The alleged for-me-ness or mineness of conscious experience has been the topic of considerable debate in recent phenomenology and philosophy of mind. By considering a series of objections to the notion of for-me-ness, or to a properly robust construal of it, this paper attempts to clarify to what the notion is committed and to what it is not committed. This exercise results in the emergence of a relatively determinate and textured portrayal of for-me-ness as the authors conceive of it.

Many currently working on a Russellian notion of perceptual acquaintance and its role in perceptual experience (including Campbell 2002a, 2002b, and 2009 and Tye 2009) treat naïve realism and indirect realism as an exhaustive disjunction of possible views. In this paper, I propose a form of direct realism according to which one is directly aware of external objects and their features without perceiving a mind-dependent intermediary and without making any inference. Nevertheless, it also maintains that the qualitative character of perceptual (...) experience is a feature of our internal states of sentient awareness and so is to be distinguished from the features of objects in the perceptual scene. On this proposal, we are pre-reflectively aware of the qualitative character of our sensations simply in virtue of having them, and we are non-inferentially aware of external objects and their features by being attuned to what the occurrence of our sensations tells us about the rest of the world. Consequently, we are presented with, and thus acquainted with, both the external objects and the qualitative character of our sensory experiences, albeit in very different ways. Drawing on resources from Perry (2001) and Searle (in draft), I explain how perceptual experience has this “two-faced presentational character”. (shrink)

John Searle's Speech Acts and Expression and Meaning developed a highly original and influential approach to the study of language. But behind both works lay the assumption that the philosophy of language is in the end a branch of the philosophy of the mind: speech acts are forms of human action and represent just one example of the mind's capacity to relate the human organism to the world. The present book is concerned with these biologically fundamental capacities, and, though third (...) in the sequence, in effect it provides the philosophical foundations for the other two. Intentionality is taken to be the crucial mental phenomenon, and its analysis involves wide-ranging discussions of perception, action, causation, meaning, and reference. In all these areas John Searle has original and stimulating views. He ends with a resolution of the 'mind-body' problem. (shrink)

Traditionally the intentionality of consciousness has been understood as the idea that many conscious states are about something, that they have objects in a broad sense - including states of affairs - which they represent, and it is on account of being representational that they are said to have contents. It has also been claimed, more controversially, that conscious intentional contents must be available to the subject as reasons for her judgments or actions, and that they are therefore necessarily conceptual. (...) This paper challenges the assumptions that all conscious intentional contents are representations of objects, and that they are essentially conceptual. Both assumptions will be shown to be intimately connected. The first main part of the paper offers an account of conscious intentionality that is not prejudicial on the issue of whether all intentional contents of conscious mental states represent objects which the mental state can be said to be about. The author then shows that many personal-level perceptual contents, including those involved in our evaluative stance towards aspects of the world, have non-conceptual components even on a wide construal of the conceptual sphere , allowing for demonstrative concepts. In the second main part of the paper it is argued that experiences themselves, as contrasted with what they are experiences of, are non-conceptual contents. To this purpose the author reconstructs and develops some suggestive observations found in the phenomenology of Husserl to the effect that experiences as directly presented or 'lived through' are not objects of consciousness. It is argued that this thesis, properly understood, is true and that it entails that experiences as directly presented in consciousness are themselves non-conceptual intentional contents. Husserl's thesis is illuminating and important, allowing among other things a more satisfactory account of the elusive phenomenon of depth we normally attribute to the conscious self - the idea that there is always more to our experienced selves at any moment than what we are capable of articulating at the time. (shrink)