fragments of consciousness

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.
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(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.