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Shorter reviews and
occasional pieces: 1) Interview with Kris Notaro (stable URL: http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/notaro20100823, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, August 23, 2010). 2) Five entries in 30-second Philosophies, Ivy Press, 2009 (on Descartes’ dualism, Ryle’s behaviorism, Fodor’s account of Language of Thought, Parfit’s theory of persons, Chalmers’ zombies, and Free Will). 3) Comments on Ned
Block’s target article, Behavioral
and Brain Sciences 30(4), (2007), 499-500. Here is Blocks target article with commentaries and author’s replies: “Consciousness, accessibility, and the mesh between psychology and neuroscience” , Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30(4), 481-548. 2007. Block argues that relevant data in psychology and neuroscience shows that access consciousness is not constitutively necessary for phenomenality. However, a phenomenal state can be access conscious in two radically different ways. Its content can be access conscious, or its phenomenality can be access conscious. I’ll argue that while Block’s thesis is right when it is formulated in terms of the first notion of access consciousness, there is an alternative hypothesis about the relationship between phenomenality and access in terms of the second notion that is not touched by Block’s argument. 4) Review of David
Papineau’s Thinking about
Consciousness, Mind , Mind, vol. 113, no. 452, 2004, 774-778. Papineau in his book provides a detailed defense of physicalism via what has recently been dubbed the “phenomenal concept strategy”. I share his enthusiasm for this approach. But I disagree with his account of how a physicalist should respond to the conceivability arguments. Also I argue that his appeal to teleosemantics in explaining mental quotation is more like a promissory note than an actual theory. 5) Phenomenal Judgment and the HOT theory: Comments on David Rosenthal’s “Consciousness, Content, and Metacognitive Judgments”. Consciousness and Cognition, 9 (2), 2000, 215-219. In this review article I criticize David Rosenthal’s higher order thought theory of consciousness (HOT). This is one of the best articulated philosophical accounts of consciousness available. The theory is, roughly, that a mental state is conscious in virtue of there being another mental state, namely, a thought to the effect that one is in the first state. I argue that this account is open to the objection that it makes “HOT-zombies” possible, i.e., creatures that token higher order mental states, but not the states that the higher order states are about. I discuss a way to deal with this problem; but the solution leads to a theory that goes beyond HOT. 6) Review of Jennifer
Hornsby’s Simple Mindedness: In
Defense of Naive Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mind.
Philosophical Review 108, (4), (October 1999), 562-565. Hornsby
is a defender of a position in the philosophy of mind she calls “naïve
naturalism”. She argues that current discussions of the mind-body
problem have been informed by an overly scientistic view of nature and a
futile attempt by scientific naturalists to see mental processes as part of
the physical universe. In her view, if naïve naturalism were adopted, the
mind-body problem would disappear. I argue that her brand of anti-physicalist
naturalism runs into difficulties with the problem of mental causation and
the completeness of physics. |