Philosophical Perspectives
October 18, 2023
Angela Mendelovici, David Bourget
We distinguish between different problems of “aboutness”: the “hard” problem of explaining the everyday phenomenon of intentionality and three less challenging “easy” sets of problems concerning the posits of folk psychology, the notions of representation invoked in the mind‐brain sciences, and the intensionality (with an “s”) of mental language. The problem of intentionality is especially hard...
The Philosophical Review
April 1, 2023
Angela Mendelovici, David Bourget
Michael Tye is perhaps best known for his defense of tracking representationalism, a view that combines representationalism (the view that an experience’s phenomenal character is determined by its representational content) with a tracking theory of representation (the view that mental representation is a matter of causal covariation, carrying information, or, more generally, tracking). In...
The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness
July 9, 2020
Angela Mendelovici, David Bourget
28 citations
Philosophers traditionally recognize two key features of mental states: intentionality and phenomenal consciousness. To a first approximation, intentionality is the ‘aboutness’ of mental states, and phenomenal consciousness is the felt, experiential, qualitative, or ‘what it’s like’ aspect of mental states. In the past few decades, these features have been widely assumed to be distinct and...
Inquiry
October 13, 2017
David Bourget
5 citations
If there is content that we reason on, cognitive content, it is in the head and accessible to reasoning mechanisms. This paper discusses the phenomenal theory of cognitive content, according to which cognitive contents are the contents of phenomenal consciousness. I begin by distinguishing cognitive content from the closely associated notion of narrow content. I then argue, drawing on prior...