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28Explaining consciousnessIn David J. Chalmers (ed.), Philosophy of Mind: Contemporary Readings, Oxford University Press. pp. 406--421. 1993.
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299Moore's paradox and Crimmins's caseAnalysis 62 (2): 167-171. 2002.Moore’s paradox occurs with sentences, such as (1) It’s raining and I don’t think it’s raining. which are self-defeating in a way that prevents one from making an asser- tion with them.1 But Mark Crimmins has given us a case of a sentence that is syntactically just like (1) but is nonetheless assertible. Suppose I know somebody, and know or have excellent reason to believe that I know that very person under some other guise. I do not know what that other guise is, though I do know that I believe…Read more
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235I begin by considering Ned Block's widely accepted distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness. I argue that on Block's official characterization a mental state's being access conscious is not a way the state's being conscious in any intuitive sense; that if phenomenal consciousness itself corresponds to an intuitive way of a state's being conscious, it literally implies access consciousness; and that Block misconstrues the theoretical significance of the commonsense distinction. The…Read more
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199Color, mental location, and the visual fieldConsciousness and Cognition 10 (1): 85-93. 2001.Color subjectivism is the view that color properties are mental properties of our visual sensations, perhaps identical with properties of neural states, and that nothing except visual sensations and other mental states exhibits color properties. Color phys- icalism, by contrast, holds that colors are exclusively properties of visible physical objects and processes
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209Metacognition and higher-order thoughtsConsciousness and Cognition 9 (2): 231-242. 2000.Because there is a fair amount of overlap in the points by Balog and Rey, I will organize this response topically, referring specifically to each commentator as rele- vant. And, because much of the discussion focuses on my higher-order-thought hypothesis independent of questions about metacognition, I will begin by addressing a cluster of issues that have to do with the status, motivation, and exact formulation of that hypothesis.
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324Consciousness and MindOxford University Press UK. 2005.Consciousness and Mind presents David Rosenthal's influential work on the nature of consciousness. Central to that work is Rosenthal's higher-order-thought theory of consciousness, according to which a sensation, thought, or other mental state is conscious if one has a higher-order thought that one is in that state. The first four essays develop various aspects of that theory. The next three essays present Rosenthal's homomorphism theory of mental qualities and qualitative consciousness, and sho…Read more
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79Intentionality: A study of the views of Chisholm and SellarsPhilosophy 1-361. 1968.Edited in hypertext by Andrew Chrucky. Reprinted with the permission of Professor David Rosenthal. Editor's Note: Due to the limitation of current hypertext, the following conventions have been used. In general, if an expression has some mark over it, that mark is placed as a prefix to the expression. All Greek characters are rendered by their names. Subscripts are placed in parentheses as concatenated suffixes: thus, e.g., HO is the chemical formula for water. Sellars' dot quotes are expressed …Read more
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24State Consciousness and Transitive ConsciousnessConsciousness and Cognition 2 (4): 355-363. 1993.
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108Book reviews 581 (review)The focus of Mark Rowlands’s admirable, richly argued book is phenomenal consciousness, in particular, how such consciousness arises from processes that are not themselves phenomenally conscious. Rowlands examines several views on this question, arguing that their failures point toward his own intriguing, novel position, which he develops in the final three chapters.
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166in Mind and Consciousness: Five Questions, ed. Patrick Grim, New York and London: Automatic Press, forthcoming.
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206IntentionalityMidwest Studies in Philosophy 10 (1): 151-184. 1986.At the level of our platitudinous background knowledge about things, speech is the expression of thought. And understanding what such expressing involves is central to understanding the relation between thinking and speaking. Part of what it is for a speech act to express a mental state is that the speech act accurately captures the mental state and can convey to others what mental state it is. And for this to occur, the speech act at least must have propositional content that somehow reflects t…Read more
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278Varieties of higher-order theoryIn Rocco J. Gennaro (ed.), Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness: An Anthology, John Benjamins. 2004.A touchstone of much modern theorizing about the mind is the idea, still tac- itly accepted by many, that a state's being mental implies that it's conscious. This view is epitomized in the dictum, put forth by theorists as otherwise di-.
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297Phenomenal consciousness and what it's likeBehavioral and Brain Sciences 20 (1): 156--57. 1997.be realized. Whatever gets access to phenomenal awareness is represented within this absent together
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192Awareness and Identification of SelfIn JeeLoo Liu & John Perry (eds.), Consciousness and the Self: New Essays, . 2011.
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112The Nature of Mind (edited book)Oxford University Press. 1991.This anthology brings together readings mainly from contemporary philosophers, but also from writers of the past two centuries, on the philosophy of mind. Some of the main questions addressed are: is a human being really a mind in relation to a body; if so, what exactly is this mind and how it is related to the body; and are there any grounds for supposing that the mind survives the disintegration of the body?
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179Experience and the physicalJournal of Consciousness Studies 13 (10-11): 117-28. 2006.Strawson’s challenging and provocative defence of panpsychism1 begins by sensibly insisting that physicalism, properly understood, must unflinchingly countenance the occurrence of conscious experiences. No view, he urges, will count as ‘real physicalism’ (p. 4) if it seeks to get around or soften that commitment, as versions of socalled physicalism sometimes do. Real physicalism (hereinafter physicalism tout court) must accordingly reject any stark opposition of mental and physical, which is not…Read more
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140Multiple drafts and higher-order thoughts (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (4): 911-18. 1993.whatever it is that occurs in between the two. Though superficially tempting, this idea heightens the air of mystery surrounding consciousness. As far..
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220Consciousness, content, and metacognitive judgmentsConsciousness and Cognition 9 (2): 203-214. 2000.Because metacognition consists in our having mental access to our cognitive states and mental states are conscious only when we are conscious of them in some suitable way, metacognition and consciousness shed important theoretical light on one another. Thus, our having metacognitive access to information carried by states that are not conscious helps con?rm the hypothesis that a mental state
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93Addendum to introductionIn Materialism and the Mind-Body Problem, Hackett. 2000.Mind-body materialism is at its most inviting in the context of trying to give a unified treatment of the natural world. And the principle challenge it faces is to do justice to the distinguishing features of mental phenomena, which set them off from nonmental, physical reality. This challenge it not easy to meet. In 1971 I suggested that the difficulty in meeting it makes especially appealing the eliminative materialism of Feyerabend and Rorty. If adopting the materialist view that mental pheno…Read more
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1Sensory qualities, consciousness, and perceptionIn Consciousness and Mind, Clarendon Press. pp. 175-226. 2005.
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289MS, under submission, derived from a Powerpoint presentation at a Conference on Consciousness, Memory, and Perception, in honor of Larry Weiskrantz, City University, London, September 15, 2006.
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220Self-knowledge and Moore's paradoxPhilosophical Studies 77 (2-3). 1995.As G. E. Moore famously observed, sentences such as 'It's raining but I don't think it is', though they aren't contradictory, cannot be used to make coherent assertions.' The trouble with such sentences is not a matter of their truth conditions; such sentences can readily be true. Indeed, it happens often enough with each of us that we think, for example, that it isn't raining even though it is. This shows that such sentences are not literally contradictory. But even though such sentences have u…Read more
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15A theory of consciousnessIn Ned Block, Owen J. Flanagan & Guven Guzeldere (eds.), The Nature of Consciousness, Mit Press. 1997.
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166Higher-order theories of consciousnessScholarpedia 3 (5): 4407. 2008.in Scholarpedia, forthcoming
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2Descartes's Meditations: Critical Essays (edited book)Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 1997.This collection of recent articles by leading scholars is designed to illuminate one of the greatest and most influential philosophical books of all time. It includes incisive commentary on every major theme and argument in the Meditations, and will be valuable not only to philosophers but to historians, theologians, literary scholars, and interested general readers
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248Unity of consciousness and the selfProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 103 (3): 325-352. 2003.The so-called unity of consciousness consists in the compelling sense we have that all our conscious mental states belong to a single conscious subject. Elsewhere I have argued that a mental state's being conscious is a matter of our being conscious of that state by having a higher-order thought (HOT) about it. Contrary to what is sometimes argued, this HOT model affords a natural explanation of our sense that our conscious states all belong to a single conscious subject. HOTs often group states…Read more
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CUNY Graduate CenterDepartment of Philosophy
Cognitive Science
Linguistics
Cognitive NeuroscienceProfessor
New York City, New York, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Language |
Cognitive Sciences |