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247Is 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
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1061Are 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.
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442[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
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11Response to Dr. BernsteinPAIN 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.
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25Response to Drs. Anand, Craig, and WilliamsPAIN 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.
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709Does 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
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1105Is the experience of pain transparent? Introspecting Phenomenal QualitiesSynthese 196 (2): 677-708. 2019.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
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307This 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
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661What 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
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Syntax, Functionalism, Connectionism, and the Language of ThoughtDissertation, 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
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1342Pain and PleasureIn 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.
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733This 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
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1Introduction: A critical and quasi-historical essay on theories of painIn Pain: New Essays on its Nature and the Methodology of its Study, Bradford Book/mit Press. 2005.
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391Consciousness, conceivability arguments, and perspectivalism: The dialectics of the debateCommunication and Cognition: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly Journal 34 (1-2): 99-122. 2001.
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14The main difficulty with painIn Pain: New Essays on its Nature and the Methodology of its Study, Bradford Book/mit Press. pp. 123-136. 2005.Consider the following two sentences: " I see a dark discoloration in the back of my hand. I feel a jabbing pain in the back of my hand. " They seem to have the same surface grammar, and thus prima facie invite the same kind of semantic treatment. Even though a reading of ‘see’ in where the verb is not treated as a success verb is not out of the question, it is not the ordinary and natural reading. Note that if I am hallucinating a dark discoloration in the back of my hand, then is simply false.…Read more
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244An analysis of pleasure vis-a-vis painPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 61 (3): 537-570. 2000.I take up the issue of whether pleasure is a kind of sensation or not. This issue was much discussed by philosophers of the 1950’s and 1960’s, and apparently no resolution was reached. There were mainly two camps in the discussion: those who argued for a dispositional account, and those who favored an episodic feeling view of pleasure. Here, relying on some recent scientific research I offer an account of pleasure which neither dispositionalizes nor sensationalizes pleasure. As is usual in the t…Read more
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209Pure informational semantics and the narrow/broad dichotomyIn Dunja Jutronic (ed.), The Maribor Papers in Naturalized Semantics, Maribor. pp. 157. 1997.The influence of historical-causal theories of reference developed in the late sixties and early seventies by Donnellan, Kripke, Putnam and Devitt has been so strong that any semantic theory that has the consequence of assigning disjunctive representational content to the mental states of twins (e.g. [H2O or XYZ]) has been thereby taken to refute itself. Similarly, despite the strength of pre-theoretical intuitions that exact physical replicas like Davidson's Swampman have representational menta…Read more
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471Language of thought: The connectionist contributionMinds and Machines 7 (1): 57-101. 1997.Fodor and Pylyshyn's critique of connectionism has posed a challenge to connectionists: Adequately explain such nomological regularities as systematicity and productivity without postulating a "language of thought" (LOT). Some connectionists like Smolensky took the challenge very seriously, and attempted to meet it by developing models that were supposed to be non-classical. At the core of these attempts lies the claim that connectionist models can provide a representational system with a comb…Read more
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681Fodor on concepts and Frege puzzlesPacific Philosophical Quarterly 79 (4): 289-294. 1998.ABSTRACT. Fodor characterizes concepts as consisting of two dimensions: one is content, which is purely denotational/broad, the other the Mentalese vehicle bearing that content, which Fodor calls the Mode of Presentation (MOP), understood "syntactically." I argue that, so understood, concepts are not interpersonally sharable; so Fodor's own account violates what he calls the Publicity Constraint in his (1998) book. Furthermore, I argue that Fodor's non-semantic, or "syntactic," solution to Frege…Read more
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1879A short primer on situated cognitionIn Murat Aydede & P. Robbins (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition, Cambridge University Press. pp. 3--10. 2009.Introductory Chapter to the _Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition_ (CUP, 2009)
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728Affect: Representationalists' HeadachePhilosophical Studies 170 (2): 175-198. 2014.Representationalism is the view that the phenomenal character of experiences is identical to their representational content of a certain sort. This view requires a strong transparency condition on phenomenally conscious experiences. We argue that affective qualities such as experienced pleasantness or unpleasantness are counter-examples to the transparency thesis and thus to the sort of representationalism that implies it
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648Some foundational problems in the scientific study of painPhilosophy of Science Supplement 69 (3): 265-83. 2002.This paper is an attempt to spell out what makes the scientific study of pain so distinctive from a philosophical perspective. Using the IASP definition of ‘pain’ as our guide, we raise a number of questions about the philosophical assumptions underlying the scientific study of pain. We argue that unlike the study of ordinary perception, the study of pain focuses from the very start on the experience itself and its qualities, without making deep assumptions about whether pain experiences are per…Read more
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585Pain: Perception or Introspection?In Jennifer Corns (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Pain, Routledge. 2017.[Penultimate draft] I present the perceptualist/representationalist theories of pain in broad outline and critically examine them in light of a competing view according to which awareness of pain is essentially introspective. I end the essay with a positive sketch of a naturalistic proposal according to which pain experiences are intentional but not fully representational. This proposal makes sense of locating pains in body parts as well as taking pains as subjective experiences.
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639On the type/token relation of mental representationsFacta Philosophica 2 (1): 23-50. 2000.According to the Computational/Representational Theory of Thought (CRTT ? Language of Thought Hypothesis, or LOTH), propositional attitudes, such as belief, desire, and the like, are triadic relations among subjects, propositions, and internal mental representations. These representations form a representational _system_ physically realized in the brain of sufficiently sophisticated cognitive organisms. Further, this system of representations has a combinatorial syntax and semantics, but the pro…Read more
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1070Consciousness, intentionality, and intelligence: Some foundational issues for artificial intelligenceJournal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 12 (3): 263-277. 2000.
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1038Reasons and Theories of Sensory AffectIn 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
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830A Contemporary Account of Sensory PleasureIn 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
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283Pain: New Essays on its Nature and the Methodology of its Study (edited book)MIT Press. 2005.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
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2740The language of thought hypothesisStanford 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
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Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Perception, General |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics |
Meta-Ethics |
Value Theory, Miscellaneous |