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138Ruritania revisitedPhilosophical Issues 6 171-187. 1995.Perhaps you are wondering what I mean by ‘holism’. After all, everyone seems to use the term in a different sense. Even if we restrict ourselves to holism of meaning and content, we have many different holisms. Some take holism about meaning to be the doctrine that if you’ve got one meaning, you’ve got lots of them.2 On other views, to say meaning is holistic is to say that the meaning of each term depends on the meanings of all or most other terms.3 Others take meaning holism to be the doctrine…Read more
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1099Review 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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450Concepts of ConsciousnessIn David J. Chalmers (ed.), Philosophy of Mind: Contemporary Readings, Oxford University Press. pp. 206-218. 2002.
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1Two kinds of lawsIn C. Macdonald & G. Macdonald (eds.), Philosophy of Psychology: Debates on Psychological Explanation, Oxford University Press. 1994.
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763Consciousness, Accessibility, and the Mesh between Psychology and NeuroscienceBehavioral and Brain Sciences 30 (5): 481--548. 2007.How can we disentangle the neural basis of phenomenal consciousness from the neural machinery of the cognitive access that underlies reports of phenomenal consciousness? We can see the problem in stark form if we ask how we could tell whether representations inside a Fodorian module are phenomenally conscious. The methodology would seem straightforward: find the neural natural kinds that are the basis of phenomenal consciousness in clear cases when subjects are completely confident and we have n…Read more
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2893On 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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1328The 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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117Spatial perception via tactile sensationTrends in Cognitive Sciences 7 (7): 285-286. 2003.I’m now looking at a soccer ball and a Nintendo Game Cube, and thus am having a perceptual experience of a sphere and a cube. My friend, blind from birth, (who’s helping me with the cleaning) is touching these items, and is thus having a perceptual experience of the same things. Not only are we perceiving the same items, but in doing so we apply the terms ‘sphere’ and ‘cube’, respectively, to them. Are we, in doing so, applying the same, or different, perceptual concepts?
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43469What 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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10Searle's arguments against cognitive scienceIn John M. Preston & Michael A. Bishop (eds.), Views Into the Chinese Room: New Essays on Searle and Artificial Intelligence, Oxford University Press. pp. 70--79. 2003.
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1114Top-down attention and consciousness: comment on Cohen et alTrends in Cognitive Sciences 16 (11): 527. 2012.
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1039Comparing 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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376Readings in Philosophy of Psychology: 1 (edited book)Harvard University Press. 1980.... PHILOSOPHY OF PSYCHOLOGY is the study of conceptual issues in psychology. For the most part, these issues fall equally well in psychology as in..
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Perception |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Philosophy of Neuroscience |
Philosophy of Mind |