This paper is a discussion of Michael Thau's interesting critique in Chapter 2 of Consciousness and Cognition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, of the common view that beliefs are internal states.

W. E. B. Du Bois was one of the most profound and influential African-American intellectuals of the twentieth century. This volume addresses the complexities of Du Bois' legacy, showing how his work gets to the heart of today's theorizing about the color line.

Block's cases of superblindsight, the pneumatic drill, and the Sperling experiments do not show that P-consciousness and Aconsciousness can come apart. On certain tendentious but not implausible construals of the concepts of P- and A-consciousness, they refer to the same psychological phenomenon.

Les croyances sont aujourd'hui mieux respectées, mais la crédulité est ignorée tandis qu'on s'évertue à croire. Banalisation derrière laquelle se cache une fonction psychique inquiétante. Il a donc semblé urgent de situer, préciser et expliquer celle-ci. Ceci alors que la penséee active, constructive, se voit fragiliséee, menacée, ou même étoufféee par l'explosion médiatique et informatique. Polémiquer en faveur de la vérité est une nécessité.

The field of metacognition, richly sampled in the book under review, is recognized as an important and growing branch of psychology. However, the field stands in need of a general theory that (1) provides a unified framework for understanding the variety of metacognitive processes, (2) articulates the relation between metacognition and consciousness, and (3) tells us something about the form of meta-level representations and their relations to object-level representations. It is argued that the higher-order thought theory of consciousness supplies us (...) with the rudiments of a theory that meets these desiderata and integrates the principal findings reported in this collection. (shrink)

According to a model of inter-theoretic relations advocated by Patricia S. Churchland, psychology will need to revise its theories so as to fit them for "smooth reduction" to the neurosciences, and this will lead to the elimination of reference to intentional contents from psychology. It is argued that this model is ambiguous; on one reading it is empirically implausible, on the other its methodology is confused. The connectionist program NETtalk, far from exemplifying the model as Churchland claims, suggests a theoretical (...) rationale for employing relations to intentional contents in psychology. (shrink)