Jose Luis Bermudez

Thinking about self-control takes us to the heart of practical decision-making, human agency, motivation, and rational choice. Psychologists, philosophers, and decision theorists have all brought valuable insights and perspectives on how to model self-control, on different mechanisms for achieving and strengthening self-control, and on how self-control fits into the overall cognitive and affective economy. Yet these different literatures have remained relatively insulated from each other. Self-Control, Decision Theory, and Rationality brings them into dialog by focusing on the theme of rationality. It contains eleven newly written essays by a distinguished group of philosophers, psychologists, and decision theorists, together with a substantial introduction, collectively offering state-of-the-art perspectives on the rationality of self-control and the different mechanisms for achieving it.

In their recent book The Inessential Indexical Herman Cappelen and Josh Dever take issue with what has become close to philosophical orthodoxy – the view, most often associated with John Perry and David Lewis, that psychological explanations are essentially indexical. Cappelen and Dever claim that claims of essential indexicality are typically driven by intuitions rather than supported by arguments. They issue a challenge to supporters of essential indexicality: Produce an argument to back up the intuitions. This paper answers their challenge.

[Phenomenology of Bodily Perception] Since this is colloquium on phenomenological and experimental approaches to cognition I’d like to set up te problem I want to address in terms of two of the different strands that we find in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking about the phenomenology of the body. One of these strands is profoundly insightful. The other one, however, seems to me to be lacking in plausibility – or rather, to put it less confrontationally and more in keeping with the spirit of the colloquium, the second strand seems to stand in the way of there being a certain type of fruitful interaction between phenomenological and experimental approaches to cognition.

In Thinking about Consciousness David Papineau develops a position that combines the following four theses: A) Phenomenal properties exist. B) Any phenomenal property is identical to some material property. C) Phenomenal concepts refer to material properties that are identical to phenomenal properties. D) Phenomenal concepts are vague. The overall position is intended to do justice to materialism (in virtue of (B) and (C)), while at the same time accommodating the concerns both of those impressed by the Knowledge Argument and related arguments (in virtue of (A)) and of those skeptical about the prospects for a science of consciousness (in virtue of D)). This paper shows that (A) through (D) cannot be held simultaneously.

Thought, Reference, and Experience is a collection of important new essays on topics at the intersection of philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and philosophical logic. The starting-point for the papers is the brilliant work of the British philosopher Gareth Evans before his untimely death in 1980 at the age of 34. Evans's work on reference and singular thought transformed the Fregean approach to the philosophy of thought and language, showing how seemingly technical issues in philosophical semantics are inextricably linked to fundamental questions about the structure of our thinking about ourselves and about the world. The papers, all newly written for this volume, explore different aspects of Evans's philosophical legacy, showing its importance to central areas in contemporary analytic philosophy. The volume includes a substantial introduction that introduces the principal themes in Evans's thought and places the papers in context.

This paper explores some of the areas where neuroscientific and philosophical issues intersect in the study of self-consciousness. Taking as point of departure a paradox (the paradox of self-consciousness) that appears to block philosophical elucidation of self-consciousness, the paper illustrates how the highly conceptual forms of self-consciousness emerge from a rich foundation of nonconceptual forms of self-awareness. Attention is paid in particular to the primitive forms of nonconceptual self-consciousness manifested in visual perception, somatic proprioception, spatial reasoning and interpersonal psychological interactions. The study of these primitive forms of self-consciousness is an interdisciplinary enterprise and the paper considers a range of points of contact where philosophical work can illuminate work in the cognitive sciences, and vice versa.

This paper explores Kornblith's proposal in "Knowledge and its Place in Nature" that knowledge is a natural kind that can be elucidated and understood in scientific terms. Central to Kornblith's development of this proposal is the claim that there is a single category of unreflective knowledge that is studied by cognitive ethologists and is the proper province of epistemology. This claim is challenged on the grounds that even unreflective knowledge in language-using humans reflects forms of logical reasoning that are in principle unavailable to nonlinguistic animals.

This article argues that bodily awareness is a basic form of self-consciousness through which perceiving agents are directly conscious of the bodily self. It clarifies the nature of bodily awareness, categorises the different types of body-relative information, and rejects the claim that we can have a sense of ownership of our own bodies. It explores how bodily awareness functions as a form of self-consciousness and highlights the importance of certain forms of bodily awareness that share an important epistemological property with canonical forms of self-consciousness such as introspection.

The most frequently discussed skeptical arguments in the history of philosophy are to be found in the tightly argued twelve paragraphs of Descartes’ Meditation One. There is considerable controversy about how to interpret the skeptical arguments that Descartes offers; the extent to which those arguments rest upon implicit epistemological and/or metaphysical presuppositions; their originality within the history of skepticism; and the role they play within Cartesian philosophy and natural science. This chapter begins by tracing the complex argumentation of Meditation One. The second section explores the differences between Cartesian skeptical arguments and the skeptical arguments discussed in the ancient world, while the third section considers whether there might be medieval antecedents for the radical doubts that end Meditation One. The final section suggests that the radical nature of the doubts raised in Meditation One has its sources in two fundamental characteristics of Cartesian science: the radical error that Cartesian science posits in our everyday experience of the world, and the hypothetical and (only) morally certain nature of the scientific edifice that is proposed to replace the commonsense view of the world enshrined in Aristotelian science.

It is now 25 years since Gareth Evans introduced the distinction between conceptual and nonconceptual content in The Varieties of Reference. This is a fitting time to take stock of what has become a complex and extended debate both within philosophy and at the interface between philosophy and psychology. Unfortunately, the debate has become increasingly murky as it has become increasingly ramified. Much of the contemporary discussion does not do full justice to the powerful theoretical tool originally proposed by Evans and subsequently refined by theorists in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s – most effectively, I think, by Christopher Peacocke (particularly in his 1992). Even worse, significant parts of the discussion are somewhat confused. This paper makes a start on clarifying what I think ought to be the central issues in debates about nonconceptual content. I begin in §1 by pointing out how narrowly focused contemporary discussion is relative to Evans’s original discussion. We are not making as much use as we should of nonconceptual content as a tool for understanding subpersonal information processing and the complexities of its status relative to perception and thought at the personal level. In §2 I turn to what is the central focus of contemporary discussion, namely, the content of perception and identify a “master argument” for nonconceptualism based on the relation between conceptual capacities and capacities for perceptual discrimination. The aim of §3 is to clarify the relation between the claim that perception has nonconceptual content and some superficially similar claims discussed by philosophers of perception. Finally, in §4 I explain why the attention recently focused on what is sometimes called the state version of the nonconceptualist thesis seems to me to be misdirected.

This article proposes an object properties approach to object perception. By thinking about objects as clusters of co-instantiated features that possess certain canonical higher-order object properties we can steer a middle way between two extreme views that are dominant in different areas of empirical research into object perception and the development of the object concept. Object perception should be understood in terms of perceptual sensitivity to those object properties, where that perceptual sensitivity can be explained in a manner consistent with the graded representation approach adopted by some connectionist modellers. The object properties approach does justice to the differences between a perceptual system solving the binding problem, on the one hand, and genuinely perceiving objects, on the other, without running into the theoretical problems associated with treating young infants as 'little scientists'.

This paper considers how best an eliminativist might argue for the radical falsity of commonsense psychology. I will be arguing that Paul Churchland’s “official” arguments for eliminative materialism (in, e.g., Churchland 1981) are unsatisfactory, although much of the paper will be developing themes that are clearly present in Churchland’s writings. The eliminativist needs to argue that the representations that feed into action are fundamentally different from those invoked by propositional attitude psychology. The “springs of action” are representations of features that are much more finely grained than those encoded within the vocabulary that we employ to specify the content of propositional attitudes. The eliminativist’s most promising strategy is to argue that, whatever we might think about why we behave the way we do, careful experimental work will show that we are in fact acting in virtue of representations of properties and microfeatures that fall completely outside the ambit of propositional attitude psychology. The paper considers a number of examples of how this eliminativist strategy might be developed, ranging from the implications of the two visual systems hypothesis to research in social psychology into the role that situational factors play in controlling action.