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1175Blockheads! Essays on Ned Block’s Philosophy of Mind and Consciousness (edited book)MIT Press. 2019.Perhaps more than any other philosopher of mind, Ned Block synthesizes philosophical and scientific approaches to the mind; he is unique in moving back and forth across this divide, doing so with creativity and intensity. Over the course of his career, Block has made groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of intelligence, representation, and consciousness. Blockheads! (the title refers to Block's imaginary counterexample to the Turing test—and to the Block-enthusiast contributors) off…Read more
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2759Representationalism about ConsciousnessIn Uriah Kriegel (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness, Oxford University Press. 2020.Discusses recent work on representationalism, including: the case for a representationalist theory of consciousness, which explains consciousness in terms of content; rivals such as neurobiological type-type identity theory (Papineau, McLaughlin) and naive realism (Allen, Campbell, Brewer); John Campbell and David Papineau's recent objections to representationalism; the problem of the "laws of appearance"; externalist vs internalist versions of representationalism; the relation between represent…Read more
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234Review of Langsam The Wonder of Consciousness (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 3. 2014.
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253Comments on an early version of Johnston's "The Problem with the Content View" (in Berit Brogaard ed. *Does Perception Have Content?*, 2014) delivered at a workshop on perception at NYU in 2010.
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129Discussion of Bill Brewer's “Perceptual Experience and Empirical Reason”Analytic Philosophy 59 (1): 19-32. 2018.What is the role of conscious experience in the epistemology of perceptual knowledge: how should we characterise what is going on in seeing that o is F in order to illuminate the contribution of seeing o to their status as cases of knowing that o is F? My proposal is that seeing o involves conscious acquaintance with o itself, the concrete worldly source of the truth that o is F, in a way that may make it evident to the subject that o is an instance of ‘x is F’ as she understands this, and hence…Read more
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114Discussion of Anil Gupta's “Outline of an Account of Experience”Analytic Philosophy 59 (1): 75-88. 2018.
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2042The significance argument for the irreducibility of consciousnessPhilosophical Perspectives 31 (1): 349-407. 2017.The Significance Argument (SA) for the irreducibility of consciousness is based on a series of new puzzle-cases that I call multiple candidate cases. In these cases, there is a multiplicity of physical-functional properties or relations that are candidates to be identified with the sensible qualities and our consciousness of them, where those candidates are not significantly different. I will argue that these cases show that reductive materialists cannot accommodate the various ways in which con…Read more
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315Does it matter whether we perceptually represent tomato-hood?
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65The Perceptual Representation of Objects and Natural Kinds: Comments on SpeaksPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 95 (2): 470-477. 2017.
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339Jane Friedman proposes DBI: One ought not to believe an (complete) answer to a question & at the same time inquire into that question – that’d be irrational. I raise some counterexamples. Then I propose an alternative principle which avoids the counterexamples and which has the further advantage of following from more general platitudes about knowledge.
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1401I develop a new argument against Russellian Monism about consciousness.
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424I raise some objections to the theory presented in *Outside Color*.
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1403In the first instance, IIT is formulated as a theory of the physical basis of the 'degree' or ‘level’ or ‘amount’ of consciousness in a system. I raise a series of questions about the central explanatory target, the 'degree' or ‘level’ or ‘amount’ of consciousness. I suggest it is not at all clear what scientists and philosophers are talking about when they talk about consciousness as gradable. This point is developed in more detail in my paper "What Is the Integrated Information Theory of Consc…Read more
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90PerceptionRoutledge. 2021.Perception is one of the most pervasive and puzzling problems in philosophy, generating a great deal of attention and controversy in philosophy of mind, psychology and metaphysics. If perceptual illusion and hallucination are possible, how can perception be what it intuitively seems to be, a direct and immediate access to reality? How can perception be both internally dependent and externally directed? Perception is an outstanding introduction to this fundamental topic, covering both the p…Read more
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629Can disjunctivists explain our access to the sensible world?Philosophical Issues 21 (1): 384-433. 2011.Develops an empirical argument against naive realism-disjunctivism: if naive realists accept "internal dependence", then they cannot explain the evolution of perceptual success. Also presents a puzzle about our knowledge of universals.
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1650Experiences are Representations: An Empirical Argument (forthcoming Routledge)In Bence Nanay (ed.), Current Controversies in Philosophy of Perception, Routledge. 2016.In this paper, I do a few things. I develop a (largely) empirical argument against naïve realism (Campbell, Martin, others) and for representationalism. I answer Papineau’s recent paper “Against Representationalism (about Experience)”. And I develop a new puzzle for representationalists.
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674The Interdependence of Phenomenology and IntentionalityThe Monist 91 (2): 250-272. 2008.I address the question of whether phenomenology is "prior to" all intentionality. I also sketch a version of David Lewis's interpretationism in which phenomenal intentionality plays the role of source intentionality.
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708The real trouble for phenomenal externalists: New empirical evidence (with reply by Klein&Hilbert)In Richard Brown (ed.), Consciousness Inside and Out: Phenomenology, Neuroscience, and the Nature of Experience, Springer Studies in Brain and Mind. pp. 237-298. 2013.
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480Colour, philosophical perspectivesIn Patrick Wilken, Timothy J. Bayne & Axel Cleeremans (eds.), The Oxford Companion to Consciousness, Oxford University Press. pp. 144-149. 2009.An overview of the main positions on colour.
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83Review of Jonathan Cohen, The Red and the Real: An Essay on Color Ontology (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2010 (3). 2010.A review of Cohen's *The Red and the Real*
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682This paper (from 2006) is now defunct. I argue against "realist primitivism". One of my arguments is a kind of "evolutionary debunking argument". Some of the material of this was incorporated into “Can Disjunctivists Explain Our Access to the Sensible World?” and "How Does Color Experience Represent the World?"
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400What are the contents of experiencesPhilosophical Quarterly 59 (236): 483-507. 2009.I address three interrelated issues concerning the contents of experiences. First, I address the preliminary issue of what it means to say that experiences have contents. Then I address the issue of why we should believe that experiences have contents. Finally, I address the issue of what the contents of experiences are.
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531Intentionalism and perceptual presencePhilosophical Perspectives 21 (1): 495-541. 2007.H. H. Price (1932) held that experience is essentially presentational. According to Price, when one has an experience of a tomato, nothing can be more certain than that there is something of which one is aware. Price claimed that the same applies to hallucination. In general, whenever one has a visual experience, there is something of which one is aware, according to Price. Call this thesis Item-Awareness
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934A Simple View of ConsciousnessIn Robert C. Koons & George Bealer (eds.), The waning of materialism, Oxford University Press. pp. 25--66. 2010.Phenomenal intentionality is irreducible. Empirical investigation shows it is internally-dependent. So our usual externalist (causal, etc.) theories do not apply here. Internalist views of phenomenal intentionality (e. g. interpretationism) also fail. The resulting primitivist view avoids Papineau's worry that terms for consciousness are highly indeterminate: since conscious properties are extremely natural (despite having unnatural supervenience bases) they are 'reference magnets'.
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782Sensory awareness is not a wide physical relation: An empirical argument against externalist intentionalismNoûs 40 (2): 205-240. 2006.Phenomenal intentionality is a singular form of intentionality. Science shows it is internally-determined. So standard externalist models for reducing intentionality don't apply to it.
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328Can the physicalist explain colour structure in terms of colour experience?1Australasian Journal of Philosophy 84 (4). 2006.Physicalism about colour is the thesis that colours are identical with response-independent, physical properties of objects. I endorse the Argument from Structure against Physicalism about colour. The argument states that Physicalism cannot accommodate certain obvious facts about colour structure: for instance, that red is a unitary colour while purple is a binary colour, and that blue resembles purple more than green. I provide a detailed formulation of the argument. According to the most popul…Read more
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68An argument against Armstrong's analysis of the resemblance of universalsAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 75 (1). 1997.This Article does not have an abstract
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735Why explain visual experience in terms of content?In Bence Nanay (ed.), Perceiving the world, Oxford University Press. pp. 254--309. 2010.
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1349Does Phenomenology Ground Mental Content?In Uriah Kriegel (ed.), The Phenomenal Intentionality Research Program, Oxford University Press. pp. 194-234. 2013.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 …Read more
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Mind |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |