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1IIn Samuel Guttenplan (ed.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, Blackwell. 2017.What is the relation between mind and physical reality? Well‐established schools of thought give starkly opposing answers to this question. Descartes insisted that mental phenomena are non‐physical in nature. This view seems inviting because mental phenomena are indisputably different from everything else. Moreover, it's safe to assume that all phenomena that aren't mental have some physical nature. So it may seem that the best way to explain how the mental differs from everything else is to hyp…Read more
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65Res Cogitans: An Essay in Rational Psychology (review)Journal of Philosophy 73 (9): 240-252. 1976.
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67The nature of mental imagery: How null is the “null hypothesis”?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25 (2): 187-188. 2002.Is mental imagery pictorial? In Pylyshyn's view no empirical data provides convincing support to the “pictorial” hypothesis of mental imagery. Phenomenology, Pylyshyn says, is deeply deceiving and offers no explanation of why and how mental imagery occurs. We suggest that Pylyshyn mistakes phenomenology for what it never pretended to be. Phenomenological evidence, if properly considered, shows that mental imagery may indeed be pictorial, though not in the way that mimics visual perception. Moreo…Read more
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How to think about mental qualitiesIn Josh Weisberg (ed.), Consciousness (Key Concepts in Philosophy), Polity. 2014.
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272The extra ingredientBiology and Philosophy 36 (2): 1-4. 2021.Birch et. al. see their model as incompatible with higher-order-thought (HOT) theories of consciousness, on which a state is conscious if one is in some suitable way aware of that state. They see higher-order (HO) awareness as an “extra ingredient”. But since Birch et al go on to say that “[t]his is not the place for a detailed discussion of HOT theories,” they don’t address why they take HO awareness to be an extra ingredient or why HOT theorists are convinced that it’s needed. In this comme…Read more
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36Chalmers' Meta-ProblemJournal of Consciousness Studies 26 (9-10): 194-204. 2019.There is strong reason to doubt that the intuitions Chalmers' meta-problem focuses on are widespread or independent of proto-theoretical prompting. So it's unlikely that they result from factors connected to the nature of consciousness. In any case, it's only the accuracy of the problem intuitions that matters for evaluating theories of consciousness or revealing the nature of consciousness, not an explanation of how they arise. Unless we determine that they're accurate about consciousness, we m…Read more
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93Dintre fenomenele mentale, nici unul nu pare să reziste atât de bine explicaţiei precum conştiinţa. Parţial, dificultatea se datorează faptului că folosim termenul „conştient” şi alţii înrudiţi să dea seama de anumite fenomene distincte ale căror legături nu sunt întotdeauna clare. Iar acest lucru duce adesea la amestecarea acestor fenomene distincte. De aceea, orice încercare de a explica conştiinţa trebuie să înceapă prin a distinge diferitele lucruri pe care le numim conştiinţă. Un astfel de …Read more
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203Quality-space theory in olfactionFrontiers in Psychology 5. 2014.Quality-space theory (QST) explains the nature of the mental qualities distinctive of perceptual states by appeal to their role in perceiving. QST is typically described in terms of the mental qualities that pertain to color. Here we apply QST to the olfactory modalities. Olfaction is in various respects more complex than vision, and so provides a useful test case for QST. To determine whether QST can deal with the challenges olfaction presents, we show how a quality space (QS) could be construc…Read more
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23XV-Unity of Consciousness and the SelfProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 103 (1): 325-352. 2003.
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399Measuring away an attentional confound?Neuroscience of Consciousness 3 (1): 1-3. 2017.A recent fMRI study by Webb et al. (Cortical networks involved in visual awareness independent of visual attention, Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 2016;113:13923–28) proposes a new method for finding the neural correlates of awareness by matching atten- tion across awareness conditions. The experimental design, however, seems at odds with known features of attention. We highlight logical and methodological points that are critical when trying to disentangle attention and awareness.
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138A striking difference between those fields we classify as humanities and those we regard as sciences is the attitude within each field toward its history. Learning about literature, music, or the visual arts requires becoming knowledgeable about a significant amount of the history of those areas. And education in these fields, at whatever level, invariably involves some study of great accomplishments in the past. By contrast, scientific work and standard scientific textbooks make little referenc…Read more
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220Self-knowledge and Moore's paradoxPhilosophical Studies 77 (2-3). 1995.As G. E. Moore famously observed, sentences such as 'It's raining but I don't think it is', though they aren't contradictory, cannot be used to make coherent assertions.' The trouble with such sentences is not a matter of their truth conditions; such sentences can readily be true. Indeed, it happens often enough with each of us that we think, for example, that it isn't raining even though it is. This shows that such sentences are not literally contradictory. But even though such sentences have u…Read more
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15A theory of consciousnessIn Ned Block, Owen J. Flanagan & Guven Guzeldere (eds.), The Nature of Consciousness, Mit Press. 1997.
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166Higher-order theories of consciousnessScholarpedia 3 (5): 4407. 2008.in Scholarpedia, forthcoming
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2Descartes's Meditations: Critical Essays (edited book)Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 1997.This collection of recent articles by leading scholars is designed to illuminate one of the greatest and most influential philosophical books of all time. It includes incisive commentary on every major theme and argument in the Meditations, and will be valuable not only to philosophers but to historians, theologians, literary scholars, and interested general readers
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248Unity of consciousness and the selfProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 103 (3): 325-352. 2003.The so-called unity of consciousness consists in the compelling sense we have that all our conscious mental states belong to a single conscious subject. Elsewhere I have argued that a mental state's being conscious is a matter of our being conscious of that state by having a higher-order thought (HOT) about it. Contrary to what is sometimes argued, this HOT model affords a natural explanation of our sense that our conscious states all belong to a single conscious subject. HOTs often group states…Read more
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CUNY Graduate CenterDepartment of Philosophy
Cognitive Science
Linguistics
Cognitive NeuroscienceProfessor
New York City, New York, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Language |
Cognitive Sciences |