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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

A month in Europe

I'm just back from a month in Europe: Cologne, Berlin, Lund, Copenhagen, Bristol, London, Paris, and Milan.  I've put photos online from three conferences along the way.  The summer school on my work in Cologne (photos) was especially enjoyable (Daniel Cohnitz has a little summary and a nice cartoon), despite my frying a laptop and losing a leather jacket, among other mishaps.  Thanks to Thomas Grundmann for organizing a memorable week.  The GAP conference in Berlin (photos) and the SIFA conference just north of Milan (photos) were also sources of much good philosophy and good cheer.  I'm now back at ANU for the rest of the year.

Time and consciousness

The Time and Consciousness conference in Sydney (here are some photos) yielded a lot of food for thought.  The talks focused on a number of different connections between the phenomena.  Barry Dainton and Philippe Chuard focused on the experience of time in perception, giving models to explain the experience of a "specious present".  Jenann Ismael and Jordi Fernandez focused on representation of time in memory, over scales up to a lifetime.  Craig Callender examined experimental studies of time perception to undermine arguments that appeal to temporal experience to support an A-theory ("flow") model of the metaphysics of time.  Steve Weinstein discussed models in physics that posit multi-dimensional time, and their implications for the experience of time.  Simon Haines focused on different conceptions of time in the history of philosophy and in the history of poetry.  Finally, Alex Byrne, Uriah Kriegel, and I gave summary presentations.

The issue most closely connected to my own interests is the representation of time in perceptual experience.  One connection: I think one can argue that at least at the level of representation, experience represents time as passing in a robust A-theoretic sense, so that Eden (the world where our experience is perfectly veridical) is a world of temporal passage, rather than a "block universe".  Of course this does not entail that our world is such a world: as with color experience, our temporal experience might be only imperfectly veridical.  I have seen people use temporal experience to support the A-theory more directly, by arguing that it is not just the case that experience represents A-time, but that the flow of experience itself involves the passage of A-time.  Here we are faced with the familiar issue of whether introspection reveals only properties represented by experience, but also nonrepresentational properties of experiences.

Getting clear on this issue, as most issues involving the relation between time and consciousness, involves understanding the relations between three vertices of a triangle: (TCC) the temporal contents of consciousness (time as represented in experience), (TPC) the temporal properties of consciousness (time in which experience takes place), and (TPW) the temporal properties of things in the world.  Of course TCC represents TPW, and TPC is an aspect of TPW. The crucial issues for understanding temporal consciousness seem to me to be understanding just what is built into TCC, and just what is the relationship between TCC and TPC.

Even once one distinguishes TCC from TPC, it remains tempting to think there is some closer connection between them than there is in the case of color and space, say.  It is not implausible that a being could have the same spatial phenomenology as me, despite a massive distortion or inversion of spatial properties of representations in its brain.  But could a being have the same temporal phenomenology as that of my stream of consciousness, despite undergoing my experience in reverse temporal order, or in assorted jagged bursts?  There is some intuition that the answer is no.  If this is right, then inferences from TCC to TPC may be somewhat more legitimate than in the case of color and shape.  If this is wrong, however, then one can make the familiar representationalist move saying that introspection tells us only about temporal contents of experience and not about temporal properties, in which case phenomenology will give relatively little guidance about the temporal metaphysics of experience.

The issue of TCC and its relationship to TPC is also central to the debate over different models of the perceptual experience of time, as discussed in the talks by Chuard and Dainton. Here the leading candidates include the "retention" model of Husserl and Broad, which postulates momentary experiences that represent not just present goings-on but momentarily preceding goings-on, and the "extension" model of Dainton and others, which postulates temporally extended experiences that represent goings-on over a brief period of time.  Both models allow that TCC involves representation of at least a brief period of time, but the extension model postulates a much closer connection between TCC and TPC than the retention model.  The "projection" model suggested at the conference by Chuard involves an interestingly different role for TPC.  According to this model, perceptual experience represents only a momentary state of the world, but the succession of experiences in time produces the cognitive illusion that perception represents more than this.  On this model, in effect, TCC is quite thin, but there is an illusion of thickness brought about by TPC.

In any case, this is all just scraping the tip of the iceberg of a very complex issue.  There are some good relevant papers in the time and consciousness section of my online papers directory. Sean Kelly  (also here) gives a nice introduction to the issue between the retention and extension (or "specious present") model, arguing for the former. Shaun Gallagher and Barry Dainton have an exchange that goes into great depth and detail on this issue in a PSYCHE symposium on Dainton's book Stream of Consciousness (the middle chapters of which are perhaps the best starting point for issues about time consciousness), arguing for the retention and extension models respectively.  Rick Grush discusses the relationship between models of temporal phenomenology and potential mechanisms in cognitive neuroscience. There's obviously a lot of room for further work here, and I'm looking forward to seeing how things develop in coming years.

AAP recap

The Australasian Association of Philosophy conference last week was excellent, as always.  Congratulations to Al and Renee Hajek for doing a great job with the organization.  I've put some photos from the conference online (including some from my end-of-conference party, where we got to wish David Armstrong a happy 80th birthday).  I see that there are also blog reports on aspects of the conference from Russell Blackford (plus here), Richard Chappell (plus here and here), Kate Devitt, Kenny Easwaran, and John Wilkins.  (Still waiting on reports from Gill and Matt.)

I've also put online the detailed handout from my talk at the conference: "Conceptual Analysis meets 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism'".  To a first approximation, this paper attempts to address Quine's arguments from revisability and holding-true-come-what-may in "Two Dogmas", focusing on the issue of conceptual change, using tools drawn from 2D-style conditional conceptual analysis and Bayesian confirmation theory.  As always, any comments are welcome.

Epistemic Modality

The Epistemic Modality conference last week was pretty enjoyable.  Two talks (by Frank Jackson and me) on the space of epistemic possibilities -- worlds vs scenarios, 2D contents, epistemic rigidity, etc -- bookending four talks (by Andy Egan, Jonathan Schaffer, Matt Weiner, and Seth Yalcin) on the semantics of epistemic modals -- relativism vs contextualism vs no truth-conditions, etc.  No photos for this one -- I'm saving those for the AAP next week.  For reports and commentary, see the postings on the conference by Richard Chappell and Kenny Easwaran.