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Monsters Among Us1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Timothy Schroeder
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Extract

There are monsters that scare children and monsters that scare grownups, and then there are monsters that scare philosophers of mind. This paper is concerned with this third sort of monster, whose primary representative is the zombie – a living being, physically just like a person but lacking consciousness. Though zombies act like normal people and appear to have normal brains, everything is blank inside. Unfortunately, the term ‘zombie’ covers a narrower class of deficits than is convenient, failing to cover apparently normal human beings lacking propositional attitudes. Davidson's (1987) “Swampman” is supposed to be an example of such a creature, so I will dub individuals who are apparently normal but lack all propositional attitudes ‘swampfolk,’ though this is non-standard terminology. In what follows, I will refer to both zombies and swampfolk as ‘monsters,’ and will similarly designate animals lacking in consciousness or propositional attitudes.

Type
II. Teleosemantics
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume , Volume 27: Naturalism, Evolution & Intentionality , 2001 , pp. 167 - 184
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2001

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Footnotes

1

This paper draws on Chapter 4 of my unpublished doctoral dissertation, Foundations of Mental Representation. Thanks to Fred Dretske, Patricia Smith Churchland, and Peter Godfrey-Smith for helpful comments on ancestors of the present work.

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