Christopher Peacocke

How is there communication in music, and what is it that is communicated? When you hear a mental state in a passage of music, you hear a quite specific fine-grained state, and the specific mental state is given to you in a way that makes it clear what it would be like to experience that state. You commonly hear features of the music metaphorically as that state. What is communicated is a hearing of that passage in such a way. This approach is developed to explain the distinctive way in which music can communicate emotion, including the fact that music can, in the representation of mental states, leap over the first-person/third-person barrier. This treatment is extended in discussions of: the expressed world perceived in an extended musical work; intentional subjects heard in music; and communal, ‘we’, content heard in music.

Six issues are salient in discussions of the first person since 1900: immunity to error through misidentification; the possibility of survival without survival of one’s body; the elusiveness of the self; the role of the first person attitudes in the explanation of action; the first person component in mental concepts; and the role of the first person simulation in explaining the actions of others. Since 1900, there have been accounts both of the nature of the first person concept, and accounts of the nature of subjects of experience. This paper discusses the achievements and limitations of these accounts in addressing the preceding six issues. These issues are also assessed against a wider range of possibilities, both for the first person and for the subject to which it refers, than are considered in this literature.

This chapter raises interesting new questions for aesthetics. While philosophers have long debated the question as to what makes something a work of art, Christopher Peacocke asks: What makes a work an example of a particular artistic style? Using the example of the Romantic style of music, Peacocke proposes an answer that draws on the perception of expressive action in combination with an account of what is involved in hearing emotion and other mental states in music. The account can link the phenomenology of musical perception with the ideas and ideals of the Romantic movement. He notes that by changing various parameters in the account, we can also obtain accounts of what is variously distinctive of impressionist music, expressionist music, and some neoclassical writing in the style of Stravinsky.

The chapter offers an account of the rational application of a concept that respects the intuitive idea that rational judgement results from the interaction of understanding or grasp, together with background information and the thinker’s perceptions. The account is a form of truth-conditional account, on which understanding consists fundamentally in tacit knowledge of fundamental reference rules for concepts. The chapter argues for the explanatory power of such an account. The account also provides the resources for replying to Wright’s arguments that the intuitive conception is erroneous. It makes possible an account of the first-person phenomenon of knowing what one means. It allows us to steer a middle course between the two very unattractive positions of extreme Platonism and linguistic idealism. It leaves room for substantive philosophy of particular concepts and particular types of concepts.

This chapter explores how we think about conscious perceptual experience, both our own and that of others. It begins by considering the first-person case, that in which a thinker judges that he himself sees. The case falls within a general area to which Gareth Evans made original, important, and influential contributions, notably on the self-ascription of belief. After considering the first-person case and some of the epistemic and metaphysical ramifications of the treatment offered, the chapter goes on to compare it with Evans's account. It then discusses the relation between first-person and third-person ascription and to the explanation of some developmental phenomena. It concludes with a discussion of the extension of the model presented to the self-ascription and other-ascription of action and intentionality.

This paper defend the principle, disputed by Jane Heal, that whenever someone consciously Fs and also has the concept F, then she will be able to judge explicitly, with non-inferential justification, that she Fs. The defense turns on the distinction between experiencing something as F, as opposed to having in consciousness manifestations of an otherwise unconscious state of F. Reasons are offered against her view that perceptual models can illuminate our knowledge of our unconscious states. Lucy O’Brien asks how my account of action awareness can work in cases of action types where failure is impossible. I offer an account of how it can work there too, and outline an account of the differences between apparent action awareness and apparent perceptual awareness.

The first part of the paper proposes a positive account of _de se_ intentional content. _De se_ content is individuated by the condition that it refers _de jure_ to the owner of the mental state or event in whose content it features. There is a corresponding account of the distinctive way in which _de se_ information is updated as time passes. Three degrees of involvement of self-representation in a subject’s conception of the world are distinguished. The second part gives an account of the ontology of subjects, as metaphysically interdependent with conscious mental states and events. Subjects of consciousness are individuated by the identity of the apparatus that integrates information to produce unified conscious states. The theory is applied in critical discussion of the classical views of Hume, Kant, and the early Wittgenstein on the self.

The Realm of Reason is a manifesto for a new rationalism in philosophy. Christopher Peacocke develops an original theory of what makes a thinker entitled to form a given belief. The theory is articulated in three principles of rationalism, which together imply that all entitlement has an element that is independent of experience. Peacocke elaborates this rationalism in detail for the classical issues of perceptual knowledge, induction, and the status of moral thought. His new generalized approach to epistemology has applications throughout philosophy, and it will interest all concerned with knowledge, truth, and rationality.

Only computational explanations of a content‐involving sort can answer certain ‘how’‐questions; can support content‐involving counterfactuals; and have the generality characteristic of psychological explanations. Purely formal characteriza‐tions of computations have none of these properties, and do not determine content. These points apply not only to psychological explanation, but to Turing machines themselves. Computational explanations which involve content are not opposed to naturalism. They are also required if we are to explain the content‐involving properties of mental states.

This note aims to clarify which arguments do, and which arguments do not, tell against Conceptualism, the thesis that the representational content of experience is exclusively conceptual. Contrary to Sean Kelly's position, conceptualism has no difficulty accommodating the phenomena of color constancy and of situation‐dependence. Acknowledgment of nonconceptual content is also consistent with holding that experiences have nonrepresentational subjective features. the crucial arguments against conceptualism stem from animal perception, and from a distinction, elaborated in the final section of the paper, between content which is objective and content which is also conceived of by its subject as objective.