Manuscrito
August 12, 2025
Roberto Horácio de Sá Pereira, Victor Machado Barcellos
Abstract This review critically examines Frances Egan’s Deflating Mental Representation (MIT Press, 2025), a seminal work in the philosophy of mind that challenges traditional conceptions of mental representation and intentionality. Egan argues for a deflationary account wherein ascriptions of content to mental states are pragmatically grounded and serve primarily as explanatory tools, rather...
Qeios
June 7, 2023
Roberto Horácio de Sá Pereira, Sérgio Farias de Souza Filho, Victor Machado Barcellos
This essay aims to expose the metaphysical underpinnings of enactivism. While enactivism relies heavily on rejecting the traditional mind-body problem by excluding the familiar thought experiments that favor phenomenal dualism, the crucial point that is overlooked is instead the brain-body problem, specifically the crucial interaction between the brain and the bodily limbs in their embodied...
Qeios
April 5, 2023
Roberto Horácio de Sá Pereira, Sérgio Farias de Souza Filho, Victor Machado Barcellos
1 citation
This paper explores the crucial connection between the brain and other organs of the body and the concept of embodied sensorimotor contingencies. Our contention is this: enactivism in all its forms reverses the conventional order of things. It is not the embodied sensorimotor actions that shape and configure brain patterns, but rather the "brainets" (synchronizations of neural activities...
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
December 7, 2020
Roberto Horácio de Sá Pereira
Abstract How does one know the phenomenal character of one’s own experience? I aim to present and defend a new view of the epistemology of qualia that addresses this issue. My view results from a reworking of Dretske’s displaced perception model. The guiding line is the key Wittgensteinian insight of his Private Language Argument, namely the claim that no inner perception of qualia can justify...
Grazer Philosophische Studien
November 7, 2016
Roberto Horácio de Sá Pereira
The purpose of this article is to offer a new view of the key relation between the content and the conscious character of visual experience. The author aims to support the following claims. First, the author rejects the qualia realist claim that conscious character is an intrinsic, nonrepresentational property of visual experience, for example, a pattern of activation of neurons. However, the...
Analytica Revista de Filosofia
2009
Roberto Horácio de Sá Pereira
1 citation
Este artigo objetiva desenvolver e defender uma nova abordagem para a nocao de conteudo exiguo no âmbito da vertente nao-individualista na filosofia da mente e da teoria da informacao na semântica. Seu objetivo consiste em mostrar que o conteudo de certos estados mentais e determinado em parte pelas relacoes que o individuo entretem com as entidades do seu ambiente, mas em parte tambem pela...