With clarity and grace, he also reveals the limited truth of some of the "common sense" assumptions which make it difficult for us to appreciate its full ...

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Cognitive science typically postulates unconscious mental phenomena, computational or otherwise, to explain cognitive capacities. The mental phenomena in question are supposed to be inaccessible in principle to consciousness. I try to show that this is a mistake, because all unconscious intentionality must be accessible in principle to consciousness; we have no notion of intrinsic intentionality except in terms of its accessibility to consciousness. I call this claim the The argument for it proceeds in six steps. The essential point is that (...) intrinsic intentionality has aspectual shape: Our mental representations represent the world under specific aspects, and these aspectual features are essential to a mental state's being the state that it is. (shrink)

No mental phenomenon is more central than consciousness to an adequate understanding of the mind. Nor does any mental phenomenon seem more stubbornly to resist theoretical treatment. Consciousness is so basic to the way we think about the mind that it can be tempting to suppose that no mental states exist that are not conscious states. Indeed, it may even seem mysterious what sort of thing a mental state might be if it is not a conscious state. On this way (...) of looking at things, if any mental states do lack consciousness, they are exceptional cases that call for special explanation or qualification. Perhaps dispositional or cognitive states exist that are not conscious, but nonetheless count as mental states. (shrink)

This first volume contains discussions of the brain, methods for analyzing behavior, thought, consciousness, attention, association, time, and memory.

With a new chapter This new edition of Herbert Fingarette's classic study in philosophical psychology now includes a provocative recent essay on the topic by ...

Describes the various senses as sensory systems that are attuned to the environment. Develops the notion of rich sensory information that specifies the distal environment. Includes a discussion of affordances.

Addressed here are certain relations among intentionality, consciousness, and subjectivity which Searle has lately been calling our attention, while arguing that certain brain-occurrences possess irreducibly subjective features - in the sense that no amount of strictly objective, third-person information about the animal and his or her brain and behavior could result in a description of any such features, except by inference based on the first-person perspective. In his relevant discussions, Searle has focused on the aspectual shapes of conscious mental brain-occurrences, (...) that is, the particular intrinsic feature of any mental occurrence responsible for the mental occurrence's being of or as of something beyond itself. However, Searle's view would seem, undesirably, to conceive of aspectual shape as purely appearential, in the same sense as a hallucinated fire-breathing dragon is purely appearential. Has not Searle thus abandoned ontological subjectivity - though he has available other ways to conceive of the undoubtedly, as he says, plain fact about biological evolution which is ontological subjectivity? Throughout the present article, Freud's conception of consciousness serves as an aid to understanding Searle's views of subjectivity, consciousness, and intentionality. (shrink)