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281Mental Pictures and Cognitive SciencePhilosophical Review 92 (4): 499--542. 1983.Such claims are part 0f a viewpoint according t0 which mental images represent in thc manner of pictures. It is very natural t0 think that such claims are confused or nonsensical. One of my purposes here is a limited dcfcnsc of this supposedly confused doctrine, especially against its chief cognitive science rival. But this..
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268How to Find the Neural Correlate of Consciousness*: Ned BlockRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 43 23-34. 1998.There are two concepts of consciousness that are easy to confuse with one another, access-consciousness and phenomenal consciousness. However, just as the concepts of water and H 2 O are different concepts of the same thing, so the two concepts of consciousness may come to the same thing in the brain. The focus of this paper is on the problems that arise when these two concepts of consciousness are conflated. I will argue that John Searle's reasoning about the function of consciousness goes wron…Read more
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267Let's get rid of the concept of an object fileIn Brian McLaughlin & Jonathan Cohen (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind, Second Edition., Wiley. pp. 494-516. forthcoming.
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262Sexism, ageism, racism, and the nature of consciousnessPhilosophical Topics 26 (1-2): 39-70. 1999.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 experience that, together with some empirical facts, suggests that color experience cannot be veridical for both men and women, both blacks and whites, both young and old
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261Can the mind change the world?In George S. Boolos (ed.), Meaning and Method: Essays in Honor of Hilary Putnam, Cambridge University Press. pp. 137--170. 1989.
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257Behaviorism revisitedBehavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (5): 977-978. 2001.O'Regan and Noe declare that the qualitative character of experience is constituted by the nature of the sensorimotor contingencies at play when we perceive. Sensorimotor contingencies are a highly restricted set of input-output relations. The restriction excludes contingencies that don’t essentially involve perceptual systems. Of course if the ‘sensory’ in ‘sensorimotor’ were to be understood mentalistically, the thesis would not be of much interest, so I assume that these contingencies are to …Read more
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213Paradox and cross purposes in recent work on consciousnessCognition 79 (1-2): 197--219. 2001.Dehaene and Naccache, Dennett and Jack and Shallice “see convergence coming from many different quarters on a version of the neuronal global workspace model†(Dennett, p. 1). (Boldface references are to papers in this volume.) On the contrary, even within this volume, there are commitments to very different perspectives on consciousness. And these differing perspectives are based on tacit differences in philosophical starting places that should be made explicit.  Indeed, it is not clear …Read more
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207Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett (review)Journal of Philosophy 90 (4): 181-193. 1993.
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200Discussion of J. Kevin O’Regan’s “Why Red Doesn’t Sound Like a Bell: Understanding the Feel of Consciousness”Review of Philosophy and Psychology 3 (1): 89-108. 2012.Discussion of J. Kevin O’Regan’s “Why Red Doesn’t Sound Like a Bell: Understanding the Feel of Consciousness” Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-20 DOI 10.1007/s13164-012-0090-7 Authors J. Kevin O’Regan, Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, CNRS - Université Paris Descartes, Centre Biomédical des Saints Pères, 45 rue des Sts Pères, 75270 Paris cedex 06, France Ned Block, Departments of Philosophy, Psychology and Center for Neural Science, New York University, 5 Washington Place, New York,…Read more
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195The photographic fallacy in the debate about mental imageryNoûs 17 (4): 651-62. 1983.There has been considerable debate among philosophers and psychol- ogists about whether the internal representations of imagery represent in the manner of pictures or in the manner of language. One side, pictorialism,holds that an internal imagery representation of Reagan is like a picture of Reagan. The other side, descriptionalism,holds that an internal imagery representation of Reagan is more like a string of words denoting or describing Reagan. My aim here is to expose a widespread fallacy o…Read more
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191The Anna Karenina Principle and Skepticism about Unconscious PerceptionPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 93 (2): 452-459. 2015.
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188Troubles with FunctionalismIn Alvin Goldman (ed.), Readings in Philosophy and Cognitive Science, Mit Press. pp. 231. 1978.
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156Semantics, conceptual roleIn [Book Chapter] (Unpublished), Routledge. pp. 242--256. 1997.According to Conceptual Role Semantics ("CRS"), 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…Read more
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154States' rightsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (1): 73-74. 1980.This is a response to Jerry Fodor’s article, Fodor, J. (1980). "Methodological solipsism as a research strategy in cognitive psychology." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3: 63-109.
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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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136An argument for holismProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 95 151-70. 1995.Ned Block; IX*—An Argument for Holism1, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 95, Issue 1, 1 June 1995, Pages 151–170, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristot.
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134IX*—An Argument for Holism1Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 95 (1): 151-170. 1995.Ned Block; IX*—An Argument for Holism1, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 95, Issue 1, 1 June 1995, Pages 151–170
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129Are mechanistic and teleological explanations of behaviour incompatible?Philosophical Quarterly 21 (April): 109-117. 1971.
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128Overflow, access, and attentionBehavioral and Brain Sciences 30 (5-6): 530-548. 2007.In this response to 32 commentators, I start by clarifying the overflow argument. I explain why the distinction between generic and specific phenomenology is important and why we are justified in acknowledging specific phenomenology in the overflow experiments. Other issues discussed are the relations among report, cognitive access, and attention; panpsychic disaster; the mesh between psychology and neuroscience; and whether consciousness exists.
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128Phenomenal and Access Consciousness Ned Block and Cynthia MacDonald: Consciousness and Cognitive AccessProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 108 (1pt3). 2008.
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120How many concepts of consciousness?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18 (2): 272-287. 1995.With some help from the commentators, a few adjustments to the characterizations of A-consciousness and P-consciousness can avoid some trivial cases of one without the other. But it still seems that the case for the existence of P without A is stronger than that for A without P. If indeed there can be P without A, but not A without P, this would be a remarkable result that would need explanation.
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Areas of Specialization
Perception |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Philosophy of Neuroscience |
Philosophy of Mind |