Semantic gaps between physical and mental discourse include the 'explanatory', 'epistemic' (Black-and-White Mary), and 'suppositional' (zombies) gaps; protosemantics is concerned with what is fundamental to meaning. Our tradition presupposes a truth-based protosemantics, with disastrous consequences for interpreting the semantic gaps: nonphysicalism, epiphenomenalism, separatism. Fortunately, an endorsement-based protosemantics, recentering meaning from the world to the mind, is technically viable, intuitively more plausible, and empirically more adequate. But, of present significance, it makes room for interpreting mental discourse as expressing simulations: this blocks (...) the disastrous consequences; and, as a bonus, accommodates hitherto anomalous asymmetries among the various semantic gaps. (shrink)

The following thesis starts from the question «why be moral?» and adresses an action-theoretic strategy for answering this question in the positive by reference to the constitutive natur of actions. In these debates, the epistemology of action has turned into a central issue. The thesis adresses these debates and develops a novel account of the epistemology: an account that may well turn out to provide a ground for the aforementioned constitutivist strategies.

The aim for this thesis is to motivate, critically evaluate and defend the claim that subjects are able to consciously perceive the affordances of objects. I will present my protagonist, the ‘Conscious Affordance Theorist’, with what are two main obstacles to this claim. The first of these is that affordance perception correctly understood refers only to a kind of subpersonal visual processing, and not to a kind of conscious visual experience. I claim that this results in an explanatory gap at (...) the level of intentional action, which in order to correct we need to redefine the notion of affordance perception to include conscious as well as subpersonal affordance perception. Precisely, I claim that ‘affordance awareness’ has a crucial epistemological role to play, and that subjects must be able to consciously experience affordances in order to gain this awareness. In answer to this claim, I supplement the objection that affordance perception is defined as subpersonal perception to include the claim that any awareness subjects have of the affordances of objects they visually experience is due to them having thoughts about those affordances, and not visual experience of them. I then consider the Conscious Affordance Theorist’s response to this supplemented account. The second obstacle is the claim that conscious visual affordance perception is an impossible notion given that affordances are dispositional properties, and the dispositional properties of objects cannot be ‘seen’. In facing this objection I look to the supporting claims and motivations that lie behind it, in order to find a way for the Conscious Affordance Theorist to challenge its central claim that affordances cannot be seen. I end this thesis with an account of the Conscious Affordance Theorist’s own positive position, and a consideration of how his account has the ability to provide for conscious affordance perception in the case of non-human animals. (shrink)

William Molyneux raised the following question: if a congenital blind person is made to see, and is visually presented with a cube and a globe, would he be able to call the shapes before him a cube and a globe before touching them? Locke, Berkeley, Leibniz, and Reid presented their phenomenological view of shape perception, i.e. their view as to what it is like to perceive shape by sight and touch, in responding to Molyneux’s Question. The four philosophers shared the (...) view that visual perception delivers no solid shape. This view would provide a premise for an argument for immaterial objects. The purpose of my thesis is to reject that argument. Kant’s view and John Campbell’s externalist account offer a way to reject the premise of the argument in question. However, my strategy is not to adopt their view. I pursue Reichenbach’s view that the there is no congruence or incongruence involved in the visual phenomenology. I develop his view, and propose the view that visual perception delivers no flat or solid shape. Although my view endorses the premise in question, I can offer a way to reject the argument. This is because my view is compatible with a form of externalism about perception (which differs from Campbell’s). My view can also do full justice to the phenomenological views presented by the four philosophers. (shrink)

In this dissertation I critically engage and draw insights from classical Indian, Anglo-American, phenomenological, and cognitive scientific approaches to the topic of self-awareness. In particular, I argue that in both the Western and the Indian tradition a common and influential view of self-awareness---that self-awareness is the product of an act of introspection in which consciousness takes itself as an object---distorts our understanding of both self-awareness and consciousness as such. In contrast, I argue for the existence and primacy of pre-reflective self-awareness (...) ---a form of self-awareness that is an effect of both our embodiment and the basic structure of consciousness. In arguing for this account of self-awareness, I take up, among other things, the following: the semantics of the first-person and of indexicals in general, qualia and phenomenal consciousness; the possibility of non-conceptual self-awareness, the nature of introspection; the importance of embodiment and agency for our understanding of self-awareness, and the consequences of my account for the metaphysics of personal identity. (shrink)

The claim that consciousness is propositional has be widely debated in the past. For instance, it has been discussed whether consciousness is always propositional, whether all propositional consciousness is linguistic, whether propositional consciousness is always articulated, or whether there can be non-articulated propositions. In contrast, the question of whether propositions are conscious has not very often been the focus of attention.

La eclosión de las neurodisciplinas está conectada con el amplio y creciente uso de neuroimágenes en neurociencia cognitiva, en particular de las obtenidas mediante resonancia magnética funcional. Sin embargo, la aplicación de estudios sobre el cerebro basados en esta técnica a la filosofía, la ética o el derecho, entre otros campos, no es tan clara como a veces se supone y encuentra importantes limitaciones.

One might interpret the locution “the phenomenological mind” as a declaration of a philosophical thesis that the mind is in some sense essentially phenomenological. Authors Gallagher & Zahavi appear to have intended it, however, to refer more to the phenomenological tradition and its methods of analysis. From the subheading of this book, one gains an impression that readers will see how the resources and perspectives from the phenomenological tradition illuminate various issues in philosophy of mind and cognitive science in particular. (...) This impression is reinforced upon finding that many analytic philosophers’ names appear throughout the book. That appearance notwithstanding, as well as the distinctiveness of the book as an introduction, the authors do not sufficiently engage with analytic philosophy. (shrink)