Qualia, space, and control

Philosophical Psychology 12 (1):47-60 (1999)
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Abstract

According to representionalists, qualia-the introspectible properties of sensory experience-are exhausted by the representational contents of experience. Representationalists typically advocate an informational psychosemantics whereby a brain state represents one of its causal antecedents in evolutionarily determined optimal circumstances. I argue that such a psychosemantics may not apply to certain aspects of our experience, namely, our experience of space in vision, hearing, and touch. I offer that these cases can be handled by supplementing informational psychosemantics with a procedural psychosemantics whereby a representation is about its effects instead of its causes. I discuss conceptual and empirical points that favor a procedural representationalism for our experience of space.

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Pete Mandik
William Paterson University of New Jersey

Citations of this work

Egocentric Spatial Representation in Action and Perception.Robert Briscoe - 2009 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 79 (2):423-460.
Pressing the flesh: A tension in the study of the embodied, embedded mind.Andy Clark - 2008 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 76 (1):37–59.
Is consciousness embodied.Jesse Prinz - 2009 - In Murat Aydede & P. Robbins (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 419--437.

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References found in this work

Consciousness and Experience.William G. Lycan - 1996 - Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Naturalizing the Mind.Fred Dretske - 1995 - Philosophy 72 (279):150-154.
Naturalizing the Mind.Fred Dretske - 1997 - Noûs 31 (4):528-537.
Consciousness and Experience.William G. Lycan - 1996 - Philosophy 72 (282):602-604.

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