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215Review of Langsam The Wonder of Consciousness (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 3. 2014.
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227Comments 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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148Discussion 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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108Discussion of Anil Gupta's “Outline of an Account of Experience”Analytic Philosophy 59 (1): 75-88. 2018.
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1916The 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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299Does it matter whether we perceptually represent tomato-hood?
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60The Perceptual Representation of Objects and Natural Kinds: Comments on SpeaksPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 95 (2): 470-477. 2017.
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313Jane 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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1331I develop a new argument against Russellian Monism about consciousness.
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405I raise some objections to the theory presented in *Outside Color*.
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1338In 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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687Why 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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1230Does Phenomenology Ground Mental Content?In Uriah Kriegel (ed.), Phenomenal Intentionality, 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
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107Consciousness * by Christopher hillAnalysis 71 (2): 393-397. 2011.(No abstract is available for this citation).
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358These are some responses to an early version of Johnston's paper "The Personite Problem" (now published in Nous).
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2The Hard Core of the Mind-Body Problem: Essays on Sensory Consciousness and the Secondary QualitiesDissertation, New York University. 2004.The mind-body problem is one of the last great intellectual mysteries facing humankind. The hard core of the mind-body problem is the problem of qualitative character: the what-it's-likeness of conscious states. What is the nature of qualitative character? Can it be explained in terms of the intentional content of experience? What is the nature of the so-called secondary qualities---colors, sounds, smells, and so on? Finally, is Physicalism about qualitative character correct? In other words, ar…Read more
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365Do theories of consciousness rest on a mistake?Philosophical Issues 20 (1): 333-367. 2010.Using empirical research on pain, sound and taste, I argue against the combination of intentionalism about consciousness and a broadly ‘tracking’ psychosemantics of the kind defended by Fodor, Dretske, Hill, Neander, Stalnaker, Tye and others. Then I develop problems with Kriegel and Prinz's attempt to combine a Dretskean psychosemantics with the view that sensible properties are Shoemakerian response-dependent properties. Finally, I develop in detail my own 'primitivist' view of sensory intenti…Read more
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301An argument against Fregean that-clause semanticsPhilosophical Studies 138 (3). 2008.I develop a problem for the Fregean Reference Shift analysis of that-clause reference. The problem is discussed by Stephen Schiffer in his recent book The Things We Mean (2003). Either the defender of the Fregean Reference Shift analysis must count certain counterintuitive inferences as valid, or else he must reject a plausible Exportation rule. I consider several responses. I find that the best response relies on a Kaplan-inspired analysis of quantified belief reports. But I argue that this res…Read more
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158What is my evidence that here is a cup? Comments on Susanna SchellenbergPhilosophical Studies 173 (4): 915-927. 2016.This paper is about Susanna Schellenberg's view on the explanatory role of perceptual experience. I raise a basic question about what the argument for her view might be. Then I develop two new problem cases: one involving “seamless transitions” between perception and hallucination and another involving the graded character of perceptual evidence and justification
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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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599Can 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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1611Experiences 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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643The 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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669The 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. pp. 237-298. 2013.
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460Colour, philosophical perspectivesIn Axel Cleeremans, Patrick Wilken & Tim Bayne (eds.), 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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661This 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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388What 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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522Intentionalism 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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Philosophy of Mind |
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Metaphysics |
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Philosophy of Mind |