Elaborates some of the background assumptions made by the chapters that follow and situates the theory that the author espouses within a wider context and range of alternatives. More specifically, it distinguishes between creature consciousness and state consciousness, and between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness. And it defends representationalist accounts of consciousness against brute physicalist accounts. The chapter also introduces the remaining 11 chapters.

How can the propositional attitudes of several individuals be aggregated into overall collective propositional attitudes? Although there are large bodies of work on the aggregation of various special kinds of propositional attitudes, such as preferences, judgments, probabilities and utilities, the aggregation of propositional attitudes is seldom studied in full generality. In this paper, we seek to contribute to …lling this gap in the literature. We sketch the ingredients of a general theory of propositional attitude aggregation and prove two new theorems. (...) Our …rst theorem simultaneously characterizes some prominent aggregation rules in the cases of probability, judgment and preference aggregation, including linear opinion pooling and Arrovian dictatorships. Our second theorem abstracts even further from the speci…c kinds of attitudes in question and describes the properties of a large class of aggregation rules applicable to a variety of belief-like attitudes. Our approach integrates some previously disconnected areas of investigation. (shrink)