Online research in philosophy

The sensation-perception distinction did not appear before the seventeenth century, but since then various formulations of it have gained wide acceptance. This is not an historical accident and the article suggests an explanation for its appearance. Section 1 describes a basic assumption underlying the sensation-perception distinction, to wit, the postulation of a pure sensory stage--viz. sensation--devoid of active influence of the agent's cognitive, emotional, and evaluative frameworks. These frameworks are passive in that stage. I call this postulation (...) the passivity assumption. Section 2 suggests three major reasons for the emergence of this assumption in the seventeenth century: the mental-physical gap, the causal theory of perception, and epistemological considerations regarding the status of the sensory given. In the last section a critical discussion is presented. The passivity assumption is found to have serious empirical and theoretical flaws. (shrink)

Descartes's lack of clarity about the causal connections between brain states and mental states has led many commentators to conclude that he has no coherent account of body-mind relations in sensation, or that he was simply confused about the issue. In this paper I develop what I take to be a coherent account that was available to Descartes, and argue that there are both textual and systematic reasons to think that it was his considered view. The account has brain (...) states serving as occasions for the mind to produce in itself the sensations that it takes these brain states to signify. The relation between body and mind on this model is thus neither a standard efficient-causal relation, nor an occasionalist one, but rather a semantic-causal relation (i.e. a non-standard efficient causal relation that goes by way of natural signification). At the end of the paper I argue that the model does not undermine Descartes' commitment to the self-transparency of the mind. -/- . (shrink)

Like their contemporary counterparts, early modern philosophers find themselves in a predicament. On one hand, there are strong reasons to deny that sensations are representations. For there seems to be nothing in the world for them to represent. On the other hand, some sensory representations seem to be required for us to experience bodies. How else could one perceive the boundaries of a body, except by means of different shadings of color? -/- I argue that Nicolas Malebranche offers an extreme (...) – and ultimately unworkable – attempt to solve this riddle. Most commentators claim that Malebranche defends an adverbial theory of sensation, according to which a sensation is merely a way in which an act of sensing happens. The adverbial reading is wrong, or so I argue. Once we arrive at a more accurate reading, we shall see that his position is much more strange than is currently thought. -/- Nevertheless, Malebranche’s view is similar to the adverbial theory in one respect, albeit it at a very high level of generality. His view thus inherits two of the main problems that afflict adverbial theories. Although Malebranche fails to solve them, his ingenious attempts to do so are instructive. (shrink)

Are sensation ascriptions descriptive, even in the first person present tense? Do sensation terms refer to, denote, sensations, so that truth and falsity of sensation ascriptions depend on the properties of the denoted sensations? That is, do sensation terms have a denotational semantics? As I understand it, this is denied by Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein rejects the idea of a denotational semantics for public language sensation terms, such as.

We can find no place in psychology for the concept of stimulus as a physical agent to which an individual responds in a psychological manner. Moreover, we can find no place for sensation and image when considered as simple mental elements. We would also purge ...

Prologue : narratocracy and the contours of political life -- From nomos to nomad : Kant, Deleuze, and Rancière on sensation -- The piazza, the edicola, and the noise of the utterance -- Machiavelli's theory of sensation and Florence's vita festiva -- The viewing subject : Caravaggio, Bacon, and the ring -- "You're eating too fast!" slow food's ethos of convivium -- Epilogue : "the photographs tell it all" : on an ethics of appearance.

In this paper I will delineate the psychological operations and faculties required for linguistic apprehension within a Thomistic psychology. This will require first identifying the proper object of linguistic apprehension, which will then allow me to specify the distinct operations and faculties necessary for linguistic apprehension. I will argue that the semantic value of any linguistic term is a type of incidental sensible and that its cognitive apprehension is a type of incidental sensation. Hence, the faculties necessary for the (...) apprehension of any linguistic term’s semantic value will be the cogitative power and the intellect. The cogitative power, because it is the faculty of particular intentions, and the intellect, because it is the faculty of universal intentions. (shrink)

A focus on the relation between sensation and the perceptual object in the philosophies of G H Mead and Maurice Merleau-Ponty points toward their shared views of perception as non-reductionistic and holistic, as inextricably tied to the active role of the sensible body, and as involving a new understanding of the nature of immediacy within experience. This essay explores these shared views.

There seems to be a large gulf between percepts and concepts. In particular, con- cepts seem to be capable of representing things that percepts cannot. We can conceive of things that would be impossible to perceive. (The converse may also seem true, but I will leave that to one side.) In one respect, this is trivially right. We can conceive of things that we cannot encounter, such as unicorns. We cannot literally perceive unicorns, even if we occasionally.

Replacing the traditional opposition of literal and figural with new distinctions between stasis and motion and between actual and virtual,Parables for the ...

I interpret the anti-idealist manoeuverings of the second half of Moore's 'The refutation of idealism', material as widely cited for its discussion of 'transparency' and 'diaphanousness' as it is deeply obscure. The centerpiece of these manoeuverings is a phenomenological argument for a relational view of perceptual phenomenal character, on which, roughly, 'that which makes the sensation of blue a mental fact' is a non-intentional relation of conscious awareness, a view close to the opposite of the most characteristic contemporary view (...) going under the transparency rubric. The discussion of transparency and diaphanousness is a sidelight, its principal purpose to shore up the main line of argumentation against criticism; in those passages all Moore argues is that the relation of conscious awareness is not transparent, while acknowledging that it can seem to be. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to defend a version of the brain process theory, or identity thesis, which differs in one important respect from the theory put forward by J.J.C. Smart. I shall argue that although the sensations which a person experiences are, as a matter of contingent fact, brain processes, nonetheless there are facts about sensations which cannot be described or understood in terms of any physical theory. These 'mental' facts cannot be described by physics for the simple (...) reason that physical descriptions are designed specifically to avoid mentioning such facts. Thus in giving a physical explanation of a sensation we necessarily describe and render intelligible that sensation only as a physical process, and not also as a sensation. If we are to describe and render intelligible a person's sensations, or inner experiences, as sensations, and not as physical processes occurring in that person's brain, then we must employ a kind of description that connot be derived from any set of physical statements. (shrink)

The theory presented here is a near neighbour of Humphrey's theory of sensations as actions. O'Regan & Noë have opened up remarkable new possibilities. But they have missed a trick by not making more of the distinction between sensation and perception; and some of their particular proposals for how we use our eyes to represent visual properties are not only implausible but would, if true, isolate vision from other sensory modalities and do little to explain the phenomenology of conscious (...) experience in general. (shrink)

I discuss two forms of the thesis that to have a sensation is to token a sentence in a language of thought-what I call, following Georges Rey, the sensational sentences thesis. One form of the thesis is a version of standard functionalism, while the other is a version of the increasingly popular thesis that for a sensation to have qualia is for it to have a certain kind of intentional content-that is, intentionalism. I defend the basic idea behind (...) the sensational sentences thesis, and argue that the intentionalist version is either false or collapses into the standard functionalist thesis. (shrink)

The sensation of will is not the same thing as the will itself any more than the sensation of hunger is the same thing as being devoid of nutrients. This is not a really surprising claim, but it is the only claim to which Wegner is entitled in his book.

Amid the ongoing debate over the proper interpretation of Aristotle's theory of sense perception in the "De Anima," Steven Everson has recently presented a well-documented and ambitious treatment of the issue, arguing in favor of Richard Sorabji's controversial position that sense organs literally take on the qualities of their proper objects. Against the interpretation of M. F. Burnyeat, Everson and others make a compelling case the Aristotelian account of sensation requires some physical process to occur in sense organs. A (...) detailed examination of the interpretation by Everson and Sorabji of Aristotle's theory, however, shows that their reading cannot be the correct one, since it involves many textual and philosophical difficulties. Their interpretation, for instance, would require abandoning Aristotle's requirement that only a transparent substance is suitable matter for an eye. Likewise, their understanding of the Aristotle's doctrine of sensation as the reception of form without matter in "DA 2.12" cannot be reconciled with other texts of his from "On Generation and Corruption." An analysis of these texts, as well as "DA 2.7" and "De Sensu 6" on the roles of light and the transparent medium in vision, show that, for Aristotle, the physical processes which sense organs undergo are not standard qualitative changes (i.e. alterations), but activities or the actualizations of potencies in the material constituents of living animal bodies. (shrink)

To what extent is imagination dependent on embodied experience? In attempting to answer such questions I consider the experiences of those who have to come to terms with altered neurological function, namely those with spinal cord injury at the neck. These people have each lost all sensation and movement below the neck. How might these new ways of living affect their imagination?

Can an understanding be formed of how sensory experience might be presented or manipulated in visual art in order to promote a relational concept of the senses, in opposition to the customary, capitalist notion of sensation as a private possession, as a sensory impression that is mine? I ask the question in the light of recent visual art theory and practice which pursue relational, ecological ambitions. As Arnold Berleant, Nicolas Bourriaud, and Grant Kester see it, ecological ambition and artistic (...) form should correspond, but they fail to recognize sensation as a site where the ecological cause can be fought. Jacques Rancière argues for the political force of the senses, but his distribution of the sensible does not address the particularity of sensory experience. I identify the difference between these approaches within recent relational or ecological aesthetics and my position on sensibility, and indicate some of the problems involved in referring to the senses. I set out the concepts that are central to the cultivation of relational sensibility: style, autofiguration, and the mobility of sensory meaning, extrapolated from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of Paul Cézanne. They amount to positioning the senses ontologically as movements along lines of conceptual-sensory connection and implication, based on the transfer of meanings created artistically through style and autofiguration. (shrink)

Abstract Having, in previous papers, distinguished at least three forms of consciousness (a first?order, information?processing state?called here ?C1'; a second?order, direct, non?inferential accessing of other conscious states?called here ?C2'; and a phenomenological state?called here ?CN'), I now further examine their differences. This examination has some surprising results. Having argued that neither C1 nor C2 is a phenomenological state?and so different from CN?I now show that CN itself is best thought of as a subclass of a larger state ('CS'?sensation consciousness). (...) CS is the set of image?representation states. CN is that set of CS states that we are also C2 about. I argue that CN states should be considered a subset of CS states because they share with other CS states imagistic representational powers as opposed to the sentential ones of C1 and C2. And I argue that there are good reasons to consider any state which utilises imagistic representation as a sensation. I then show that the notion of an unconscious sensation makes sense if we think of it as a CS state that is not C2. More radically, I conclude that either it makes sense to say that there are unfelt sensations or there are felt sensations (phenomenological states) we are not conscious about. While there are good reasons for saying one or the other of these surprising things, I argue that the second, more radical sounding, alternative is actually better motivated?and not quite so surprising as it sounds. (shrink)

Davide Panagia, The Poetics of Political Thinking (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006). ISBN 0-8223-3718-5, (hbk) US$ 74.95, (pbk) US$ 21.95,166pp. and Davide Panagia, The Political Life of Sensation (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2009). ISBN 978-0-8223-4479-7, (hbk) US$ 79.95, (pbk) US$ 22.95, 213pp.

Depue & Collins associate dopaminergically mediated incentive motivational processes with extraversion. In this commentary I consider dopaminergic indices from neuroimaging investigations which correlate more closely with impulsive sensation seeking personality traits than with extraversion. Measures of relevant behavioural processes also appear to correlate with personality measures other than extraversion.

This volume presents a series of studies that expand laws, invariants, and principles of psychophysics beyond its classical domain of sensation.

In this paper, I shall present an argument against Deleuze’s philosophy of painting. Deleuze’s main thesis in Logic of Sensation is twofold: [1] he claims that painting is based on a non-representational level; and [2] he claims that this level comes out of the materiality of painting. I shall claim that Deleuze’s theses should be rejected for the following reasons: first, the difference between non-intentional life and the representational world is too strict. I submit that the nonintentional relation that (...) painting opens up is itself part of andemerges out of the representational force of painting. If this would not be the case, then the criterion for differentiating between paintings and other objects cannot be developed. Indeed, Deleuze fails to give us a criterion. Second, Deleuze’s way of dealing with materiality in painting remains unsatisfactory insofar as he is unable to take into account how materiality is charged with an “attitude toward the world.” In sum, materiality can only be painting’s materiality if we understand it as being formed and disclosed in representation. (shrink)

Amid the ongoing debate over the proper interpretation of Aristotle's theory of sense perception in the "De Anima," Steven Everson has recently presented a well-documented and ambitious treatment of the issue, arguing in favor of Richard Sorabji's controversial position that sense organs literally take on the qualities of their proper objects. Against the interpretation of M. F. Burnyeat, Everson and others make a compelling case the Aristotelian account of sensation requires some physical process to occur in sense organs. A (...) detailed examination of the interpretation by Everson and Sorabji of Aristotle's theory, however, shows that their reading cannot be the correct one, since it involves many textual and philosophical difficulties. Their interpretation, for instance, would require abandoning Aristotle's requirement that only a transparent substance is suitable matter for an eye. Likewise, their understanding of the Aristotle's doctrine of sensation as the reception of form without matter in "DA 2.12" cannot be reconciled with other texts of his from "On Generation and Corruption." An analysis of these texts, as well as "DA 2.7" and "De Sensu 6" on the roles of light and the transparent medium in vision, show that, for Aristotle, the physical processes which sense organs undergo are not standard qualitative changes (i.e. alterations), but activities or the actualizations of potencies in the material constituents of living animal bodies. (shrink)

Inverted sensation arguments such as the inverted spectrum thought experiment are often criticized for relying on an unconstrained notion of 'qualia'. In reply to this criticism, 'qualia-free' arguments for inversion have been proposed, in which only physical changes happen: inversions in the world, such as the replacement of surface colors by their complements, and a rewiring of peripheral input cables to more central areas in the nervous system. I show why such constrained inversion arguments won't work. The first problem (...) is that the world lacks the symmetry required to invert physical properties in the way required. The second problem concerns 'rewiring'. Empirical evidence indicates that the rewirings are either impossible, or would not result in an inversion of sensation. I propose the deeper reason for the failure of constrained inversion arguments lies in the fact that sensations are not properties of brain states, but spread into the world and the body. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's critique of solipsism is explained as a development in three stages. In the first, which appeares in the Notebooks 1914-16 and Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he criticizes the solipsist for not identifying his ego and, therefore, leaving the objects presented to it unidentified. He argues that this is like trying to identify the eye without using any psychological facts. In the second stage, which appeares in The Blue Book and Notes for Lectures on "Private Experience" and "Sensations", he assumes that the (...) solipsist does not even try to identify his ego but merely points at the objects of which he is directly aware. The critique of this inward pointing is based on a development of the original analogy between ego and eye. The third stage is the argument against the possibility of a sensation-language without any connections with the physical world. This appeares in Notes for Lectures on "Private Experience" and "Sense Data" and in Philosophical Investigations. Here the focus is not on the ego but on the objects presented to it. However the criticism is similar: those objects and their types need criteria of identity but would not have sense i f they were not connected with the physical world. (shrink)

Following some preliminary intuitions, a view attributing a specific level to sensation in a two levels model of mind is promoted. Some opinions deny the specificity of sensation by claiming either that it is physical or again by implying that it is completely cognitive. Meinong's definition of sensation as a simple perceptual representation originating from peripheric stimulation is reconstructed. France Veber's promotion of the hitting function with its attachment to sensation is derived from this definition by (...) his teacher. Veber ambiguously extends the hitting function to the higher cognitive level. Although he underlines their importance, just like Meinong he does not acknowledge sensations' autonomous level. (shrink)

This is a book about sensory states and their apparent characteristics. It confronts a whole series of metaphysical and epistemological questions and presents an argument for type materialism: the view that sensory states are identical with the neural states with which they are correlated. According to type materialism, sensations are only possessed by human beings and members of related biological species; silicon-based androids cannot have sensations. The author rebuts several other rival theories (dualism, double aspect theory, eliminative materialism, functionalism), and (...) explores a number of important issues: the forms and limits of introspective awareness of sensations, the semantic properties of sensory concepts, knowledge of other minds, and unity of consciousness. The book is a significant contribution to the philosophy of mind, and has much to say to psychologists and cognitive scientists. (shrink)

: Malebranche famously objects to Descartes' argument that the nature of the mind is better known than the nature of body as follows: if we had an idea of the mind's nature we would know the possible range of modes of the mind, including the sensory modes, but we do not know those modes and thus can't have an idea of the mind's nature. I argue that Malebranche's objections are readily answerable from within the Cartesian system. This argument involves examining (...) the status of sensations in Descartes, innate ideas, and Malebranche's occasionalism. (shrink)

Sensations of acting and control have been neglected in theory of action. I argue that they form the core of action and are integral and indispensible parts of our actions, participating as they do in feedback loops consisting of our intentions in acting, the bodily movements required for acting and the sensations of acting. These feedback loops underlie all activities in which we engage when we act and generate our control over our movements.The events required for action according to the (...) causal theory, or Searle. (shrink)

My goal is to formulate a theory of introspection that can be integrated with a strongly reductionist account of sensations that I have defended elsewhere. In pursuit of this goal, I offer a skeletal explanation of the metaphysical nature of introspection and I attempt to resolve several of the main questions about the epistemological status of introspective beliefs.

Sellars and Dewey each isolated and critiqued different aspects of the atomistic epistemology of the logical positivists: Dewey labeled his target "Sensationalistic Empiricism", and Sellars labeled his "the Myth of the Given." The main theme of this paper will be the similarity and differences in their responses to this kind of philosophy, and how both responses can be clarified and strengthened by considering recent discoveries in Cognitive Neuroscience. What we have recently learned about neural architecture accounts for a distinction between (...) knowledge and experience that is a recurrent theme in both Sellars and Dewey. Dewey, however, made a sharper break from the positivists by seeing all experience as shaped by skills and abilities which were designed to acheive certain goals and were colored by emotions. The connectionist architecture used in Cognitive Neuroscience supports this view, as does the psychological research of J.J. Gibson. Once we consider the ways in which connectionist cognitive abilities differ from linguistic ones, Sellars' distinction between thoughts and sensations, and Dewey's distinction between knowledge and experience, can both be plausibly accounted for. (shrink)

It is the ambition of evolutionary psychology to explain how the basic features of human mental life came to be selected because of their contribution to biological survival. Counted among the most basic must be the subjective qualities of conscious sensory experience: the felt redness we experience on looking at a ripe tomato, the felt saltiness on tasting an anchovy, the felt pain on being pricked by a thorn. But, as many theorists acknowledge, with these qualia, the ambition of evolutionary (...) psychology may have met its match. Everyone agrees that a trait can only contribute to an organism's biological survival in so far as it operates in the public domain. Yet almost everyone also agrees that the subjective quality of sensory experience is (at least for all practical purposes) private and without external influence. Then, maybe we must either concede that the subjective quality of sensations cannot after all have been determined by selection (even if this is theoretically depressing) or else demonstrate that the quality of sensations is not as private as it seems to be (even if this is intuitively unconvincing). No. I believe neither of these solutions to the puzzle is in fact the right one. I argue instead that the truth is that the quality of sensations has indeed been shaped by selection in the past, despite the fact that it is today effectively private. And this situation has come about as a result of a remarkable evolutionary progression, whereby the primitive activity of sensing slowly became "privatized" - that is to say, removed from the domain of overt public behavior and transformed into a mental activity that is now, in humans, largely if not exclusively internal to the subject's mind. (shrink)

This paper celebrates an anniversary, or near anniversary. As we write it is just more than 40 years since U. T. Place's “Is consciousness a brain process?†appeared in the British Journal of Psychology, and just less than 40 since J. J. C. Smart's “Sensations and brain processes†appeared, in its first version, in The Philosophical Review (Place 1962/1956, Smart 1962/1959).  These two papers arguably founded contemporary philosophy of mind. They defined its central preoccupation (the ontology of consciousness), introduced (...) its regnant ontology (materialism/physicalism), offered its initial logical techniques (e.g. appeals to the concepts of identity and event) as well as empirical reliances (on neuroscience), and, finally, offered its most seminal sectarian doctrine (central state materialism). No history of philosophy of mind can afford to neglect them. (See for discussion Macdonald 1989.) It is to be near both the letter of Smart's paper and the spirit of his and Place's concern for how best to develop a philosophical understanding of consciousness that we entitle our own paper 'Sensations and grain processes'. (That is not a typo, as will be seen momentarily.)            In the years since Smart's and Place's contributions, the landscape of philosophy of mind has changed in many ways. The empirical reliances of very recent philosophy of mind have expanded to include the cognitive sciences (not just neuroscience); central state materialism alternately has been displaced by causal role and functional specification theories of mind; fresh logical techniques have been introduced (e.g. the concept of supervenience); and it is less clear than it was in the 1950's whether materialism is to be preferred to some more ecumenical ontology (such as naturalism).            This paper is about the current status of the philosophy of consciousness (which we take to be phenomenal consciousness, for purposes of the paper; of which more momentarily); not so much the case for materialism (which we take to be, for the most part, complicated by considerations which we shall adduce below) as what the philosophical program for doing the philosophy of the conscious mind is and where it can, and most importantly can't, rely on cognitive science. There is quite a lot of ground to cover in a short space. So let's begin by demarcating the subject matter and outlining the paper to follow.. (shrink)

This paper celebrates an anniversary, or near anniversary. As we write it is just more than 40 years since U. T. Place's “Is consciousness a brain process?†appeared in the British Journal of Psychology, and just less than 40 since J. J. C. Smart's “Sensations and brain processes†appeared, in its first version, in The Philosophical Review (Place 1962/1956, Smart 1962/1959).  These two papers arguably founded contemporary philosophy of mind. They defined its central preoccupation (the ontology of consciousness), introduced (...) its regnant ontology (materialism/physicalism), offered its initial logical techniques (e.g. appeals to the concepts of identity and event) as well as empirical reliances (on neuroscience), and, finally, offered its most seminal sectarian doctrine (central state materialism). No history of philosophy of mind can afford to neglect them. (See for discussion Macdonald 1989.) It is to be near both the letter of Smart's paper and the spirit of his and Place's concern for how best to develop a philosophical understanding of consciousness that we entitle our own paper 'Sensations and grain processes'. (That is not a typo, as will be seen momentarily.)            In the years since Smart's and Place's contributions, the landscape of philosophy of mind has changed in many ways. The empirical reliances of very recent philosophy of mind have expanded to include the cognitive sciences (not just neuroscience); central state materialism alternately has been displaced by causal role and functional specification theories of mind; fresh logical techniques have been introduced (e.g. the concept of supervenience); and it is less clear than it was in the 1950's whether materialism is to be preferred to some more ecumenical ontology (such as naturalism).            This paper is about the current status of the philosophy of consciousness (which we take to be phenomenal consciousness, for purposes of the paper; of which more momentarily); not so much the case for materialism (which we take to be, for the most part, complicated by considerations which we shall adduce below) as what the philosophical program for doing the philosophy of the conscious mind is and where it can, and most importantly can't, rely on cognitive science. There is quite a lot of ground to cover in a short space. So let's begin by demarcating the subject matter and outlining the paper to follow.. (shrink)

In his last great philosophical essay, 'Of Power', Reid makes the plausible claim that 'our first exertions are instinctive' and made 'without any distinct conception of the event that is to follow'. According to Reid, these instinctive exertions allow us to form beliefs about correlations between exertions and consequential events. Such instinctive exertions also explain the origin of our conception of power. In this paper, I argue that we can use the notion of instinctive exertions to address several objections that (...) have been raised concerning Reid's rejection of the claim that sensations possess spatial content. (shrink)

This classic work of recent philosophy was first published in 1968, and remains the most compelling and comprehensive statement of the view that the mind is material or physical. In A Materialist Theory of the Mind , D. M. Armstrong provided insight into the debate surrounding the relationship of the mind and body. He put forth a detailed materialist account of all the main mental phenomena, including perception, sensation, belief, the will, introspection, mental images, and consciousness. This causal analysis (...) of mental concepts, along with the similar theory by David Lewis, has come to dominate all subsequent debates in the philosophy of mind. In the preface to this updated edition, Armstrong reflects on the impact of the book, and places it in the context of subsequent developments. A full bibliography of all the key writings that have appeared in the materialist debate is also provided. (shrink)

SUPPOSE that I report that I have at this moment a roundish, blurry-edged after-image which is yellowish towards its edge and is orange towards its centre. What is it that I am reporting?l One answer to this question might be that I am not reporting anything, that when I say that it looks to me as though there is a roundish yellowy orange patch of light On the wall I am expressing some sort of temptation, the temptation to say that (...) there is a roundish yellowy orange patch on the wall (though I may know that there is not such a patch on the wall). This is perhaps Wittgenstein's view in the Philosophical Investigations (see paragraphs 367, 370). Similarly, when I "report" a pain, I am not really reporting anything (or, if you like, I am reporting in a queer sense of "reporting"), but am doing a sophisticated sort of wince. (See paragraph 244: "The verbal expression of pain replaces crying and docs not describe it." Nor docs it describe anything else?)2 I prefer most of the time to discuss an afterimage rather than a pain, because the word "pain" brings in something which is irrelevant to my purpose: the notion of "distress." I think that "he is in pain" entails "he is in distress," that is, that he is in a certain agitation-condition.3 Similarly, to say "I am in pain" may be to do more than "replace pain behavior": it may be partly to report something, though this something is quite nonmysterious, being an agitation-condition, and so susceptible of behavioristic analysis. The suggestion I wish if possible to avoid is a different one, namely that "I am in pain" is a genuine report, and that what it reports is an irreducibly psychical something. And similarly the suggestion I wish to resist is also that to say "I have a yellowish orange after-image" is to report something irreducibly psychical. (shrink)

Representationism¹, as I use the term, says that the phenomenal character of an experience just is its representational content, where that representational content can itself be understood and characterized without appeal to phenomenal character. Representationists seem to have a harder time handling pain than visual experience. (I say 'seem' because in my view, representationists cannot actually handle either type of experience successfully, but I will put that claim to one side here.) I will argue that Michael Tye's (2004) heroic attempt (...) at a representationist theory of pain, although ingenious and enlightening, does not adequately come to terms with the root of this difference. (shrink)

Neural impulses from the senses to the brain convey information, not sensation. The direct electrical stimulation of the cortex produces sensations. Hence, such sensations are evoked in the brain, and not received from the senses, nor from the outside world through the senses. More specifically, the experience of light is evoked in the brain and not received from the eyes. Consequently, the born blind, too, would experience light in response to electrical brain stimulation. The luminosity of light is not (...) a property of electromagnetic radiation. If the experience of light is private, then so are the visual observations it makes possible. (shrink)

Non-sensory experiences represent almost all context information in consciousness. They condition most aspects of conscious cognition including voluntary retrieval, perception, monitoring, problem solving, emotion, evaluation, meaning recognition. Many peculiar aspects of non-sensory qualia (e.g., they resist being 'grasped' by an act of attention) are explained as adaptations shaped by the cognitive functions they serve. The most important nonsensory experience is coherence or "rightness." Rightness represents degrees of context fit among contents in consciousness, and between conscious and non-conscious processes. Rightness (not (...) familiarity) is the feeling-of-knowing in implicit cognition. The experience of rightness suggests that neural mechanisms "compute" signals indicating the global dynamics of network integration. (shrink)

In the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke insists that all knowledge consists in perception of the agreement or disagreement of ideas. However, he also insists that knowledge extends to outer reality, claiming that perception yields ‘sensitive knowledge’ of the existence of outer objects. Some scholars have argued that Locke did not really mean to restrict knowledge to perceptions of relations within the realm of ideas; others have argued that sensitive knowledge is not strictly speaking a form of knowledge for Locke. (...) This chapter argues that Locke’s conception of sensitive knowledge is in fact compatible with his official definition of knowledge, and discusses his treatment of the problem of skepticism, both in the Essay and in the correspondence with Stillingfleet. (shrink)

The first use of the term “information” to describe the content of nervous impulse occurs in Edgar Adrian's The Basis of Sensation (1928). What concept of information does Adrian appeal to, and how can it be situated in relation to contemporary philosophical accounts of the notion of information in biology? The answer requires an explication of Adrian's use and an evaluation of its situation in relation to contemporary accounts of semantic information. I suggest that Adrian's concept of information can (...) be to derive a concept of arbitrariness or semioticity in representation. This in turn provides one way of resolving some of the challenges that confront recent attempts in the philosophy of biology to restrict the notion of information to those causal connections that can in some sense be referred to as arbitrary or semiotic. (shrink)

James argued that time is a sensation, and the main point of this paper is to deny that claim. The concept of the specious present is explained, indicating how it clarifies the concept of "the present moment." But neither it nor an argument used by Mach and James show time to be a sensation. The analysis presented here requires distinguishing concepts of sensation from concepts of temporal relations. James' view is really a theory that time-as-duration is sensed. (...) But this assumes that the description of time as sensed is also a description of time as an objective property of independent events. This is nowhere established, and making it plausible is a recurrent problem for philosophies like neutral monism and radical empiricism. (shrink)

consciousness. Such unconscious processing always

Cambridge, UK

tends to re?ect habitual or strong responses. From this.

I’m now looking at a soccer ball and a Nintendo Game Cube, and thus am having a perceptual experience of a sphere and a cube. My friend, blind from birth, (who’s helping me with the cleaning) is touching these items, and is thus having a perceptual experience of the same things. Not only are we perceiving the same items, but in doing so we apply the terms ‘sphere’ and ‘cube’, respectively, to them. Are we, in doing so, applying the same, (...) or different, perceptual concepts? (shrink)

The doctrine of the specious present holds that sensation at an instant encompasses objects as they are over an interval. Now there actually is intersubjective agreement with respect to past, present, and future determinations, and it is a necessary condition for legitimately postulating them as objective. I argue that the specious present doctrine would make this actuality an impossibility, and that the data on which the doctrine is based do not in fact support it.

This paper discusses recent neuroscientific research that indicates a solution for what we label the ''causal problem'' of pain qualia, the problem of how the brain generates pain qualia. In particular, the data suggest that pain qualia naturally supervene on activity in a specific brain region: the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). The first section of this paper discusses several philosophical concerns regarding the nature of pain qualia. The second section overviews the current state of knowledge regarding the neuroanatomy and physiology (...) of pain processing. The third section highlights the recent research by Rainville et al. [(1997) Pain affect encoded in human anterior cingulate but not somatosensory cortex, Science, 277, 968-971], which suggests that pain affect is encoded in the ACC. The final section of the paper spells out exactly how these data affect the causal problem of pain qualia. (shrink)