fragments of consciousness

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.

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.

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.

Online Philosophy Conference

The Online Philosophy Conference got underway a week ago, and has just entered its second round.  This week, my paper "Probability and Propositions" is under discussion, along with a commentary by David Braun and my reply.  In addition, there are three other papers in the philosophy of mind: Brie Gertler on externalism, Benj Hellie on sensations, and Uriah Kriegel on narrow content.  Then there are two papers on metaphilosophy --  Swain, Alexander, and Weinberg on intuitions and Amie Thomasson on metaontology -- along with papers by John Fischer on free will and Thomas Hurka on friendship.  It looks like a great group of papers.  It would be good to get lively discussion going, so everyone is encouraged to contribute.

Probability and Propositions

The conference on probability, organized by Alan Hajek here at the ANU a couple of weeks ago, was terrific.  I've put some photos online, as have Al and Brad Armendt.

I've also put online my paper from the conference: Probability and Propositions.  This paper will also be my contribution to the Online Philosophy Conference (which I gather has now been postponed until May), with David Braun as commentator.  The paper argues that Bayesian accounts of reasoning are in strong tension with referentialist views of the objects of credence, and uses this point to argue against referentialist views of the objects of thought.  In effect, it raises a probabilistic version of Frege's puzzle, with credence playing the role of cognitive value.  It's a fairly obvious idea, but it's interesting to see how the details play out in this territory.  At the end of the paper I also put forward a positive view of the objects of credence, by putting a probabilistic spin on two-dimensional semantic values.

The two key cases in the paper involve Wanda Tinasky and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  I like the former, but the latter is just a placeholder until I find a better example with the same structure.  You can find the case near the start of the paper: the basic structure involves knowing under one mode of presentation that x has property P, knowing under another that x has Q, without knowing that x has P&Q, where x's having P&Q would be strong evidence for some relevant hypothesis.  It's easy to come up with cases with this form, but it would be nice to have a really clean and memorable version of it.  So I thought I would throw the challenge open to readers of this weblog.  Suggestions in the comments or by e-mail are welcome -- of course I'll give credit for any suggestions that I use in the final version.  Any comments on the paper itself are also very welcome.

Scott Soames' Two-Dimensionalism

At the meeting of the Central Division of the APA in Chicago this April, there will be an author-meets-critics session on Scott Soames' book Reference and Description: The Case Against Two-Dimensionalism, with Bob Stalnaker and me as critics and Soames replying.  I've put online my paper for that session: "Scott Soames' Two-Dimensionalism" (the official version for the session is a somewhat abridged version of this).  As the title suggests, one focus of the paper is the portion of the book where Soames turns out, surprisingly enough, to be a sort of two-dimensionalist himself.  There are also some bits responding to Soames' arguments on issues related to descriptivism and context-dependence.  There's not much overlap with my posts from last year on attitude ascriptions, as all that got much too long.  Instead that material has been incorporated into a new paper on a Fregean account of propositions and attitude ascriptions, which I'll be posting here shortly.

New SEP entries

There have been a number of new Stanford Encyclopedia entries in the philosophy of mind since last report: Steven Yalowitz on anomalous monism, Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence on concepts, Alec Hyslop on other minds, Murat Aydede on pain, Leonard Katz on pleasure, Karen Bennett and Brian McLaughlin on supervenience.  Also Roberto Casati and Jerome Dokic on sounds (commissioned by the metaphysics editors).  Check them out.