fragments of consciousness

Papineau on phenomenal concepts

David Papineau has put online his paper "Phenomenal and Perceptual Concepts", forthcoming next year in the Alter/Walter collection Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge: New Essays on Consciousness and Physicalism.  In the paper he extends and elaborates the "quotational concepts" view he put forward in his 2002 book Thinking about Consciousness, and uses it to answer various anti-materialist challenges.  In the last section of the paper, he tries to use the account to answer the challenge I put forward in "Phenomenal Concepts and the Explanatory Gap", posted here earlier this year, and forthcoming in the same volume.

In that paper, I argued that accounts of phenomenal concepts that attempt to explain away the explanatory gap face a dilemma: either there is an epistemic gap between P (physical processes) and C (the relevant features of phenomenal concepts), or there's not.  If the former, then the relevant features of phenomenal concepts can't be physically explained.  If the latter, then there's an epistemic gap between C and E (the epistemic feature we face with regard to consciousness), so that C can't be used to explain our epistemic situation.  In his paper, Papineau claims to embrace both horns (!) of the dilemma.  A response (adapted from recent correspondence with Papineau) is after the fold.

Russell, Newman, and the mind-body problem

Bertrand Russell's The Analysis of Matter has had a resurgence of interest in recent years, both among philosophers of science interested in structural realism, and among philosophers of mind interested in the mind-body problem.  Russell's basic idea that science characterizes the physical world in terms of its structure but not in terms of its intrinsic nature has seemed to some philosophers (Russell himself, and more recently Grover Maxwell, Michael Lockwood, and me, among others) to leave the door open to a close tie between the unknown intrinsic properties at the basis of physics and consciousness itself.  This leads to the view that I have called Russellian monism (or type-F monism, in "Consciousness and the Place in Nature").

At the same time, Russell's structuralism suffers from a well-known difficulty, pointed out in 1928 by the mathematician M.H.A. Newman in "Mr. Russell's 'Causal Theory of Perception'" (JSTOR link), and revived in a 1985 article by Demopoulos and Friedman.  A purely structural description of the world, saying that there exists a relation under which entities in the world are related with a certain structure, can be satisfied by any set of the appropriate cardinality, by defining an appropriate relation on that set.   So this sort of purely structural description seems near-vacuous.  Some philosophers take this to be a devastating problem for structuralism (e.g. Michael Friedman raises it as a deathknell for Carnap's Aufbau), while others (e.g. Putnam in his model-theoretic argument) use it to raise problems about realism and reference.

I received an interesting e-mail from Moises Macias, an undergraduate at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, asking how one can reconcile this problem for structuralism with its popularity in the philosophy of mind.  This led to some useful correspondence.  Since this is an issue that quite often comes up in discussion, and it's one of my favorite issues, I thought I'd post some of the correspondence here (after the fold, with text from Moises indented).

Joni Mitchell meets the Zombies

Alan White has posted a new addition to his philosophy songs page: "Two Sides Now", an adaptation of Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" to address the zombie argument.  He says it was inspired by my paper on the 2-D argument against materialism.  Here's the lyrics and the music.  It joins such classics as "Readin' Kripke" (music), "Solipsism's Painless" (music),  and "Make a Talk on the Ryle Side" (music), as well as tributes to Bill Lycan and Brian Weatherson.

ALso on the zombie front, Victor Caston pointed out the Onion's news item on Pittsburgh's unreadiness for a major zombie attack.

More online papers

Although I posted the last list of additions to the page of people with online papers in philosophy just a week or two ago, there have been a number of notable additions since then.  Brendan Jackson, post-doc at ANU, has posted some papers on logical form and on fictionalism.  Two recent ANU graduates, Lisa Bortolotti and Nic Damnjanovic now have pages (check out Nic and Stuart Candlish's monster paper on 20th-century theories of truth).  And Scott Soames has posted a big crop of papers (including a paper on ambitious two-dimensionalism and another on the necessary a posteriori that may be of interest to people who read my discussion of his book on two-dimensionalism earlier this year).  Other new additions include Randolph Clarke, Niko Kolodny, Hallvard Lillehammer, and Veronique Munoz Darde.  Thanks again to Ming Tan.

I think we've now reached the point where well over half the research-active people in most areas of analytic philosophy have online papers and are included on this page.  I was told recently that in a hiring meeting in a good department looking to make a mid-level appointment in one of these areas, it was suggested that to find candidates, they should "go down Chalmers' list".  I've occasionally heard similar things about conference invitations and the like.  So, if you don't have papers online, you may be missing opportunities for professional advancement!  Maybe that can serve as some incentive for the holdouts.

Update:  Also Robert Van Gulick (with four papers on consciousness and two consciousness conference movies!), Linda Martin Alcoff (thanks to Mark Barber for these two), Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Adrian Piper.

The Two-Dimensional Argument Against Materialism

I've put a new paper online: "The Two-Dimensional Argument Against Materialism".  An abridged version is forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Mind (edited by Brian McLaughlin), and the whole thing is forthcoming in my book The Character of Consciousness, to be published next year by Oxford University Press.  A fair amount of the material is recycled from my other papers in this vicinity in the last few years, but some of it is new.  This paper is intended to be the definitive version of the two-dimensional argument, being maximally explicit about details and replying to many of the objections that have been raised in the literature in the last ten years or so.  This version is a draft (I have to submit it fairly soon), and there are probably mistakes here and there. Any comments would be appreciated.

Wikipedia on consciousness

The entry on consciousness at Wikipedia is coming along.  The section of the entry on philosophical approaches is a bit odd, though, and has provoked some argument on the entry's discussion page.   I don't think it's appropriate for me to get too involved, as I'm discussed in the entry.  (I had a Marshall McLuhan moment, but it seems that not everyone has seen Annie Hall.)  But I do think it would be a good thing for more philosophers to get involved with Wikipedia, as these entries are certain to be used more and more as reference works as time goes on.  If philosophers who know something about the philosophy of consciousness were to help flesh out this article, and related articles, that would certainly be a good thing.

New people with online papers

Some additions to the page of people with online papers in philosophy, since the last update: Ken Aizawa, Michael Anderson, David Barnett, Robert Batterman, Gordon Belot, Alexander Bird, Jason Bridges, David Brink, John Carroll, Nancy Cartwright, Tony Chemero, Robert Cummins, Justin D'Arms, John Dupre, Marc Ereshefsky, Elizabeth Harman, Jakob Hohwy, Henry Laycock, Peter Lewis, Elisabeth Lloyd, Kris McDaniel, Peter Milne, Jessica Moss, Eddy Nahmias, Lucy O'Brien, Christopher Peacocke, Simon Prosser, Paul Raymont, Michael Ridge, Richard Samuels, Bradford Skow, Peter Smith, Robert Stern, Chris Swoyer, Amie Thomasson, Raimo Tuomela, Kendall Walton, Caroline West, John Williams, Robert Williams, Kenneth Williford, Robert Wilson.  As always, thanks especially to Ming Tan.