Search results for "Philosophy of mind"

Consciousness and Moral Status of Animals

2021

Consciousness is the basis for granting moral status, but it is ephemeral and elusive. Both the ontological and epistemic dimension of consciousness cause hard problems for modern science and the philosophy of mind. On the one hand, consciousness is subjective, and includes conscious states with a phenomenal or qualitative character – “qualia”. It consists of mental states which are accessible to a subject only from the first-person perspective. A being is phenomenally conscious when there is something that is like to be that being. Utilitarianism uses the hedonistic strategy of the moral status, ascribing to that the demand for us to treat sentience as the fundamental property for obtainin…

Representation

2020

Representation is a primitive notion of many philosophical theories and of cognitive science. It is assumed as an intuitively understandable label assigned to the functions by which a biological or an artificial agent takes part in the world in an epistemological or a behavioral manner. It is employed to define the conditions for the semantic individuation of the states of the agent. The notion of representation was introduced systematically in the Scholastics’ view of cognition. In modern philosophy, the term is often used as a verb. Representation becomes the function of a class of mental states. In contemporary philosophy, the debate over the semantic individuation of states is intertwin…

2013

This metatheoretical paper develops a list of new research targets by exploring particularly promising interdisciplinary contact points between empirical dream research and philosophy of mind. The central example is the MPS-problem. It is constituted by the epistemic goal of conceptually isolating and empirically grounding the phenomenal property of "minimal phenomenal selfhood," which refers to the simplest form of self-consciousness. In order to precisely describe MPS, one must focus on those conditions that are not only causally enabling, but strictly necessary to bring it into existence. This contribution argues that research on bodiless dreams, asomatic out-of-body experiences, and ful…

Group epistemic value

2021

AbstractSometimes we are interested in how groups are doing epistemically in aggregate. For instance, we may want to know the epistemic impact of a change in school curriculum or the epistemic impact of abolishing peer review in the sciences. Being able to say something about how groups are doing epistemically is especially important if one is interested in pursuing a consequentialist approach to social epistemology of the sort championed by Goldman (Knowledge in a social world. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999). According to this approach we evaluate social practices and institutions from an epistemic perspective based on how well they promote the aggregate level of epistemic value ac…

Introduction: Subjectivity and Selfhood in the History of Philosophy

2016

In our everyday dealings with ourselves, other persons and the world, we commonly take our selves, or the entities signified by our employment of the first-personal pronoun ‘I’ in simple assertoric sentences such as ‘I am’, ‘I think’, or ‘I am walking’, to be the uncontroversial loci of our experiences of being, knowing, and acting. But when we glance at contemporary literature on the philosophy of mind and action, on a steady increase for much of the twentieth and the present century in naturalist, analytic, and phenomenological approaches alike, we find that few of the intuitions we may have about that first-personal pivot actually stand uncontested. In fact, it rather seems that if there…

2013

Are dreams subjective experiences during sleep? Is it like something to dream, or is it only like something to remember dreams after awakening? Specifically, can dream reports be trusted to reveal what it is like to dream, and should they count as evidence for saying that dreams are conscious experiences at all? The goal of this article is to investigate the relationship between dreaming, dream reporting and subjective experience during sleep. I discuss different variants of philosophical skepticism about dream reporting and argue that they all fail. Consequently, skeptical doubts about the trustworthiness of dream reports are misguided, and for systematic reasons. I suggest an alternative,…

Naturalizzazione, mente e conoscenza

2009

Naturalizzazione, mente e conoscenza - A controversial issue regarding Quine’s naturalised epistemology is that it may involve some form of reductionism. This article focuses on one of these forms, analysing the interplay of his philosophy of mind and epistemology. It aims to show that if we take into proper consideration the way in which the version of anomalous monism embraced affects his conception of mental states like sensations and propositional attitudes, Quine’s philosophy of mind should be regarded as anti-reductionist. Through a discussion of his theory of perception, I try to argue that what is entailed by it is, in a sense only partially accepted by Quine himself, that neither p…

How coincidence Bears on Persistence

2011

The ‘paradoxes of coincidence’ are generally taken as an important factor for deciding between rival views on persistence through time. In particular, the ability to deal with apparent cases of temporary coincidence is usually regarded as a good reason for favouring perdurantism (or ‘four-dimensionalism’) over endurantism (or ‘three-dimensionalism’). However, the recent work of Gilmore (2007) and McGrath (2007) challenges this standard view. For different reasons, both Gilmore and McGrath conclude that perdurantism does not really obtain support from the puzzles of temporary coincidence. In this paper, I will evaluate their arguments and defend the opposite view: that the paradoxes of coinc…

Beyond Conceptual Dualism

2008

Francesc Forn I ARGIMON: Editorial Foreword: Special Series in Cognitive Science John R. SEARLE: Guest Foreword Preface Introduction One: Problems and Theories: The Mind-Body Problem in Contemporary Philosophical Debate Two: Biological Naturalism: A Naturalistic and Non-Reductive Ontology of Consciousness Three: Functionalistic Models of Consciousness: Dennett, Chalmers, and the Desubstantialization of Mind Four: Holism and Mental Causation in the Theory of Intentionality Five: John Searle and Contemporary Neuroscience. Holism, Mental Causation, and the Roots of Subjectivity Conclusion Works Cited About the Author Index

Blending the Erotic and the Divine in Mystical Literature

2004

THE BEGINNINGS OF SYMBOLIC-RELIGIOUS COGNITION - Cognitive Archeology and Cognitive Fluidity: About 30,000 years ago (70,000 years after the fossil records of the anatomically modern human), religious thought and symbolic conceptual activity arose from the capacity of integrating specific-domain a process called "cognitive fluidity" (Mithen 1996). Metaphor, Anthropomorphism and Cognitive Science: Metaphor is a basic mental capacity by which people understand themselves and the world around them through conceptual mappings of knowledge between mental spaces, using everyday knowledge to reason about more abstract concepts. Of all the templates for supernatural concepts, the ones that seriousl…