fragments of consciousness

Back in the saddle

I'm back in Canberra after a month of traveling in the US and Canada: Pasadena, Buffalo, Toronto, Brown, New York, Rutgers, Texas, Arizona. The highlight was the consciousness conference in Tucson, which had superb sessions on consciousness vs attention, local vs global neural correlates of consciousness, brain imaging as mind reading, first-person methods and the richness of consciousness, and many others. Various blog posts on the conference have been posted by John Derbyshire, Anand Rangarajan, and Eric Schwitzgebel (and here). I've posted some photos here.

Having turned 42 since returning, I've also posted some photos from my Life, the Universe, and Everything party.

Supersizing the Mind

Andy Clark's book Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension is being published by Oxford University Press later this year. Among other things, this book fleshes out and defends the ideas put forward in our joint 1998 article "The Extended Mind". It includes a comprehensive (and I think largely compelling) set of replies to the various objections to the extended mind thesis that have been raised over the last decade, and also has a lot on applications of the extended mind idea within cognitive science.

I've written a foreword to the book, which I've just put online. The foreword will also form the basis for my talk in the Barwise Prize session at the Pacific APA meeting later this week. Of course this short piece doesn't go into remotely the depth of Andy's book, but it gives some elements of my current take on the extended mind thesis, ten years after publication of the original article.

Philosophy teams

Some frivolity for the new year. Some of you may know about the fish philosophers and the bird philosophers:

Fish philosophers: Adrian Haddock, Kelly Roe, Nathan Salmon, Scott Sturgeon, J.D. Trout, Jennifer Whiting. (Borderline case: Ellery Eells.) Captain: Bill Fish.

Bird philosophers: Tim Crane, Antony Eagle, Alicia Finch, Mike Martin, Chris Peacocke, Rob Sparrow. (Borderline cases: Gabe and Susanna Seagull.) Captain: Alexander Bird.

There are also:

Occupation philosophers: Lynne Baker, Alex Barber, Bill Brewer, John Gardner, Cliff Hooker, Jeff King, Ray Monk, Graham Priest, Sydney Shoemaker, Peter Singer, Ken Taylor. (Captain: Steve Jobs?)

Body-part philosophers: Justin D'Arms, Philippa Foot, Michael Hand, R.M. Hare, H.L.A. Hart, Cathy Legg, Louis Loeb.

Colour philosophers: Max Black, Jessica Brown, Ian Gold, T.H. Green, Thomas Pink, Wolfgang Schwarz, Anita Silvers, Ming Tan, Roger White. (Captain: Hue Price?)

Then there are the autological philosophers: Jack Smart, Kit Fine, Stephen White. And the heterological philosophers: Max Black, Steven Gross, Alva Noe. (I leave aside hard cases such as Crispin Wright and Joe Heterological.) And the philosophers whose name are sentences: Lynda Burns, Immanuel Kant, Benson Mates, Adam Pautz, John Shook, Jeff Speaks.

More philosophers for these categories, and more categories?

Jobs at ANU

Two advertisements for positions at ANU have just appeared in Jobs for Philosophers.    The first is for post-doctoral fellowships associated with the Centre for Consciousness:

The Philosophy Program, Research School of Social Sciences, seeks to appoint one or more research-only Postdoctoral/Research Fellows (Level A/B). The fellows will be appointed in association with Professor David Chalmers’ Federation Fellowship project on ‘The Contents of Consciousness’, and/or in association with other projects in the Program in related areas. Candidates should hold a Ph.D. in philosophy or a related discipline prior to appointment, and should specialize in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, the philosophy of language, metaphysics, and/or epistemology. Appointment will be for up to three years. The Program will consider proposals to fill the positions by secondment, and particularly welcomes applications from women. Send applications (reference: CASS4400), preferably by e-mail (Word, rtf, or pdf format) to jobs@anu.edu.au, or by mail to: Applications Officer, Human Resources Division, Chancelry 10A, Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia. Full details are available at http://consc.net/fellows.html. [Formal information is available here and here.]  Closing date: November 30, 2007.

The second is for continuing positions in the RSSS Philosophy Program (abbreviated version here):

The Philosophy Program, Research School of Social Sciences, seeks to make continuing appointments, 1 or 2 depending on rank.  Appointment will be offered at Levels B through E2 (Assistant to Full Professor, salary package: $66,764-$131,929 plus 17% super), depending on qualifications and experience.  This is an opportunity for outstanding scholars to take up an ongoing research position in a program with a major international profile and a very strong graduate program.  Applications are invited in any area of philosophy consonant with work currently being done in the Philosophy Program, but preference for one of the positions may be given to Social & Political Theory. Applicants must, except in exceptional circumstances, be willing and able to make a major contribution to one or more of the overarching themes  around which the work of the School is organized.  The Research School of Social Sciences particularly welcomes applications from women. The beginning dates are negotiable. Further particulars are available here.

Re the continuing positions: these full-time permanent research positions (tenurable after a few years, in the case of a junior appointment) are of course very attractive, and applications/enquiries from distinguished philosophers are encouraged. The information regarding rank of the continuing positions in the ad and on the ANU website is confusing, but these should be treated as an open rank positions.   The JFP ad doesn't list a closing date, but the ANU ad lists a closing date of November 19 (9 days from now).  I don't know how serious this closing date is, but it would be a good idea to send applications as soon as possible.  Note that e-mail applications are accepted for both positions.

MindPapers

I'm pleased to announce the launch of MindPapers, an online bibliography of around 18,000 published papers and online papers in the philosophy of mind.  The site grew out of a combination of my old bibliography and my old page of online papers, but it is much bigger than both, and it has many new capabilities.

The expansion and new capabilities are thanks to David Bourget -- ANU graduate student, pure representationalist pioneer, and programmer extraordinaire.  David added many new tools (which are outlined here, along with a history of the site) for importing papers from various sources, and also added many new tools for using the website.  Some of the tools available to users of the website include (i) links and citation information throughout, (ii) highly flexible navigation, display, and search options, (iii) the ability to submit and edit entries, (iv) automated off-campus proxy access to commercial sites, and (v) a lot of cool statistical information.

The bibliography has also roughly doubled in size.  There is an all-new section on the philosophy of perception, and the other sections are restructured and expanded throughout.  The philosophy of mind parts include new subsections on such topics as what it is like, conceptual analysis and a priori entailment, Searle's biological naturalism, neutral monism, idealism and phenomenalism, phenomenal intentionality, conscious thought, temporal consciousness, consciousness of agency, bodily experience, attention and consciousness, unconscious states, thinking, interpretivism, intentional objects, collective intentionality, formulating physicalism, realization, various subtopics of personal identity, mental acts, various subtopics of self-knowledge, robotics, folk concepts and folk intuitions, language and thought, various subtopics of the philosophy of neuroscience, as well as around 50 subtopics of the philosophy of perception.  In the science of consciousness section, there are new subsections on binocular rivalry, visual pathways, neglect and extinction, schizophrenia, anosognosia, vegetative states and coma, the minimally conscious state, synesthesia, hypnosis, meditation, drugs and consciousness, other altered states, verbal reports and heterophenomenology, Eastern and contemplative approaches, and a few others.

Although MindPapers subsumes the old page of online papers, we have retained a distinct front-end for Online Papers on Consciousness, both for continuity with the old version, and because this site has a somewhat different emphasis: free online papers only, and structured in a way that is somewhat more oriented to issues about consciousness and cognitive science, and somewhat less to academic philosophy.  Everything available under online papers can also be found under MindPapers, however, by setting the viewing options appropriately.

I encourage everyone to try things out.  There will certainly be errors, bugs, and missing items: if you find these, please notify us using the tools on the site.  People with published and/or online papers in relevant areas might start by searching on their own names to see if there's anything we've missed.  Any suggestions for further development are welcome.

Update: The site went down for a while overnight, probably due to all the traffic from around the web, but it's up and running again now.

Bits and pieces

• An initial announcement and call for papers has been issued for next year's "Toward a Science of Consciousness" conference in Tucson, April 8-12.  Confirmed plenary speakers at this point include: Andy Clark, Stan Dehaene, Alison Gopnik, Stuart  Hameroff, Christof Koch, Adrian Owen, Eric Schwitzgebel, Rupert Sheldrake, Susanna Siegel, Wolf Singer, Frank Tong, Michael Tye, and numerous others, with more still to come.


• Congratulations to the five current ANU graduate students -- Ben Blumson, Jacek Brzozowski, Yuri Cath, Ole Koksvik, and Dan Marshall -- who have had articles accepted at leading philosophy journals in the last month or two.  Berit has details.


• RIP Alex, the African Grey parrot trained by my Arizona ex-colleague Irene Pepperberg.  I'm now even sorrier that I didn't take up Irene's invitation to "meet the A-man" before she left for MIT.


• My philosophical humor page has been updated.  Additions include Rachael Briggs' modal logic version of "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend".

Recent collections on consciousness

I've been meaning to do some posts about a number of recent interesting books on consciousness and related topics, but I haven't gotten a chance.  So rather than do a series of separate posts, I thought I'd do a single post here about a number of books that are worth checking out.  I'll devote this post to collections, and save single-authored books for another post somewhere down the line.

The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, edited by Max Velmans and Susan Schneider.  This is a really impressive volume containing about 55 substantial articles, roughly evenly divided between the philosophy and the science of consciousness, written by many of the leading people in the field.  I've read a number of the articles already, and they are terrific.  For someone wanting a comprehensive yet in-depth guide to the field, there probably isn't a better single source.

The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness, edited by Philip Zelazo, Morris Moscovitch, and Evan Thompson.  A similar volume, but containing 31 chapters mostly on the science of consciousness.  This has especially strong coverage in psychology and cognitive science, although it's somewhat lighter on neuroscience and philosophy (just four overview articles on the philosophy of consciousness).  I haven't read many of the chapters yet, but the quality seems to be high.

(Completing a triumvirate, there is also an Oxford Companion to Consciousness, edited by Tim Bayne and  Axel Cleeremans, forthcoming in a year or two.  This will probably have the most comprehensive coverage of neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology of the three, in a format of around 250 shorter articles, encyclopedia-style.)

Expressivism, Pragmatism, and Representationalism

I've just gotten back from a road trip to Sydney for the "Expressivism, Pragmatism, and Representationalism" conference (along with half a day at the "Moral Cognition and Meta-Ethics" conference).  I've put some photos online, as have Berit and Joe.  Joe also has a report on the first day.

The purpose of the conference was to bring together various "pragmatist" and "expressivist" (e.g. those of Blackburn, Brandom, Gibbard, Price) approaches to truth and meaning, and to contrast them with more traditional "representational" approaches.  As a flat-footed representationalist, I thought that the conference would be something like going to an interesting foreign country, but what struck me was that most of what the pragmatists had to say was quite congenial to representationalism.  Some amateurish thoughts on these issues follow.

Susan Hurley

Susan Hurley died yesterday.  Susan was a creative philosopher and a force of nature.  She was a major contributor to the philosophy of mind, the foundations of cognitive science, and social and political philosophy.  Her 1998 book Consciousness in Action is full of ideas and insights that can't be found elsewhere.

I first met Susan at the Tucson and Brussels consciousness conferences in 2000, and got to know her better on visits to Oxford and at the Santa Cruz summer institute in 2002 (here's a photo).  We agreed on very little, but she was terrific company, and her ideas always repaid close attention.  My paper with Tim Bayne, "What is the Unity of Consciousness?", started life in part as a commentary on Susan's work in a symposium at the Brussels ASSC conference in 2000.   She was a frequent visitor to the ANU, and last year was offered a professorship here, although to our disappointment she ended up moving to Bristol instead. At the time of her death Susan had a contract for a book on the boundaries of the mind, co-authored with Alva Noe, in the book series I edit at Oxford University Press.  I suppose that this book will now never see the light of day.

Susan was passionate about everything that she did, and had an unquenchable appetite for living and thinking.  She treated her repeated battles with cancer as inconveniences that should not get in the way of doing philosophy.  A month before she died, Susan organized a big conference on perception, action, and consciousness at Bristol, which by all accounts was a big success.  She was due to visit ANU in early September and give a talk.  Characteristically, she kept up this plan until near the end.  It was only last Sunday that she e-mailed me to cancel, saying "I still hope that maybe I can make it there someday, but that may not be probable given my illness".  She will be missed.

X-Phi meets A-Phi

The "Experimental Philosophy Meets Conceptual Analysis" last week was a lot of fun -- one of the most stimulating conferences I've been to for some time.  I've posted photos, and the Powerpoint for my wrap-up talk "X-Phi Meets A-Phi" (some of which is summarized below).  Here the A stands for "armchair" or "a priori", as you please.  See the experimental philosophy page and the experimental philosophy blog for some background on the issues, and see also Alex Plakias's conference recap on the Go Grue blog.

The conference had something of a tag-team wrestling format, alternating X-Phi speakers (in the 'red corner") with A-Phi speakers (in the blue corner).  The X-Phi speakers were Steve Stich (with a nice overview of his work on disagreement over the intuitions that analytic philosophers often appeal to, in epistemology, the philosophy of language, and ethics), Josh Knobe (who outlined experimental work on people's intuitions about consciousness, suggesting that they're willing to ascribe nonphenomenal states much more freely than phenomenal states), John Doris (who used empirical work on the role of social processes in moral thinking to support a socially-extended view of cognition), Alex Plakias (on empirical work on moral disagreement) and Adina Roskies (on the implications of acquired sociopathy for moral internalism).  The A-Phi speakers were Frank Jackson (on conceptual analysis as a kind of experimental philosophy), Michael Smith (on pure and applied conceptual analysis, responding to various aspects of the X-Phi critique), Farid Masrour (on the relevance of the distinction between prima facie and ideal intuitions), Jeanette Kennett (who responded to Adina on empirical arguments against internalism), and, I suppose, me.

In the end there was a lot more agreement than disagreement, though there were certainly some contentious issues along the way.  Given the emphasis on conceptual analysis, it's not surprising that different concepts of experimental philosophy were distinguished.  For a start, one needs to distinguish experimental philosophy from empirical philosophy simpliciter, where the key distinction is the focus on data about philosophically relevant intuitions and judgments.  Farid also usefully distinguished "positive" from "negative" experimental philosophy.  The former, typified by Josh Knobe's work on intentional action, tries to find interesting patterns in people's application of concepts to cases, drawing out conclusions about the way those concepts work.   The latter, typified by the work of Steve Stich and colleagues on Getter and Kripke intuitions, tries to find cross-group or cross-cultural differences in philosophically relevant intuitions, with a view to potentially undermining the appeal to these intuitions in traditional philosophy.

We also brought some experimental philosophy to bear on the relationship between experimental philosophy and conceptual analysis.   In my talk I presented a series of vignettes ranging from (a) someone asking a number of other people for judgments about intentional action to (b) someone asking one other person for such judgments to (c) someone asking themselves for such judgments, and polled the audience on whether each counts as experimental philosophy, or as conceptual analysis.  The numbers slid gradually from (a) to (c), suggesting a pretty strong continuity.  The moral is that positive experimental philosophy, at least, seems fairly continuous with conceptual analysis, though with more than one subject and performed in the third-person mode.

Conference wrap-up

I'm back now from two enjoyable weeks of conferences.  I've posted some photos from the Norms and Analysis conference in Sydney (along with the ANU-Sydney-Kyoto Probability workshop) and have also posted the Powerpoint for my talk, "Moral Relativism and Conceptual Analysis" (my first-ever venture into meta-ethics).  Kenny Easwaran has posted Rachael Briggs' marvelous limerick summary of the N&A conference, and Carrie Jenkins has also posted some comments.   In addition, I've posted photos from the Australasian Association of Philosophy conference, and have posted the Powerpoint for my presidential address, "From the Aufbau to the Canberra Plan".

Canberra update

I've been back in Canberra for a while now.  The month away was a lot of fun, with the highlight being a memorable week in the Caribbean (including a marvelous match between the West Indies and England in Barbados in front of a full house of local fans), and the lowlight being the loss of my laptop in Atlanta airport.  As a result, I've lost my photos from the (excellent) Boise conference on metametaphysics and from the Caribbean, but I've posted some photos from the subsequent conference on formal epistemology in Oklahoma.

Here at ANU, conference season is warming up.  Last Friday saw an enjoyable workshop on "The Epistemology of Experience" with talks by Carrie Jenkins, Jim Pryor, Declan Smithies, and Nico Silins.  Carrie has posted a summary and Ole Koksvik has posted some photos.  Coming up June 15 is a workshop on "Phenomenology and Intentionality" featuring Bill Lycan, Adam Pautz, and Susanna Siegel.  The conference on "Experimental Philosophy Meets Conceptual Analysis" will be July 18-20, preceded by an undergraduate workshop July 17.  Interested undergraduates from Australasian universities should e-mail me.  In addition, there are a small number of open 20-minute slots for submitted papers at the main conference.  People with suitable papers on experimental philosophy should get in touch with me.  There are also a number of other conferences coming up in other bits of Australasia.  The AAP website has a fairly extensive list.  Note that the AAP conference in Armidale July 1-6 (at which I'm supposed to give the presidential address, tentatively entitled "From the Aufbau to the Canberra Plan") has extended its deadline for submissions to May 31.

Elsewhere on the web: I recently did a video interview with John Horgan (author of The End of Science and various other books and articles), which has just been posted on the Bloggingheads website.  My webcam skills are revealed to be fairly shaky, but otherwise the interview seems to have come out OK.  It's also worth checking out Jerry Fodor's entertaining review of the "Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism?" collection by Galen Strawson et al, in which Fodor comes surprisingly close to endorsing a form of property dualism with fundamental laws connecting physical processes and consciousness.

A month in the north

I'm about to head off for a month in the northern hemisphere.  The itinerary includes Boise (for the Metametaphysics conference), San Francisco (for the APA), UC Riverside, UC Davis, Harvard/MIT, Yale, NYU, the Caribbean, Georgia State, and Oklahoma (for the "Why Formal Epistemology?" conference).  Apart from the two new states at the end, the highlight will be a week in the West Indies for the World Cup, taking in matches in Grenada (Australia vs New Zealand), Barbados (England vs West Indies), and St. Lucia (semi-final).  Fingers crossed for no more murders!

Experimental Philosophy Meets Conceptual Analysis

This is advance notice of a conference on "Experimental Philosophy Meets Conceptual Analysis", to be held at ANU on July 18-20, 2007.  The focus of the conference will be on recent work on experimental philosophy, especially the experimental study of philosophical intuitions, and its relationship to more traditional philosophical methods such as conceptual analysis.  Speakers will include John Doris, Joshua Knobe, Stephen Stich, Frank Jackson, Michael Smith, and me.  The conference is open to all and attendance is free, but if you plan to attend, please e-mail Maire Ni Mhorda at maire [at] coombs.anu.edu.au.

The conference will be part of what is shaping up to be a very busy conference season in Australia.  At ANU alone, apart from this conference, there will likely be a conference on basic knowledge in late May or early June, a conference on reasons and rationality in August, and possibly something on perception in June.  At Sydney there will be conferences on Norms and Analysis on June 26-28, on Expressivism, Pragmatism and Representationalism August 29-31, and on Moral Cognition and Meta-Ethics from August 31 to September 2.  Of course there is the Australasian Association of Philosophy, to be held on July 1-6.  There will also be the World Congress of Neuroscience in Melbourne July 12-17 and the International Society for Research on the Emotions in Brisbane July 11-15.  I'm sure there are many others I've missed -- feel free to make additions in the comments.

Consciousness in the news

The mind-body problem has been in the news lately.  A couple of weeks ago, Time magazine had a special issue on mind and brain, with a lead story by Steven Pinker on the mystery of consciousness, along with brief sidebar articles on consciousness by Bernard Baars, Dan Dennett, Antonio Damasio, Michael Gazzaniga, Colin McGinn.  Now the New Yorker has just published a long article by Larissa MacFarquhar on Pat and Paul Churchland (not online, unfortunately), with a lot of nice biographical and sociological background and some philosophical discussion along the way.  I talked to Larissa for this article a year or two ago, when it was a general article on the problem of consciousness, and a fair amount of philosophical background on consciousness has survived into the final version.

Job ads

As mentioned earlier, 2-3 permanent research positions in the Philosophy Program in the ANU Research School of Social Sciences are being advertised.  The ad is now available.  Inquiries and applications are welcome.  The deadline is March 1.

Another job ad: PSYCHE, the e-journal on consciousness, has been taken under the wing of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness.  It is now looking for two executive editors, one for broadly philosophical and/or theoretical work, the other for empirical work.  The deadline is February 15.

Cowboy ontology

Last week I was at the Arizona Ontology Conference, held at the White Stallion Ranch outside Tucson.  This was a memorable occasion, with some philosophy papers interspersed among the horseback riding, hiking, and other cowboy activities.  (As a bonus, there was a freak snowstorm on the Sunday evening, delaying my flight back by a day.)  Joe Salerno has put some great photos online, and I've put some online as well, while Berit Brogaard has a report on some of the philosophy.  Thanks to Laurie Paul for putting such an excellent event together.  (Update: still more photos from Brian Fiala, Andy Egan, and Benj Hellie and Jessica Wilson.)

I gave my paper on "Ontological Anti-Realism" at the conference, with excellent comments by Jonathan Schaffer (who has given permission to put them online).  One of Jonathan's points is that I "half succeed" because my view yields "half-realism": realism about the fundamental but not the nonfundamental.  I'm happy enough with the half-realism, as this is more or less the line I take in the paper.  But it's worth noting that the realism about the fundamental need only be a metaphysical realism, where reality objectively and determinately has a certain fundamental nature.  This needn't be an ontological realism, where this fundamental nature involves a domain of fundamental objects having fundamental properties (it might be, on some versions of the view, but the framework doesn't require it).

Jonathan also gives three interesting arguments against the distinction between ordinary and ontological existence assertions of a sentence, at least construed as involving a difference in truth-conditions (as opposed to pragmatic correctness conditions).  I think these arguments can be answered, but in any case it turns out that Jonathan and I were interpreting the claim that there is such a distinction in different ways: on my reading it's compatible with the claim that these assertions have different underlying logical form (e.g. involving covert variables), while on Jonathan's reading it is not.  So where Jonathan proposes what he takes to be an alternative to the distinction, involving covert variables for furnishing functions, I'd happily endorse this proposal as an implementation of the distinction as I construe it.  In any case the exchange and the discussion at the conference were very useful, and I hope to have a revised version of the paper online before long.

Ontological Anti-Realism

A new paper for the new year: "Ontological Anti-Realism".  This is a descendant of my talk on "Ontological Indeterminacy" from the 2005 ANU Metametaphysics conference.  The paper is destined to appear in the collection Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), which I'm co-editing with David Manley and Ryan Wasserman, and which will include the six papers from the ANU conference along with six others.  In the meantime, I'll be giving the paper at a conference on ontology in Arizona later this month, and at another metametaphysics conference in Idaho at the end of March.  The current version is still a rough draft, and comments are welcome.

Propositions and Attitude Ascriptions

Another new online paper: "Propositions and Attitude Ascriptions: A Fregean Account".  This lays out the two-dimensional account of Fregean senses and propositions that I now favor (this is a change from the view in "On Sense and Intension"), and uses this to give an account of propositional attitude ascription (one that is mostly compatible with the remarks on this subject in "The Components of Content" but which goes beyond this and is much more detailed).  Along the way I address a number of standard puzzles about attitude ascriptions.  In my favorite part of the paper, the Fregean hierarchy of senses is reconstructed in 2-D terms.  In the last section of the paper, I respond to Scott Soames' objections (in his book Reference and Description) to my earlier account of attitude ascriptions.

The paper is still a draft and comments are very welcome.  The typesetting is still a work in progress.  I've just returned to using LaTeX after many years away and I'm sure there are plenty of errors.

Lectures and symposia

Two interesting sets of lectures that appear to be tied to forthcoming books are online: Robert Brandom's Locke Lectures on "Between Saying and Doing: Toward an Analytic Pragmatism" and Tim Williamson's Hempel Lectures on "The Philosophy of Philosophy".  The latter are accompanied by a full book manuscript.

In addition, there are two new PSYCHE symposia on consciousness-related topics.  There's a symposium on Gregg Rosenberg's book A Place For Consciousness (previously discussed here), with seven papers, and a symposium on Consciousness and Self-Representation, with four papers, four commentaries, and an introduction.

Nida-Rumelin on grasping phenomenal properties

One of the most interesting papers in the Alter and Walter collection is Martine Nida-Rümelin's "Grasping Phenomenal Properties", which gives a new argument against the materialist thesis that phenomenal properties are physical properties. Nida-Rümelin's argument uses the two-dimensional apparatus at various points in an auxiliary role, but she argues that her argument requires weaker and less controversial assumptions than my two-dimensional argument.  Here I'll look into this a bit.  (It might be worth looking at these two papers first, if you're not familiar with the issues.)

Nida-Rümelin's argument runs roughly as follows.

(1) A person who grasps a property via two distinct concepts is in a position to rationally judge that those concepts are necessarily coextensive.

(2) Phenomenal properties are grasped via phenomenal concepts.

(3) Any physical property can be grasped via a physical concept, by someone with relevant physical background knowledge.

(4) No amount of physical background knowledge puts one in a position to rationally judge that a phenomenal concept and a physical concept are necessarily coextensive.
______________________

(5) No phenomenal property is a physical property.

Ramsey + Moore = God

Here's a short paper co-authored with my colleague Alan Hájek:  "Ramsey + Moore = God".  The idea is that it follows from versions of the Ramsey test and Moore's paradox that rational subjects should accept all instances of 'If p, then I believe p', and 'If I believe p, then p', so they should accept that they are omniscient and infallible.  Of course there is more that could be said about various things here, but we went for the short-and-sweet model.  The paper is forthcoming in Analysis.

Discussions elsewhere

Elsewhere on the web, there have been a number of recent discussions that may be of interest to readers of this weblog, some of which I've been involved with.  Berit Brogaard  has made a number of interesting posts about two-dimensionalism: e.g. Chalmers on De Re Epistemic Ascriptions, 2Dism and Epistemic Extension, Modal Adverbials, and Another 2D Puzzle.  The last two of these have had lively discussions that have clarified a number of issues.  Eric Schwitzgebel posted on Chalmers on "Modal Rationalism", again with a lively and useful discussion thread.  Pete Mandik's work-in-progress blog has hosted a discussion of Brendan Ritchie's paper "Dualism and the Limits of Conceivability", as well as a lively thread on Hyperbolic Mary.  Wo has a post on Conceivably Possible Zombies.  Esa Diaz Leon has a post on Stoljar on actors and zombies and two on my paper "Phenomenal Concepts and the Explanatory Gap".  Robert Howell at Brain Pains has two posts on Daniel Stoljar's "Categorical Phenomenalism", with a reply by Stoljar.   As always, Conscious Entities has a lot of interesting material on consciousness.  And Mixing Memory has a fine zombie music video.

Update: See also a very interesting exchange between John Bengson, Adam Pautz, and others at Close Range on Being Aware of Uninstantiated Universals.  Also, Berit has a new post on 2D and Context-Sensitive Predicates.

Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge

I just received my copy of Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowlege: New Essays on Consciousness and Physicalism, edited by Torin Alter and Sven Walter.  There have been quite a few collections of new papers on consciousness in recent years, but I think this is the best of them.  It's focused on what has become the central set of issues in the debate over materialism and dualism about consciousness: namely, the epistemic and ontological gaps between the physical and the phenomenal, and the role that phenomenal concepts play in grounding these gaps.  I'd say that every paper in this book is important, and that collectively the papers in the book greatly advance our understanding of these topics.

The first section on the knowledge argument has a number of special treats: Knut Nordby, the achromat color scientist, with a piece on what it's like to be in Mary's situation; Lawrence Nemirow, author of the original defence of the ability hypothesis concerning the knowledge argument, rebutting all the objections to the hypothesis that have sprung up in recent years; Dan Dennett with his "RoboMary" response to the knowledge argument; and an exchange between Frank Jackson and Torin Alter on whether representationalism undermines the knowledge argument (Jackson says yes, Alter no).

The second half of the book has a number of papers right at the leading edge of the debate over phenomenal concepts.  Janet Levin and David Papineau set out definitive versions of their well-known materialist views of phenomenal concepts, including replies to objections.  Joe Levine and I have papers raising problems for any materialist account of phenomenal concepts.  John Hawthorne raises problems for the sort of "direct reference" account of phenomenal concepts that I and many others favor.  Finally, there is a terrific set of three papers on arguments for dualism and the role of phenomenal concepts therein.  Stephen White defends the property dualism argument and Ned Block argues against it, both with a lot of attention to the conceptual foundations.  And Martine Nida-Rümelin has a new and important argument for dualism, one that is based on a two-dimensional analysis but is quite different from the 2-D arguments that I and others have put forward.

The editors are to be congratulated for putting together such a superb book.  I expect that the papers in it will shape much of the debate on these topics in the coming years, and I strongly recommend that anyone interested in these issues take a look at it.

Jobs at ANU

A number of positions are being advertised at ANU.  We are about to advertise 2-3 permanent positions in the RSSS Philosophy Program. These positions will be advertised as open rank, and while permanent RSSS positions typically go to senior candidates, a more junior appointment is not out of the question.  Of course these research-only positions are almost unique within philosophy, and the academic environment in the Philosophy Program is unmatched.  Inquiries from distinguished philosophers are welcome -- feel free to send an e-mail to me or to other members of the Program.

At the same time, we are also advertising 2-3 postdoctoral positions in the Centre for Consciousness.  Two of these positions will be attached to my Federation Fellowship project on "The Contents of Consciousness", and one will be attached to a newly-funded ARC project on "The High-Level Structure of Consciousness", directed by me, Ned Block, and Susanna Siegel.  More details about these positions can be found here.  (Note in particular that these positions aren't limited to people working directly on consciousness or even to philosophers of mind.  Note also the misprinted reference number in the JFP ad.)  Again, inquiries are welcome.

All this terrific news for ANU philosophy comes in combination with the good news that Frank Jackson is stepping down as director of the Research School of Social Sciences to once again become a regular member of the Philosophy Program, where he will be full-time apart from a period each year in Princeton (as Brian Leiter reports).  Frank has done an extraordinary job as director, but it will be great to have him around more.  After a recent review of the whole RSSS, it is good to see that things are moving in such a positive direction.

Should Old Aquinas Be Forgot?

I received the following question from Jerry Reedy at Macalester College:

Have you ever heard the song "Should old Aquinas be forgot in the days of Wittgenstein?  I heard Anthony Kenny sing a few lines at Oxford, but I didn't write the words down.  I'd love to find it.  The fourth line is "Willard Van Orman Quine".

A Google search turns up a few references but few lyrics.  The closest thing, turned up by Google Book Search, is a reference by Alvin Plantinga in The Nature of Necessity, giving one more line: "Hesperus and Phosphorus are entities distinct".

Anyone know more?

Ziring Ziderata

I've recently been looking through back issues of journals in updating the philosophy of mind bibliography (more on this shortly).  One finds all sorts of fascinating things this way (e.g. there's a huge philosophical literature on consciousness circa 1900, especially sophisticated on issues such as spatial and temporal consciousness, the unity of consciousness, and its relational structure).  But perhaps the most unexpectedly wonderful piece I've come across was a paper from Mind in 1966, by one Fred I. Dretske, entitled "Ziring Ziderata".  (Here's an Oxford link in addition to the JSTOR link; both have restricted access.)  Apart from the aesthetic appeal of its title, there's also a fine aesthetic appeal in its content.

The paper is in effect an adaptation/parody of A.J. Ayer's arguments for a sense-datum-based analysis of the ordinary notion of 'perceiving', whereby perceiving an external-world object is a matter of sensing a sense-datum with an appropriate relation to that object.  On Dretske's account, desiring an external-world object is a matter of "ziring" a "zideratum" of the appropriate sort.  He establishes the existence of ziderata via an analog of the argument from illusion, and goes on to draw out consequences.  One pleasant consequence is that one's zires are always satisfied, as one always has the corresponding zideratum.  Of course there are tricky questions about unzired ziderilia, about the indeterminacy of ziderata, and so on.  The article is sufficiently straight-faced that if one didn't know more about the author, one might take it at face value, at least until encountering the footnote "See my unpublishable paper 'Are Specklish Ziderata Really Speckled?'".

Oddly, I had never heard of this article.  The only Google hits for the title are links to the original publication, and a citation index reveals exactly one citation of it (in a 1970 review article on perception).  Very strange, given that it's by a major philosopher (albeit early in his career), in a major journal, with a striking title and wonderful content!  Anyway, it strikes me that this article ought to be a classic.

More people with online philosophy

It's been about a year since I posted an update here concerning the page of people with philosophy papers online.  In the meantime, the list has grown a lot, thanks as ever to Ming Tan's help.  The new additions include some well-known philosophers working on consciousness, such as Janet Levin, Joe Levine, Martine Nida-Rümelin, and Scott Sturgeon.  Other additions include Brad Armendt, Lynne Rudder Baker, Berit Brogaard, Ruth Chang, David Christensen, Eros Corazza, Garrett Cullity, Stephen Davies, Eric Dietrich, Ron Endicott, Peter Gardenfors, Carl Gillett, Clark Glymour, Chris Grau, Paul Griffiths, Alan Hajek, Lloyd Humberstone, Peter van Inwagen, Kevin Kelly, Berel Dov Lerner, Peter Lipton, Pascal Ludwig, David Macarthur, Ishani Maitra, Genoveva Marti, Alyssa Ney, Mark van Roojen, Joe Salerno, Samuel Scheffler, Gila Sher, Mandy Simons, Peter Slezak, Isidora Stojanovic, Patrick Suppes, Charles Travis, Kadri Vihvelin, Joan Weiner, Josh Weisberg, and Dean Zimmerman.  Plus many others, along with many updated and moved pages.

For another source of online papers on consciousness (both science and philosophy), check out the ASSC ePrints server.

Searching for photos

By now there are around 1500 photos in the photo gallery on my website.  Clearly, a search engine is needed, and the remarkable David Bourget has just produced one.  You can now search an individual's name (first, last, or both), and all photos matching that name will show up.  There's some flexibility in the names (e.g. 'Dave' and 'David' are equivalent), and in many cases a photo is returned even when the person in question is only in the background.  Give it a try -- search here for yourself or your favorite philosopher, and see what shows up.

In addition, I have a request.  This archive of photos has grown to be comprehensive enough that I would like to extend it backward in time, if I can.  I started taking photos at conferences in early 2001.  It would be great to be able to include photos from conferences before then: for example, the various Tucson and ASSC consciousness conferences, SPP and Metaphysical Mayhem conferences, and many others.  (To keep things under control, I'll restrict the list to conferences I attended.  I don't have a full list of these, but there's a list of conferences at which I've given papers under "Conference Presentations" in my CV.)  Obviously I don't have many photos taken at those conferences, but others may.  If you have photos from these events and wouldn't object to their being used on my website, or if you know of others who have such photos, please let me know.

Fifty years of the identity theory

U.T. Place's pioneering article on the mind-brain identity theory, "Is Consciousness a Brain Process?", was published fifty years ago this year.  As part of a special focus on 1956, the ABC Radio show "All in the Mind" has just done an episode devoted to the identity theory: "The Mind-Body Problem Down Under".    Natasha Mitchell, who has done a great job with the show the last few years, interviews Jack Smart, David Armstrong, Gerard O'Brien, and me.  The ABC website has the audio and a transcript.  The University of Adelaide website has Place's brain.