Elizabeth Schechter

There are cases in which someone insists to themselves that they are the gender they were assigned at birth without “deep down” believing this. In such a case, which is to be respected: the identity an agent avows or the identity that they fearfully deny? We consider three forms of respect for gender identity and argue that although avowed gender identity should generally receive the first two forms of respect, there are two special contexts in which avowed gender identity can be respectfully challenged. The third form of respect, meanwhile, might equally be owed to avowed and unavowed identity.

Under experimental conditions, behavior suggesting dual agency is easily elicited from split‐brain subjects who usually behave in an unremarkable fashion. This article presents a model of split‐brain agency that accounts for this apparent tension. Right and left hemisphere are associated with distinct agents, R and L, each of whose unity is grounded in the special inferential and experiential relations that its mental states bear to each other. These same relations do not hold interhemispherically; rather, unified behavior is largely the result of a split‐brain subject's having a single body, much of whose coordination in action is maintained by forces operating downstream of reasons and intentions and conscious experiences. The split‐brain subject as a whole is still a unified agent as well, however, in virtue of R's and L's intentions bearing, with respect to one and the same body, those special causal powers that an individual's intentions (and hers alone) bear to her body (and to her body alone).

Two kinds of behavioral dissociation are distinctive of the so-called split-brain phenomenon and first motivated the thought that split-brain consciousness might be structurally dual, with each cerebral hemisphere associated with a distinct stream or sphere of consciousness. One of these behavioral dissociations, however, tends to diminish in observed frequency and severity over time. What implications does this have for the debate over the structure of split-brain consciousness? Some neuroscientists have recently argued that motoric information remains interhemispherically integrated and that this shows that split-brain consciousness is unitary after all. This paper argues that an account of conscious unity grounded in that sort of integration would look quite different from the most familiar accounts of conscious unity. It proposes a new kind of unity relation that might persist after split-brain surgery and then considers whether this relation is a genuine kind of conscious unity.

This paper defends the avowal view of self-deception, according to which the self-deceived agent has been led by the evidence to believe that ¬p and yet is sincere in asserting that p. I argue that the agent qualifies as sincere in asserting the contrary of what they in the most basic sense believe in virtue of asserting what they are committed to believing. It is only by recognizing such commitments and distinguishing them from the more basic beliefs whose rational regulation is automatic that the tension between the self-deceived agent’s actions and assertions can be explained in a core subset of cases of self-deception.

Many experimental findings with split-brain subjects intuitively suggest that each such subject has two minds. The conceptual and empirical basis of this duality intuition has never been fully articulated. This article fills that gap, by offering a reconstruction of early neuropsychological literature on the split-brain phenomenon. According to that work, the hemispheres operate independently of each other insofar as they interact via the mediation of effection and transduction—via behavior and sensation, essentially. This is how your mind and my mind interact with each other, however, giving rise to the intuition that a split-brain subject has two minds

The attempt to model the structure of consciousness in split-brain subjects is ongoing. This paper concerns the recently proposed ?switch model? of split-brain consciousness, according to which a split-brain subject possesses only a single stream of consciousness, unified at and across time, that shifts from one hemisphere to the other from moment to moment. The paper argues that while the central explanatory element of the switch model may account for some aspects of split-brain consciousness, the best general picture of split-brain consciousness is still offered by some version of the ?conscious duality model.?

Some philosophers have argued that so long as two neural events, within a subject, are both of the same type and both carry the same content, then these events may jointly constitute a single mental token, regardless of the sort of causal relation to each other that they bear. These philosophers have used this claim—which I call the “singularity-through-redundancy” position—in order to argue that a split-brain subject normally has a single stream of consciousness, disjunctively realized across the two hemispheres. This paper argues, against this position, that the kind of causal relations multiple neural events bear to each other constrains the mental tokens with which functionalists who are realists can identify them.

: This paper argues for a distinction between possession of a unified consciousness and possession of a single stream of consciousness. Although the distinction has widespread applicability in discussions of the structure of consciousness and of pathologies of conscious experience, I will illustrate its importance primarily using the debate about consciousness in split-brain subjects, suggesting that those who have argued that split-brain subjects have two streams of consciousness apiece and those who have argued that they have a unified consciousness may both be right

This paper concerns the relationships between persons, brains, behaviour, and psychological explanation. Tye defines a ‘psychological framework’ (PF) as a set of token beliefs, desires, intentions, memories, streams of consciousness, higher-order mental states, etc., that ‘form a coherent whole’ and against which a creature’s ‘behavior can be explained’ (p. 141). A person is the subject of such a psychological framework. Each person has one PF, and with each new PF there is a new person. Meanwhile materialism tells us, according to Tye, that brains are the bearers of mental states. In other words, ‘each person is a brain’ (p. 142) — or rather a ‘global physical state of the brain,’ since Tye believes that a single brain might realize multiple PFs and thus constitute multiple persons. Most of this paper simply assumes Tye’s account of personal identity, in order to expose certain contradictions within what Tye says about personhood in split-brain subjects. Towards the end of the paper, however, I turn to alternative accounts of persons. While a method of individuating persons grounded in scientific psychology would identify persons with psychological frameworks, as Tye does, perhaps an account of personhood grounded either in a non-psychological science, or in non-scientific psychology, would better fit the interests we have in personal identity.

This paper concerns the role that reference to subjects of experience can play in individuating streams of consciousness, and the relationship between the subjective and the objective structure of consciousness. A critique of Tim Bayne’s recent book indicates certain crucial choices that works on the unity of consciousness must make. If one identifies the subject of experience with something whose consciousness is necessarily unified, then one cannot offer an account of the objective structure of consciousness. Alternatively, identifying the subject of experience with an animal means forgoing the conceptual connection between being a subject of experience and having a single phenomenal perspective