Ioannis G. Ntagkas

It's very interesting to see neurophysiological evidence brought to bear on the puzzling question of conscious experience. Many have observed that information-processing models of cognition seem to leave consciousness untouched; it is natural to hope that turning to neurophysiology might lead us to the Holy Grail. Still, I think there are reasons to be skeptical. There are good reasons to suppose that neurophysiological investigation contributes to cognitive explanation at best in virtue of constraining the information-processing structure of cognition. Of course this is a very large and significant role for it to play, but it may be over-optimistic to suppose that it can play some further explanatory role, taking us where information-processing theories cannot. If so, then neurophysiological accounts will be no more and no less successful at dealing with consciousness than information-processing accounts are.

One of the strongest objections to epiphenomenalism is that it precludes any kind of knowledge of qualia, since empirical knowledge has to include a causal relationship between the respective belief and the object of knowledge. It is argued that this objection works only if the causal relationship is understood in a very specific sense (as a 'direct' causal relationship). Epiphenomenalism can, however, live well with other kinds of causal relationships ('indirect' causal relationships) or even with a reliability account of knowledge which does not invoke causation at all. Michael Pauen has argued extensively (this volume of Journal of Consciousness Studies), however, that this line of defence doesn't work because it presupposes the existence of psychophysical laws connecting qualia with physical phenomena which cannot be established under epiphenomenalist presuppositions. It is argued that Pauen's arguments lead to sceptical consequences which threaten not only interactionist alternatives to epiphenomenalism but finally his own account.

The liking of a sensation, e.g., a taste, is a conscious occurrent but does not consist in having the liked sensation accompanied by a "pleasure sensation" - for there is no such sensation. Several alternative accounts of liking, including Aydede's "feeling episode" theory and Schroeder's representationalist theory are considered. The proposal that liking a sensation is having the non-sensory experience of liking directed upon it is explained and defended. The pleasure provided by thoughts, conversations, walks, etc., is analyzed and brought into relation to the account of liking one's sensations

Relativists make room for the possibility of “faultless disagreement” by positing the existence of subjective propositions, i.e. propositions true from some points of view and not others. We discuss whether the adoption of this position with respect to a certain domain of discourse is compatible with a realist attitude towards the matters arising in that domain. At first glance, the combination of relativism and realism leads to an unattractive metaphysical picture on which reality comprises incoherent facts. We will sketch the contours of a realist-relativist position called “subjectivism”, which avoids this result by giving up the assumption that the points of view of different subjects are all metaphysically “on a par”.

A central thesis of Frankish's argument for illusionism is the claim that illusionism is possibly true. This is what the realist about phenomenal consciousness must deny. Frankish's argument for that premise is based on a widely shared understanding of phenomenal consciousness as being a matter of certain events instantiating special properties. I argue that the illusionist's reasoning is difficult to avoid if one accepts this common account. A positive argument for the thesis that the mere possibility of illusionism can be excluded is developed. It uses a proposal about how the notion of phenomenal consciousness should be taken to pick out the phenomenon it refers to. Given that account it becomes obvious that the illusionist cannot be understood as seriously accepting his own theory. The belief in illusionism thus turns out to be an illusion.

According to an influential view that I call agentialism, our capacity to believe and intend directly on the basis of reasons—our rational agency—has a normative significance that distinguishes it from other kinds of agency (Bilgrami 2006, Boyle 2011, Burge 1996, Korsgaard 1996, Moran 2001). Agentialists maintain that insofar as we exercise rational agency, we bear a special kind of responsibility for our beliefs and intentions; and it is only those attitudes that represent the exercise of rational agency that are truly our own. In this paper I challenge these agentialist claims. My argument centers on a case in which a thinker struggles to align her belief to her reasons, and succeeds only by resorting to non-rational methods. Because she relies on non-rational methods, this revision of her belief does not express her rational agency, in the agentialist sense. I argue that this process nevertheless expresses her capacities for rationality and agency; that she is responsible for the belief shaped through this process; and that the revised belief is truly her own. So rational agency is not distinctive in the ways that agentialists contend.

When read as demands for justification, these questions seem absurd. We don’t normally ask people to substantiate assertions like “I think it will rain tomorrow” or “I have a headache”. There is, at the very least, a strong presumption that sincere self-attributions about one’s thoughts and feelings are true. In fact, some philosophers believe that such self-attributions are less susceptible to doubt than any other claims. Even those who reject that extreme view generally acknowledge that there is some salient epistemic difference between (a) one’s belief that she thinks it will rain tomorrow, or that she has a headache, and (b) her belief that it is raining, or that another person has a headache.

Abstract to Equations, Qualia, and Qualations With regard to consciousness, we could write an equation B = black. But it is possible to rewrite this using a quale, namely, B = █. This latter equation might be called a ‘qualation’. It has the same meaning regardless of the physiology that apprehends it. This article argues a whole theory of qualations could be developed. Further, to a Dualist, it could be that a materialist is convinced by materialist arguments involving the first equation, but it is unimaginable how this could ever be for a qualation. In view of the strong association of qualia with McTaggart’s A-series (future/present/past) a few notes on time are included.

This paper addresses the issue of stipulation in three cases of implicit definitions. It argues that the alleged implicit definitions do not have a purely stipulative status. Stipulation of the vehicles of the implicit definitions in question should end up with true postulates. However, those postulates should not be taken to be true only in virtue of stipulation since they have extra commitments. Horwich’s worry emerges in all three kinds of implicit definitions under consideration, since the existence of meanings so that the alleged postulates are true depends on extra requirements that should be fulfilled. Moreover, if Ramseyfication method is applied to the three kinds of implicit definition, they are split up into two components from which the first one is broadly factual while the second one is purely stipulative. The paper argues that their definitional task in each case should be assigned to their second component i.e. their Carnap-conditional.

Plato's theory of forms is developed and compared to the modern theory of recursion. I show how Plato's theory, as it applies to mathematical objects, is essentially a primitve version of modern recursion theory, which has all the essential elements of the ancient theory. However, Plato himself thought there was more than mathematics to his forms. He believed that form had a noncomposite, unanalyzable component. So, while recursion theory provides an adequate formalization of Plato's theory, it cannot be considered identical to it. I argue--drawing from material in the "Meno," "Phaedo," and "Republic"--that Plato's arguments for noncomposite form are largely fallacious. Plato would, I believe, have taken the computational version developed here seriously, since mathematics was his primary source for clear examples of forms (one could argue that it was his only source short of dipping into mysticism). In fact, there is a long-standing oral tradition that Plato developed a more formal version of his theory in lecture notes for courses he taught at the Academy (the university he founded in Athens). Any such notes, if they existed at all, have been lost. But if such a formal version did exist, it is tantalizing to wonder to what extent Plato may have anticipated modern theoretical computer science and metamathematics.

This paper aims to investigate certain aspects of Weyl’s account of implicit definitions. The paper takes under consideration Weyl’s approach to a certain kind of implicit definitions i.e. abstraction principles introduced by Frege.ion principles are bi-conditionals that transform certain equivalence relations into identity statements, defining thereby mathematical terms in an implicit way. The paper compares the analytic reading of implicit definitions offered by the Neo-Fregean program with Weyl’s account which has phenomenological leanings. The paper suggests that Weyl’s account should be construed as putting emphasis on intentionality of human mind towards certain invariant features of the elements of initial domains of discourse that are involved in equivalence relations. Definition of terms like direction, shape, number etc. is achieved by a kind of transformation of those invariants into ideal objects that is involved in intuition. Then the paper argues that at the period of 1926 Weyl’s writings on implicit definitions, he is inclined to endorse symbolic construction as a way to explicate the objectivity of certain processes as those that are carried out in case of implicit definitions.

One of the most pressing challenges that occupy the Russellian panpsychist’s agenda is to come up with a way to reconcile the traditional argument from categorical properties (Seager, 2006; Alter & Nagasawa, 2015) with H. H. Mørch’s dispositionalism-friendly argument from the experience of causation (2014, 2018, 2020) — on the way to a unitary, all-encompassing case for the view. In this regard, Mørch claims that, via the commitment to the Identity theory of properties, one can consistently hold both panpsychist arguments without contradiction (2020: 281) — I shall refer to such proposal as Reconciliation. In my paper, I shall argue that this is not the case. To this extent, I will first consider H. Taylor’s argument that the Identity theorists have the exact same resources as the dispositionalists (as, after careful enquiry, their views on the metaphysics of properties turn out to coincide (2018: 1438)), and thus contend that Reconciliation fails to obtain. Then, I will suggest that one can avoid the problem and reconcile the arguments by adopting a different version of the powerful qualities view, namely the Compound view — and thus advance a reformulated version of the claim, i.e. Reconciliation*. Finally, even though pursuing my proposed solution might expose Russellian panpsychism to the risk of epiphenomenalism, I shall conclude that such specific form of epiphenomenalism is a rather benign one, and thus that, via Reconciliation*, the constitution of a unitary case for panpsychism as a positive proposal (and not as a mere alternative to dualism and physicalism) can be achieved.

A prominent objection to supervenience physicalism is that a definition of physicalism in terms of supervenience allows for physicalism to be compatible with nonphysicalist outlooks, such as certain forms of emergentism. I take as my starting point a recent defense of supervenience physicalism from this objection. According to this line of thought, the subvenient base for emergent properties cannot be said to be purely physical; rather, it is “polluted” with emergent features in virtue of necessarily giving rise to them. Thus, if emergentism is true, it is false that everything supervenes on physical properties. I argue that this gives way to a new challenge for supervenience physicalism. The challenge, roughly, is to distinguish the emergentist’s “polluted” base from a physical supervenience base; that is, to give conditions under which the subvenient base is not “polluted” by supervenient properties. The problem, I argue, is that it is hard to see how this can be done without collapsing supervenience physicalism into alternative approaches to physicalism. I thus argue that if the present defense of supervenience physicalism succeeds in defending the adequacy of a supervenience-based definition of physicalism, it does so by compromising its uniqueness

We provide a formulation of physicalism, and show that this is to be favoured over alternative formulations. Much of the literature on physicalism assumes without argument that there is a fundamental level to reality, and we show that a consideration of the levels problem and its implications for physicalism tells in favour of the form of physicalism proposed here. Its hey elements are, fast, that the empirical and substantive part of physicalism amounts to a prediction that physics will not posit new entities solely for the purpose of accounting for mental phenomena, nor new entities with essentially mental characteristics such as propositioned attitudes or intentions; secondly, that physicalism can safely make do with no more than a weak global formulation of supervenience.

This correction reflects that I forgot to cite Stephan Leuenberger's unpublished work in the paragraph beginning "More promising, perhaps, is the orthodox view ..." in Section 5. The overall argument of Section 5 is a development of an argument I gave in footnote 27 of 'No Work for a Theory of Grounding' (Inquiry, 2014). At issue in the relevant sections of 'No Work...' and 'Grounding-based Formulations...' is whether a proponent of Grounding has resources to accommodate strongly emergent phenomena, where strong emergence is understood as contrasting with physicalism. In 'No Work...', after arguing in the text that an account of strong emergence as involving a failure of full Grounding would not accommodate the live possibility that strongly emergent goings-on might be partially but not completely metaphysically dependent on physical goings on, I considered in note 27 whether strong emergence, again understood as contrasting with physicalism, could be characterized by appeal to a Finean notion of partial Grounding, as the view that strongly emergent goings-on are partially but not fully Grounded in physical goings-on, and I argued that assuming that the notion of partial Grounding was taken to be primitive, then (since there were no prospects of defining full Grounding in terms of primitive partial Grounding along lines of defining a general notion of parthood in terms of primitive proper parthood or identity), such an approach would require that full Grounding also be taken as primitive, with possibly yet another primitive connecting partial and full Grounding. I heard Leuenberger's talk 'Emergence and Failures of Supplementation' in May 2015; for purposes of developing my previous argument (as per Section 5 in 'Grounding-based Formulations...') this talk was helpful since Leuenberger correctly argued that there were also no prospects for implementing the partial Grounding-based strategy by taking full Grounding to be primitive and defining partial Grounding in terms of full Grounding, since that would import a weak supplementation structure that might not be present in cases of strong emergence. I wrote to Leuenberger asking for his slides so that I could reference him and his work (which again is presented in the paragraph beginning "More promising, perhaps, is the orthodox view..."), but somehow forgot to include a citation to his talk, for which I sincerely apologize. One last thing: the erratum is a bit misleading about my use of Leuenberger's work. My discussion of whether a primitivist (i.e., 'non-orthodox') understanding of Finean partial Ground serves as a suitable basis for a partial Grounding-based approach to strong emergence stems from footnote 27 of my 2014, not Leuenberger's 2015 talk, and in both 'No Work...' and 'Grounding-based Formulations...' I argue that such an approach would be problematic, not "suitable", since involving two or three primitives. Also worth noting is that I do not claim or argue that the orthodox conception of partial Grounding as defined in supplementary fashion in terms of full Grounding is *incompatible* with strong emergence. Again, at issue in both 'No Work...' and in 'Grounding-based Formulations...' is strong emergence understood as contrasting with physicalism, so the relevant application of a partial Grounding-based strategy, whether or not involving an 'orthodox' account of partial Grounding as definable in terms of full Grounding, is in my papers one according to which strongly emergent goings-on are partially but not fully Grounded in *physical* goings-on. So far as I can tell, there might be cases of strong emergence that *do* obey supplementation, and which would be compatible with a partial Grounding-based account of strong emergence, where the operative notion of partial Grounding is 'orthodox' (non-primitive). For my purposes, what is important is that cases of strong emergence might not obey supplementation.

I problematize Grounding-based formulations of physicalism. More specifically, I argue, first, that motivations for adopting a Grounding-based formulation of physicalism are unsound; second, that a Grounding-based formulation lacks illuminating content, and that attempts to imbue Grounding with content by taking it to be a strict partial order are unuseful and problematic ; third, that conceptions of Grounding as constitutively connected to metaphysical explanation conflate metaphysics and epistemology, are ultimately either circular or self-undermining, and controversially assume that physical dependence is incompatible with explanatory gaps; fourth, that in order to appropriately distinguish physicalism from strong emergentism, a Grounding-based formulation must introduce one and likely two primitives in addition to Grounding; and fifth, that understanding physical dependence in terms of Grounding gives rise to ‘spandrel’ questions, including, e.g., “What Grounds Grounding?”, which arise only due to the overly abstract nature of Grounding.

The physicalist thesis that all entities are nothing over and above physical entities is often interpreted as appealing to a supervenience-based account of "nothing over and aboveness”, where, schematically, the A-entities are nothing over and above the B-entities if the A-entities supervene on the B-entities. The main approaches to filling in this schema correspond to different ways of characterizing the modal strength, the supervenience base, or the supervenience connection at issue. I consider each approach in turn, and argue that the resulting formulation of physicalism is compatible with physicalism’s best traditional rival: a naturalist emergentism. Others have argued that supervenience-based formulations of physicalism fail. My aim here, besides addressing the full spectrum of supervenience-based approaches, is to show how certain philosophical and scientific theses concerning naturalism, properties, and laws give us new reasons to think that supervenience-based formulations of physicalism are untenable.

Eriksson thinks that moral disagreements are intuitively faulty whereas disagreements about taste are intuitively faultless. He attempts to account for this difference by arguing, first, that moral judgements and taste judgements differ with regard to the presence of a disposition to challenge conflicting judgements and, second, that the intuition that a judgement is mistaken consists in the disposition to challenge it. In this article, I focus on the reasons given to support the first claim and argue that they are not sufficient. First, I assess the thesis that a taste judgement is only contingently connected with a disposition to challenge conflicting judgements. Second, I focus on the claim that a moral judgement is in part a disposition to challenge conflicting judgements. In both cases, I argue that the reasons given fail to disclose any substantial difference between the two domains.

Non-reductive physicalists have made a number of attempts to provide the relation of supervenience between levels of properties with enough bite to analyze interesting cases without at the same time losing the relation's acceptability for the physicalist. I criticize some of these proposals and suggest an alternative supplementation of the supervenience relation by imposing a requirement of robustness which is motivated by the notion of structural stability familiar from dynamical systems theory. Robust supervenience, I argue, captures what the non-reductive physicalist wants from supervenience; most importantly, it provides a natural background for reconstructing the notion of (diachronic) property emergence in a way acceptable to physicalists

The majority of contemporary philosophers of mind are physicalists. The majority of physicalists, however, are non-reductive physicalists. As nonreductive physicalists, these philosophers hold that a system's mental properties are different from a system's physical properties, that is, they hold that the sum total of mental facts about some system is a different set of facts than the sum total of physical facts about the same system. As physicalists, however, these nonreductivists hold that mental facts are nonetheless determined by physical facts, that is, they subscribe to the supervenience thesis, i.e., the thesis that no mental differences can obtain without physical differences obtaining. In this paper I take up the issue of how best to understand the notion of supervenience, especially in the light of recent advances in the neurosciences

David Papineau, Jerry Fodor and many others wonder how the conjunction of the following three positions can be true: 1) Special science laws: There are lawlike generalizations in the special sciences. These sciences trade in kinds that are such that statements about salient, reliable correlations that are projectible and that support counterfactuals apply to the tokens coming under these kinds. 2) Non-reductionism: The laws of some of the special sciences cannot be reduced to physical laws. 3) Physicalism: Everything there is in the world supervenes on the physical, that is, is fixed by the distribution of the physical properties in the world. The obvious problem is that (3) implies that the similarities among tokens in the world, accounting for the kinds in which the special sciences trade, and the correlations among such tokens, accounting for the laws of the special sciences, are fixed by the distribution of the physical properties. By contrast, (2) implies that some of the laws seizing such correlations are not reducible to physical laws. By using the term “token”, I mean a particular instantiating a property. Papineau’s proposal to reconcile these three positions is to account for (2) in terms of selection (pp. 6-9): There can be laws in the special sciences that are not reducible to physical laws if and only if these laws focus on effects that are selected for in a given context independently of the mechanisms by which they are brought about. Thus, the fact of there being such laws and their non-reducibility to physics do not contradict physicalism (3). The drawback is that the kinds that figure in such laws cannot enter into a rich network of laws 199 and that nothing can be causally efficacious insofar as it is a member of such a kind. In these comments, I shall try to push Papineau further in the direction of a reductive physicalism, thus solving the problem by simply abandoning (2)..

After the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953, scientists working in molecular biology embraced reductionism—the theory that all complex systems can be understood in terms of their components. Reductionism, however, has been widely resisted by both nonmolecular biologists and scientists working outside the field of biology. Many of these antireductionists, nevertheless, embrace the notion of physicalism—the idea that all biological processes are physical in nature. How, Alexander Rosenberg asks, can these self-proclaimed physicalists also be antireductionists? With clarity and wit, Darwinian Reductionism navigates this difficult and seemingly intractable dualism with convincing analysis and timely evidence. In the spirit of the few distinguished biologists who accept reductionism—E. O. Wilson, Francis Crick, Jacques Monod, James Watson, and Richard Dawkins—Rosenberg provides a philosophically sophisticated defense of reductionism and applies it to molecular developmental biology and the theory of natural selection, ultimately proving that the physicalist must also be a reductionist.

The wave function in quantum mechanics presents an interesting challenge to our understanding of the physical world. In this paper, I show that the wave function can be understood as four intrinsic relations on physical space. My account has three desirable features that the standard account lacks: it does not refer to any abstract mathematical objects, it is free from the usual arbitrary conventions, and it explains why the wave function has its gauge degrees of freedom, something that are usually put into the theory by hand. Hence, this account has implications for debates in philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science. First, by removing references to mathematical objects, it provides a framework for nominalizing quantum mechanics. Second, by excising superfluous structure such as overall phase, it reveals the intrinsic structure postulated by quantum mechanics. Moreover, it also removes a major obstacle to ``wave function realism.''

This chapter develops a realist information-theoretic interpretation of the nonclassical features of quantum probabilities. To make plain these nonclassical features, quantum games are analyzed in which a ‘no-signaling’ constraint has to be satisfied. It is further shown how the Lüders Rule may be seen as an instruction how to update probabilities following some measurement. As conditionalization following this rule leads to inevitable losses of information, it is argued that quantum theory implies new constraints on information. A parallel is drawn to the Special Theory of Relativity: The geometric structure of Hilbert spaces imposes new, but objective probabilistic constraints on correlations between events, just as the geometric structure of Minkowski space in special relativity imposes new spatio-temporal kinematic constraints on events.