This excellent collection of essays by Sydney Shoemaker covers his work over the last ten years in the philosophy of mind. Shoemaker's overarching concern in the collection is to provide an account of the mind that does justice to the “first-person perspective.” The two main topics are the nature of self-knowledge and the nature of sensory experience. The essays are insightful, careful, and thought-provoking.

This excellent collection of essays by Sydney Shoemaker covers his work over the last ten years in the philosophy of mind. Shoemaker's overarching concern in the collection is to provide an account of the mind that does justice to the “first-person perspective.” The two main topics are the nature of self-knowledge and the nature of sensory experience. The essays are insightful, careful, and thought-provoking.

I am grateful to Michael Tye for his discussion of my book, and to the editor for offering me the opportunity to respond to Tye's criticisms of my account of the phenomenal character of perceptual experience—especially since this prompted reflections that led me to see a way of removing one unattractive feature of the account.

The words “content” and “character” in my title refer to the representational content and phenomenal character of color experiences. So my topic concerns the nature of our experience of color. But I will, of course, be talking about colors as well as color experience. Let me set the stage by mentioning some things, some more controversial than others, that I will be taking for granted. I assume, to begin with, that objects in the world have colors, and have them independently (...) of being perceived to have them, and independently even of there being creatures capable of perceiving them. I think, and this of course sets me apart from the many color irrealists among philosophers and color scientists, that any reasonable semantics for color terms, and any reasonable account of the reference of color concepts, should yield the result that colors are properties of external things that are realized in certain of their physical properties, namely those responsible for their reflecting or emitting the light whose impact on our retinas is involved in causing our color perceptions. This brings me to a further assumption that I shall be making, namely the truth of physicalism. I take physicalism to be the thesis that all properties of things either are or are realized in basic physical properties, where basic physical properties are the properties that underlie the behavior and causal powers of inanimate things. There are two ways in which the commitment to physicalism will figure in my discussion. First, I assume that colors are physically realized properties. Second, I assume that color experiences are physically realized. These two commitments frame the problem I am discussing – how can colors be properties realized in the microphysical properties of things, and how can color experience be so realized? I don’t think there is any generally accepted account of what it is for a property to be “realized in” other properties. For those who think, as I do, that properties are individuated by their causal features, it should seem plausible to say that property P realizes property Q just in case the forward looking causal features of Q are a subset of the forward looking causal features of P, and the backward looking.... (shrink)

This paper defends a version of Sheomaker-style representationalism about qualitative character.

This expanded edition of C L Hardin's ground-breaking work on colour features a new chapter, 'Further Thoughts: 1993', in which the author revisits the dispute ...

Sydney Shoemaker is one of the most influential philosophers currently writing on philosophy of mind and metaphysics. The essays in this collection deal with the way in which we know our own minds, and with the nature of those mental states of which we have our most direct conscious awareness. Professor Shoemaker opposes the 'inner sense' conception of introspective self-knowledge. He defends the view that perceptual and sensory states have non-representational features - 'qualia' - that determine what it is like (...) to have them. Amongst the other topics covered are the unity of consciousness, and the idea that the 'first-person perspective' gives a privileged route to philosophical understanding of the nature of mind. This major collection is sure to prove invaluable to all advanced students of the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. (shrink)

This expanded edition of C L Hardin's ground-breaking work on colour features a new chapter, 'Further Thoughts: 1993', in which the author revisits the dispute ...

This excellent collection of essays by Sydney Shoemaker covers his work over the last ten years in the philosophy of mind. Shoemaker's overarching concern in the collection is to provide an account of the mind that does justice to the “first-person perspective.” The two main topics are the nature of self-knowledge and the nature of sensory experience. The essays are insightful, careful, and thought-provoking.