6 found
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  1. Aphantasia and Conscious Thought.Preston Lennon - 2023 - In Uriah Kriegel (ed.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind Vol. 3. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    The sensory constraint on conscious thought says that if a thought is phenomenally conscious, its phenomenal properties must be reducible to some sensory phenomenal character. I argue that the burgeoning psychological literature on aphantasia, an impoverishment in the ability to generate mental imagery, provides a counterexample to the sensory constraint. The best explanation of aphantasics’ introspective reports, neuroimaging, and task performance is that some aphantasics have conscious thoughts without sensory mental imagery. This argument against the sensory constraint supports the existence (...)
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  2. Delusions and madmen: against rationality constraints on belief.Declan Smithies, Preston Lennon & Richard Samuels - 2022 - Synthese 200 (3):1-30.
    According to the Rationality Constraint, our concept of belief imposes limits on how much irrationality is compatible with having beliefs at all. We argue that empirical evidence of human irrationality from the psychology of reasoning and the psychopathology of delusion undermines only the most demanding versions of the Rationality Constraint, which require perfect rationality as a condition for having beliefs. The empirical evidence poses no threat to more relaxed versions of the Rationality Constraint, which only require only minimal rationality. Nevertheless, (...)
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  3. Cognitive Phenomenology: In Defense of Recombination.Preston Lennon - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    The cognitive experience view of thought holds that the content of thought is determined by its cognitive-phenomenal character. Adam Pautz argues that the cognitive experience view is extensionally inadequate: it entails the possibility of mix-and-match cases, where the cognitive-phenomenal properties that determine thought content are combined with different sensory-phenomenal and functional properties. Because mix-and-match cases are metaphysically impossible, Pautz argues, the cognitive experience view should be rejected. This paper defends the cognitive experience view from Pautz’s argument. I build on resources (...)
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  4. Athletes as workers.Preston Lennon - forthcoming - Journal of the Philosophy of Sport:1-20.
    I argue that there are a number of ethical issues facing college and professional athletes that admit of a unified treatment: viewing athletes as workers. By worker, I mean an agent who sells their labor for compensation. With this notion of worker in place, I present and discuss arguments for four claims: not paying college athletes is morally wrong; that the N.C.A.A. infringes on the right of college athletes to collectively bargain; that it is prima facie wrong to draft and (...)
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  5. Are Phenomenal Theories of Thought Chauvinistic?Preston Lennon - 2024 - American Philosophical Quarterly 61 (3):199-213.
    The phenomenal view of thought holds that thinking is an experience with phenomenal character that determines what the thought is about. This paper develops and responds to the objection that the phenomenal view is chauvinistic: it withholds thoughts from creatures that in fact have them. I develop four chauvinism objections to the phenomenal view—one from introspection, one from interpersonal differences, one from thought experiments, and one from the unconscious thought paradigm in psychology—and show that the phenomenal view can resist all (...)
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  6. In Defense of Cognitive Phenomenology: Meeting the Matching Content Challenge.Preston Lennon - 2021 - Erkenntnis 88 (6):2391-2407.
    Bayne and McClelland (2016) raise the matching content challenge for proponents of cognitive phenomenology: if the phenomenal character of thought is determined by its intentional content, why is it that my conscious thought that there is a blue wall before me and my visual perception of a blue wall before me don’t share any phenomenology, despite their matching content? In this paper, I first show that the matching content challenge is not limited to proponents of cognitive phenomenology but extends to (...)
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