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  1. Unconscious Perception, Action, and the Problem of Attribution.Paweł Jakub Zięba - forthcoming - Acta Analytica:1-22.
    According to Phillips, (1) genuine perception is attributable to the individual (i.e. it’s a personal state/event, as opposed to sub-personal states/events in the individual’s brain); (2) since unconscious perceptual representations are ill-suited to guide action, there’s no good reason to attribute them to the individual; (3) not being attributable to the individual, they don’t instantiate genuine perception, thereby failing to support the hypothesis that genuine perception can occur unconsciously. I argue that this reasoning is flawed and can’t be easily fixed. (...)
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  • Perception needs modular stimulus-control.Anders Nes - 2023 - Synthese 201 (6):1-30.
    Perceptual processes differ from cognitive, this paper argues, in functioning to be causally controlled by proximal stimuli, and being modular, at least in a modest sense that excludes their being isotropic in Jerry Fodor's sense. This claim agrees with such theorists as Jacob Beck and Ben Phillips that a function of stimulus-control is needed for perceptual status. In support of this necessity claim, I argue, inter alia, that E.J. Green's recent architectural account misclassifies processes deploying knowledge of grammar as perceptual. (...)
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  • The role of conscious perception in semantic processing: Testing the action trigger hypothesis.Nitzan Micher & Dominique Lamy - 2023 - Consciousness and Cognition 107 (C):103438.
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  • The epistemic import of phenomenal consciousness.Paweł Jakub Zięba - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy:1-37.
    This paper controverts the ability of intentionalism about perception to account for unique epistemic significance of phenomenal consciousness. More specifically, the intentionalist cannot explain the latter without denying two well-founded claims: the transparency of experience, and the possibility of unconscious perception. If they are true, intentionality of perception entails that phenomenal consciousness has no special epistemic role to play. Although some intentionalists are ready to bite this bullet, by doing so they effectively undermine one of the standard motivations of their (...)
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  • The extended mind argument against phenomenal intentionality.Cody Turner - 2021 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 21 (4):747-774.
    This paper offers a novel argument against the phenomenal intentionality thesis (or PIT for short). The argument, which I'll call the extended mind argument against phenomenal intentionality, is centered around two claims: the first asserts that some source intentional states extend into the environment, while the second maintains that no conscious states extend into the environment. If these two claims are correct, then PIT is false, for PIT implies that the extension of source intentionality is predicated upon the extension of (...)
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  • Seeing colours unconsciously.Paweł Jakub Zięba - 2022 - Synthese 200 (3):1-36.
    According to unconscious perception hypothesis (UP), mental states of the same fundamental kind as ordinary conscious seeing can occur unconsciously. The proponents of UP often support it with empirical evidence for a more specific hypothesis, according to which colours can be seen unconsciously (UPC). However, UPC is a general claim that admits of many interpretations. The main aim of this paper is to determine which of them is the most plausible. To this end, I investigate how adopting various conceptions of (...)
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  • First-Person Perspective in Experience: Perspectival De Se Representation as an Explanation of the Delimitation Problem.Miguel Ángel Sebastián - 2024 - Erkenntnis 89 (3):947-969.
    In developing a theory of consciousness, one of the main problems has to do with determining what distinguishes conscious states from non-conscious ones—the delimitation problem. This paper explores the possibility of solving this problem in terms of self-awareness. That self-awareness is essential to understanding the nature of our conscious experience is perhaps the most widely discussed hypothesis in the study of consciousness throughout the history of philosophy. Its plausibility hinges on how the notion of self-awareness is unpacked. The idea that (...)
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  • Perceptual capacitism: an argument for disjunctive disunity.James Openshaw & Assaf Weksler - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (11):3325-3348.
    According to capacitism, to perceive is to employ personal-level, perceptual capacities. In a series of publications, Schellenberg (2016, 2018, 2019b, 2020) has argued that capacitism offers unified analyses of perceptual particularity, perceptual content, perceptual consciousness, perceptual evidence, and perceptual knowledge. “Capacities first” (2020: 715); appealing accounts of an impressive array of perceptual and epistemological phenomena will follow. We argue that, given the Schellenbergian way of individuating perceptual capacities which underpins the above analyses, perceiving an object does not require employing a (...)
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  • What Blindsight Means for the Neural Correlates of Consciousness.Michael Barkasi - 2021 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 28 (11-12):7-30.
    Do perceptual experiences always inherit the content of their neural correlates? Most scientists and philosophers working on perception say ‘yes’. They hold the view that an experience’s content just is (i.e. is identical to) the content of its neural correlate. This paper presses back against this view, while trying to retain as much of its spirit as possible. The paper argues that type-2 blindsight experiences are plausible cases of experiences which lack the content of their neural correlates. They are not (...)
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  • Selectionism and Diaphaneity.Paweł Jakub Zięba - 2022 - Axiomathes 32 (Suppl 2):S361–S391.
    Brain activity determines which relations between objects in the environment are perceived as differences and similarities in colour, smell, sound, etc. According to selectionism, brain activity does not create those relations; it only selects which of them are perceptually available to the subject on a given occasion. In effect, selectionism entails that perceptual experience is diaphanous, i.e. that sameness and difference in the phenomenal character of experience is exhausted by sameness and difference in the perceived items. It has been argued (...)
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  • How (not) to underestimate unconscious perception.Matthias Michel - 2022 - Mind and Language 38 (2):413-430.
    Studying consciousness requires contrasting conscious and unconscious perception. While many studies have reported unconscious perceptual effects, recent work has questioned whether such effects are genuinely unconscious, or whether they are due to weak conscious perception. Some philosophers and psychologists have reacted by denying that there is such a thing as unconscious perception, or by holding that unconscious perception has been previously overestimated. This article has two parts. In the first part, I argue that the most significant attack on unconscious perception (...)
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  • Contents of Unconscious Color Perception.Błażej Skrzypulec - 2022 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 13 (3):665-681.
    In the contemporary discussions concerning unconscious perception it is not uncommon to postulate that content and phenomenal character are ‘orthogonal’, i.e., there is no type of content which is essentially conscious, but instead, every representational content can be either conscious or not. Furthermore, this is not merely treated as a thesis justified by theoretical investigations, but as supported by empirical considerations concerning the actual functioning of the human cognition. In this paper, I address unconscious color perception and argue for a (...)
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  • Default Hypotheses in the Study of Perception: A Reply to Phillips.Jacob Berger & Myrto Mylopoulos - 2021 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 28 (3-4):206-219.
    Some theorists have recently raised doubts about much of the experimental evidence purporting to demonstrate the existence of unconscious perception. In our (2019) in this journal, we argued some of these considerations are not decisive. Phillips (forthcoming a) replies thoughtfully to our paper, concluding that he is unconvinced by our arguments. Phillips maintains that the view that perception is invariably conscious remains, as he puts it, the “default” hypothesis both within the folk understanding and experimental study of perception. There is (...)
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  • Whose Consciousness? Reflexivity and the Problem of Self-Knowledge.Christian Coseru - 2020 - In Mark Siderits, Ching Keng & John Spackman (eds.), Buddhist Philosophy of Consciousness: Tradition and Dialogue. Boston: Brill | Rodopi. pp. 121-153.
    If I am aware that p, say, that it is raining, is it the case that I must be aware that I am aware that p? Does introspective or object-awareness entail the apprehension of mental states as being of some kind or another: self-monitoring or intentional? That is, are cognitive events implicitly self-aware or is “self-awareness” just another term for metacognition? Not surprisingly, intuitions on the matter vary widely. This paper proposes a novel solution to this classical debate by reframing (...)
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  • The Structure of Bias.Gabbrielle M. Johnson - 2020 - Mind 129 (516):1193-1236.
    What is a bias? Standard philosophical views of both implicit and explicit bias focus this question on the representations one harbours, for example, stereotypes or implicit attitudes, rather than the ways in which those representations are manipulated. I call this approach representationalism. In this paper, I argue that representationalism taken as a general theory of psychological social bias is a mistake, because it conceptualizes bias in ways that do not fully capture the phenomenon. Crucially, this view fails to capture a (...)
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  • Naive Realism for Unconscious Perceptions.Ori Beck - 2022 - Erkenntnis 87 (3):1175-1190.
    Unconscious perceptions have recently become a focal point in the debate for and against naive realism. In this paper I defend the naive realist side. More specifically, I use an idea of Martin’s to develop a new version of naive realism—neuro-computational naive realism. I argue that neuro-computational naive realism offers a uniform treatment of both conscious and unconscious perceptions. I also argue that it accommodates the possibility of phenomenally different conscious perceptions of the same items, and that it can answer (...)
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  • The role of experience in demonstrative thought.Michael Barkasi - 2019 - Mind and Language 34 (5):648-666.
    Attention plays a role in demonstrative thought: It sets the targets. Visual experience also plays a role. I argue here that it makes visual information available for use in the voluntary control of focal attention. To do so I use both introspection and neurophysiological evidence from projections between areas of attentional control and neural correlates of consciousness. Campbell and Smithies also identify roles for experience, but they further argue that only experience can play those roles. In contrast, I argue that (...)
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  • Unconscious Perception Reconsidered.Ian Phillips - 2018 - Analytic Philosophy 59 (4):471-514.
    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 (...)
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  • Unconscious perception and phenomenal coherence.Jake Quilty-Dunn - 2019 - Analysis 79 (3):461-469.
    It is an orthodoxy in cognitive science that perception can occur unconsciously. Recently, Hakwan Lau, Megan Peters and Ian Phillips have argued that this orthodoxy may be mistaken. They argue that many purported cases of unconscious perception fail to rule out low degrees of conscious awareness while others fail to establish genuine perception. This paper presents a case of unconscious perception that avoids these problems. It also advances a general principle of ‘phenomenal coherence’ that can insulate some forms of evidence (...)
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  • Biased by our imaginings.Ema Sullivan-Bissett - 2018 - Mind and Language 34 (5):627-647.
    I propose a new model of implicit bias, according to which implicit biases are constituted by unconscious imaginings. I begin by endorsing a principle of parsimony when confronted with unfamiliar phenomena. I introduce implicit bias in terms congenial to what most philosophers and psychologists have said about their nature in the literature so far, before moving to a discussion of the doxastic model of implicit bias and objections to it. I then introduce unconscious imagination and argue that appeal to it (...)
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  • Unconscious perceptual justification.Jacob Berger, Bence Nanay & Jake Quilty-Dunn - 2018 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 61 (5):569-589.
    Perceptual experiences justify beliefs. A perceptual experience of a dog justifies the belief that there is a dog present. But there is much evidence that perceptual states can occur without being conscious, as in experiments involving masked priming. Do unconscious perceptual states provide justification as well? The answer depends on one’s theory of justification. While most varieties of externalism seem compatible with unconscious perceptual justification, several theories have recently afforded to consciousness a special role in perceptual justification. We argue that (...)
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  • The central executive system.Denis Buehler - 2018 - Synthese 195 (5):1969-1991.
    Executive functioning has been said to bear on a range of traditional philosophical topics, such as consciousness, thought, and action. Surprisingly, philosophers have not much engaged with the scientific literature on executive functioning. This lack of engagement may be due to several influential criticisms of that literature by Daniel Dennett, Alan Allport, and others. In this paper I argue that more recent research on executive functioning shows that these criticisms are no longer valid. The paper clears the way to a (...)
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  • Naïve realism about unconscious perception.Paweł Jakub Zięba - 2019 - Synthese 196 (5):2045-2073.
    Recently, it has been objected that naïve realism is inconsistent with an empirically well-supported claim that mental states of the same fundamental kind as ordinary conscious seeing can occur unconsciously (SFK). The main aim of this paper is to establish the following conditional claim: if SFK turns out to be true, the naïve realist can and should accommodate it into her theory. Regarding the antecedent of this conditional, I suggest that empirical evidence renders SFK plausible but not obvious. For it (...)
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  • Naïve realism and unconscious perception: A reply to Berger and Nanay.Alfonso Anaya & Sam Clarke - 2017 - Analysis 77 (2):267-273.
    In a recent paper, Berger and Nanay consider, and reject, three ways of addressing the phenomenon of unconscious perception within a naïve realist framework. Since these three approaches seem to exhaust the options open to naïve realists, and since there is said to be excellent evidence that perception of the same fundamental kind can occur, both consciously and unconsciously, this is seen to present a problem for the view. We take this opportunity to show that all three approaches considered remain (...)
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  • Relationalism and unconscious perception.Jacob Berger & Bence Nanay - 2016 - Analysis 76 (4):426-433.
    Relationalism holds that perceptual experiences are relations between subjects and perceived objects. But much evidence suggests that perceptual states can be unconscious. We argue here that unconscious perception raises difficulties for relationalism. Relationalists would seem to have three options. First, they may deny that there is unconscious perception or question whether we have sufficient evidence to posit it. Second, they may allow for unconscious perception but deny that the relationalist analysis applies to it. Third, they may offer a relationalist explanation (...)
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  • The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness.Uriah Kriegel (ed.) - 2020 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness provides the most comprehensive overview of current philosophical research on consciousness. Featuring contributions from some of the most prominent experts in the field, it explores the wide range of types of consciousness there may be, the many psychological phenomena with which consciousness interacts, and the various views concerning the ultimate relationship between consciousness and physical reality. It is an essential and authoritative resource for anyone working in philosophy of mind or interested in (...)
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  • Unconscious Perception and Unconscious Bias: Parallel Debates about Unconscious Content.Gabbrielle Johnson - 2023 - In Uriah Kriegel (ed.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind Vol. 3. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 87-130.
    The possibilities of unconscious perception and unconscious bias prompt parallel debates about unconscious mental content. This chapter argues that claims within these debates alleging the existence of unconscious content are made fraught by ambiguity and confusion with respect to the two central concepts they involve: consciousness and content. Borrowing conceptual resources from the debate about unconscious perception, the chapter distills the two conceptual puzzles concerning each of these notions and establishes philosophical strategies for their resolution. It then argues that empirical (...)
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  • Does perceiving require perceptual experience?David John Bennett - 2023 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 14 (3):763-790.
    In Section I, I clarify turning point issues in the Phillips and Block debate about whether there is unconscious perception. These include questions about whether uptake of certain visual information is an individual or person level accomplishment, as required for genuine unconscious _perceiving_. Section II takes up a recent reorientation proposed in Block ( 2017 ) towards the question of whether there is unconscious perceiving, where we are to look for the pervasive role of unconscious perceiving in, perhaps especially, the (...)
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  • Unconscious perception and central coordinating agency.Joshua Shepherd & Myrto Mylopoulos - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (12):3869-3893.
    One necessary condition on any adequate account of perception is clarity regarding whether unconscious perception exists. The issue is complicated, and the debate is growing in both philosophy and science. In this paper we consider the case for unconscious perception, offering three primary achievements. First, we offer a discussion of the underspecified notion of central coordinating agency, a notion that is critical for arguments that purportedly perceptual states are not attributable to the individual, and thus not genuinely perceptual. We develop (...)
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  • Phillips on Unconscious Perception and Overflow.Nicholas D’Aloisio-Montilla - 2019 - Philosophia 47 (3):649-662.
    Phillips argues that Block faces a “serious internal challenge” in defending the claim that unconscious perception is of the same fundamental kind as conscious perception. This challenge is said to result from Block’s commitment to phenomenal overflow. However, in this paper, I demonstrate that Phillips’ rejection of overflow likewise renders his view on unconscious perception “internally challenged” and therefore equally problematic.
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  • Consciousness and content in perception.Bill Brewer - 2017 - Philosophical Perspectives 31 (1):41-54.
    Normal perception involves conscious experience of the world. What I call the Content View, (CV), attempts to account for this in terms of the representational content of perception (Brewer, 2011, esp. ch. 4). I offer a new argument here against this view. Ascription of personal level content, either conceptual or nonconceptual, depends on the idea that determinate predicational information is conveyed to the subject. This determinate predication depends upon the exercise of certain personal level capacities for categorization and discrimination. Exercise (...)
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  • Unitary and dual models of phenomenal consciousness.Tomáš Marvan & Michal Polák - 2017 - Consciousness and Cognition 56:1-12.
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  • The Collapse Argument.Joseph Gottlieb - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (1):1-20.
    We can divide philosophical theories of consciousness into two main camps: First-Order theories and Higher-Order theories. Like all Higher-Order theories, many First-Order theories are mentalistic theories of consciousness: they attempt to reduce a mental state’s being consciousness using mental (but non-phenomenal) terms, such as being available to certain cognitive centers. I argue that mentalistic First-Order theories, once fully cashed out, collapse into some form of Higher-Order theory. I contend that not only is there general considerations in favor of this conclusion, (...)
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  • Embodied appearance properties and subjectivity.Miguel Angel Sebastian - 2018 - Adaptive Behavior 26 (Special Issue: Spotlight on 4E C):1-12.
    The traditional approach in cognitive sciences holds that cognition is a matter of manipulating abstract symbols followingcertain rules. According to this view, the body is merely an input/output device, which allows the computationalsystem—the brain—to acquire new input data by means of the senses and to act in the environment following its com-mands. In opposition to this classical view, defenders of embodied cognition (EC) stress the relevance of the body inwhich the cognitive agent is embedded in their explanation of cognitive processes. (...)
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  • Are there subintentional actions?William Hornett - forthcoming - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
    When I fiddle with my hair, or adjust my posture, it is plausible that these activities fall well below my cognitive radar. Some have argued that these are examples of ‘sub‐intentional actions’, actions which are not intentional under any description at all. If true, they are direct counterexamples to the dominant view on which the difference between actions and other events is their intentionality. In this paper, I argue that the case for sub‐intentional actions fails. Firstly, I show that the (...)
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  • Object files and unconscious perception: a reply to Quilty-Dunn.Ian Phillips - 2020 - Analysis 80 (2):293-301.
    A wealth of cases – most notably blindsight and priming under inattention or suppression – have convinced philosophers and scientists alike that perception occurs outside awareness. In recent work (Phillips 2016a, 2018; Phillips and Block 2017, Peters et al. 2017), I dispute this consensus, arguing that any putative case of unconscious perception faces a dilemma. The dilemma divides over how absence of awareness is established. If subjective reports are used, we face the problem of the criterion: the concern that such (...)
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  • The Anna Karenina Principle and Skepticism about Unconscious Perception.Ned Block - 2015 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 93 (2):452-459.
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  • The unconscious mind: From classical theoretical controversy to controversial contemporary research and a practical illustration of the “error of our ways”.Myron Tsikandilakis, Persefoni Bali, Jan Derrfuss & Peter Chapman - 2019 - Consciousness and Cognition 74 (C):102771.
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  • Cognition and the Structure of Bias.Gabbrielle Johnson - 2019 - Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles
    I argue that there exists a natural kind social bias that subsumes seemingly heterogenous cases of implicit bias and other forms of social cognition. I explore the implications of this explicated notion of bias for the organization of the mind, theories of consciousness, and the system-dependence of biases.
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  • What Makes Behavioral Measures of Consciousness Subjective and Direct?Jakub Jonkisz - 2022 - Philosophy of Science 89 (4):683-700.
    This article addresses two issues: the distinction between objective and subjective measures and the directness of such measures. It is argued that the distinction is unambiguous only when based on a methodological criterion rather than a semantic one. Different senses of directness are discussed: metaphysical, methodological, semantic, and causal.
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  • Fuzziness in the Mind: Can Perception be Unconscious?Henry Taylor - 2020 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 101 (2):383-398.
    Recently, a new movement has arisen in the philosophy of perception: one that views perception as a natural kind. Strangely, this movement has neglected the extensive work in philosophy of science on natural kinds. The present paper remedies this. I start by isolating a widespread and influential assumption, which is that we can give necessary and sufficient conditions for perception. I show that this assumption is radically at odds with current philosophy of science work on natural kinds. I then develop (...)
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