•  123
    The same-order monitoring theory of consciousness
    In Uriah Kriegel & Kenneth Williford (eds.), Self-Representational Approaches to Consciousness, Mit Press. pp. 143--170. 2006.
    One of the promising approaches to the problem of consciousness has been the Higher-Order Monitoring Theory of Consciousness. According to the Higher-Order Monitoring Theory, a mental state M of a subject S is conscious iff S has another mental state, M*, such that M* is an appropriate representation of M. Recently, several philosophers have developed a Higher-Order Monitoring theory with a twist. The twist is that M and M* are construed as entertaining some kind of constitutive relation, rather…Read more
  •  1925
    Consciousness as intransitive self-consciousness: Two views and an argument
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 33 (1): 103-132. 2003.
    The word ?consciousness? is notoriously ambiguous. This is mainly because it is not a term of art, but a mundane word we all use quite frequently, for different purposes and in different everyday contexts. In this paper, I discuss consciousness in one specific sense of the word. To avoid the ambiguities, I introduce a term of art ? intransitive self-consciousness ? and suggest that this form of self-consciousness is an essential component of the folk notion of consciousness. I then argue for a s…Read more
  •  299
    Phenomenal content
    Erkenntnis 57 (2): 175-198. 2002.
    This paper defends a version of Sheomaker-style representationalism about qualitative character.
  •  1627
    Fact-Introspection, Thing-Introspection, and Inner Awareness
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 8 (1): 143-164. 2017.
    Phenomenal beliefs are beliefs about the phenomenal properties of one's concurrent conscious states. It is an article of common sense that such beliefs tend to be justified. Philosophers have been less convinced. It is sometimes claimed that phenomenal beliefs are not on the whole justified, on the grounds that they are typically based on introspection and introspection is often unreliable. Here we argue that such reasoning must guard against a potential conflation between two distinct introspec…Read more
  •  218
    Two Defenses of Common-Sense Ontology
    Dialectica 65 (2): 177-204. 2011.
    In a series of publications, Eli Hirsch has presented a sustained defense of common-sense ontology. Hirsch's argument relies crucially on a meta-ontological position sometimes known as ‘superficialism’. Hirsch's argument from superficialism to common-sense ontology is typically resisted on the grounds that superficialism is implausible. In this paper, I present an alternative argument for common-sense ontology, one that relies on (what I argue is) a much more plausible meta-ontological position,…Read more
  •  297
    Phenomenal Intentionality (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2013.
    Phenomenal intentionality is supposed to be a kind of directedness of the mind onto the world that is grounded in the conscious feel of mental life. This book of new essays explores a number of issues raised by the notion of phenomenal intentionality
  •  538
    Lorsque je me réveille le matin, je trouve ma femme à côté de moi et notre chien lové entre nous. Elle est calme et il est petit. Le faible bruit de leur respiration m’enveloppe tandis que je reprends progressivement conscience. Je repousse la couverture ; la fraîcheur de l’air me frappe. Je vais dans la cuisine et tourne le robinet pour me remplir un verre d’eau. Je suis l’aiguille des secondes sur...
  •  213
    Some mental events are conscious, some are unconscious. What is the difference between the two? Uriah Kriegel offers an answer. His aim is a comprehensive theory of the features that all and only conscious mental events have. The key idea is that consciousness arises when self-awareness and world-awareness are integrated in the right way. Conscious mental events differ from unconscious ones in that, whatever else they may represent, they always also represent themselves, and do so in a very spec…Read more
  •  349
    Precis of The Varieties of Consciousness
    Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia 7 (2): 240-246. 2016.
  •  11
    Introduction: Consciousness and Self-Representation
    PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 12. 2006.
    The symposium before us examines aspects of the relationship between phenomenal consciousness and self-representation—in particular, the alleged capacity of some mental state to represent themselves. The hypothesis under consideration is that all and only conscious states are self-representational in this way. The symposium contains two papers favoring the hypothesis and two opposing it. Each paper is accompanied by a critical commentary.
  •  1440
    Cognitivism about emotion and the alleged hyperopacity of emotional content
    Philosophical Studies 173 (2): 315-320. 2016.
    According to cognitivism about emotion, emotions are reducible to some non-emotional states. In one version, they are reducible entirely to cognitive states, such as beliefs or judgments; in another, they are reducible to combinations of cognitive and conative states, such as desire or intention. Cognitivism is plausibly regarded as the orthodoxy in the philosophy of emotion since the 1980s. In a recent paper, however, Montague develops a powerful argument against cognitivism. Here I argue that …Read more
  •  80
  •  61
    Review of D. Stoljar, Ignorance and Imagination (review)
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 86 (3): 515-519. 2008.
  •  1661
    Brentano's Dual‐Framing Theory of Consciousness
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 97 (1): 79-98. 2018.
    Brentano's theory of consciousness has garnered a surprising amount of attention in recent philosophy of mind. Here I argue for a novel interpretation of Brentano's theory that casts it as more original than previously appreciated and yet quite plausible upon inspection. According to Brentano's theory, as interpreted here, a conscious experience of a tree is a mental state that can be simultaneously thought of, or framed, equally accurately as an awareness of a tree or an awareness of an awarene…Read more
  •  205
    Trope theory and the metaphysics of appearances
    American Philosophical Quarterly 41 (1): 5-20. 2004.
    The concept of appearance has had the historical misfortune of being associated with a Kantian or idealist program in metaphysics. Within this program, appearances are treated as "internal objects" that are immaterial and exert no causal powers over the physical world. However, there is a more mundane and innocuous notion of appearance, in which to say that x appears to y is just to say that y perceives x. In this more mundane sense of the term, an appearance is a perceived object ? qua perceive…Read more
  • Conscious Content
    Dissertation, Brown University. 2003.
    The purpose of this dissertation is to argue that mental states are conscious when, and only when, they are intentionally directed at themselves. Thus, if for subject x to perceive a tree is for x to harbor an internal state which is intentionally directed at a tree, then for x to have a conscious perception of a tree is for x to harbor an internal state which is primarily directed at the tree and secondarily directed at itself. If so, consciousness is reductively explicable in terms of intentio…Read more
  •  701
    Phenomenal Intentionality Meets the Extended Mind
    with Terence Horgan
    The Monist 91 (2): 347-373. 2008.
    We argue that the letter of the Extended Mind hypothesis can be accommodated by a strongly internalist, broadly Cartesian conception of mind. The argument turns centrally on an unusual but highly plausible view on the mark of the mental.
  •  2302
    Two Notions of Mental Representation
    In U. Kriegel (ed.), Current Controversies in Philosophy of Mind, Routledge. pp. 161-179. 2013.
    The main thesis of this paper is twofold. In the first half of the paper, (§§1-2), I argue that there are two notions of mental representation, which I call objective and subjective. In the second part (§§3-7), I argue that this casts familiar tracking theories of mental representation as incomplete: while it is clear how they might account for objective representation, they at least require supplementation to account for subjective representation.
  •  2454
    It is a curious fact about mainstream discussions of animal rights that they are dominated by consequentialist defenses thereof, when consequentialism in general has been on the wane in other areas of moral philosophy. In this paper, I describe an alternative, non‐consequentialist ethical framework and argue that it grants animals more expansive rights than consequentialist proponents of animal rights typically grant. The cornerstone of this non‐consequentialist framework is the thought that the…Read more
  •  305
    Moral phenomenology: Foundational issues
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7 (1): 1-19. 2008.
    In this paper, I address the what, the how, and the why of moral phenomenology. I consider first the question What is moral phenomenology?, secondly the question How to pursue moral phenomenology?, and thirdly the question Why pursue moral phenomenology? My treatment of these questions is preliminary and tentative, and is meant not so much to settle them as to point in their answers’ direction
  •  2438
    Thought and Thing: Brentano's Reism as Truthmaker Nominalism
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 90 (3): 153-180. 2015.
    The ontological theory of the later Franz Brentano is often referred to as ‘reism.’ But what exactly is reism, and how is it related to modern-day nominalism? In this paper, I offer an interpretation of Brentano’s reism as a specific variety of nominalism. This variety, although motivated by distinctly modern concerns about truthmakers, adopts a strategy for providing such truthmakers that is completely foreign to modern nominalism. The strategy rests on proliferation of coincident concrete part…Read more
  •  134
    The Varieties of Consciousness
    Oxford University Press. 2015.
    Recent work on consciousness has featured a number of debates on the existence and character of controversial types of phenomenal experience. Perhaps the best-known is the debate over the existence of a sui generis, irreducible cognitive phenomenology – a phenomenology proper to thought. Another concerns the existence of a sui generis phenomenology of agency. Such debates bring up a more general question: how many types of sui generis, irreducible, basic, primitive phenomenology do we have to po…Read more
  •  3
    Interpretation: Its Scope and Limits
    In Allan Hazlett (ed.), New Waves in Metaphysics, Palgrave-macmillan. 2010.
    According to interpretivism, all there is to having an intentional property is being best interpreted as having it. I present a regress-or-circularity argument against this. In §1, I elucidate interpretivism, and in §2, I present the argument against it.
  •  2158
    What is the rationale for the methodological innovations of experimental philosophy? This paper starts from the contention that common answers to this question are implausible. It then develops a framework within which experimental philosophy fulfills a specific function in an otherwise traditionalist picture of philosophical inquiry. The framework rests on two principal ideas. The first is Frank Jackson’s claim that conceptual analysis is unavoidable in ‘serious metaphysics’. The second is that…Read more
  •  56
    Gray matters: Functionalism, intentionalism, and the search for NCC in Jeffrey gray's work
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 14 (4): 96-116. 2007.
    Since Francis Crick popularized the term `Neural Correlate of Consciousness' (NCC), it has been the focus of what is perhaps the most exciting research area in the cognitive sciences. Different researchers and laboratories have offered different brain structures as candidates for the NCC prize. Different chunks of gray matter have been identified as the potential seat of consciousness. Some researchers attempt to identify the NCC via a characterization of the cognitive aspects of consciousness, …Read more
  •  301
    Self-representationalism and phenomenology
    Philosophical Studies 143 (3): 357-381. 2009.
    To a first approximation, self-representationalism is the view that a mental state M is phenomenally conscious just in case M represents itself in the appropriate way. Proponents of self-representationalism seem to think that the phenomenology of ordinary conscious experience is on their side, but opponents seem to think the opposite. In this paper, I consider the phenomenological merits and demerits of self-representationalism. I argue that there is phenomenological evidence in favor of self-re…Read more
  •  1199
    Franz Brentano was not a systematic writer, but he was very much a systematic thinker. Through his manuscripts, lecture notes, letters, dictations, and occasional published writings, one can discern a systematic, unified approach to the true, the good, and the beautiful. My goal here is to articulate explicitly this approach, and the philosophical program it reflects. The exercise requires going over big stretches of terrain with some efficiency; I will go just as deep into Brentano’s approaches…Read more
  •  354
    Cognitive Phenomenology as the Basis of Unconscious Content
    In T. Bayne & M. Montague (eds.), Cognitive Phenomenology, Oxford University Press. pp. 79--102. 2011.
    Since the seventies, it has been customary to assume that intentionality is independent of consciousness. Recently, a number of philosophers have rejected this assumption, claiming intentionality is closely tied to consciousness, inasmuch as non- conscious intentionality in some sense depends upon conscious intentionality. Within this alternative framework, the question arises of how to account for unconscious intentionality, and different authors have offered different accounts. In this paper, …Read more
  •  239
    Michael Tye has recently argued that the phenomenal character of conscious experiences is "one and the same as" (1) Poised (2) Abstract (3) Non-conceptual (4) Intentional Content (PANIC). Tye argues extensively that PANIC Theory accounts for differences in phenomenal character in representational terms. But another task of a theory of phenomenal consciousness is to account for the difference between those mental states that have phenomenal character at all and those that do not. By going through…Read more