Ross on Macpherson on the Senses

From NDPR: Peter Ross reviews Fiona Macpherson's new collection on the senses (a collection containing a piece by my good buddy Brian Keeley).

This collection makes it clear that philosophical issues about the sensory modalities deserve attention. It comprises eleven 'classic' works, eight previously unpublished papers, and a substantial introduction by Macpherson. All of the classic works (with the exception of a selection from Aristotle's De Anima) were published in the past 50 years. Some of these selections -- in particular, De Anima and H. P. Grice's 1962 essay "Some Remarks about the Senses" -- are classic in any context. However, the other classic selections have been underappreciated until recently, when the philosophical literature on sensory modalities started gaining more attention. Together the classic works demonstrate the challenge, complexity, and sheer (philosophical) fun of issues having to do with senses. The previously unpublished papers, most of which originated as invited papers for a 2004 conference titled "Individuating the Senses" at University of Glasgow, largely build on the classic works.

Empirical support for higher-order theories of conscious awareness

ScienceDirect - Trends in Cognitive Sciences : Empirical support for higher-order theories of conscious awareness:

by Hakwan Lau and David Rosenthal

Abstract:

Higher-order theories of consciousness argue that conscious awareness crucially depends on higher-order mental representations that represent oneself as being in particular mental states. These theories have featured prominently in recent debates on conscious awareness. We provide new leverage on these debates by reviewing the empirical evidence in support of the higher-order view. We focus on evidence that distinguishes the higher-order view from its alternatives, such as the first-order, global workspace and recurrent visual processing theories. We defend the higher-order view against several major criticisms, such as prefrontal activity reflects attention but not awareness, and prefrontal lesion does not abolish awareness. Although the higher-order approach originated in philosophical discussions, we show that it is testable and has received substantial empirical support.

Eric Dietrich, There Is No Progress in Philosophy | PhilPapers

Eric Dietrich, There Is No Progress in Philosophy | PhilPapers

Eric Dietrich (2011). There Is No Progress in Philosophy. Essays in Philosophy 12 (2).
ABSTRACT:

Except for a patina of twenty-first century modernity, in the form of logic and language, philosophy is exactly the same now as it ever was; it has made no progress whatsoever. We philosophers wrestle with the exact same problems the Pre-Socratics wrestled with. Even more outrageous than this claim, though, is the blatant denial of its obvious truth by many practicing philosophers. The No-Progress view is explored and argued for here. Its denial is diagnosed as a form of anosognosia, a mental condition where the affected person denies there is any problem. The theories of two eminent philosophers supporting the No-Progress view are also examined. The final section offers an explanation for philosophy's inability to solve any philosophical problem, ever. The paper closes with some reflections on philosophy's future.

Dennett's Kinds of Things—Towards a Bestiary of the Manifest Image

Kinds of Things—Towards a Bestiary of the Manifest Image

Daniel C. Dennett final draft for SCIENTIFIC PHILOSOPHY AND METAPHYSICS. Edited by Don Ross, James Ladyman & Harold Kincaid. Oxford U.P. March 25, 2011

http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/kindsofthingsfin.pdf

The main goal in the rest of this paper is simply to draw attention to the riotous assembly of candidate things that we find in the manifest image. Wilfrid Sellars (1963) “discovered” the manifest image much the way Columbus discovered the western hemisphere, but he, like Columbus, was more the explorer than the systematic cartographer, and, as just noted, our Mercator has yet to appear. But what about a Linnaeus, a systematic taxonomist of all the things we find in this new, if all too familiar, world? Ontology, it seems to me, has been resolutely reductive and minimalist in its attempts to come up with an exhaustive list of kingdoms, classes, genera and species of things. No doubt the motivation has been the right one: to prepare the disheveled cornucopia for scientific accounting, with everything put ultimately in terms of atoms and the void, space-time points, or (by somewhat different reductive trajectories) substances and universals, events and properties and relations, As is well known, these procrustean beds provide metaphysicians with no end of difficult challenges, trying to fit all the candidates into one austere collection of pigeonholes or another. Where do we put numbers, or melodies, or ideas, for instance? Do numbers even exist, and are there different kinds of existence? Instead of attempting any answers of my own to these oft-asked questions of systematic taxonomy, I am going to push, informally, in the opposite direction, like the bestiarists of yore, recounting with as much ontological tolerance as I can, a few of the neglected candidates for thinghood that everyday folks have no trouble countenancing in their casual ontologies. Metaphysics as folklore studies, you might say.

Paul Thagard - The Brain and the Meaning of Life - Reviewed by Adina Roskies, Dartmouth College - Philosophical Reviews - University of Notre Dame

Paul Thagard - The Brain and the Meaning of Life - Reviewed by Adina Roskies, Dartmouth College - Philosophical Reviews - University of Notre Dame

Justin Fisher: "Why Nothing Mental is Just in the Head"

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Fisher, Justin. (forthcoming) “Why Nothing Mental is Just in the Head.” (forthcoming in Noûs) [link]

Abstract: Mental internalists hold that an individual’s mental features at a given time supervene upon what is in that individual’s head at that time. While many people reject mental internalism about content and justification, mental internalism is commonly accepted regarding such other mental features as rationality, emotion-types, propositional-attitude-types, moral character, and phenomenology. I construct a counter-example to mental internalism regarding all these features. My counter-example involves two creatures: a human and an alien from ‘Pulse World’. These creatures’ environments, behavioral dispositions and histories are such that it is intuitively clear that they are mentally quite different, even while they are, for a moment, exactly alike with respect to what’s in their heads. I offer positive reasons for thinking that the case I describe is indeed possible. I then consider ways in which mental internalists might attempt to account for this case, but conclude that the only plausible option is to reject mental internalism and to adopt a particular externalist alternative - a history-oriented version of teleo-functionalism.

Josh Weisberg, Misrepresenting consciousness | PhilPapers

Josh Weisberg, Misrepresenting consciousness | PhilPapers

forthcoming in Philosophical Studies

Abstract:

An important objection to the “higher-order” theory of consciousness turns on the possibility of higher-order misrepresentation. I argue that the objection fails because it illicitly assumes a characterization of consciousness explicitly rejected by HO theory. This in turn raises the question of what justifies an initial characterization of the data a theory of consciousness must explain. I distinguish between intrinsic and extrinsic characterizations of consciousness, and I propose several desiderata a successful characterization of consciousness must meet. I then defend the particular extrinsic characterization of the HO theory, the “transitivity principle,” against its intrinsic rivals, thereby showing that the misrepresentation objection conclusively falls short.

Rey's Sensational Sentences

I know that rhetorical questions are no substitute for arguments, but sometimes I just really love me some rhetorical questions. There are two especially sweet and lovable ones down there at the end.

Excerpt from Rey, G. (1993). Sensational sentences. In M. Davies & G. W. Humphreys (Eds.) Consciousness, (pp. 240-257). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

[B]y assimilating [qualitative] experience to [propositional] attitudes, we explain the essential unity of the mind, what it is that makes beliefs, desires, memories, hopes, fears and sensations all states of the same sort of entity. What are sometimes proposed as rival accounts seem to me to lack this unity. For example, biologistic or dualistic accounts that regard qualia as biological or as entirely non-physical properties of a computationally organized brain have trouble explaining how a mind that thinks by computing manages to feel by being in some further non-computational relation to such further properties. The further properties seem gratuitous and accidental: unless they were somehow represented in that life, how could they be any more a part of a person’s mental life than the colour of their brain? But then why should not the representations be enough, whether or not there are the corresponding properties? (p. 248)

William G. Lycan: Is Property Dualism Better Off than Substance Dualism?

William G. Lycan: Is Property Dualism Better Off than Substance Dualism?

During the last quarter-century, mind-body dualism has been doing surprisingly well: Campbell (1984), Swinburne (1986), Madell (1988), Robinson (1988, 2004), Hart (1988), Foster (1991), Seager (1991), Strawson (1994), Chalmers (1995), Taliaferro (1996), Bealer (1997), Stubenberg (1998), Griffin (1998), Hasker (1999), Rosenberg (2004), and others. But, with the notable exceptions of Swinburne, Hart and Foster, these dualists are merely property dualists rather than Cartesian substance dualists. They hold that some of our mental states have immaterial properties, but not that we ourselves are immaterial Cartesian souls entirely distinct from our bodies. The prevalent idea is that property dualism is tenable (or even demonstrated), but we are not crazy. I reject this disparity. I think that most of the standard objections to Cartesian dualism (CD) count as effectively against property dualism (PD), and that PD is hardly more plausible, or less implausible, than CD. Granted, assuming that a Cartesian ego would eo ipso have some immaterial mental properties, you might suppose that CD is logically stronger than PD; so one would need a reason for accepting CD over and above PD, and there must be at least one objection that applies to CD but not to PD. However, as we shall see, nonCartesian property dualism (PD & ~CD) faces at least two objections that CD does not.

Notes on "What is it like to be a phenomenologist?"

Notes on Jolley, K. D., & Watkins, M. (1998). What is it Like to be a Phenomenologist? The Philosophical Quarterly, 48(191), 204-209.

J&W might seem to be fellow travellers in my quest to ward off Raffman’s worries about conceptualism [link to my Color-Consciousness Conceptualism], but there are two related points that bother me about their account. The first is that they find themselves denying that, in relevant cases of judgment, judgments of distinctness can be made without differences in appearance. The second concerns their illustration of the first point (illustrations involving phenomenal sorites). When we think about the illustration in the right way, we come to see that they have not properly focused on the relevant class of judgments.

Their discussion of sorieties goes something like this. A series of chips placed side by side can be produced such that adjacent chips are indistinguishable shades, but chips at the beginning and end of the series are clearly distinguishable. As J&W describe these cases one might come to judge that adjecent chips are of different shades even though there is no difference in the appearance of the chips.

I question whether such judgments are relevant for the discussion of Raffman’s criticism of conceptualism. The sorites case seems to me to be importantly similar to the following case, a case that I take to be clearly irrelevant to the evaluation of Raffman’s case.

Suppose there are two shades that I judge to be different because I’ve watched over a black & white TV one of my color-sighted friends distinghish the shades. But this seems to clearly be irrelevant to the discussion of Raffman’s arguments. Perhaps the problem here is that the concepts I exercise in the TV case aren’t observational concepts (they are, in this case, deferential).

So what judgments are relevant to the evaluation of Raffman’s arguments? They seem to be the ones in which there clearly is an apparent difference in the color samples presented. For it is in these cases it is plausible that, at least in the synchronic conditions, there are different color-correlated contents in conscious experience.

Dennett's "The Part of Cognitive Science That Is Philosophy"

Daniel C. Dennett. The Part of Cognitive Science That Is Philosophy.
Topics in Cognitive Science 1 (2009) 231–236
http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/tops_1015.pdf

Abstract: There is much good work for philosophers to do in cognitive science if they adopt the constructive attitude that prevails in science, work toward testable hypotheses, and take on the task of clarifying the relationship between the scientific concepts and the everyday concepts with which we conduct our moral lives.