The question has long confounded philosophers and scientists, and it is this so-called explanatory gap between biological life and consciousness that Evan ...

This is a unique book. It is excellently written, crammed with information, wise and a pleasure to read.' ---Daniel C. Dennett, Tufts University.

The relationship of self, and self-awareness, and experience: exploring classical phenomenological analyses and their relevance to contemporary discussions in ...

How do rational minds make contact with the world? The empiricist tradition sees a gap between mind and world, and takes sensory experience, fallible as it is, to provide our only bridge across that gap. In its crudest form, for example, the traditional idea is that our minds consult an inner realm of sensory experience, which provides us with evidence about the nature of external reality. Notoriously, however, it turns out to be far from clear that there is any viable (...) conception of experience which allows it to do the job. The original problem is to show that thought is rationally constrained by external reality. If sensory experience is to provide the solution--in particular, if it is to provide the answer to sceptical challenges--it must therefore meet two criteria. First, it must itself be `receptive'--i.e., appropriately constrained by external reality. Second, it must be the kind of thing that can enter into a logical or rational relationship with belief--it must already be `conceptual,' in other words. In arguing against the idea that anything could serve both roles, Wilfred Sellars termed this conception of experience "the Myth of the Given.". (shrink)

"The book presents in accessible fashion recent important work on the self and self-consciousness and also moves the issues forward with interesting new ideas. It provides a notably crisp and clear treatment of some extremely intriguing topics." -- Jane Heal, Department of Philosophy, University of Cambridge In this book, José Luis Bermú dez addesses two fundamental problems in the philosophy and psychology of self-consciousness: (1) Can we provide a noncircular account of fully fledged self-conscious thought and language in terms of (...) more fundamental capacities? (2) Can we explain how fully fledged self-conscious thought and language can arise in the normal course of human development? Bermú dez argues that a paradox (the paradox of self-consciousness) arises from the apparent strict interdependence between self-conscious thought and linguistic self-reference. The paradox renders circular all theories that define self-consciousness in terms of linguistic mastery of the first-person pronoun. It seems to follow from the paradox of self-consciousness that no such account or explanation can be given. Drawing on recent work in empirical psychology and philosophy, the author argues that any explanation of fully fledged self-consciousness that answers these two questions requires attention to primitive forms of self-consciousness that are prelinguistic and preconceptual. Such primitive forms of self-consciousness are to be found in somatic proprioception, the structure of exteroceptive perception, and prelinguistic forms of social interaction. The author uses these primitive forms of self-consciousness to dissolve the paradox ofself-consciousness and to show how the two questions can be given an affirmative answer. (shrink)

This paper responds to the issues raised by D. Chalmers by offering a research direction which is quite radical because of the way in which methodological principles are linked to scientific studies of consciousness. Neuro-phenomenology is the name I use here to designate a quest to marry modern cognitive science and a disciplined approach to human experience, thereby placing myself in the lineage of the continental tradition of Phenomenology. My claim is that the so-called hard problem that animates these Special (...) Issues can only be addressed productively by gathering a research community armed with new pragmatic tools for the development of a science of consciousness. I will claim that no piecemeal empirical correlates, nor purely theoretical principles, will really help us at this stage. We need to turn to a systematic exploration of the only link between mind and consciousness that seems both obvious and natural: the structure of human experience itself. In what follows I motivate my choice by briefly examining the current debate about consciousness at the light of Chalmer’s hard problem. Next, I outline the phenomenological strategy. Finally I conclude by discussing some of the main difficulties and consequences of this strategy. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been much focus on the apparent heterogeneity of schizophrenic symptoms. By contrast, this article proposes a unifying account emphasizing basic abnormalities of consciousness that underlie and also antecede a disparate assortment of signs and symptoms. Schizophrenia, we argue, is fundamentally a self-disorder or ipseity disturbance that is characterized by complementary distortions of the act of awareness: hyperreflexivity and diminished self-affection. Hyperreflexivity refers to forms of exaggerated self-consciousness in which aspects of oneself are experienced as akin (...) to external objects. Diminished self-affection or self-presence refers to a weakened sense of existing as a vital and self-coinciding source of awareness and action. This article integrates recent psychiatric research and European phenomenological psychiatry with some current work in cognitive science and phenomenological philosophy. After introducing the phenomenological approach along with a theoretical account of normal consciousness and self-awareness, we turn to a variety of schizophrenic syndromes. We examine positive, then negative, and finally disorganization symptoms—attempting in each case to illuminate shared distortions of consciousness and the sense of self. We conclude by discussing the possible relevance of this approach for identifying early schizophrenic symptoms. (shrink)

These questions provide the impetus for the detailed discussions of ontology, human agency, and everyday psychological explanation presented in this book.

How is our conception of what there is affected by our counting ourselves as inhabitants of the natural world? How do our actions fit into a world that is altered through our agency? And how do we accommodate our understanding of one another as fellow subjects of experience--as beings with thoughts and wants and hopes and fears? These questions provide the impetus for the detailed discussions of ontology, human agency, and everyday psychological explanation presented in this book. The answers offer (...) a distinctive view of questions about "the mind's place in nature," and they argue for a particular position in philosophy of mind: naive naturalism. This position opposes the whole drift of the last thirty or forty years' philosophy of mind in the English-speaking world. Jennifer Hornsby sets naive naturalism against dualism, but without advancing the claims of "materialism," "physicalism," or "naturalism" as these have come to be known. She shows how we can, and why we should, abandon the view that thoughts and actions, to be seen as real, must be subject to scientific explanation. (shrink)

I review three answers to the question: How can phenomenology contribute to the experimental cognitive neurosciences? The first approach, neurophenomenology, employs phenomenological method and training, and uses first-person reports not just as more data for analysis, but to generate descriptive categories that are intersubjectively and scientifically validated, and are then used to interpret results that correlate with objective measurements of behaviour and brain activity. A second approach, indirect phenomenology, is shown to be problematic in a number of ways. Indirect phenomenology (...) is generally put to work after the experiment, in critical or creative interpretations of the scientific evidence. Ultimately, however, proposals for the indirect use of phenomenology lead back to methodological questions about the direct use of phenomenology in experimental design. The third approach, 'front-loaded' phenomenology, suggests that the results of phenomenological investigations can be used in the design of empirical ones. Concepts or clarifications that have been worked out phenomenologically may operate as a partial framework for experimentation. (shrink)

The term phenomenology can be used in a generic sense to cover a variety of areas related to the problem of consciousness. In this sense it is a title that ranges over issues pertaining to first-person or subjective experience, qualia, and what has become known as "the hard problem" (Chalmers 1995). The term is sometimes used even more generally to signify a variety of approaches to studying such issues, including contemplative, meditative, and mystical studies, and transpersonal psychology.(1) Within the disciplines (...) of philosophy and psychology, however, phenomenology has a more specialized meaning. In this case it refers to the methodology and philosophy initiated by the philosopher Edmund Husserl at the beginning of the twentieth-century and developed in various ways by theorists such as Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Schutz. I restrict the scope of this review to phenomenology in this more specialized sense. In the light of several recent publications, the general questions I address are: What is and what ought to be the relationship between phenomenology and cognitive science? and What, if any, recent contributions has phenomenology made to the science of consciousness? (shrink)

In the first part of this paper I characterize a minimal form of self-consciousness, namely pre-reflective self-consciousness. It is a constant structural feature of conscious experience, and corresponds to the consciousness of the self-as-subject that is not taken as an intentional object. In the second part, I argue that contemporary cognitive neuroscience has by and large missed this fundamental form of self-consciousness in its investigation of various forms of self-experience. In the third part, I exemplify how the notion of pre-reflective (...) self-awareness can be of relevance for empirical research. In particular, I propose to interpret processes of sensorimotor integration in light of the phenomenological approach that allows the definition of pre-reflective self-consciousness. (shrink)

Since 1969, when Dennett introduced a distinction between personal and sub- personal levels of explanation, many philosophers have used 'sub- personal ' very loosely, and Dennett himself has abandoned a view of the personal level as genuinely autonomous. I recommend a position in which Dennett's original distinction is crucial, by arguing that the phenomenon called mental causation is on view only at the properly personal level. If one retains the commit-' ments incurred by Dennett's early distinction, then one has a (...) satisfactory anti-physicalistic, anti-dualist philosophy of mind. It neither interferes with the projects of sub- personal psychology, nor encourages ; instrumentalism at the personal level. (shrink)

The phenomenological approach to schizophrenia has undergone something of a renaissance in Anglophone psychiatry in recent years. There has been a proliferation of works that focus on the nature of subjectivity in schizophrenia and related disorders, and that take inspiration from the work of such German and French philosophers as Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, and such classical psychiatrists as Minkowski, Blankenburg, and Binswanger (Rulf 2003; Sass 2001a, 2001b). This trend includes predominantly theoretical articles, which typically incorporate clinical material as well (...) as reviews of empirical and experimental findings in psychopathology. Some very recent examples (since 2000) are studies of .. (shrink)

The “default system” of the brain has been described as a set of regions which are ‘activated’ during rest and ‘deactivated’ during cognitively effortful tasks. To investigate the reliability of task-related deactivations, we performed a meta-analysis across 12 fMRI studies. Our results replicate previous findings by implicating medial frontal and parietal brain regions as part of the “default system”.However, the cognitive correlates of these deactivations remain unclear. In light of the importance of social cognitive abilities for human beings and their (...) propensity to engage in such activities, we relate our results to findings from neuroimaging studies of social cognition. This demonstrates a remarkable overlap between the brain regions typically involved in social cognitive processes and the “default system”.We, henceforth, suggest that the physiological ‘baseline’ of the brain is intimately linked to a psychological ‘baseline’: human beings have a predisposition for social cognition as the default mode of cognizing which is implemented in the robust pattern of intrinsic brain activity known as the “default system”. (shrink)

I argue that immunity to error through misidentification primarily characterizes thoughts that are 'implicitly' de se, as opposed to thoughts that involve an explicit self-identification. Thoughts that are implicitly de se involve no reference to the self at the level of content: what makes them de se is simply the fact that the content of the thought is evaluated with respect to the thinking subject. Or, to put it in familiar terms : the content of the thought is a property (...) which the thinking subject self-ascribes (as in the Loar/Lewis/Chisholm analysis). After answering an objection (to the effect that immunity can affect explicit de se thoughts), I extend the analysis to demonstrative thoughts, which also exhibit the property of immunity to error through misidentification. (shrink)

Self-consciousness, many philosophers agree, is essential to being a person. There is not so much agreement, however, about how to understand what self-consciousness is. Philosophers in the field of cognitive science tend to write off self-consciousness as unproblematic. According to such philosophers, the real difficulty for the cognitive scientist is phenomenal consciousness--the fact that we have states that feel a certain way. If we had a grip on phenomenal consciousness, they think, self-consciousness could be easily handled by functionalist models. For (...) example, recently Ned Block commented. (shrink)

Philosophers and logicians use the term “indexical” for words such as “I”, “you” and “tomorrow”. Demonstratives such as “this” and “that” and demonstratives phrases such as “this man” and “that computer” are usually reckoned as a subcategory of indexicals. (Following [Kaplan, 1989a].) The “context-dependence” of indexicals is often taken as a defining feature: what an indexical designates shifts from context to context. But there are many kinds of shiftiness, with corresponding conceptions of context. Until we clarify what we mean by (...) “context”, this defining feature remains unclear. In sections 1–3, which are largely drawn from [Perry, forthcoming(a)], I try to clarify the sense in which indexicals are context-dependent and make some distinctions among the ways indexicals depend on context. In sections 3–6, I contrast indexicality with another phenomenon that I call “unarticulated constituents.”. (shrink)

One oft the most fascinating abilities of humans is the ability to become conscious of the own physical and mental states. In this systematic investigation of self-consciousness, a representational theory is developed that is able to distinguish between different levels of self-consciousness. The most basic levels are already present in such simple animals as ants. From these basic forms, which are also relevant for adult human self-consciousness, high-level self-consciousness including self-knowledge can arise. Thereby, the theory is not only able to (...) integrate developmental considerations but also to sharply distinguish different aspects of the complex phenomenon self-consciousness. Pathological breakdowns of these different aspects, as they can be found in schizophrenia, are explained by specific impairments on different levels of self-representation. In this way, the work shows that a naturalistic theory of self-consciousness is possible, if the analysis starts with very simple and basic mechanisms instead of starting on the »top of the iceberg«. (shrink)

Self-consciousness can be defined as the ability to think 'I'-thoughts. Recently, it has been suggested that self-consciousness in this sense can (and should) be accounted for in terms of nonconceptual forms of self-representation. Here, I will argue that while theories of nonconceptual self-consciousness do provide us with important insights regarding the essential genetic and epistemic features of self-conscious thought, they can only deliver part of the full story that is required to understand the phenomenon of self-consciousness. I will provide two (...) arguments to this effect, drawing on insights from the philosophy of language and on structural differences between conceptual and nonconceptual forms of representation. Both arguments rest on the intuition that while self-consciousness requires explicit self-representation, nonconceptual content can at best provide implicit self-related information. I will conclude that in order to explain the emergence of self-conscious thought out of more basic forms of representations one has to explain the transition between implicit self-related information and explicit self-representation. (shrink)

I argue that immunity to error through misidentification primarily characterizes thoughts that are 'implicitly' de se, as opposed to thoughts that involve an explicit self-identification. Thoughts that are implicitly de se involve no reference to the self at the level of content: what makes them de se is simply the fact that the content of the thought is evaluated with respect to the thinking subject. Or, to put it in familiar terms : the content of the thought is a property (...) which the thinking subject self-ascribes (as in the Loar/Lewis/Chisholm analysis). After answering an objection (to the effect that immunity can affect explicit de se thoughts), I extend the analysis to demonstrative thoughts, which also exhibit the property of immunity to error through misidentification. (shrink)

Can facts about subpersonal states and events be constitutively relevant to personal-level phenomena? And can knowledge of these facts inform explanations of personal-level phenomena? Some philosophers, like Jennifer Hornsby and John McDowell, argue for two negative answers whereby questions about persons and their behavior cannot be answered by using information from subpersonal psychology. Knowledge of subpersonal states and events cannot inform personal-level explanation such that they cast light on what constitutes persons? behaviors. In this paper I argue against this position. (...) After having distinguished between enabling and constitutive relevance, I defend the claim that at least some facts about subpersonal states and events are constitutively relevant to some personal-level phenomenon, and therefore can, and sometimes should, inform personal-level explanations. I draw some of the possible consequences of my claim for our understanding of personal-level behavior by focusing on the phenomenon of addiction. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes between implicit self-related information and explicit self-representation and argues that the latter is required for self-consciousness. It is further argued that self-consciousness requires an awareness of other minds and that this awareness develops over the course of an increasingly complex perspectival differentiation, during which information about self and other that is implicit in early forms of social interaction becomes redescribed into an explicit format.

Can facts about subpersonal states and events be constitutively relevant to personal-level phenomena? And can knowledge of these facts inform explanations of personal-level phenomena? Some philosophers, like Jennifer Hornsby and John McDowell, argue for two negative answers whereby questions about persons and their behavior cannot be answered by using information from subpersonal psychology. Knowledge of subpersonal states and events cannot inform personal-level explanation such that they cast light on what constitutes persons’ behaviors. In this paper I argue against this position. (...) After having distinguished between enabling and constitutive relevance, I defend the claim that at least some facts about subpersonal states and events are constitutively relevant to some personal-level phenomenon, and therefore can, and sometimes should, inform personal-level explanations. I draw some of the possible consequences of my claim for our understanding of personal-level behavior by focusing on the phenomenon of addiction. (shrink)

Murphy (2006) criticizes psychiatric nosology from the perspective of the philosophy of science, arguing that the model of pathology as encapsulated in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders reflects a folk conception of the mental, and of malfunctioning, that is inadequately integrated with cognitive and behavioral neuroscience. The present paper supports this view through a case study of research on pathological gambling. It argues that recent modeling based on fMRI studies and behavioral genetics suggests a stipulative, non-seamless reduction (...) of pathological gambling to a specific disorder of the mesolimbic dopamine system. This argument is agnostic as between prior philosophical commitments to realism or empiricism. (shrink)

Pathological gambling (PG) is a kind of ‘ideal puzzle’ for the economic model of the consumer. The pathological gambler takes pains to engage in activity that transparently has negative expected returns if utility varies positively with money. She also, typically, spends further resources on commitment devices designed to interfere with her gambling. These properties together describe an agent that is a kind of perfect foil for the rationally maximizing consumer. Recently, aspects of the neuropathology underlying the strange economic agency of (...) the pathological gambler are becoming understood. Thus PG is an ideal test bed phenomenon for working out relationships between economic modeling based on constrained optimization of utility and the new neuroscience of behavior. (shrink)

I discuss Bermudez' minimalist approach to self-consciousness approvingly, connecting it with other positions in philosophy and trying to separate it from ideas about non-conceptual content.

Dualism, but he seems at least to have acknowledged the possibility that Descartes might be right on this issue, i.e., that the real self is a _res cogitans_. Maybe this is why talk of.

Hornsby is a defender of a position in the philosophy of mind she calls “naïve naturalism”. She argues that current discussions of the mind-body problem have been informed by an overly scientistic view of nature and a futile attempt by scientific naturalists to see mental processes as part of the physical universe. In her view, if naïve naturalism were adopted, the mind-body problem would disappear. I argue that her brand of anti-physicalist naturalism runs into difficulties with the problem of mental (...) causation and the completeness of physics. (shrink)

A bodily self is characterized by pre-reflective bodily self-consciousness that is.