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- Jose Luis Bermudez (2000). Personal and Subpersonal: A Difference Without a Distinction. Philosophical Explorations 3 (1):63-82.This paper argues that, while there is a difference between personal and sub-personal explanation, claims of autonomy should be treated with scepticism. It distinguishes between horizontal and vertical explanatory relations that might hold between facts at the personal and farts at the sub-personal level. Noting that many philosophers are prepared to accept vertical explanatory relations between the two levels, I argue for the stronger claim that, in the case of at least three central personal level phenomena, the demands of explanatory adequacy require postulating horizontal explanatory relations.In my reading list | Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
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This paper argues that, while there is a difference between personal and sub-personal explanation, claims of autonomy should be treated with scepticism. It distinguishes between horizontal and vertical explanatory relations that might hold between facts at the personal and farts at the sub-personal level. Noting that many philosophers are prepared to accept vertical explanatory relations between the two levels, I argue for the stronger claim that, in the case of at least three central personal level phenomena, the demands of explanatory (...)
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Since 1969, when Dennett introduced a distinction between personal and sub-personal levels of explanation, many philosophers have used 'sub-personal' very loosely, and Dennett himself has abandoned a view of the personal level as genuinely autonomous. I recommend a position in which Dennett's original distinction is crucial, by arguing that the phenomenon called mental causation is on view only at the properly personal level. If one retains the commit-' ments incurred by Dennett's early distinction, then one has a satisfactory anti-physicalistic, anti-dualist (...)
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| | Other links: informaworld.com | Scholar | More.. This paper attempts in the first instance to clarify the application of the personal/sub-personal distinction to psychoanalysis and to indicate how this issue is related to that of psychoanalysis" epistemology. It is argued that psychoanalysis may be regarded either as a form of personal psychology, or as a form of jointly personal and sub-personal psychology, but not as a form of sub-personal psychology. It is further argued that psychoanalysis indicates a problem with the personal/sub-personal distinction itself as understood by Dennett (...)
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| | Other links: informaworld.com | Scholar | More.. I claim that consciousness, just as thought or action, is only to be found at the personal level of explanation. Dennett's account is often taken to be at odds with this view, as it is seen as explicating consciousness in terms of sub-personal processes. Against this reading, and especially as it is developed by John McDowell, I argue that Dennett's work is best understood as maintaining a sharp personal/sub-personal distinction. To see this, however, we need to understand better what content (...)
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| Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: informaworld.com | Scholar | More..
| | Other links: informaworld.com | Scholar | More.. I defend a conception of the relationship between the personal and sub-personal levels as interaction withoutreduction.There are downward inferences from the personal to the sub-personal level but we find upward explanatory gaps when we try to construct illuminating accounts of personal level conditions using just sub-personal level notions. This conception faces several serious challenges but the objection that I consider in this paper says that, when theories support downward inferences from the personal to the sub-personal level, this is the product (...)
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| Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: informaworld.com | Scholar | More..
| | Other links: informaworld.com | Scholar | More.. We all know about the vehicle/content distinction (see Dennett 1991a, Millikan 1991, 1993). We shouldn't confuse properties represented in content with properties of vehicles of content. In particular, we shouldn't confuse the personal and subpersonal levels. The contents of the mental states of subject/agents are at the personal level. Vehicles of content are causally explanatory subpersonal events or processes or states. We shouldn't suppose that the properties of vehicles must be projected into what they represent for subject/agents, or vice versa. (...)
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| Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: cogprints.org cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk warwick.ac.uk citebase.eprints.org blackwell-synergy.com ingentaconnect.com | Scholar | More..
| | Other links: cogprints.org cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk warwick.ac.uk citebase.eprints.org blackwell-synergy.com ingentaconnect.com | Scholar | More.. In this paper, I argue that we should not ascribe beliefs and desires to subjects like zombies or (present day) computers which do not have phenomenal consciousness. In order to ascribe beliefs, we must distinguish between personal and subpersonal content. There may be states in my brain which represent the array of light intensities on my retina, but these states are not beliefs, because they are merely subpersonal. I argue that we cannot distinguish between personal and subpersonal content without reference (...)
In this paper the thesis that personal identity is essentially constituted by social relations is defended. To make this plausible the problem of personal identity is broken down into four interrelated sets of problems. Of these, the unity -- and the persistence -- problems cannot be resolved using the notion of a person and therefore personal identity in this sense is not socially constituted. But this paper argues that the conditions of personhood, and the structure of a human being's personality (...)
This paper explores a new understanding of mind or mental representation by arguing that contents at the personal level are not carried by vehicles. Contentful mental states at the personal level are distinctive by virtue of their vehicle-less nature: the subpersonal physiological or functional states that are associated with and enable personal level contents cannot be understood as their vehicles, neither can the sensations or the sensory conditions associated with perceptual contents. This result is obtained by first extending the interpretationist (...)
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| Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: taylorandfrancis.metapress.com informaworld.com ingentaconnect.com | Scholar | More..
| | Other links: taylorandfrancis.metapress.com informaworld.com ingentaconnect.com | Scholar | More.. The current orthodoxy on mental representation can be characterized in terms of three
central ideas. The first is ontological, the second semantic, and the third methodological. After
elucidating those, I argue that the emerging picture of mental representation is satisfactory only as
an account of mental representation at the sub-personal level. It is unsatisfactory, in a principled
way, as an account of mental representation at the personal level.
central ideas. The first is ontological, the second semantic, and the third methodological. After
elucidating those, I argue that the emerging picture of mental representation is satisfactory only as
an account of mental representation at the sub-personal level. It is unsatisfactory, in a principled
way, as an account of mental representation at the personal level.
