Online research in philosophy

Suppose your conscious life were surgically excised, but everything else left intact, what would you miss? In this situation you would not have the slightest idea what was going on. You would have no idea what there is in the world around you; what the grounds are of the potentialities and threats are that you are negotiating. Experience of your surroundings provides you with knowledge of what is there: with your initial base of knowledge of what the things are that (...) you are thinking and talking about. But this connection between consciousness of the objects and properties around you, and knowledge of the references of the basic terms you use, has proven difficult to articulate. The connection cannot be recognized so long as you think of consciousness as a kind of glow with which representations are accompanied or enlivened. It is, though, also possible to think of perceptual experience as fundamentally a relation between the subject and the things experienced; and given such a conception, we can make visible the link between consciousness and reference. (shrink)

in Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn (eds.), Library of Living Philosophers: The Philosophy of Michael Dummett.

The last fifty years has seen intense and broad development in philosophy of mind, unprecedented in the whole history of the subject. In this essay I will try to convey something of the broad sweep of developments, but I may as well say now that (a) it would have been possible, even for this author, let alone someone with a quite different approach to the subject, to write a review of the period that focused mostly on material I have either (...) not mentioned or mentioned only in passing, and (h) it is not possible within the scope of a single essay to convey the depth with which every single topic in the area has been discussed. It would, for example, be quite possible to write a long and interesting book that simply reviewed all that has been said about the inverted spectrum during the last fifty years. I have kept references to a minimum. (shrink)

In the movie Contact, an astronomer played by Jodie Foster discovers a radio signal with a discernable pattern, a sequence representing prime numbers from 2 to 101. Because the pattern is too specifically arranged to be mere random space noise, the scientists infer from this data that an extraterrestrial intelligence has transmitted this signal on purpose.

The design inference uncovers intelligent causes by isolating the key trademark of intelligent causes: specified events of small probability. Just about anything that happens is highly improbable, but when a highly improbable event is also specified (i.e., conforms to an independently given pattern) undirected natural causes lose their explanatory power. Design inferences can be found in a range of scientific pursuits from forensic science to research into the origins of life to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

My project in this paper is to extend the interventionist analysis of causation to give an account of causation in psychology. Many aspects of empirical investigation into psychological causation fit straightforwardly into the interventionist framework. I address three problems. First, the problem of explaining what it is for a causal relation to be properly psychological rather than merely biological. Second, the problem of rational causation: how it is that reasons can be causes. Finally, I look at the implications of an (...) interventionist analysis for the idea that an inquiry into psychological causes must be an inquiry into causal mechanisms. I begin by setting out the main ideas of the interventionist approach. (shrink)

Suppose your conscious life were surgically excised, but everything else left intact, what would you miss? In this situation you would not have the slightest idea what was going on. You would have no idea what there is in the world around you; what the grounds are of the potentialities and threats are that you are negotiating. Experience of your surroundings provides you with knowledge of what is there: with your initial base of knowledge of what the things are that (...) you are thinking and talking about. But this connection between consciousness of the objects and properties around you, and knowledge of the references of the basic terms you use, has proven difficult to articulate. The connection cannot be recognized so long as you think of consciousness as a kind of glow with which representations are accompanied or enlivened. It is, though, also possible to think of perceptual experience as fundamentally a relation between the subject and the things experienced; and given such a conception, we can make visible the link between consciousness and reference. (shrink)

I will describe two non-standard ways of thinking about time. The first is ubiquitous in animal cognition. I will call it ‘phase time’. Suppose for example you consider a hibernating animal. This animal might have representation of the various seasons of the year, and modulate its actions dependent on the season. But it need have no distinction between the winter of one year and the winter of another; it thinks of time only in terms of repeatable phases.

Ir IS winmx HELD that the capacity for spatial thought depends upon the ability to refer to physical things. The argument is that the identification of places depends upon the identification of things; places in themselves are all very much alike and can be distinguished only by their spatial relations to things. So one could not so much as think about places unless one could think about things (Strawson, 1959). It has to be acknowledged that our identifications of places are (...) greatly enriched by our ability to refer to physical things. But, as we shall see, it is possible to identify places without identifying objects. 'Ihis raises the question whether there is any fundamental role that physical objects do play in our spatial thinking. I begin with the ways in which reference to physical objects enriches our capacity to identify places. We shall then consider whether reference to places as such demands reference to objects, and if not, what special role there might be for physical things in spatial thinking. A physical object has a certain causal structure. We can bring this out by reflecting on the way in which the properties of a physical thing affect its behaviour. Some of the properties of a thing just are propensities for it to behave in particular ways in particular circumstances. For example, being elastic, or brittle, are dispositional charac- 'teristics, they say that the thing will behave one way rather than another under pressure. But other properties of a thing, such as its size and.. (shrink)

Our use of ‘I’, or something like it, is implicated in our self-regarding emotions, in the concern to survive, and so seems basic to ordinary human life. But why does that pattern of use require a referring term? Don't Lichtenberg's formulations show how we could have our ordinary pattern of use here without the first person? I argue that what explains our compulsion to regard the first person as a referring term is our ordinary causal thinking, which requires us to (...) find a persisting object as the mechanism that underpins the causal structure we naturally ascribe to the self. I thus argue against Peacocke's picture (2012), on which it's the cogito that explains one's knowledge of one's own existence. (shrink)

I introduce the notion of a ‘control variable’ which gives us a way of seeing how mental causation could be an unproblematic case of causation in general, rather than being some sui generis form of causation. Psychological variables may be the control variables for a system for which there are no physical control variables, even in a deterministic physical world. That explains how there can be psychological causation without physical causation, even in a deterministic physical world.

I set out two theses. The first is Lynn Robertson’s: (a) spatial awareness is a cause of object perception. A natural counterpoint is: (b) spatial awareness is a cause of your ability to make accurate verbal reports about a perceived object. Zenon Pylyshyn has criticized both. I argue that nonetheless, the burden of the evidence supports both (a) and (b). Finally, I argue conscious visual perception of an object has a different causal role to both: (i) non-conscious perception of the (...) object, and (ii) experience, e.g. hallucination, that may be subjectively indiscriminable from, but is not, perception of the object. (shrink)

It seems a compelling idea that experience of colour plays some role in our having concepts of the various colours, but in trying to explain the role experience plays the first thing we have to describe is what sort of colour experience matters here. I will argue that the kind of experience that matters is conscious attention to the colours of objects as an aspect of them on which direct intervention is selectively possible. As I will explain this idea, it (...) is a matter of being able to use experience to inform linguistic or conceptual thought about what would happen were there to be various interventions on an object. Against this background, I will review Locke’s fundamental argument that since we can change the colour of an almond by pounding it, there must be an error embodied in our ordinary concepts of colour: there is no such thing as intervening directly on the colour of an object. The analysis I present brings out the force of Locke’s argument. But I will propose a vindication of our commonsense conception of colour as an aspect of objects on which direct intervention is selectively possible. (shrink)

Ordinary common sense suggests that we have just one set of shape concepts that we apply indifferently on the bases of sight and touch. Yet we understand the shape concepts, we know what shape properties are, only because we have experience of shapes. And phenomenal experience of shape in vision and phenomenal experience of shape in touch seem to be quite different. So how can the shape concepts we grasp and use on the basis of vision be the same as (...) the shape concepts we grasp and use on the basis of touch? I think this is the intuitive puzzle that underlies the question sent by the Dublin lawyer Molyneux to John Locke. This concerns a man born blind, who learns by the use of his touch to discriminate cubes from spheres. Suppose him now to gain the use of his sight. And suppose him to be presented with a cube and a sphere, of nighly the same bigness. Quaere, will he be able to tell, by the use of his vision alone, which is the sphere, and which the cube? (Locke 1975, II/ix/8.). (shrink)

This chapter makes the case for a relational version of an experientialist view of joint attention. On an experientialist view of joint attention, shifting from solitary attention to joint attention involves a shift in the nature of your perceptual experience of the object attended to. A relational analysis of such a view explains the latter shift in terms of the idea that, in joint attention, it is a constituent of your experience that the other person is, with you, jointly attending (...) to the object. We need such an analysis of joint attention to explain the possibility of success in tasks such as coordinated attack. (shrink)

Rey does not try to achieve an overall statement of the view he is discussing; rather, he fastens on to a series of individual passages in Reference and Consciousness and expresses disagreement with each of them. Most of his complaints rest on imprecision in his understanding of the relevant passage. To make it easier to match my responses to the detail of Rey’s comments, I have organized my responses to the four sections of his article under the same headings as (...) he uses. (shrink)

What knowledge of the colors does perception of the colors provide? My first aim in this essay is to characterize the way in which color experience seems to provide knowledge of colors. This in turn tells us something about what it takes for there to be colors. Color experience provides knowledge of the aspect of the world that is being acted on when we, or some external force, act on the color of an object and thus make a difference to (...) the experiences of people looking at it. It is in this sense that the nature of the colors is transparent to us. For there to be colors is for there to be the qualitative categorical properties that we encounter in perception, action on which affects the color experiences of observers. This line of thought contrasts with the idea that color experience reveals the colors to us, in the sense that it provides knowledge of a number of necessary truths about the colors. In a recent paper, Alex Byrne and David Hilbert provide a careful exposition and critique of this way of developing the idea of color experience as revelatory of the colors. In this paper my main aim is simply to contrast the idea that experience makes the colors transparent to us, with the idea that color experience provides us with knowledge of truths relating to the essences of the colors. (shrink)

But say you,surely there is nothing easier than to imagine trees,for instance,in a park, or books existing in a closet, and nobody by to perceive them. I answer, you may so, there is no dif?culty in it:but what is all this,I beseech you,more than framing in your mind certain ideas which you call books and trees, and at the same time omitting to frame the idea of anyone that may perceive them? But do you not yourself perceive or think of (...) them all the while? This therefore is nothing to the purpose: it only shows you have the power of imagining or forming ideas in your mind;but it doth not shew that you can conceive it possible, the objects of your thought may exist without the mind: to make out this, it is necessary that you conceive them existing unconceived or unthought of, which is a manifest repugnancy. (shrink)

Philosophers often discuss altruism, how it is to be understood, explained, justified, evaluated, etc. Few refer to any experimental data on helping behaviour. I will argue that some of these data seem at least initially to present a challenge to various philosophical accounts of altruism. Put very broadly, when one looks at various philosophical accounts of altruism in light of various data on helping behaviour, one might wonder whether many philosophical accounts fall prey to the 'fundamental attribution error', overestimating people's (...) character and personal dispositions as the basis of their actions and underestimating the role of persons' situations and their construals of them in determining what they do. (shrink)

On a classical conception, knowing the sense of a proposition is knowing its truth-condition, rather than simply knowing how to verify the proposition, or how to find its implications (whether deductive implications or implications for action). But knowing the truth-condition of a proposition is not unrelated to your use of particular methods for verifying the proposition, or finding its implications. Rather, your knowledge of the truth-condition of the proposition has to justify the use of particular methods for verifying it, or (...) finding its implications. And your knowledge of the truth-condition of the proposition has to be what causes your use of particular methods for verifying it or finding its implications. So on a classical picture, we do not appeal to knowledge of sense only in explaining the informativeness of identities. We have to think of knowledge of sense as what causes, and justifies, your use of particular ways of verifying or finding the implications of a proposition. I argue that in the case of a perceptual demonstrative, like 'that star' or 'that mountain', it is conscious attention to the object that causes, and justifies, your use of particular ways of verifying or finding the implications of propositions involving the demonstrative. So conscious attention to the object is what constitutes your grasp of the sense of the demonstrative. This runs counter to the philosophical tradition since Locke, which takes it that the role of experience in understanding has to do solely with the verification of propositions. I argue that once we think of conscious attention as a pre-intentional acquaintance with the object itself, we can see how it is possible to think of understanding as consisting in knowledge of classical truth-conditions. (shrink)

Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 71 (1997), 55-74, with a reply by Michael Martin.

Physics tells us what is objectively there. It has no place for the colours of things. So colours are not objectively there. Hence, if there is such a thing at all, colour is mind-dependent. This argument forms the background to disputes over whether common sense makes a mistake about colours. It is assumed that..

in Enrique Villanueva (ed.), Perception (Philosophical Issues vol. 7) (Atascadero: Ridgeview 1996), 301-318, with replies by Brian Loar and Kirk Ludwig.

Physics tells us what is objectively there. It has no place for the colours of things. So colours are not objectively there. Hence, if there is such a thing at all, colour is mind-dependent. This argument forms the background to disputes over whether common sense makes a mistake about colours. It is assumed that..

in Charles Travis (ed.), Meaning and Interpretation (Oxford and New York: Blackwell 1986), 159-174.

cellence of current Locke exegesis, however, should not blind us to the fact that recent readings are in urgent need of supplementation: and one aim of this paper is to show how this might be achieved.