Galen Strawson

THIS PAPER ARGUES FOR THE CLAIM THAT ALTHOUGH COLOUR WORDS LIKE 'RED' ARE, ESSENTIALLY, 'PHENOMENAL-QUALITY' WORDS—I.E., WORDS FOR PROPERTIES WHOSE WHOLE AND ESSENTIAL NATURE CAN BE AND IS FULLY REVEALED IN SENSORY EXPERIENCE, GIVEN ONLY THE QUALITATIVE CHARACTER THAT THAT EXPERIENCE HAS—STILL 'RED' CANNOT BE SUPPOSED TO BE A WORD THAT PICKS OUT OR DENOTES ANY PARTICULAR PHENOMENAL QUALITY. THE ARGUMENT RESTS ESSENTIALLY ON THE SUPPOSITION, OFTEN DISCUSSED UNDER THE HEADING OF THE 'COLOR-SPECTRUM INVERSION ARGUMENT', THAT TWO PEOPLE COULD POSSIBLY AGREE IN ALL THEIR COLOUR-JUDGEMENTS WHILE DIFFERING IN THEIR COLOUR EXPERIENCE.

This article begins with some brief reflexions on the definition of determinism (II), on the notion of the subject of experience (III), and on the relation between conscious experience and brain events (IV). The main discussion (V?XIII) focuses on the traditional view, endorsed by Honderich in his book A Theory of Determinism, that the truth of determinism poses some special threat to our ordinary conception of ourselves as morally responsible free agents (and also to our ?life?hopes'). It is argued that this is half right: the truth of determinism does indeed threaten certain vital parts of our ordinary conception of ourselves as morally responsible free agents. The trouble is that the falsity of determinism does not diminish the threat in any useful way. The old, natural, and recurrent mistake is to think that we would really be better off, so far as free will and moral responsibility (and our ?life?hopes') were concerned, if determinism were false. It is argued that there is no important sense in which this is true, and that the question of whether determinism is true or false is therefore of no real importance, so far as the free will debate is concerned

The shortest form of the Basic Argument against free will and moral responsibility runs as follows: [1] When you act, you do what you do—in the situation in which you find yourself—because of the way you are. [2] If you do what you do because of the way you are, then in order to be fully and ultimately responsible for what you do you must be fully and ultimately responsible for the way you are. But [3] You cannot be fully and ultimately responsible for the way you are. So [4] You cannot be fully and ultimately responsible for what you do. This paper restates the Basic Argument and varies it in several different ways.

I endorse a 12-word metaphysics. [1] Stoff ist Kraft ≈ being is energy. [2] Wesen ist Werden ≈ being is becoming. [3] Sein ist Sosein ≈ being is qualit[ativit]y. [4] Ansichsein ist Fürsichsein ≈ being is mind. [1]–[3] are plausible metaphysical principles and unprejudiced consideration of what we know about concrete reality obliges us to favor [4], i.e. panpsychism or panexperientialism, above all other positive substantive proposals. For [i] panpsychism is the most ontologically parsimonious view, given that the existence of conscious experience is certain and that panpsychism doesn’t posit the existence of any kind of stuff other than conscious experience. [ii] A question also arises about why metaphysicians have posited the existence of something for which there is zero evidence: non-experiential concrete reality. The question is the more pressing because of the silence of physics: physics with its numbers and equations is perfectly silent on the question of the intrinsic non-structural nature of reality.

Intentionalität ist ein essenziell mentales, essenziell ereignishaftes und essenziell auf Erfahrung beruhendes Phänomen. Jeder Versuch, der die Intentionalität charakterisieren will und sie von der bewussten Erfahrung entkoppelt, sieht sich zwei unüberwindbaren Problemen gegenübergestellt. Erstens muss man einräumen, dass beinahe alles Intentionalität besitzt – bis hin zu den subatomaren Partikeln. Zweitens hat dies zur Folge, dass alles, was Intentionalität besitzt, viel zuviel davon besitzt – ja vielleicht sogar unendlich viel davon. Der Schlüssel zu einer zufrieden stellenden und wirklich naturalistischen Theorie der Intentionalität ist ein realistisches Konzept des Naturalismus und ein wohl entwickeltes Verständnis des Phänomens der kognitiven Erfahrung

In his book Individuals P. F. Strawson writes that ‘both the Cartesian and the no-ownership theorists are profoundly wrong in holding, as each must, that there are two uses of ‘I’, in one of which it denotes something which it does not denote in the other’ . I think, by contrast, that there is a defensible ‘Cartesian materialist’ sense, which Strawson need not reject, in which I can and does denote two different things, and which is nothing like the flawed Wittgensteinian distinction between the use of I ‘as object’ and the use of I ‘as subject’. I don’t argue directly for the ‘two uses’ view, however. Instead I do some preparatory work. First I criticize one bad argument for the ‘only one use of I’ view. Then I offer a phenomenological description of our everyday experience of ourselves that leads to an attack on ‘corporism’—the excessive focus on the body in present-day analytic philosophy of mind

What is the self? Does it exist? If it does exist, what is it like? It's not clear that we even know what we're asking about when we ask these large, metaphysical questions. The idea of the self comes very naturally to us, and it seems rather important, but it's also extremely puzzling. As for the word "self"--it's been taken in so many different ways that it seems that you can mean more or less what you like by it and come up with almost any answer. Galen Strawson proposes to approach the (seeming) problem of the self by starting from the thing that makes it seem there is a problem in the first place: our experience of the self, our experience of having or being a self, a hidden, inner mental presence or locus of consciousness. He argues that we should consider the phenomenology (experience) of the self before we attempt its metaphysics (its existence and nature). And when we have considered what it's like for human beings (assuming we can generalize about ourselves), we need to consider what it might be like for other possible creatures: what's the very least that might count as experience of oneself as a self? This, he proposes, will give us a good idea of what we ought to be looking for when we go on to ask whether there is such a thing-an idea worth following wherever it leads. It leads Strawson to conclude that selves, inner subjects of experience, do indeed exist. But they bear little resemblance to traditional conceptions of the self

L’intentionnalité est un phénomène essentiellement mental, essentiellement événementiel et essentiellement expérienciel . Toute tentative de caractérisation de l’intentionnalité qui la sépare de l’expérience consciente est confrontée à deux problèmes insurmontables. D’abord elle est obligée de reconnaître que presque tout – y compris même les particules subatomiques – est doté d’intentionnalité. En conséquence de quoi, tout ce qui est doté d’intentionnalité en est beaucoup trop – peut-être infiniment. La clé d’une théorie de l’intentionnalité satisfaisante et vraiment naturiste est une conception réaliste du naturalisme et une compréhension correctement développée du phénomène de l’expérience cognitive

Short version of 'Real materialism', given at Tucson III Conference, 1998. (1) physicalism is true (2) the qualitative character of experience is real, as most naively understood ... so (3) the qualitative character of experience (considered specifically as such) is wholly physical. ‘How can consciousness possibly be physical, given what we know about the physical?’ To ask this question is already to have gone wrong. We have no good reason (as Priestley and Russell and others observe) to think that we know anything about the physical that gives us any reason to find any problem in the idea that consciousness is wholly physical.

On the whole, we continue to believe firmly both that we have free will and that we are morally responsible for what we do. Here, the author argues that there is a fundamental sense in which there is no such thing as free will or true moral responsibility (as ordinarily understood). Devoting the main body of his book to an attempt to explain why we continue to believe as we do, Strawson examines various aspects of the "cognitive phenomenology" of freedom--the nature, causes, and consequences of our deep commitment to belief in freedom.

This article examines the metaphysics and phenomenology of the self or subject of experience. It suggests that the phenomenological description of the minimal subject requires no reference to body, environment, or social relations and argues for a thin conception of subjectivity which equates the subject with the experience itself. Under this principle of minimal conception, the subject does not exist if the person is asleep. It contends that the profound metaphysical question about experience and experiential selves is whether experience is limited to certain types of physical processes, or is characteristic of all physical processes, which would entail panpsychism.

Cognitive phenomenology starts from something that has been obscured in much recent analytic philosophy: the fact that lived conscious experience isn’t just a matter of sensation or feeling, but is also cognitive in character, through and through. This is obviously true of ordinary human perceptual experience, and cognitive phenomenology is also concerned with something more exclusively cognitive, which we may call propositional meaning-experience: occurrent experience of linguistic representations as meaning something, for example, as this occurs in thinking or reading or hearing others speak. One source of resistance to accepting this view has been a failure to distinguish sharply between cognitive content and cognitive-phenomenological content.

Nicholas Everitt's objection to my discussion of the regularity theory of causation is a common one. Ithink it misses the point, but the point it misses is in a way a delicate one, and hard to express, and the general worry he expresses is a natural one. For that reason it is important, and its importance is reflected in the fact that it is very difficult to find a satisfyingly substantive way of stating the difference between regularity theories of causation and non-regularity theories of causation. I have had no new ideas about how to do this [...], but I will restate some of [my older] ideas [...], in order to try to answer Everitt [...].