(No abstract is available for this citation).

Professor Strawson's paper is refreshing in content as well as refreshingly intemperate. It is salutary to be reminded that even the Type Identity Theory does not entail physicalism as that doctrine is usually understood (since c-fiber firings are not by definition purely physical). And it's fun to consider versions of panpsychism. I can see why Strawson finds his position hard to classify (p. 7), and I sympathize. In my title I have cast my own vote for '?-ism' on the grounds (...) that any familiar label would be either misleading or unwieldy. My main purpose here is to assess Strawson's case for panpsychism and then to offer some objections to panpsychism, but first I want to answer an interesting and serious charge he makes against me. (shrink)

This paper compares the attempts of hare, Singer and gewirth to provide the trivially true universalizability principle with normative content. The programs of hare and singer share an inability to convict the sincere fanatic ( the servant of an immoral but aesthetically compelling ideal) of moral inconsistency. Gewirth avoids the "fanatic" pitfall by adding some purely logical footwork; but his system too admits of important indeterminacies which may or may not prove fatal, E.G., The handling of morally tolerable coercion and (...) of the occasional duty to repair damage caused by someone else. (shrink)

CHARLES HARTSHORNE, in Anselm’s Discovery, begins his attempt to save the Ontological Argument by claiming that its latter half has been ‘conveniently ignored’ by its critics through nine centuries of debate. His own contentions center around a slightly updated version of Anselm’s ‘second’ Argument, as found in Proslogium III I paraphrase his reasoning as follows.

Defences of inference to the best explanation (IBE) frequently associate IBE with scientific realism, the idea that it is reasonable to believe our best scientific theories. I argue that this linkage is unfortunate. IBE does not warrant belief, since the fact that a theory is the best available explanation does not show it to be (even probably) true. What IBE does warrant is acceptance: taking a proposition as a premise in theoretical and/or practical reasoning. We ought to accept our best (...) scientific theories since they are the theories that are most likely to lead to the goal of science, which is that of knowledge. In support of this claim I invoke Bill Lycan's Panglossian reflections regarding Mother Nature.1. (shrink)

The 1990’s, we’ve been told, were the decade of the brain. But without anyone announcing or declaring, much less deciding that it should be so, the 90’s were also a breakthrough decade for the study of consciousness. (Of course we think the two are related, but that is another matter altogether.) William G. Lycan leads the charge with his 1987 book Consciousness (MIT Press), and he has weighed-in again with Consciousness and Experience (1996, MIT Press). Together these two books put (...) forth Lycan’s formidable view of consciousness, extending the theory of mind that he calls ‘homuncular functionalism.’ Roughly, Lycan’s view is that conscious beings are hierarchically composed intentional systems, whose representational powers are to be understood in terms of their biological function. In this review we will call the view ‘teleological functionalism’ or ‘teleofunctionalism’ – the homuncular part, for which Lycan and Daniel Dennett argued convincingly, is now so widely accepted that it fails to distinguish Lycan’s view from other versions of functionalism. This, by itself, is a testament to the importance of Lycan’s work. (shrink)

The explanatory gap refers to the lack of concepts for understanding “how it is that . . . a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue.” By assuming that there are colours in the outside world, Block needlessly widens this gap and Lycan and Kitcher simply fail to see the gap. When such assumptions are abandoned, an unnecessary and incomprehensible constraint disappears. It then becomes clear that the brain can use its own neural language for (...) representing aspects of the outside world. While this may not close the gap, it becomes clearer where we need new concepts. (shrink)

The subjectivity of the mental consists in the idea that there are features of our mental states that are perspectival in that they are accessible only from the first-person point of view. This is held to be a problem for materialist theories of mind, since such theories contend that there is nothing about the mind that cannot be fully described from a third-person point of view. Lycan suggests a notion of “phenomenal information” that is held to be perspectival in the (...) relevant sense but also perfectly objective, since it is explicated in terms of the computational roles of higher-order mental representations. I argue that his project fails because phenomenal information is accessible to observers, and hence it fails to be perspectival in the required sense. That sense demands that there be aspects of our conscious experiences that cannot be intersubjectively compared. (shrink)

My paper “On the Indispensability of Intentionality” is faulted on two counts by William Lycan:I fail to show that there are any non-intentional psychological verbsmy argument against eliminative materialism contains a false premiss.I intend to deal swiftly with Lycan's indictment, as I believe it to be patently insubstantial. The aim, in my paper, of pointing out that there are non-intentional psychological verbs was to show that Lycan and others have been mistaken in believing that every psychological verb is intentional.I shall (...) respond first to, to Lycan's charge that the fifth premiss of his reconstruction of my argument against eliminative materalism is false, or at least not obviously true. The premiss reads: “If language takes place, it takes place between persons.” The eliminative materialist can reasonably deny this premiss, Lycan maintains, since it “seems plausible” to predict that we will someday be able to explain, with no reference to people's mental states or activities, what language is and how it works. I believe that because this “prediction” is in fact self-contradictory, it casts no doubt whatsoever on the fifth premiss of my anti-materialist argument. (shrink)

Now in its Third Edition, Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction introduces students to the main issues and theories in twentieth-century philosophy of language, focusing specifically on linguistic phenomena. Author William G. Lycan structures the book into four general parts. Part I, Reference and Referring, includes topics such as Russell's theory of descriptions (and its objections), Donnellan's distinction, problems of anaphora, the description theory of proper names, Searle's cluster theory, and the causal-historical theory. Part II, Theories of Meaning, surveys the (...) competing theories of linguistic meaning and compares their various advantages and liabilities. Part III, Pragmatics and Speech Acts, introduces the basic concepts of linguistic pragmatics and includes a detailed discussion of the problem of indirect force. Part IV, The Expressive and the Figurative, examines various forms of expressive language and what "metaphorical meaning" is and how most listeners readily grasp it. (shrink)

Lycan (1985, 1988) defended a “Principle of Credulity”: “Accept at the outset each of those things that seem to be true” (1988, p. 165). Though that takes the form of a rule rather than a thesis, it does not seem very different from Huemer’s (2001, 2006, 2007) doctrine of phenomenal conservatism (PC): “If it seems to S that p , then, in the absence of defeaters, S thereby has at least some degree of justification for believing that p ” (2007, (...) p. 30). My Principle was differently motivated and put to uses different from Huemer’s. In this paper I shall explore some of the differences. (shrink)

Toward theory a homuncular of believing For years and years, philosophers took thoughts and beliefs to be modifications of incorporeal Cartesian egos. ...

Someday there will be no more articles written about the.

Philosophers and logicians have long debated how best to understand conditional or hypothetical sentences. William G. Lycan has a distinctive approach to this debate, attending not just to the semantics of such sentences, but equally to their syntax. He shows how insights from linguistic theory help to illuminate problems about the meaning and function of conditionals. For instance, philosophers and logicians have had problems analysing the locutions 'only if', 'unless', and 'even if'. Lycan sets out a general semantic theory of (...) conditionals which works for all such sentences; he assigns meanings to them in a way that explains how and why those meanings depend upon features of utterance context. According to Lycan's theory the 'if'-clauses refer to items called 'events', 'circumstances', or 'conditions'.Real Conditionals gives at last the definitive presentation of this original approach to a topic at the intersection of philosophy, logic, and linguistics. Lycan's characteristically lively and witty expository style ensures that it can be enjoyed by readers from all three disciplines. (shrink)

Davidson made a strikingly distinctive and valuable contribution to the practice of ontology. It was a species of argument for the existence of things of one kind or another. It combined Quine's doctrine that “To be is to be the value of a bound variable” with Davidson's own apparently anti‐Quinean views on semantics and logical form in natural language. Roughly: Suppose truth‐conditional analysis of certain English sentences assigns them logical forms containing characteristic quantifiers, and the quantifiers' domains include entities of (...) a certain sort. Then, assuming that some of the relevant sentences are true, it follows that there exist entities of that sort. This chapter expounds Davidson's extended defense of that method, and then considers and tries to rebut five potential objections to it. (shrink)

In two recent publications I argued against Nemirow and Lewis that there is distinctive, irreducibly phenomenal and perspectival information of the sort alleged by Jackson; but I gave an account of such information that is entirely compatible with a materialist view of human subjects. Hershfield argues that the latter account is inadequate, in that it fails to support the claim that the information it characterizes is irreducibly phenomenal or perspectival. I reply that Hershfield's conclusion does not follow from his argument's (...) premises. (shrink)