2) as acts of awareness experiences reveal other experiences to subjects by way of modes of presentation of those experiences. I shall argue against (1). Possibility (2), I shall argue, entails a form of representationalism about experiences: experiences are defined by their representational role. However, (2) also yields a crucial but largely neglected consequence of representationalism: necessarily, in any given experience, there is an aspect of this experience that must be understood in terms of its representational role but cannot be understood in terms of its representational content. I shall call this the ineliminable intentional core of the experience. The ineliminable intentional core of the experience is, necessarily, not an object of inwardly engaged awareness. This entails a significant revision in the way we think about the concept of the first-person perspective, and of what it is to study consciousness from the inside. (shrink)

Perceptual experiences inform us about objective properties of things in our environment. But they also have perspectival character in the sense that they differ phenomenally when objects are viewed from different points of view. Contemporary representationalists hold, at a minimum, that phenomenal character supervenes on representational content. Thus, in order to account for perspectival character, they need to indentify a type of representational content that changes in appropriate ways with the perceiver’s point of view. Many representationlists, including Shoemaker and Lycan, (...) argue that such contents are best construed in terms of mind-dependent properties. Other representationalists, including Tye and Dretske, hold that these contents involve only mind-independent properties. Susanna Schellenberg has recently developed an account of perceptual experience that would serve these latter representationalists extremely well. She suggests that we can do justice to the perspectival character of perceptual experience by appeal to representations of a certain type of relational properties, so-called ‘situation-dependent properties.’ In this paper, I critically engage with Schellenberg’s proposal in order to show how mind-independent representationalists can explain perspectival character. I argue that appeal to situation-dependent properties is problematic. I then show that mind-independent representationalists can account for perspectical character by means of scenario contents in Christopher Peacocke’s sense. (shrink)

This paper proposes a novel experimental approach that would help to determine whether perspectival shapes, such as the elliptical profile of a tilted plate or coin, are part of perceptual experience. If they are part of perceptual experience, then it should be possible to identify these shapes simply by attending appropriately to them. Otherwise, in order to identify perspectival shapes they must first be constructed in the visual imagination. We propose that these accounts of perspectival identification can be tested by (...) measuring the interference between visual and verbal working memory load, respectively, and the identification of perspectival shapes in the appearance of a 3D object. (shrink)

David Rosenthal explains conscious mentality in terms of two independent, though complementary, theories—the higher-order thought (“HOT”) theory of consciousness and quality-space theory (“QST”) about mental qualities. It is natural to understand this combination of views as constituting a kind of representationalism about experience—that is, a version of the view that an experience’s conscious character is identical with certain of its representational properties. At times, however, Rosenthal seems to resist this characterization of his view. We explore here whether and to what (...) extent it makes sense to construe Rosenthal’s views as representationalist. Our goal is not merely terminological—discerning how best to use the expression ‘representationalism’. Rather, we argue that understanding Rosenthal’s account as a kind of representationalism permits us not only to make sense of broader debates within the philosophy of mind, but also to extend and clarify aspects of the view itself. (shrink)

endorsed one kind of inverted spectrum hypothesis and rejected another. This paper argues that the kind of inverted spectrum hypothesis that Wittgenstein endorsed is the thin end of the wedge that precludes a Wittgensteinian critique of the kind of inverted spectrum hypothesis he rejected. The danger of the dangerous kind is that it provides an argument for qualia, where qualia are contents of experiential states which cannot be fully captured in natural language. I will pinpoint the difference between the innocuous (...) and dangerous scenarios that matters for the argument for qualia, give arguments in favor of the coherence and possibility of the dangerous scenario, and try to show that some standard arguments against inverted spectra are ineffective against the version of the dangerous scenario I will be advocating. The leading idea of the paper is that an argument for qualia based on spectrum inversion does not require that the inversion be behaviorally indistinguishable. At one crucial point, I will rely on a less controversial version of an argument I gave in Block. Wittgenstein's views provide a convenient starting point for a paper that is much more about qualia than about Wittgenstein. (shrink)

: Although Externalism is widely accepted as a thesis about belief, as a thesis about experience it is both controversial and unpopular. One potential explanation of this difference involves the phenomenality of perceptual experience—perhaps there is something about how perceptual experiences seem that straightforwardly speaks against Externalist accounts of their individuation conditions. In this paper, I investigate this idea by exploring the role that the phenomenality of color experience plays in a prominent argument against Phenomenal Externalism: Ned Block’s Inverted Earth (...) Argument. In the course of carrying out this investigation, I will show that challenging Phenomenal Externalism on phenomenological grounds is not as straightforward a task as it is commonly assumed to be. -/- . (shrink)

According to phenomenal conservatism or dogmatism, perceptual experiences can give us immediate justification for beliefs about the external world in virtue of having a distinctive kind of phenomenal character—namely phenomenal force. I present three cases to show that phenomenal force is neither pervasive among nor exclusive to perceptual experiences. The plausibility of such cases calls out for explanation. I argue that contrary to a long-held assumption, phenomenal force is a separate, non-perceptual state generated by some metacognitive mechanisms that monitor one’s (...) first-order mental processes and states. This new account advances our understanding of the nature of phenomenal force. (shrink)

Integration information theories posit that the integration of information is necessary and/or sufficient for consciousness. In this paper, we focus on three of the most prominent information integration theories: Information Integration Theory, Global Workspace Theory, and Attended Intermediate-Level Theory. We begin by explicating each theory and key concepts they utilize. We then argue that the current evidence indicates that the integration of information is neither necessary nor sufficient for consciousness. Unlike GWT and AIR, IIT maintains that conscious experience is both (...) necessary and sufficient for consciousness. We present empirical evidence indicating that simple features are experienced in the absence of feature integration and argue that it challenges IIT’s necessity claim. In addition, we challenge IIT’s sufficiency claim by presenting evidence from hemineglect cases and amodal completion indicating that contents may be integrated and yet fail to give rise to subjective experience. Moreover, we present empirical evidence from subjects with frontal lesions who are unable to carry out simple instructions and argue that they are irreconcilable with GWT. Lastly, we argue that empirical evidence indicating that patients with visual agnosia fail to identify objects they report being conscious of present a challenge to AIR’s necessity claim. (shrink)

Physicalism is the thesis that everything is physical, or as contemporary philosophers sometimes put it, that everything supervenes on, or is necessitated by, the physical. The thesis is usually intended as a metaphysical thesis, parallel to the thesis attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Thales, that everything is water, or the idealism of the 18th Century philosopher Berkeley, that everything is mental. The general idea is that the nature of the actual world (i.e. the universe and everything in it) conforms (...) to a certain condition, the condition of being physical. Of course, physicalists don't deny that the world might contain many items that at first glance don't seem physical — items of a biological, or psychological, or moral, or social nature. But they insist nevertheless that at the end of the day such items are either physical or supervene on the physical. (shrink)

David Rosenthal couples his higher-order thought theory of consciousness with a theory of “mental qualities”, properties of mental states. The first thesis of this paper is that there are no mental qualities as Rosenthal conceives of them. The second thesis is that Rosenthal’s residual insights are significant. They naturally lead to a simple first-order theory of consciousness.

Consciousness is central to our lived experience. It is unsurprising, then, that the topic has captivated many students, neuroscientists, philosophers, and other theorists working in cognitive science. But consciousness may seem especially difficult to explain. This is in part because the term “consciousness” has been used in many different ways. The goal of this chapter is to explore several kinds of consciousness: what theorists have called “creature,” “phenomenal,” “access,” “state,” “transitive,” “introspective,” and “self” consciousness. The basic distinctions among these kinds (...) of consciousness are described in Section 1. Section 2 raises potential challenges for explaining these varieties of consciousness and describes a few current theories of them. Section 3 closes the chapter by exploring directions for future work in the cognitive science of consciousness. Along the way, some of the possible interrelationships among these kinds of consciousness are discussed. (shrink)

There is consensus within the chemosciences that olfactory perception is of the molecular structure of chemical compounds, yet within philosophical theories of smell there is little agreement about the nature of smell. The paper critically assesses the current state of debate regarding smells within philosophy in the hopes of setting it upon firm scientific footing. The theories to be covered are: Naïve Realism, Hedonic Theories, Process Theory, Odor Theories, and non-Objectivist Theories. The aforementioned theories will be evaluated based on their (...) explanations of the (a) the olfactory quality of a smell, (b) smells as distal entities, and (c) our experience of smells as intentional objects. The paper concludes with a defense of Molecular Structure Theory that demonstrating its superiority in accounting for each of these three aspects of smell. (shrink)

This paper asks whether phenomenal intentionality (intentionality that arises from phenomenal consciousness alone) has a relational structure of the sort envisaged in Russell’s theory of acquaintance. I put forward three arguments in favor of a relation view: one phenomenological, one linguistic, and one based on the view’s ability to account for the truth conditions of phenomenally intentional states. I then consider several objections to the relation view. The chief objection to the relation view takes the form of a dilemma between (...) Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of the properties constitutive of the contents of phenomenally intentional states on this view: the Aristotelian view seems unable to account for all the apparent contents of phenomenally intentional states, but the Platonic view seems to be ontologically unacceptable. I also consider other objections from physicalism, phenomenology, and epistemology. (shrink)

This chapter argues that olfactory experiences represent either everyday objects or ad hoc olfactory objects as having primitive olfactory properties, which happen to be uninstantiated. On this picture, olfactory experiences reliably misrepresent: they falsely represent everyday objects or ad hoc objects as having properties they do not have, and they misrepresent in the same way on multiple occasions. One might worry that this view is incompatible with the plausible claim that olfactory experiences at least sometimes justify true beliefs about the (...) world. This chapter argues that there is no such incompatibility. Since olfactory experiences reliably misrepresent, they can lead to true and justified beliefs about putatively smelly objects. (shrink)

A primer on the philosophical issues relating to phenomenal consciousness, part of a collection of new papers by scientists and philosophers on the constitution of consciousness.

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 (...) suggest how the proponent of the knowledge argument might respond to each of these challenges. In doing so, I will draw on recent discussions of grounding and essence in the metaphysics literature. (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.

Higher-order thought theories maintain that consciousness involves the having of higher-order thoughts about mental states. In response to these theories of consciousness, an attempt is often made to illustrate that nonhuman animals possess said consciousness, overlooking an alarming consequence: attributing higher-order thought to nonhuman animals might entail that they should be held morally accountable for their actions. I argue that moral responsibility requires more than higher-order thought: moral agency requires a specific higher-order thought which concerns a belief about the rightness (...) or wrongness of affecting another’s mental states. This “moral thought” about the rightness or wrongness is not yet demonstrated in even the most intelligent nonhuman animals, thus we should suspend our judgments about the “rightness” or “wrongness” of their actions while further questioning the recent insistence on developing an animal morality. (shrink)

Eric Schwitzgebel (2011) argues that phenomenal judgments are in general less reliable than perceptual judgments. This paper distinguishes two versions of this unreliability thesis. The process unreliability thesis says that unreliability in phenomenal judgments is due to faulty domain-specific mechanisms involved in producing these judgments, whereas the statistical unreliability thesis says that it is simply a matter of higher numbers of errors. Against the process unreliability thesis, I argue that the main errors and limitations in making phenomenal judgments can be (...) accounted for by domain-general factors: attention, working memory limits and conceptualization. As these factors are shared with the production of perceptual judgments, errors in phenomenal judgments are not due to faulty domain-specific processes. Furthermore, this account defends phenomenal judgments against general scepticism by providing criteria for distinguishing between reliable and unreliable phenomenal judgments. (shrink)

Um dos grandes desafios da era da informação consiste em filtrar informações claras, rigorosas e atualizadas sobre tópicos importantes. O mesmo vale para a filosofia. Como encontrar conteúdo filosófico confiável em meio a milhares de artigos publicados diariamente na internet? Para ir ainda mais longe, como encontrar uma introdução a algum tópico com uma lista de referências bibliográficas atualizadas e que seja organizada por um especialista da área? Já que você começou a ler este livro, é provável que tenha ouvido (...) falar em algum momento da Enciclopédia Stanford de Filosofia, disponível gratuitamente na internet desde 1995. A página da Stanford faz exatamente isso. Ela cobre inúmeros verbetes sobre quase tudo em filosofia, oferecendo informação confiável sobre temas como feminismo, filosofia na América Latina, zumbis, metafísica e milhares de outros tópicos. A sugestão típica aos profissionais da filosofia que têm interesse em começar a estudar algum tópico, mas não sabem sequer por onde começar, é procurar pelo verbete relevante da Stanford. Infelizmente, o grande empecilho da página para o nosso contexto é que todos os verbetes estão disponíveis apenas em inglês, algo que cria um obstáculo a inúmeros estudantes e interessados que não dominam a língua. Neste sentido, acreditamos que esta publicação preencha um hiato importante na filosofia brasileira. Embora a filosofia no Brasil tenha se profissionalizado e expandido ao longo dos anos, há ainda lacunas em diversas áreas, e os verbetes foram aqui selecionados cuidadosamente no intuito de preencher ao menos algumas dessas lacunas. Este livro apresenta quatro verbetes cruciais para a filosofia, aqui divididos em quatro capítulos: (1) condições necessárias e suficientes, (2) referência (3) causação e (4) consciência. (shrink)

Although philosophers of art and aesthetics regularly appeal to a notion of ‘pictorial content’, there is little agreement over its nature. The present paper argues that pictures have propositional contents. This conclusion is reached by considering a style of argument having to do with the phenomenon of negation intended to show that pictures must have some kind of non-propositional content. I first offer reasons for thinking that arguments of that type fail. Second, I show that when properly understood, such arguments (...) can in fact be turned on their heads and shown to support the propositionalist position. (shrink)

Despite the current resurgence of modest forms of mind–body dualism, traditional Cartesian immaterial-substance dualism has few, if any, defenders. This paper argues that no convincing case has been made against substance dualism, and that standard objections to it can be credibly answered.

If two subjects have phenomenally identical experiences, there is an important sense in which the way the world appears to them is precisely the same. But how are we to understand this notion of 'ways of appearing'? Most philosophers who have acknowledged the existence of phenomenal content have held that the way something appears is simply a matter of the properties something appears to have. On this view, the way something appears is simply the way something appears to be . (...) This identification supports a Russellian theory of phenomenal content, according to which phenomenal content is exhausted by facts about what specific properties are represented by an experience. The present paper motivates and develops an alternative Fregean theory of phenomenal colour content. According to Fregean theories, the phenomenal content that is shared by any two phenomenally identical experiences is a matter of how the world is represented, and need not involve sameness in what is represented. It is argued that ways of appearing are modes of presentations of external properties and objects, and a detailed theory is presented about the nature of the modes of presentation involved in colour experience. (shrink)

The prolific discussion about consciousness has resulted a multiplicity in the uses for the term. The -curious- little clarity regarding the use of the notion, can lead to confusion to who tries to enter the contemporary discussion of the philosophy of mind. The purpose of this article is to serve as a starting point for those who seek to enter the contemporary discussion of consciousness, presenting: i) the central concept of the consciousness that is used, and ii) give an account (...) of the state of the discussion, that is, the central problem of consciousness. (shrink)

We defend Laurence Nemirow’s and David Lewis’s Ability Hypothesis against Paul Raymont’s criticisms in defense of Jackson’s Knowledge Argument. According to the Ability Hypothesis, what Mary lacked when she was in her black-and-white room was a set of abilities; she did not know how to recognize or imagine certain types of experience. Her subsequent discovery of what it is like to experience color amounts to no more than her acquiring these abilities. Appealing to the Molyneux test, Raymont has argued that (...) knowledge of what an experience is like cannot be equated with the possession of any set of abilities, since one can be in possession of a recognitional ability concerning a certain type of experience without knowing what that experience is like. We argue that the intermodal recognitional ability in the Molyneux test and similar ones depends on previous experience and thus makes an implicit appeal to knowledge of what it is like. (shrink)

We perceive smells as perduring complex entities within a distal array that might be conceived of as smellscapes. However, the philosophical orthodoxy of Odor Theories has been to deny that smells are perceived as having a distal location. Recent challenges have been mounted to Odor Theories’ veracity in handling the timescale of olfactory perception, how it individuates odors as a distal entities, and their claim that olfactory perception is not spatial. The paper does not aim to dispute these criticisms. Rather, (...) what will be shown is that Molecular Structure Theory, a refinement of Odor Theory, can be further developed to handle these challenges. The theory is further refined by focusing on distal perception that requires considering the perceptual object as mereologically complex persisting odor against a background scene conceived of as a smellscape. What will be offered is an expansion of Molecular Structure Theory to account for distal smell perception within natural environments. (shrink)

Is a human more conscious than an octopus? In the science of consciousness, it’s oftentimes assumed that some creatures (or mental states) are more conscious than others. But in recent years, a number of philosophers have argued that the notion of degrees of consciousness is conceptually confused. This paper (1) argues that the most prominent objections to degrees of consciousness are unsustainable, (2) examines the semantics of ‘more conscious than’ expressions, (3) develops an analysis of what it is for a (...) degreed property to count as degrees of consciousness, and (4) applies the analysis to various theories of consciousness. I argue that whether consciousness comes in degrees ultimately depends on which theory of consciousness turns out to be correct. But I also argue that most theories of consciousness entail that consciousness comes in degrees. (shrink)

According to an influential philosophical view I call “the relational properties view”, “perspectival” properties, such as the elliptical appearance of a tilted coin, are relational properties of external objects. Philosophers have assessed this view on the basis of phenomenological, epistemological or other purely philosophical considerations. My aim in this paper is to examine whether it is possible to evaluate RPV empirically. In the first, negative part of the paper I consider and reject a certain tempting way of doing so. In (...) the second, positive part of the paper I suggest a novel way of evaluating RPV empirically, relying on the influential object files framework. (shrink)

An important objection to the "higher-order" theory of consciousness turns on the possibility of higher-order misrepresentation. I argue that the objection fails because it illicitly assumes a characterization of consciousness explicitly rejected by HO theory. This in turn raises the question of what justifies an initial characterization of the data a theory of consciousness must explain. I distinguish between intrinsic and extrinsic characterizations of consciousness, and I propose several desiderata a successful characterization of consciousness must meet. I then defend the (...) particular extrinsic characterization of the HO theory, the "transitivity principle," against its intrinsic rivals, thereby showing that the misrepresentation objection conclusively falls short. (shrink)

The same-order representation theory of consciousness holds that conscious mental states represent both the world and themselves. This complex representational structure is posited in part to avoid a powerful objection to the more traditional higher-order representation theory of consciousness. The objection contends that the higher-order theory fails to account for the intimate relationship that holds between conscious states and our awareness of them--the theory 'divides the phenomenal labor' in an illicit fashion. This 'failure of intimacy' is exposed by the possibility (...) of misrepresentation by higher-order states. In this paper, I argue that despite appearances, the same-order theory fails to avoid the objection, and thus also has troubles with intimacy. (shrink)

How do questions concerning consciousness and phenomenal experience relate to, or interface with, questions concerning plans, knowledge and intentions? At least in the case of visual experience the relation, we shall argue, is tight. Visual perceptual experience, we shall argue, is fixed by an agent’s direct unmediated knowledge concerning her poise (or apparent poise) over a currently enabled action space. An action space, in this specific sense, is to be understood not as a fine-grained matrix of possibilities for bodily movement, (...) but as a matrix of possibilities for pursuing and accomplishing one’s intentional actions, goals and projects. If this is correct, the links between planning, intention and perceptual experience are tight, while (contrary to some recent accounts invoking the notion of ‘sensorimotor expectations’) the links between embodied activity and perceptual experience, though real, are indirect. What matters is not bodily activity itself, but our practical knowledge (which need not be verbalized or in any way explicit) of our own possibilities for action. Such knowledge, selected, shaped and filtered by the grid of plans, goals, and intentions, plays, we argue, a constitutive role in explaining the content and character of visual perceptual experience. (shrink)

Is the flavor of mint reducible to the minty smell, the taste, and the menthol-like coolness on the roof of one’s mouth, or does it include something over and above these—something not properly associated with any one of the contributing senses? More generally, are there features of perceptual experiences—so-called novel features—that are not associated with any of our senses taken singly? This question has received a lot of attention of late. Yet surprisingly little attention has been paid to the question (...) of what it means to say that a feature is associated with a sensory modality in the first place. Indeed, there is only one fully developed proposal in the literature, due to Casey O’Callaghan. I argue that this proposal is too permissive to inform the debate over novel features. I go on to argue that all attempts to formulate a better proposal along these lines fail. The corollary of my arguments is that the question of the existence of novel features is poorly formed. Furthermore, the problem generalizes, with the result that we should not rely on our pre-theoretical notions of the senses as the basis of theorizing about the features of perceptual experiences. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Gow raised a new and interesting problem for externalist representationalism, the conclusion of which is that its proponents are unable to provide an acceptable account of the phenomenal character of colour hallucination. In contrast to Gow, we do not believe that the problem is particularly severe – indeed, that there is any problem at all. Thus our aim is to defend externalist representationalism against the problem raised by Gow. To this end, we will first reconstruct her (...) reasoning, and then show that it poses no real challenge to externalist representationalism. (shrink)

I discuss two forms of the thesis that to have a sensation is to token a sentence in a language of thought-what I call, following Georges Rey, the sensational sentences thesis. One form of the thesis is a version of standard functionalism, while the other is a version of the increasingly popular thesis that for a sensation to have qualia is for it to have a certain kind of intentional content-that is, intentionalism. I defend the basic idea behind the sensational (...) sentences thesis, and argue that the intentionalist version is either false or collapses into the standard functionalist thesis. (shrink)

I argue that introspection recruits the same mental mechanism as that which is required for the production of ordinary speech acts. In introspection, in effect, we intentionally tell ourselves that we are in some mental state, aiming thereby to produce belief about that state in ourselves. On one popular view of speech acts, however, this is precisely what speakers do when speaking to others. On this basis, I argue that every bias discovered by social epistemology applies to introspection and other (...) forms of self-directed representation. If so, it becomes unclear in what sense social epistemology is social. (shrink)

In a series of papers and lectures, Sydney Shoemaker has developed a sophisticated Russellian theory of phenomenal content. It has as its central motivation two considerations. One is the possibility of spectrum - inversion without illusion. The other is the transparency of experience.

Phenomenal character is determined by representational content, which both hallucinatory and veridical experiences can share. But in the case of veridical experience, unlike hallucination, the external objects of experience literally have the properties one is aware of in experience. The representationalist can accept the common factor assumption without having to introduce sensory intermediaries between the mind and the world, thus securing a form of direct realism.

Representationalism, the view that phenomenal character supervenes on intentional content, has attracted a wide following in recent years. Most representationalists have also endorsed what I call 'standard Russellianism'. According to standard Russellianism, phenomenal content is Russellian in nature, and the properties represented by perceptual experiences are mind-independent physical properties. I argue that standard Russellianism conflicts with the everyday experience of colour constancy. Due to colour constancy, standard Russellianism is unable to simultaneously give a proper account of the phenomenal content of (...) colour experience and do justice to its phenomenology. (shrink)

Critics of wide functionalism have traditionally sought to attack the theory by exposing weaknesses in its account of the qualitative content of experience. Wide functionalist theories of intentional content, however, were spared philosophical scrutiny. I propose that wide functionalist accounts of the intentional content are equally susceptible to attack. I will attempt to demonstrate this by enlisting the functionalist's old foe from the qualia wars - the inverted spectrum hypothesis - in a new way. If the argument is sound, not (...) only will I have shown that the inverted spectrum hypothesis may have more use than philosophical literature recognizes, I will have also exposed a weakness in a dominant philosophical theory: the wide functionalist theory of intentional content. (shrink)

It's a common idea in philosophy that we possess a peculiar kind of "phenomenal concept" by which we can think about our conscious states in "inner" and "direct" ways, as for example, when I attend to the way a current pain feels and think about this feeling as such. Such phenomenal ways of thinking figure in a variety of theoretical contexts. The bulk of this article discusses their use in a certain strategy – the phenomenal concept strategy – for defending (...) the physicalist view that conscious states are reducible to brain states. It also considers, more briefly, how phenomenal concepts have been used to defend dualism about consciousness, and how they have been used to explain our special access to our consciousness. It concludes with a discussion about whether, and in what more precise sense of the term, we at all possess "phenomenal concepts" of our conscious states. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to understand and assess Thomas Nagel's influential case against physicalism in the philosophy of mind. I show that Nagel has claimed that experience is "subjective", or "essentially connected with a single point of view" in at least three different senses: first, in the sense that it is essential to every experience that there be something it is like to have it; second, in the sense that what an experience is like for its possessor cannot be (...) understood by a radically different type of organism; and third, in the sense that an experience cannot be "apprehended" or "observed" from a third-person perspective. I also show that these three claims have entered into two different arguments for his view that experience cannot be accounted for in physicalist terms. By way of assessment, I suggest that physicalists have decent resources for responding to the second and third of Nagel's claims about the subjectivity of experience, but that they currently have less convincing things to say about the first claim. (shrink)

A number of philosophers have recently argued that consciousness properties are identical with some set of physical or functional properties and that we can explain away the frequently felt puzzlement about this claim as a delusion or confusion generated by our different ways of apprehending or thinking about consciousness. This paper examines David Papineau’s influential version of this view. According to Papineau, the difference between our “phenomenal” and “material” concepts of consciousness produces an instinctive but erroneous intuition that these concepts (...) can’t co-refer. I claim that this account fails. To begin with, it is arguable that we are mystified about physicalism even when the account predicts that we shouldn’t be. Further, and worse, the account predicts that an “intuition of distinctness” will arise in cases where it clearly does not. In conclusion, I make some remarks on the prospects for, constraints on, and alternatives to, a successful defence of the claim. (shrink)