Daniel Stoljar

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) offers eighteen new essays on Block's work along with substantive and wide-ranging replies by Block

A phenomenal concept is the concept of a particular type of sensory or perceptual experience, where the notion of experience is understood phenomenologically. A recent and increasingly influential idea in philosophy of mind suggests that reflection on these concepts will play a major role in the debate about conscious experience, and in particular in the defense of physicalism, the thesis that psychological truths supervene on physical truths. According to this idea—I call it the phenomenal concept strategy —phenomenal concepts are importantly different from other concepts, and arguments against physicalism fatally neglect to take this difference into account. This paper divides the phenomenal concept strategy into a number of different versions, and argues that no version of the strategy is successful. The paper ends by contrasting the phenomenal concept strategy with a rival strategy—I call it the missing concept strategy . I suggest that the missing concept strategy presents a more plausible response to the issues about physicalism and experience.

Mary is confined to a black-and-white room, is educated through black-and-white books and through lectures relayed on black-and white television. In this way she learns everything there is to know about the physical nature of the world. She knows all the physical facts about us and our environment, in a wide sense of 'physical' which includes everything in completed physics, chemistry, and neurophysiology, and all there is to know about the causal and relational facts consequent upon all this, including of course functional roles. If physicalism is true, she knows all there is to know. For to suppose otherwise is to suppose that there is more to know than every physical fact, and that is just what physicalis.

THOMSON, Judith Jarvis (1929– ) Judith Jarvis Thomson received her BA from Barnard College in 1950, her MA from Cambridge University in 1956, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1959. Her first teaching position was at Barnard where she was a lecturer from 1955–9, an instructor from 1959–60, and then Assistant Professor from 1960–2. In 1963, she moved to Boston, first as an Assistant Professor at Boston University (1963–4), and then to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she has remained ever since. She became full Professor in 1969, and between 1990 and 1996 held the Laurence S. Rockefeller Chair in Philosophy at MIT. She has received a large number of awards and honours, and contributed in many ways to professional philosophy in America. In 1992, she held the Presidency of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division), and in 1999, she gave the Tanner Lectures at Princeton University. She is Chair of the American Philosophical Association's Board of Officers for 2002-5, and gave the Association's Carus Lectures in 2003. She is also widely acknowledged as one of the best teachers of philosophy, and the excellence of the graduate program at MIT is due in no small measure to her influence. Thomson’s philosophical work ranges widely but her main areas of concentration are moral philosophy and metaphysics. In moral philosophy, Thomson has made seminal contributions to all three sub-fields of that discipline, applied ethics, moral theory and metaethics. (Indeed, the nature of her work makes these divisions seem somewhat artificial.) The papers gathered together in Rights, Restitution and Risk, and, since then, papers such as, ‘Self- Defence’, ‘Physician Assisted Suicide: Two Moral Arguments’ and ‘Assisted Suicide: The Philosophers Brief’ (written jointly with John RAWLS, Robert NOZICK, Ronald DWORKIN.

The aim of this book is to argue that issues in metaphysics—in particular issues about the nature of states and causation—will have a significant impact in philosophy of mind. As Steward puts it: “the category of state has been so grossly misunderstood that some theories of mind which are supposed to encompass entities traditionally regarded as falling under the category, e.g., beliefs and desires, cannot so much as be sensibly formulated, once we are clearer about the nature of states”. According to Steward, there are two different approaches to the metaphysics of states: a view according to which states are events, and a view according to which states are facts. Steward says that many discussions in philosophy of mind proceed on the basis of the first view, and thus proceed on what she calls the particularist approach. Steward argues that the particularist approach is mistaken, that states are facts, and that if we would recognize this, many of the problems and positions in philosophy of mind would disappear.

It is widely held that a successful theory of the mind will be neuroscientific. In this paper we ask, first, what this claim means, and, secondly, whether it is true. In answer to the first question, we argue that the claim is ambiguous between two views--one plausible but unsubstantive, and one substantive but highly controversial. In answer to the second question, we argue that neither the evidence from neuroscience itself nor from other scientific and philosophical considerations supports the controversial view

Although a wide variety of questions were raised about different aspects of the target article, most of them fall into one of five categories each of which deals with a general question. These questions are Is the radical neuron doctrine really radical? Is the trivial neuron doctrine really trivial? Were we sufficiently critical of the radical neuron doctrine? Is there a distinction to be drawn at all between the two doctrines? and How does our argument bear on related issues in the ontology of mind? Our replies to the objections and observations presented are organized around these five questions

Pereboom (2011) is an extremely rich investigation of some of the central questions in contemporary philosophy of mind. In the foreground are the usual suspects from the current scene, but Kant and Russell loom in the background, and footnotes elaborate connections to people as apparently remote from the normal run of things as Dilthey and Derrida. With so much covered one is inevitably forced to focus on some things, setting aside others. Here I will concentrate on two ideas contained in the first part of the book: Pereboom's ‘qualitative inaccuracy hypothesis’ and his criticisms of ‘the epistemic strategy’, a strategy I have defended in a number of places (e.g. Stoljar 2006, 2009).

Physicalism is the thesis that everything is physical, or as contemporary philosophers sometimes put it, that everything supervenes on, or is necessitated by, the physical. The thesis is usually intended as a metaphysical thesis, parallel to the thesis attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Thales, that everything is water, or the idealism of the 18th Century philosopher Berkeley, that everything is mental. The general idea is that the nature of the actual world (i.e. the universe and everything in it) conforms to a certain condition, the condition of being physical. Of course, physicalists don't deny that the world might contain many items that at first glance don't seem physical — items of a biological, or psychological, or moral, or social nature. But they insist nevertheless that at the end of the day such items are either physical or supervene on the physical.

Ignorance and Imagination advances a novel way to resolve the central philosophical problem about the mind: how it is that consciousness or experience fits into a larger naturalistic picture of the world. The correct response to the problem, Stoljar argues, is not to posit a realm of experience distinct from the physical, nor to deny the reality of phenomenal experience, nor even to rethink our understanding of consciousness and the language we use to talk about it. Instead, we should view the problem itself as a consequence of our ignorance of the relevant physical facts, Stoljar shows that this change of orientation is well motivated historically, empirically, and philosophically, and that it has none of the side effects it is sometimes thought to have. The result is a philosophical perspective on the mind that has a number of far-reaching consequences: for consciousness studies, for our place in nature, and for the way we think about the relationship between philosophy and science.

Many philosophers of mind are concerned to defend the thesis called physicalism ; many others are concerned to refute it. Nevertheless, there is no generally agreed on idea of what physicalism is, and why it should matter whether the mental is physical. My thesis consists of four essays whose concern is with what physicalism is in its most plausible version, and what the importance of the thesis might be for the philosophy of mind. ;I begin with the question of whether it is possible to hold physicalism in a nonreductive form. Nonreductive physicalism is a doctrine that divides into two parts. The first part--the physicalist part--is that mental properties and facts supervene on physical properties and facts. The second part--the nonreductivist part--is that this supervenience thesis does not imply that mental properties and facts are reduced to physical properties and facts. In chapter one, I argue that, when properly understood, these two claims are not cotenable. ;In chapter two, I consider a different way of developing nonreductive physicalism. ;My discussion of nonreductive physicalism has a conditional conclusion: nonreductive physicalism reduces to reductive physicalism, and thus, if one wants to be a physicalist, one must be a reductive physicalist. Accordingly, in chapter three, I turn to reductive physicalism: the thesis that mental properties simply are physical properties. ;In the final chapter, I assess the reasons for believing physicalism. Physicalists have a number of different reasons for believing their doctrine, but perhaps the most widespread is the idea that one should believe physicalism because to renounce it would be, as Schiffer has put it, "to renounce the scruples of the natural scientist". I reply that this is a mistake born from missing an ambiguity in the word 'physical'. In one sense, 'physical' applies to a property or fact which the empirical sciences are in the best position to describe. In another sense, 'physical' applies to a property or fact which a certain sub-class of the empirical sciences are in the best position to describe, namely, the subclass which includes contemporary physics, chemistry, biology and neuroscience. What is at issue in the philosophy of mind is physicalism where 'physical' has this second stricter sense. However, under that interpretation, to renounce physicalism is not, I argue, to renounce the scruples of the natural scientist. Moreover, under that interpretation, there is no strong pressure to revise our conception of what a mental property is in order to ensure the truth of physicalism.

The topic of introspection stands at the interface between questions in epistemology about the nature of self-knowledge and questions in the philosophy of mind about the nature of consciousness. What is the nature of introspection such that it provides us with a distinctive way of knowing about our own conscious mental states? And what is the nature of consciousness such that we can know about our own conscious mental states by introspection? How should we understand the relationship between consciousness and introspective self-knowledge? Should we explain consciousness in terms of introspective self-knowledge or vice versa? Until recently, questions in epistemology and the philosophy of mind were pursued largely in isolation from one another. This volume aims to integrate these two lines of research by bringing together fourteen new essays and one reprinted essay on the relationship between introspection, self-knowledge, and consciousness.

This paper defends a novel view of ‘what it is like’-sentences, according to which they attribute certain sorts of relations—I call them ‘affective relations’—that hold between events and individuals. The paper argues in detail for the superiority of this proposal over other views that are prevalent in the literature. The paper further argues that the proposal makes better sense than the alternatives of the widespread use of Nagel’s definition of conscious states and that it also shows the mistakes in two prominent suggestions about the definition when properly understood: first, that it is empty and uninformative, and second, that it leads directly to a substantial claim in the theory of consciousness, namely that an individual is in a conscious state only if the individual is aware of their being in that state.

Consciousness is extremely familiar yet it is at the limits—beyond the limits, some would say—of what one can sensibly talk about or explain. Perhaps this is the reason its study has drawn contributions from many fields including psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, anthropology, cultural and literary theory, artificial intelligence, physics, and others. The focus of this entry is on: the varieties of consciousness, different problems that have been raised about these varieties, and prospects for progress on these problems.

What is the connection between being in a conscious mental state and believing that you yourself are currently in that state? On the one hand, it is natural to think that this connection is, or involves, a necessary connection of some sort. On the other hand, it is hard to know what the nature of this necessary connection is. For there are plausible arguments according to which this connection is not metaphysically necessary, not rationally necessary, and not merely naturally necessary. If these arguments are correct, and if these options are exhaustive, while there is a necessary connection between a conscious state and the belief that you are in it, there is apparently no necessary connection it could be! This paper sets out this problem—the necessary connection problem, I will call it—and defends and explores a novel proposal about how to solve it.

This chapter begins with a putative puzzle between non-reductive physicalism according to which psychological properties are distinct from, yet metaphysically necessitated by, physical properties, and Hume's dictum according to which there are no necessary connections between distinct existences. However, the puzzle dissolves once care is taken to distinguish between distinct kinds of distinction: numerical distinctness, mereological distinctness, and what the chapter calls ‘weak modal distinctness’ and ‘strong modal distinctness’. For each of these notions, it turns out that either it makes no sense according to non-reductive physicalism or else it is unclear whether Hume's dictum is true. The chapter then deploys these distinctions to argue first that unlike the dualist, the non-reductive physicalist can reject the exclusion principle in the causal exclusion argument, and second that emergentism can be distinguished from non-reductive physicalism.

This article explores two consequences of intentionalism. My first line of argument focuses on the impact of intentionalism on the 'hard problem' of phenomenal character. If intentionalism is true, the phenomenal supervenes on the intentional. Furthermore, if physicalism about the intentional is also true, the intentional supervenes on the physical. Therefore, if intentionalism and physicalism are both true, then, by transitivity of supervenience, physicalism about the phenomenal is true. I argue that this transitivity argument is not persuasive, because on any interpretation of its central terms, at least one of its premises is as controversial as its conclusion already is. My second line of argument is about the consequences of intentionalism for the error theory of color perception. I suggest that if intentionalism is true, projectivism must be true also, because under this condition there is no single concept of color that can be used for the qualification of objects as well as for the characterization of experiences.