•  174
    Is Pain Representational?
    Belgrade Philosophical Annual. forthcoming.
    [Special issue honoring Nikola Grahek] Representationalism in philosophy of perception has become more or less the dominant view. There are various versions of it not all of which are motivated by the same set of concerns. Different metaphysical and epistemological agendas are at work in different strands of the movement. In this paper, I will focus on what has come to be known as strong representationalism. This view has reductive and non-reductive versions, which are usually paired with re…Read more
  •  1010
    Are Frege cases exceptions to intentional generalizations?
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 31 (1): 1-22. 2001.
    This piece criticizes Fodor's argument (in The Elm and the Expert, 1994) for the claim that Frege cases should be treated as exceptions to (broad) psychological generalizations rather than as counterexamples.
  •  375
    [Working Draft — Comments are welcome! — March 2024] Reductive strong representationalists accept the Common Kind Thesis about subjectively indistinguishable sensory hallucinations, illusions, and veridical experiences. I show that this doesn’t jibe well with their declared phenomenal externalism and argue that there is no sense in which the phenomenal character of sensory experiences is constituted by the sensible properties represented by these experiences, as representationalists claim. Fir…Read more
  •  11
    Response to Dr. Bernstein
    PAIN Reports 5 (e814): 1-1. 2020.
    This is a Letter to Editor responding to another Letter by Dr. LR Bernstein (PAIN Reports 5, 2020, e814) reacting to my previous article on the IASP definition of pain that appeared in PAIN Reports 4(2019)e777.
  •  22
    Response to Drs. Anand, Craig, and Williams
    PAIN Reports 5 (e812): 1-2. 2020.
    This is a Letter to Editor responding to the reaction by Ken Craig, Amanda Williams, KJS Anand, to my previous article on the IASP definition of pain that appeared in PAIN Reports 4(2019)e777. The reaction is also in the form of a Letter to Editor in PAIN Reports 5(2020)e811.
  •  657
    Does the IASP Definition of Pain Need Updating?
    PAIN Reports 4 (5 - e777): 1-7. 2019.
    The current IASP definition of pain has come under renewed criticisms recently. There is a new momentum for its revision as reflected by the fact that IASP has now a Presidential Task Force dedicated to look into whether there is enough warrant to update the definition. I critically review all the major criticisms of the current definition in detail, and raise new difficulties rarely discussed before. I show that none of the major criticisms has enough warrant to force us to substantially revise…Read more
  •  1009
    I distinguish between two claims of transparency of experiences. One claim is weaker and supported by phenomenological evidence. This I call the transparency datum. Introspection of standard perceptual experiences as well as bodily sensations is consistent with, indeed supported by, the transparency datum. I formulate a stronger transparency thesis that is entailed by representationalism about experiential phenomenology. I point out some empirical consequences of strong transparency in the conte…Read more
  •  258
    This is the text of an invited talk exploring the connections between two apparently distinct notions of affect, sensory versus core affect. It is basically a progress report. It is exploratory and tentative. It starts from a mild puzzle about the apparent mismatch between the notion of affect that affective neuroscientists generally deploy and the notion of affect that emotion psychologists deploy. The notion favored by psychologists is the notion of core affect. The phenomenon studied by affec…Read more
  •  533
    What is a pain in a body part?
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (2). 2020.
    The IASP definition of 'pain' defines pain as a subjective experience. The Note accompanying the definition emphasizes that as such pains are not to be identified with objective conditions of body parts (such as actual or potential tissue damage). Nevertheless, it goes on to state that a pain "is unquestionably a sensation in a part or parts of the body, but it is also always unpleasant and therefore also an emotional experience." This generates a puzzle that philosophers have been well familiar…Read more
  • Syntax, Functionalism, Connectionism, and the Language of Thought
    Dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park. 1993.
    Fodor and Pylyshyn's critique of connectionism has posed a challenge to connectionists: Explain such cognitive regularities as systematicity and productivity without postulating a LOT architecture. Some connectionists took the challenge seriously. They developed some models that purport to show that they can explain the regularities without becoming classical. The key to their claim is that their models can and do provide non-concatenatively realized syntactically complex representations that ca…Read more
  •  1114
    Pain and Pleasure
    In Andrea Scarantino (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Emotion Theory, Routledge. 2024.
    This is a piece written for interdisciplinary audiences and contains very little philosophy. It looks into whether, or in what sense, pains and pleasures are emotions.
  •  688
    This is a Letter to Editor of _Pain_ recommending revision of a pain term ('nociplastic pain') recently added to the IASP Pain Terms. (With a response from the Taxonomy Committee, Eva Kosek et al. PAIN: June 2018 - Volume 159 - Issue 6 - p 1177–1178
  •  966
    Consciousness, intentionality, and intelligence: Some foundational issues for artificial intelligence
    Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 12 (3): 263-277. 2000.
  •  769
    A Contemporary Account of Sensory Pleasure
    In Lisa Shapiro (ed.), Pleasure: A History, Oxford University Press. pp. 239-266. 2018.
    [This is the penultimate version, please send me an email for the final version]. Some sensations are pleasant, some unpleasant, and some are neither. Furthermore, those that are pleasant or unpleasant are so to different degrees. In this essay, I want to explore what kind of a difference is the difference between these three kinds of sensations. I will develop a comprehensive three-level account of sensory pleasure that is simultaneously adverbialist, functionalist and is also a version of a sa…Read more
  •  978
    Reasons and Theories of Sensory Affect
    In David Bain, Michael Brady & Jennifer Corns (eds.), Philosophy of Pain, Routledge. pp. 27-59. 2018.
    Some sensory experiences are pleasant, some unpleasant. This is a truism. But understanding what makes these experiences pleasant and unpleasant is not an easy job. Various difficulties and puzzles arise as soon as we start theorizing. There are various philosophical theories on offer that seem to give different accounts for the positive or negative affective valences of sensory experiences. In this paper, we will look at the current state of art in the philosophy of mind, present the main conte…Read more
  •  273
    What does feeling a sharp pain in one's hand have in common with seeing a red apple on the table? Some say not much, apart from the fact that they are both conscious experiences. To see an object is to perceive an extramental reality -- in this case, a red apple. To feel a pain, by contrast, is to undergo a conscious experience that doesn't necessarily relate the subject to an objective reality. Perceptualists, however, dispute this. They say that both experiences are forms of perception of an o…Read more
  •  2538
    The language of thought hypothesis
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2010.
    A comprehensive introduction to the Language of Though Hypothesis (LOTH) accessible to general audiences. LOTH is an empirical thesis about thought and thinking. For their explication, it postulates a physically realized system of representations that have a combinatorial syntax (and semantics) such that operations on representations are causally sensitive only to the syntactic properties of representations. According to LOTH, thought is, roughly, the tokening of a representation that has a synt…Read more
  •  606
    Has Fodor Really Changed His Mind on Narrow Content?
    Mind and Language 12 (3-4): 422-458. 1997.
    In The Elm and the Expert (1994), Fodor rejects the notion of narrow content as superfluous. He envisions a scientific intentional psychology that adverts only to broad content properties in its explanations. I show that there has been no change in Fodor's treatment of Frege cases and cases involving the so‐called deferential concepts. And for good reason: his notion of narrow content (1985‐91) couldn't explain them. The only apparent change concerns his treatment of Twin Earth cases. However, I…Read more
  •  119
    Computation and intentional psychology
    Dialogue 39 (2): 365-379. 2000.
    The relation between computational and intentional psychology has always been a vexing issue. The worry is that if mental processes are computational, then these processes, which are defined over symbols, are sensitive solely to the non-semantic properties of symbols. If so, perhaps psychology could dispense with adverting in its laws to intentional/semantic properties of symbols. Stich, as is well-known, has made a great deal out of this tension and argued for a purely "syntactic" psychology by…Read more
  •  333
    This is a slightly more polished version of a presentation I wrote for the Author-Meets-Critics session on Colin's book at the Eastern APA session on Jan 4, 2017, in Baltimore. I’ve decided to post this commentary online pretty much as is -- I am afraid I don't have time to prepare a version suitable for publication. I hope the reader will find it helpful. At any rate, please treat this piece as a rough draft originally intended to be delivered to a live audience. Although my commentary is mostl…Read more
  •  74
    The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition (edited book)
    with P. Robbins
    Cambridge University Press. 2008.
    Since its inception some fifty years ago, cognitive science has seen a number of sea changes. Perhaps the best known is the development of connectionist models of cognition as an alternative to classical, symbol-based approaches. A more recent - and increasingly influential - trend is that of dynamical-systems-based, ecologically oriented models of the mind. Researchers suggest that a full understanding of the mind will require systematic study of the dynamics of interaction between mind, body, …Read more
  •  232
    Pain
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2019.
    Pain is the most prominent member of a class of sensations known as bodily sensations, which includes itches, tickles, tingles, orgasms, and so on. Bodily sensations are typically attributed to bodily locations and appear to have features such as volume, intensity, duration, and so on, that are ordinarily attributed to physical objects or quantities. Yet these sensations are often thought to be logically private, subjective, self-intimating, and the source of incorrigible knowledge for those who…Read more
  •  1283
    Is feeling pain the perception of something?
    Journal of Philosophy 106 (10): 531-567. 2009.
    According to the increasingly popular perceptual/representational accounts of pain (and other bodily sensations such as itches, tickles, orgasms, etc.), feeling pain in a body region is perceiving a non-mental property or some objective condition of that region, typically equated with some sort of (actual or potential) tissue damage. In what follows I argue that given a natural understanding of what sensory perception requires and how it is integrated with (dedicated) conceptual systems, these a…Read more
  •  1654
    This essay is a sustained attempt to bring new light to some of the perennial problems in philosophy of mind surrounding phenomenal consciousness and introspection through developing an account of sensory and phenomenal concepts. Building on the information-theoretic framework of Dretske (1981), we present an informational psychosemantics as it applies to what we call sensory concepts, concepts that apply, roughly, to so-called secondary qualities of objects. We show that these concepts have a…Read more
  •  688
    Aristotle on Episteme and Nous: the Posterior Analytics
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 36 (1): 15-46. 1998.
    According to the standard and largely traditional interpretation, Aristotle’s conception of nous, at least as it occurs in the Posterior Analytics, is geared against a certain set of skeptical worries about the possibility of scientific knowledge, and ultimately of the knowledge of Aristotelian first principles. On this view, Aristotle introduces nous as an intuitive faculty that grasps the first principles once and for all as true in such a way that it does not leave any room for the skeptic to…Read more
  •  115
    What makes perceptual symbols perceptual?
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22 (4): 610-611. 1999.
    It is argued that three major attempts by Barsalou to specify what makes a perceptual symbol perceptual fail. It is suggested that one way to give such an account is to employ the symbols
  •  613
    Defending the IASP Definition of Pain
    The Monist 100 (4). 2017.
    The official definition of ‘pain’ by the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) hasn’t seen much revision since its publication in 1979. There have been various criticisms of the definition in the literature from different quarters: that the definition implies a dubious metaphysical dualism, that it requires a strong form of consciousness as well as linguistic abilities, that it excludes many vulnerable groups that are otherwise perfectly capable of experiencing pain, that it has…Read more
  •  93
    Review of Nikola Grahek, Feeling Pain and Being in Pain (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (1). 2008.
  •  529
    [This is an earlier (1997), much longer and more detailed version of my entry on LOTH in the _Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy_] The Language of Thought Hypothesis (LOTH) is an empirical thesis about thought and thinking. For their explication, it postulates a physically realized system of representations that have a combinatorial syntax (and semantics) such that operations on representations are causally sensitive only to the syntactic properties of representations. According to LOTH, though…Read more
  •  852
    How to Unify Theories of Sensory Pleasure: An Adverbialist Proposal
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 5 (1): 119-133. 2014.
    A lot of qualitatively very different sensations can be pleasant or unpleasant. The Felt-Quality Views that conceive of sensory affect as having an introspectively available common phenomenology or qualitative character face the “heterogeneity problem” of specifying what that qualitative common phenomenology is. In contrast, according to the Attitudinal Views, what is common to all pleasant or unpleasant sensations is that they are all “wanted” or “unwanted” in a certain sort of way. The commona…Read more