Results for 'Transparency of mental content'

1000+ found
Order:
  1. The transparency of experience and the neuroscience of attention.Assaf Weksler, Hilla Jacobson & Zohar Z. Bronfman - 2019 - Synthese 198 (5):4709-4730.
    According to the thesis of transparency, subjects can attend only to the representational content of perceptual experience, never to the intrinsic properties of experience that carry this representational content, i.e., to “mental paint.” So far, arguments for and against transparency were conducted from the armchair, relying mainly on introspective observations. In this paper, we argue in favor of transparency, relying on the cognitive neuroscience of attention. We present a trilemma to those who hold that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  2. Transparency of Mind: The Contributions of Descartes, Leibniz, and Berkeley to the Genesis of the Modern Subject.Gary Hatfield - 2011 - In Hubertus Busche (ed.), Departure for modern Europe: a handbook of early modern philosophy (1400-1700). Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag. pp. 361–375.
    The chapter focuses on attributions of the transparency of thought to early modern figures, most notably Descartes. Many recent philosophers assume that Descartes believed the mind to be “transparent”: since all mental states are conscious, we are therefore aware of them all, and indeed incorrigibly know them all. Descartes, and Berkeley too, do make statements that seem to endorse both aspects of the transparency theses (awareness of all mental states; incorrigibility). However, they also make systematic theoretical (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  3. 자유민주주의적 가치의 철학적 해석을 통한 정신전력의 증강에 관한 연구 (Enhancement of Mental Force through the philosophical Interpretation of Liberal-democratic Values).Juyong Kim - 2022 - 정신전력연구 (Journal of Spiritual and Mental Force Enhancement) 68:205-254.
    Recently, mental strength education requires to change in a way that establishes a military value system suitable for a liberal democracy while facing the need to strengthen mental strength in response to unpredictable security situations. The key to fulfilling these twofold objectives lies in the fact that there is a positive correlation between the enhancement of a soldier’s democratic awareness and intangible force. Therefore, it is of great importance to emphasize the concept of ‘citizen in uniform’ as one (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  4. Introspection, Intentionality, and the Transparency of Experience.Tim Crane - 2000 - Philosophical Topics 28 (2):49-67.
    Some philosophers have argued recently that introspective evidence provides direct support for an intentionalist theory of visual experience. An intentionalist theory of visual experience treats experience as an intentional state, a state with an intentional content. (I shall use the word ’state’ in a general way, for any kind of mental phenomenon, and here I shall not distinguish states proper from events, though the distinction is important.) Intentionalist theories characteristically say that the phenomenal character of an experience, what (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   25 citations  
  5.  53
    The intrapersonal normative twin earth argument.Jesse Hambly - 2024 - Synthese 204 (1):1-18.
    In this paper I develop an argument against applying a causal theory of mental content to normative concepts. This argument—which I call the Intrapersonal Normative Twin Earth Argument—is inspired by Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons’ Moral Twin Earth Argument. The focus of Horgan and Timmons’ argument is showing that causal theories of mental content conflict with plausible claims about interpersonal normative disagreement. The Intrapersonal Normative Twin Earth Argument, by contrast, is focused on showing that such theories (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  6. Embedded mental action in self-attribution of belief.Antonia Peacocke - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (2):353-377.
    You can come to know that you believe that p partly by reflecting on whether p and then judging that p. Call this procedure “the transparency method for belief.” How exactly does the transparency method generate known self-attributions of belief? To answer that question, we cannot interpret the transparency method as involving a transition between the contents p and I believe that p. It is hard to see how some such transition could be warranted. Instead, in this (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  7. "How to Think Several Thoughts at Once: Content Plurality in Mental Action".Antonia Peacocke - 2022 - In Michael Brent & Lisa Miracchi Titus (eds.), Mental Action and the Conscious Mind. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 31-60.
    Basic actions are those intentional actions performed not by doing any other kind of thing intentionally. Complex actions involve doing one kind of thing intentionally by doing another kind of thing intentionally. There are both basic and complex mental actions. Some complex mental actions have a striking feature that has not been previously discussed: they have several distinct contents at once. This chapter introduces and explains this feature, here called “content plurality.” This chapter also argues for the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  8. Disjunction and distality: the hard problem for purely probabilistic causal theories of mental content.William Roche - 2019 - Synthese 198 (8):7197-7230.
    The disjunction problem and the distality problem each presents a challenge that any theory of mental content must address. Here we consider their bearing on purely probabilistic causal theories. In addition to considering these problems separately, we consider a third challenge—that a theory must solve both. We call this “the hard problem.” We consider 8 basic ppc theories along with 240 hybrids of them, and show that some can handle the disjunction problem and some can handle the distality (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  9. M-Autonomy.Thomas Metzinger - 2015 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 22 (11-12):270-302.
    What we traditionally call ‘conscious thought’ actually is a subpersonal process, and only rarely a form of mental action. The paradigmatic, standard form of conscious thought is non-agentive, because it lacks veto-control and involves an unnoticed loss of epistemic agency and goal-directed causal self-determination at the level of mental content. Conceptually, it must be described as an unintentional form of inner behaviour. Empirical research shows that we are not mentally autonomous subjects for about two thirds of our (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   15 citations  
  10. Causation and Mental Content: Against the Externalist Interpretation of Ockham.Susan Brower-Toland - 2017 - In Magali E. Roques & Jennifer Pelletier (eds.), The Language of Thought in Late Medieval Philosophy. Cham: Springer.
    On the dominant interpretation, Ockham is an externalist about mental content. This reading is founded principally on his theory of intuitive cognition. Intuitive cognition plays a foundational role in Ockham’s account of concept formation and judgment, and Ockham insists that the content of intuitive states is determined by the causal relations such states bear to their objects. The aim of this paper is to challenge the externalist interpretation by situating Ockham’s account of intuitive cognition vis-à-vis his broader (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  11. Harman on Mental Paint and the Transparency of Experience.Erhan Demircioglu - 2020 - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 27 (1):56-81.
    Harman famously argues that a particular class of antifunctionalist arguments from the intrinsic properties of mental states or events (in particular, visual experiences) can be defused by distinguishing “properties of the object of experience from properties of the experience of an object” and by realizing that the latter are not introspectively accessible (or are transparent). More specifically, Harman argues that we are or can be introspectively aware only of the properties of the object of an experience but not the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  12. Dretske’s Naturalistic Representationalism and Privileged Accessibility Thesis.Manas Kumar Sahu - 2023 - Philosophia 51:933-955.
    The objective of the current paper is to provide a critical analysis of Dretske's defense of the naturalistic version of the privileged accessibility thesis. Dretske construed that the justificatory condition of privileged accessibility neither relies on the appeal to perspectival ontology of phenomenal subjectivity nor on the functionalistic notion of accessibility. He has reformulated introspection (which justifies the non-inferentiality of the knowledge of one's own mental facts in an internalist view) as a displaced perception for the defense of naturalistic (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  13. Perceptual content and the content of mental imagery.Bence Nanay - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (7):1723-1736.
    The aim of this paper is to argue that the phenomenal similarity between perceiving and visualizing can be explained by the similarity between the structure of the content of these two different mental states. And this puts important constraints on how we should think about perceptual content and the content of mental imagery.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   55 citations  
  14. Money and mental contents.Sarah Vooys & David G. Dick - 2019 - Synthese 198 (4):3443-3458.
    It can be hard to see where money fits in the world. Money seems both real and imaginary, since it has obvious causal powers, but is also, just as obviously, something humans have just made up. Recent philosophical accounts of money have declared it to be real, but for very different reasons. John Searle and Francesco Guala disagree over whether money is just whatever acts like money, or just whatever people believe to be money. In developing their accounts of institutions (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  15. A Non-Representational Understanding of Visual Experience.Kaplan Hasanoglu - 2016 - Journal of Mind and Behavior 37:271-286.
    This paper argues that various phenomenological considerations support a non-representational causal account of visual experience. This position claims that visual experiences serve as a non-representational causally efficacious medium for the production of beliefs concerning the external world. The arguments are centered on defending a non-representational causal account’s understanding of the cognitive significance of visual experience. Among other things, such an account can easily explain the inextricable role that background beliefs and conceptual capacities play in perceptually-based external world belief-formation processes, the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  16. Does Phenomenology Ground Mental Content?Adam Pautz - 2013 - In Uriah Kriegel (ed.), The Phenomenal Intentionality Research Program. , US: Oxford University Press. pp. 194-234.
    I develop several new arguments against claims about "cognitive phenomenology" and its alleged role in grounding thought content. My arguments concern "absent cognitive qualia cases", "altered cognitive qualia cases", and "disembodied cognitive qualia cases". However, at the end, I sketch a positive theory of the role of phenomenology in grounding content, drawing on David Lewis's work on intentionality. I suggest that within Lewis's theory the subject's total evidence plays the central role in fixing mental content and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   58 citations  
  17. A Trilemma about Mental Content.Susanna Schellenberg - 2013 - In Schear Joseph (ed.), Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-world. Routledge. pp. 272-282.
    Schellenberg sheds light on the recent debate between Dreyfus and McDowell about the role and nature of concepts in perceptual experience, by considering the following trilemma: (C1) Non-rational animals and humans can be in mental states with the same kind of content when they are perceptually related to the very same environment. (C2) Non-rational animals do not possess concepts. (C3) Content is constituted by modes of presentations and is, thus, conceptually structured. She discusses reasons for accepting and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  18. Psychedelics and Meditation: A Neurophilosophical Perspective.Chris Letheby - 2022 - In Rick Repetti (ed.), Routledge Handbook on the Philosophy of Meditation. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 209-223.
    Psychedelic ingestion and meditative practice are both ancient methods for altering consciousness that became widely known in Western society in the second half of the 20th century. Do the similarities begin and end there, or do these methods – as many have claimed over the years – share some deeper common elements? In this chapter I take a neurophilosophical approach to this question and argue that there are, indeed, deeper commonalities. Recent empirical studies show that psychedelics and meditation modulate overlapping (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  19. Die Transparenz des Geistes.Wolfgang Barz - 2012 - Berlin: Suhrkamp.
    The key message of this book is that we come to know our own mental states, not by peering inward, but by focusing on the aspects of the external world to which we are intentionally related in virtue of having the mental states in question. Though many philosophers think that the idea of transparency, as it is called, may apply to self-knowledge of some mental states, it is often regarded as hopeless to widen its scope to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  20. Function, modality, mental content.Bence Nanay - 2011 - Journal of Mind and Behavior 32 (2):84-87.
    I clarify some of the details of the modal theory of function I outlined in Nanay (2010): (a) I explicate what it means that the function of a token biological trait is fixed by modal facts; (b) I address an objection to my trait type individuation argument against etiological function and (c) I examine the consequences of replacing the etiological theory of function with a modal theory for the prospects of using the concept of biological function to explain mental (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  21. How to think about mental content.Frances Egan - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 170 (1):115-135.
    Introduction: representationalismMost theorists of cognition endorse some version of representationalism, which I will understand as the view that the human mind is an information-using system, and that human cognitive capacities are representational capacities. Of course, notions such as ‘representation’ and ‘information-using’ are terms of art that require explication. As a first pass, representations are “mediating states of an intelligent system that carry information” (Markman and Dietrich 2001, p. 471). They have two important features: (1) they are physically realized, and so (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   79 citations  
  22. Mental Representations and Millikan’s Theory of Intentional Content: Does Biology Chase Causality?Robert D. Rupert - 1999 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 37 (1):113-140.
    In her landmark book, Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories (Millikan1984),1 Ruth Garrett Millikan utilizes the idea of a biological function to solve philosophical problems associated with the phenomena of language, thought, and meaning. Language and thought are activities of biological organisms, according to Millikan, and we should treat them as such when trying to answer related philosophical questions. Of special interest is Millikan’s treatment of intentionality. Here Millikan employs the notion of a biological function to explain what it is (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  23. Placement, grounding, and mental content.Kelly Trogdon - 2015 - In Chris Daly (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophical Methods. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 481-496.
    Grounding-theoretic reformulation of Fodor's theory of content that addresses recalcitrant Quinean concerns.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  24. A Deflationary Account of Mental Representation.Frances Egan - 2020 - In Joulia Smortchkova, Krzysztof Dołęga & Tobias Schlicht (eds.), What Are Mental Representations? New York, NY, United States of America: Oxford University Press.
    Among the cognitive capacities of evolved creatures is the capacity to represent. Theories in cognitive neuroscience typically explain our manifest representational capacities by positing internal representations, but there is little agreement about how these representations function, especially with the relatively recent proliferation of connectionist, dynamical, embodied, and enactive approaches to cognition. In this talk I sketch an account of the nature and function of representation in cognitive neuroscience that couples a realist construal of representational vehicles with a pragmatic account of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  25. Informational Theories of Content and Mental Representation.Marc Artiga & Miguel Ángel Sebastián - 2020 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 11 (3):613-627.
    Informational theories of semantic content have been recently gaining prominence in the debate on the notion of mental representation. In this paper we examine new-wave informational theories which have a special focus on cognitive science. In particular, we argue that these theories face four important difficulties: they do not fully solve the problem of error, fall prey to the wrong distality attribution problem, have serious difficulties accounting for ambiguous and redundant representations and fail to deliver a metasemantic theory (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  26. The Metaphysics of Mental Files.Simon Prosser - 2020 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 100 (3):657-676.
    There is much to be said for a diachronic or interpersonal individuation of singular modes of presentation (MOPs) in terms of a criterion of epistemic transparency between thought tokens. This way of individuating MOPs has been discussed recently within the mental files framework, though the issues discussed here arise for all theories that individuate MOPs in terms of relations among tokens. All such theories face objections concerning apparent failures of the transitivity of the ‘same MOP’ relation. For (...) files, these transitivity failures most obviously occur because mental files can merge or undergo fission. In this paper I argue that this problem is easily resolved once mental files are properly construed as continuants, whose metaphysics is analogous to that of persons or physical objects. All continuants can undergo fission or fusion, leading to similar transitivity problems, but there are well-established theories of persistence that accommodate this. I suggest that, in particular, the stage theory best suits the purposes of a continuant theory of MOPs. (shrink)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  27. Das Bewusstsein erklären.Michael Schmitz - 2005 - Dissertation, Universität Konstanz
    Abstract. The dissertation defends the thesis that the mind-body problem arises against the background of the elimination of the manifest physical world, and that the only satisfactory response to it is to take back that elimination and thus to dissolve the problem. Various materialist and dualist responses are shown to be inadequate. They are only different forms of ontological fundamentalism – physics fundamentalism and consciousness fundamentalism – that lead to ultimately meaningless metaphysical constructions. By contrast, on the ontologically pluralist view (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  28. Meditation and the Scope of Mental Action.Michael Brent & Candace Upton - 2019 - Philosophical Psychology 32 (1):52-71.
    While philosophers of mind have devoted abundant time and attention to questions of content and consciousness, philosophical questions about the nature and scope of mental action have been relatively neglected. Galen Strawson’s account of mental action, arguably the most well-known extant account, holds that cognitive mental action consists in triggering the delivery of content to one’s field of consciousness. However, Strawson fails to recognize several distinct types of mental action that might not reduce to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  29. Kant and the Philosophy of Mind: Perception, Reason, and the Self.Andrew Stephenson & Anil Gomes (eds.) - 2017 - Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
    The essays in this volume explore those aspects of Kant’s writings which concern issues in the philosophy of mind. These issues are central to any understanding of Kant’s critical philosophy and they bear upon contemporary discussions in the philosophy of mind. Fourteen specially written essays address such questions as: What role does mental processing play in Kant’s account of intuition? What kinds of empirical models can be given of these operations? In what sense, and in what ways, are intuitions (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  30. Rules of Belief and the Normativity of Intentional Content.Derek Green - 2021 - Acta Analytica 36 (2):159-69.
    Mental content normativists hold that the mind’s conceptual contents are essentially normative. Many hold the view because they think that facts of the form “subject S possesses concept c” imply that S is enjoined by rules concerning the application of c in theoretical judgments. Some opponents independently raise an intuitive objection: even if there are such rules, S’s possession of the concept is not the source of the enjoinment. Hence, these rules do not support mental content (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  31. Unfollowed Rules and the Normativity of Content.Eric V. Tracy - 2020 - Analytic Philosophy 61 (4):323-344.
    Foundational theories of mental content seek to identify the conditions under which a mental representation expresses, in the mind of a particular thinker, a particular content. Normativists endorse the following general sort of foundational theory of mental content: A mental representation r expresses concept C for agent S just in case S ought to use r in conformity with some particular pattern of use associated with C. In response to Normativist theories of (...), Kathrin Glüer-Pagin and Åsa Wikforss propose a dilemma, alleging that Normativism either entails a vicious regress or falls prey to a charge of idleness. In this paper, I respond to this argument. I argue that Normativism can avoid the commitments that generate the regress and does not propose the sort of explanation required to charge that its explanation has been shown to be problematically idle. The regress-generating commitment to be avoided is, roughly, that tokened, contentful mental states are the product of rule-following. The explanatory task Normativists should disavow is that of explaining how it is that beliefs and other contentful mental states are produced. I argue that Normativism, properly understood as a theory of content, does not provide this kind of psychological explanation, and therefore does not entail that such explanations are to be given in terms of rule-following. If this is correct, Normativism is not the proper target of the dilemma offered by Glüer-Pagin and Wikforss. Understanding why one might construe Normativism in the way Glüer-Pagin and Wikforss must, and how, properly understood, it avoids their dilemma, can help us to appreciate the attractiveness of a genuinely normative theory of content and the importance of paying careful attention to the sort of normativity involved in norm-based theories of content. (shrink)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  32. Attention, Gestalt Principles, and the Determinacy of Perceptual Content.Ben White - 2022 - Erkenntnis 87 (3):1133-1151.
    Theories of phenomenal intentionality have been claimed to resolve certain worries about the indeterminacy of mental content that rival, externalist theories face. Thus far, however, such claims have been largely programmatic. This paper aims to improve on prior arguments in favor of phenomenal intentionality by using attention and Gestalt principles as specific examples of factors that influence the phenomenal character of perceptual experience in ways that thereby help determine perceptual content. Some reasons are then offered for rejecting (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  33. Representation and mental representation.Robert D. Rupert - 2018 - Philosophical Explorations 21 (2):204-225.
    This paper engages critically with anti-representationalist arguments pressed by prominent enactivists and their allies. The arguments in question are meant to show that the “as-such” and “job-description” problems constitute insurmountable challenges to causal-informational theories of mental content. In response to these challenges, a positive account of what makes a physical or computational structure a mental representation is proposed; the positive account is inspired partly by Dretske’s views about content and partly by the role of mental (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   21 citations  
  34. Introspection, Phenomenality, and the Availability of Intentional Content.David Pitt - 2011 - In Tim Bayne & Michelle Montague (eds.), Cognitive Phenomenology. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press UK. pp. 141-173.
    Some analytic philosophers have recently been defending the thesis that there’s “something it’s like” to consciously think a particular thought, which is qualitatively different from what it’s like to be in any other kind of conscious mental state and from what it’s like to think any other thought, and which constitutes the thought’s intentional content. (I call this the “intentional phenomenology thesis”). One objection to this thesis concerns the introspective availability of such content: If it is true (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   48 citations  
  35. Consciousness, physicalism, and the problem of mental causation.Christian Coseru - 2022 - In Itay Shani & Susanne Kathrin Beiweis (eds.), Cross-cultural approaches to consciousness: mind, nature and ultimate reality. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
    Is there such a thing as mental causation? Is it possible for the mental to have causal influence on the physical? Or has the old “mind over matter” question been rendered obsolete by the advent of brain science? Whatever our answers to these questions, it seems that we cannot systematically pursue them without considering what makes mental causation problematic in the first place: The causal closure of the physical world. This paper revisits the problem of mental (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  36. Hume on Mental Transparency.Hsueh Qu - 2017 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 98 (4):576-601.
    This article investigates Hume's account of mental transparency. In this article, I will endorse Qualitative Transparency – that is, the thesis that we cannot fail to apprehend the qualitative characters of our current perceptions, and these apprehensions cannot fail to be veridical – on the basis that, unlike its competitors, it is both weak enough to accommodate the introspective mistakes that Hume recognises, and yet strong enough to make sense of his positive employments of mental (...). Moreover, Qualitative Transparency is also philosophically satisfying in providing good philosophical reason for why the mental states that are incorrigible should in fact be so. (shrink)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  37. Indifference vs. Universality of Mental Representation in Ockham, Buridan, and Aquinas.Gyula Klima - 2010 - Questio. Yearbook of the History of Metaphysics 10 (1):99-110.
    This paper argues in the first place that nominalists are right in insisting against ontological realists that semantic universality does not require commitment to universal entities. However, Ockham, in his zeal to get rid of Scotus’s universal entities, swept under the carpet the issue of universal representational content of genuinely universal symbols, conflating it with the mere indifference of the information content of non-distinctive singular representations. Buridan did come up with an abstractionist theory of the formation of genuinely (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  38. Context, Content, and Epistemic Transparency.Mahrad Almotahari & Ephraim Glick - 2010 - Mind 119 (476):1067-1086.
    We motivate the idea that presupposition is a transparent attitude. We then explain why epistemic opacity is not a serious problem for Robert Stalnaker's theory of content and conversation. We conclude with critical remarks about John Hawthorne and Ofra Magidor's alternative theory.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  39. Creating a World in the Head: The Conscious Apprehension of Neural Content Originating from Internal Sources.Stan Klein & Judith Loftus - manuscript
    Note: Paper to appear in special issue of the journal Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice, on the evolution of consciousness //// Klein, Nguyen, & Zhang (in press) argued that the evolutionary transition from respondent to agent during the Cambrian Explosion would be a promising vantage point from which to gain insight into the evolution of organic sentience. They focused on how increased competition for resources -- in consequence of the proliferation of new, neurally sophisticated life-forms -- made awareness (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  40. Mental Strength: A Theory of Experience Intensity.Jorge Morales - 2023 - Philosophical Perspectives 37 (1):1-21.
    Our pains can be more or less intense, our mental imagery can be more or less vivid, our perceptual experiences can be more or less striking. These degrees of intensity of conscious experiences are all manifestations of a phenomenal property I call mental strength. In this article, I argue that mental strength is a domain-general phenomenal magnitude; in other words, it is a phenomenal quantity shared by all conscious experiences that explains their degree of felt intensity. (...) strength has been largely overlooked in favor of mental states’ type, representational contents, domain-specific phenomenology, or processes such as attention. Considering mental strength in our reflections about the mind illuminates debates about the relation of representational contents and phenomenal character, and it also helps address questions about the structure and functions of consciousness. Mental strength provides a unifying construct to model what is shared in the phenomenology of different types of conscious experiences. (shrink)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  41. Orthogonality of Phenomenality and Content.Gottfried Vosgerau, Tobias Schlicht & Albert Newen - 2008 - American Philosophical Quarterly 45 (4):309 - 328.
    This paper presents arguments from empirical research and from philosophical considerations to the effect that phenomenality and content are two distinct and independent features of mental representations, which are both relational. Thus, it is argued, classical arguments that infer phenomenality from content have to be rejected. Likewise, theories that try to explain the phenomenal character of experiences by appeal to specific types of content cannot succeed. Instead, a dynamic view of consciousness has to be adopted that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  42. Teleosemantics and the Hard Problem of Content.Stephen Francis Mann & Ross Pain - 2022 - Philosophical Psychology 35 (1):22-46.
    Hutto and Myin claim that teleosemantics cannot account for mental content. In their view, teleosemantics accounts for a poorer kind of relation between cognitive states and the world but lacks the theoretical tools to account for a richer kind. We show that their objection imposes two criteria on theories of content: a truth-evaluable criterion and an intensionality criterion. For the objection to go through, teleosemantics must be subject to both these criteria and must fail to satisfy them. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  43. Mental Imagery in the Experience of Literary Narrative: Views from Embodied Cognition.Anezka Kuzmicova - 2013 - Dissertation, Stockholm University
    Defined as vicarious sensorimotor experiencing, mental imagery is a powerful source of aesthetic enjoyment in everyday life and, reportedly, one of the commonest things readers remember about literary narratives in the long term. Furthermore, it is positively correlated with other dimensions of reader response, most notably with emotion. Until recent decades, however, the phenomenon of mental imagery has been largely overlooked by modern literary scholarship. As an attempt to strengthen the status of mental imagery within the literary (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  44. Something Mental is Just in the Head, and What the Mental Out of the Head is Like.Arvan Marcus - manuscript
    In, “Why Nothing Mental is Just in The Head,” Justin Fisher (Noȗs, 2007) uses a novel thought-experiment to argue that every form of mental internalism is false. This paper shows that Fisher fails to refute mental internalism, and that a new variant of his example actually (a) confirms a form of mental internalism, as well as (b) John Locke's “resemblance thesis,” thereby (c) disconfirming all externalist theories of mental content (the type of theory Fisher (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  45. Transparency and Knowledge of One's Own Perceptions.Martin Francisco Fricke - 2017 - Contributions of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society 25:65-67.
    So-called "transparency theories" of self-knowledge, inspired by a remark of Gareth Evans, claim that we can obtain knowledge of our own beliefs by directing out attention towards the world, rather than introspecting the contents of our own minds. Most recent transparency theories concentrate on the case of self-knowledge concerning belief and desires. But can a transparency account be generalised to knowledge of one's own perceptions? In a recent paper, Alex Byrne (2012) argues that we can know what (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  46. Premium Economy: A Transparency Account of Knowledge of Perception.Shao-Pu Kang - forthcoming - Erkenntnis.
    Since the transparency approach to introspection need not posit a dedicated mechanism specialized for detecting one’s own mental states, its economy is often viewed as a major advantage by both proponents and opponents. But sometimes economy comes at the cost of relying on controversial views of the natures of mental states. Perceptual experience is a case in point. For example, Alex Byrne’s account relies on the view that experience constitutively involves belief, and Matthew Boyle’s account relies on (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  47. Mentalism and Epistemic Transparency.Declan Smithies - 2012 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 90 (4):723-741.
    Questions about the transparency of evidence are central to debates between factive and non-factive versions of mentalism about evidence. If all evidence is transparent, then factive mentalism is false, since no factive mental states are transparent. However, Timothy Williamson has argued that transparency is a myth and that no conditions are transparent except trivial ones. This paper responds by drawing a distinction between doxastic and epistemic notions of transparency. Williamson's argument may show that no conditions are (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   39 citations  
  48. Mental action.Antonia Peacocke - 2021 - Philosophy Compass 16 (6):e12741.
    Just as bodily actions are things you do with your body, mental actions are things you do with your mind. Both are different from things that merely happen to you. Where does the idea of mental action come from? What are mental actions? And why do they matter in philosophy? These are the three main questions answered in this paper. Section 1 introduces mental action through a brief history of the topic in philosophy. Section 2 explains (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  49. Externalism, inclusion, and knowledge of content.Carlos J. Moya - 2002 - In María José Frápolli & Esther Romero (eds.), Meaning, Basic Self-Knowledge, and Mind: Essays on Tyler Burge. University of Chicago Press. pp. 773-800.
    In this paper I address the question whether self-knowledge is compatible with an externalist individuation of mental content. Against some approaches, I consider self-knowledge as a genuine cognitive achievement. Though it is neither incorrigible nor infallible, self-knowledge is direct, a priori (no based on empirical investigation), presumptively true and authoritative. The problem is whether self-knowledge, so understood, is compatible with externalism. My answer will be affirmative. I will defend this species of compatibilism against several objections, in particular those (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  50. Experience and Content: Consequences of a Continuum Theory.W. M. Davies - 1996 - Avebury.
    This book is about experiential content: what it is; what kind of account can be given of it. I am concerned with identifying and attacking one main view - I call it the inferentialist proposal. This account is central to the philosophy of mind, epistemology and philosophy of science and perception. I claim, however, that it needs to be recast into something far more subtle and enriched, and I attempt to provide a better alternative in these pages. The inferentialist (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
1 — 50 / 1000