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43535What is functionalism?In Donald M. Borchert (ed.), [Book Chapter], Macmillan. 1996.What is Functionalism? Functionalism is one of the major proposals that have been offered as solutions to the mind/body problem. Solutions to the mind/body problem usually try to answer questions such as: What is the ultimate nature of the mental? At the most general level, what makes a mental state mental? Or more specifically, What do thoughts have in common in virtue of which they are thoughts? That is, what makes a thought a thought? What makes a pain a pain? Cartesian Dualism said the ultim…Read more
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4082Perceptual consciousness overflows cognitive accessTrends in Cognitive Sciences 15 (12): 567-575. 2011.One of the most important issues concerning the foundations ofconscious perception centerson thequestion of whether perceptual consciousness is rich or sparse. The overflow argument uses a form of ‘iconic memory’ toarguethatperceptual consciousnessisricher (i.e.,has a higher capacity) than cognitive access: when observing a complex scene we are conscious of more than we can report or think about. Recently, the overflow argumenthas been challenged both empirically and conceptually. This paper rev…Read more
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3811Troubles with functionalismMinnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 9 261-325. 1978.The functionalist view of the nature of the mind is now widely accepted. Like behaviorism and physicalism, functionalism seeks to answer the question "What are mental states?" I shall be concerned with identity thesis formulations of functionalism. They say, for example, that pain is a functional state, just as identity thesis formulations of physicalism say that pain is a physical state
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2907On a confusion about a function of consciousnessBrain and Behavioral Sciences 18 (2). 1995.Consciousness is a mongrel concept: there are a number of very different "consciousnesses." Phenomenal consciousness is experience; the phenomenally conscious aspect of a state is what it is like to be in that state. The mark of access-consciousness, by contrast, is availability for use in reasoning and rationally guiding speech and action. These concepts are often partly or totally conflated, with bad results. This target article uses as an example a form of reasoning about a function of "consc…Read more
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2488Seeing‐As in the Light of Vision SciencePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (1): 560-572. 2014.
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2271The mind as the software of the brainIn Daniel N. Osherson, Lila Gleitman, Stephen M. Kosslyn, S. Smith & Saadya Sternberg (eds.), An Invitation to Cognitive Science, Second Edition, Volume 3, Mit Press. pp. 377-425. 1995.In this section, we will start with an influential attempt to define `intelligence', and then we will move to a consideration of how human intelligence is to be investigated on the machine model. The last part of the section will discuss the relation between the mental and the biological
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1946Conceptual analysis, dualism, and the explanatory gapPhilosophical Review 108 (1): 1-46. 1999.The explanatory gap . Consciousness is a mystery. No one has ever given an account, even a highly speculative, hypothetical, and incomplete account of how a physical thing could have phenomenal states. Suppose that consciousness is identical to a property of the brain, say activity in the pyramidal cells of layer 5 of the cortex involving reverberatory circuits from cortical layer 6 to the thalamus and back to layers 4 and 6,as Crick and Koch have suggested for visual consciousness. .) Still, th…Read more
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1805Attention and perceptual adaptationBehavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (3): 205-206. 2013.Commentary on Andy Clark's target article on predictive coding.
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1804The Border Between Seeing and ThinkingOUP Usa. 2023.This book argues that there is a joint in nature between seeing and thinking, perception, and cognition. Perception is constitutively iconic, nonconceptual, and nonpropositional, whereas cognition does not have these properties constitutively. The book does not appeal to “intuitions,” as is common in philosophy, but to empirical evidence, including experiments in neuroscience and psychology. The book argues that cognition affects perception, i.e., that perception is cognitively penetrable, but t…Read more
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1750ConsciousnessIn R. L. Gregory (ed.), R. Gregory Oxford Companion to the Mind, Second Edition 2004, Oxford University Press. 2004.There are two broad classes of empirical theories of consciousness, which I will call the biological and the functional. The biological approach is based on empirical correlations between experience and the brain. For example, there is a great deal of evidence that the neural correlate of visual experience is activity in a set of occipetotemporal pathways, with special emphasis on the infero-temporal cortex. The functionalist approach is a successor of behaviorism, the view that mentality can be…Read more
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1689What Is Wrong with the No-Report Paradigm and How to Fix ItTrends in Cognitive Sciences 23 (12): 1003-1013. 2019.Is consciousness based in prefrontal circuits involved in cognitive processes like thought, reasoning, and memory or, alternatively, is it based in sensory areas in the back of the neocortex? The no-report paradigm has been crucial to this debate because it aims to separate the neural basis of the cognitive processes underlying post-perceptual decision and report from the neural basis of conscious perception itself. However, the no-report paradigm is problematic because, even in the absence of …Read more
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1566Sexism, racism, ageism and the nature of consciousnessIn Richard Moran, Alan Sidelle & Jennifer E. Whiting (eds.), Philosophical Topics, University of Arkansas Press. pp. 71--88. 2000.Everyone would agree that the American flag is red, white and blue. Everyone should also agree that it looks red, white and blue to people with normal color vision in appropriate circumstances. If a philosophical theory led to the conclusion that the red stripes cannot look red to both men and women, both blacks and whites, both young and old, we would be reluctant (to say the least) to accept that philosophical theory. But there is a widespread philosophical view about the nature of conscious …Read more
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1427Rich conscious perception outside focal attentionTrends in Cognitive Sciences 18 (9): 445-447. 2014.Can we consciously see more items at once than can be held in visual working memory? This question has elud- ed resolution because the ultimate evidence is subjects’ reports in which phenomenal consciousness is filtered through working memory. However, a new technique makes use of the fact that unattended ‘ensemble prop- erties’ can be detected ‘for free’ without decreasing working memory capacity.
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1359Consciousness, Big Science and Conceptual ClarityIn Gary Marcus & Jeremy Freeman (eds.), in The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World’s Leading Neuroscientists, Princeton University Press. pp. 161-176. 2014.
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1341The Grain of Vision and the Grain of AttentionThought: A Journal of Philosophy 1 (3): 170-184. 2012.Often when there is no attention to an object, there is no conscious perception of it either, leading some to conclude that conscious perception is an attentional phenomenon. There is a well-known perceptual phenomenon—visuo-spatial crowding, in which objects are too closely packed for attention to single out one of them. This article argues that there is a variant of crowding—what I call ‘‘identity-crowding’’—in which one can consciously see a thing despite failure of attention to it. This conc…Read more
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1313The Anna Karenina Theory of the UnconsciousNeuropsychoanalysis 13 (1): 34-37. 2011.The Anna Karenina Theory says: all conscious states are alike; each unconscious state is unconscious in its own way. This note argues that many components have to function properly to produce consciousness, but failure in any one of many different ones can yield an unconscious state in different ways. In that sense the Anna Karenina theory is true. But in another respect it is false: kinds of unconsciousness depend on kinds of consciousness
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1288Consciousness and accessibilityBehavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (4): 596-598. 1990.This is my first publication of the distinction between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness, though not using quite those terms. It ends with this: "The upshot is this: If Searle is using the access sense of "consciousness," his argument doesn't get to first base. If, as is more likely, he intends the what-it-is-like sense, his argument depends on assumptions about issues that the cognitivist is bound to regard as deeply unsettled empirical questions." Searle replies: "He refers …Read more
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1267Holism, mental and semanticIn Edward Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Genealogy to Iqbal, Routledge. 1998.Mental (or semantic) holism is the doctrine that the identity of a belief content (or the meaning of a sentence that expresses it) is determined by its place in the web of beliefs or sentences comprising a whole theory or group of theories. It can be contrasted with two other views: atomism and molecularism. Molecularism characterizes meaning and content in terms of relatively small parts of the web in a way that allows many different theories to share those parts. For example, the meaning of 'c…Read more
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1230The Canberra Plan Neglects GroundIn Terence Horgan, Marcelo Sabates & David Sosa (eds.), Qualia and Mental Causation in a Physical World: Themes from the Philosophy of Jaegwon Kim,, Cambridge University Press. pp. 105-133. 2015.This paper argues that the “Canberra Plan” picture of physicalistic reduction of mind--a picture shared by both its proponents and opponents, philosophers as diverse as David Armstrong, David Chalmers Frank Jackson, Jaegwon Kim, Joe Levine and David Lewis--neglects ground (Fine, 2001, 2012). To the extent that the point of view endorsed by the Canberra Plan has an account of the physical/functional ground of mind at all, it is in one version trivial and in another version implausible. In its mo…Read more
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1224Psychologism and behaviorismPhilosophical Review 90 (1): 5-43. 1981.Let psychologism be the doctrine that whether behavior is intelligent behavior depends on the character of the internal information processing that produces it. More specifically, I mean psychologism to involve the doctrine that two systems could have actual and potential behavior _typical_ of familiar intelligent beings, that the two systems could be exactly alike in their actual and potential behavior, and in their behavioral dispositions and capacities and counterfactual behavioral properties…Read more
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1215The harder problem of consciousnessJournal of Philosophy 99 (8): 391-425. 2002.consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of Djin when Aladdin rubbed his lamp.
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1157Conceptual Role SemanticsIn Edward Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Genealogy to Iqbal, Routledge. pp. 242-256. 1998.According to Conceptual Role Semantics, the meaning of a representation is the role of that representation in the cognitive life of the agent, e.g. in perception, thought and decision-making. It is an extension of the well known "use" theory of meaning, according to which the meaning of a word is its use in communication and more generally, in social interaction. CRS supplements external use by including the role of a symbol inside a computer or a brain. The uses appealed to are not just actual,…Read more
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1124Top-down attention and consciousness: comment on Cohen et alTrends in Cognitive Sciences 16 (11): 527. 2012.
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1113Review of Julian Jaynes, Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (review)Boston Globe. 1977.Review of Julian Jaynes, Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind from the Boston Globe, March 6, 1977, p. A17
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1101What is Functionalism? Functionalism is one of the major proposals that have been offered as solutions to the mind/body problem. Solutions to the mind/body problem usually try to answer questions such as: What is the ultimate nature of the mental? At the most general level, what makes a mental state mental? Or more specifically, What do thoughts have in common in virtue of which they are thoughts? That is, what makes a thought a thought? What makes a pain a pain? Cartesian Dualism said the ultim…Read more
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1077Some concepts of consciousnessIn D. Chalmers (ed.), Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings, . pp. 206-219. 2002.Consciousness is a mongrel concept: there are a number of very different "consciousnesses". Phenomenal consciousness is experience; the phenomenally conscious aspect of a state is what it is like to be in that state
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1042Comparing the major theories of consciousnessIn Michael Gazzaniga (ed.), The Cognitive Neurosciences IV, . pp. 1111-1123. 2009.This article compares the three frameworks for theories of consciousness that are taken most seriously by neuroscientists, the view that consciousness is a biological state of the brain, the global workspace perspective and an account in terms of higher order states. The comparison features the “explanatory gap” (Nagel, 1974; Levine, 1983) the fact that we have no idea why the neural basis of an experience is the neural basis of that experience rather than another experience or no experience at …Read more
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890Do causal powers drain awayPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 67 (1): 133-150. 2003.In this note, I will discuss one issue concerning the main argument of Mind in a Physical World (Kim, 1998), the Causal Exclusion Argument. The issue is whether it is a consequence of the Causal Exclusion Argument that all macro level causation (that is, causation above the level of fundamental physics) is an illusion, with all of the apparent causal powers of mental and other macro properties draining into the bottom level of physics. I will argue that such a consequence would give us reason to…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Perception |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Philosophy of Neuroscience |
Philosophy of Mind |