American Philosophical Quarterly 46 (2):117-129 (2009)
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Abstract |
Some mental states are about themselves. Nothing is a cause of itself. So some
mental states are not about their causes; they are about things distinct from their causes.
If this argument is sound, it spells trouble for causal theories of mental content—the
precise sort of trouble depending on the precise sort of causal theory. This paper shows
that the argument is sound (§§1-3), and then spells out the trouble (§4).
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Keywords | Mental Content Causal Theories of Content Self-representation |
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References found in this work BETA
Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the Philosophy of Mind.Jerry A. Fodor - 1987 - MIT Press.
The Representational Character of Experience.David J. Chalmers - 2004 - In Brian Leiter (ed.), The Future for Philosophy. Oxford University Press. pp. 153--181.
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Citations of this work BETA
Causal Theories of Mental Content.Fred Adams & Ken Aizawa - 2010 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Self-Representationalism and the Explanatory Gap.Uriah Kriegel - 2011 - In J. Liu & J. Perry (eds.), Consciousness and the Self: New Essays. Cambridge University Press.
Disjunction and Distality: The Hard Problem for Purely Probabilistic Causal Theories of Mental Content.William Roche & Elliott Sober - 2019 - Synthese 198 (8):7197-7230.
What is the Structure of Self-Consciousness and Conscious Mental States?Rocco J. Gennaro - 2022 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 13 (2):295-309.
A Puzzle About Mental Self-Representation and Causation.Mikkel Gerken - 2014 - Philosophical Psychology 27 (6):890-906.
View all 7 citations / Add more citations
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