Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
July 13, 2026
Ali Yousefi Heris
Are emotions natural kinds? The debate is often framed as a choice between biologically fixed kinds with invariant essences and culturally constructed categories lacking natural reality. I argue that this framing is too restrictive because it conflates two independent questions: what fixes the content of emotion concepts, and what unifies natural kinds. Cross-classifying externalist and...
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
July 6, 2026
Jacob Berger, Lori M. Curtindale
A new method for determining whether nonverbal organisms such as human infants have consciousness has recently emerged. According to this so-called marker methodology, we do not use theories of consciousness to assess whether creatures are conscious by meeting the conditions set out by those theories. Rather, we identify a range of markers that putatively correlate with consciousness to make...
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
July 6, 2026
Niccolò Negro
Analogical abduction is a form of reasoning that combines analogical analysis with inference to the best explanation to address the epistemological problem of other consciousnesses—that is, what justifies our ascriptions of consciousness to other entities? In this paper, I apply analogical abduction to the case of fetal consciousness, focusing on fetuses at the end of the second trimester. I...
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
July 6, 2026
Richard Brown
Higher-order theories of consciousness have gained attention as of late. This is because we are in a position where we can begin to see how we would empirically falsify these kinds of theories. I view these kinds of theories as interesting empirical conjectures about the nature of phenomenal consciousness. If they are false, it will be for empirical reasons. There has been a long debate about...
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
June 25, 2026
Wim Pouw
Iconicity denotes an informative relation between the form of an utterance and the meaning of that utterance. With good design, an utterance directly invites a suitable perceiver with a certain initiation to grasp a meaning in the right direction. Despite the touted importance of iconicity in languaging, it proves difficult to define more formally. When the term is defined, researchers often...
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
May 27, 2026
Edmundo Lopez-Sola, Roser Sanchez-Todo, Jakub Vohryzek et al.
1 citation
The phenomenon of “pure awareness”, central to many contemplative traditions, has recently attracted scientific interest for its relevance to the study of consciousness. In this paper, we investigate pure awareness through the algorithmic agent model, a computational framework with roots in algorithmic information theory. This framework proposes that agents build compressive models of the...
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
May 27, 2026
Vivian Mizrahi
This paper defends a stuff theory of the chemical senses: smell and taste, unlike vision, touch, and hearing, are directly oriented toward stuffs rather than individual objects. I first argue that stuff constitutes an irreducible ontological category — distinct from both individuals and universals. I then contend, drawing on recent anti-reductionist work in the philosophy of chemistry, that...
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
May 13, 2026
Brandon Ashby
Philosophers often discuss zombies and inverts, hypothetical cases in which perfect physical/functional duplicate of us either lack conscious experience or else have their experiences “shuffled” such that they correlate with different stimuli and physiological states. The idea that there may also be physical/functional duplicates of us who have more kinds of experiences than we do, however, has...
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
May 13, 2026
Daniel Garcia Saveedra
In this paper, I argue that two plausible claims for olfactory experience, (i) that modality is spatially indeterminate regarding the spatial location of what it presents and (ii) that whatever it presents, it is experienced as external to the perceiver’s body, are in conflict with one another. I argue that a satisfactory answer to this puzzle requires us to accept as part of olfactory...
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
March 19, 2026
Alexandros Constantinou, John Donaldson, Will Hornett et al.
Mazviita Chirimuuta’s The Brain Abstracted (2024) is a fascinating intervention into the philosophy of mind and neuroscience, containing deeply interesting ideas and arguments. Our aim is to critically probe whether Haptic Realism is neutral on some substantive issues which Chirimuuta would like it to be neutral on. Firstly, it is unclear whether Haptic Realism is compatible with Chirimuuta’s...
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
March 19, 2026
Mazviita Chirimuuta
The Brain Abstracted tackles the question of how we should interpret neuroscience for the purposes of doing philosophy of mind. Neurophilosophy rests on the premise that the findings presented in the theories and models of neuroscience are directly relevant to longstanding philosophical topics such as the nature of perception and agency. Insufficient attention has been paid to the challenge of...
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
March 19, 2026
J. Browning, Zed Adams
Mazviita Chirimuuta has written a timely book that reinvigorates a classic argument against mechanical minds: biological naturalism, the view that consciousness and general intelligence depend upon life. A central commitment of this book is a kind of Kantian humility about the prospects for our knowledge of the brain: it holds that because there is a fundamental difference in kind between...
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
February 27, 2026
Megan A. K. Peters, Hojjat Azimi Asrari
1 citation
Higher-order representations are neural or computational states that are “about” first-order representations, encoding information not about the external world per se but about the agent’s own representational processes – such as the reliability, source, or structure of a first-order representation. These higher-order representations appear critical to metacognition, learning, and even...
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
February 27, 2026
Patrick Butlin
Higher-order representations are those that are about other representations. Humans and some other animals form higher-order mental representations concerning representations in our own minds, through the operation of processes of metacognition and introspection. These have been linked with a wide range of mental capacities and attributes, including consciousness. Recent research on large...
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
February 11, 2026
Jeffrey Yoshimi, Jason A Ford
We describe a form of structuralism that focuses on the mereological parts of conscious states, drawing on the metaphor of a symphony where the removal or alteration of any contributor affects the whole in a holistic but determinate way. This variational method is applied to what we call the "minimal experience of self", a composite encompassing (1) a feeling of agency, (2) a feeling of...
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
February 9, 2026
Sascha Benjamin Fink, Andrew Y. Lee
Conscious experiences have many structural features. Consider how your color experiences have dimensions of variation corresponding to hue, saturation, and brightness, how your visual acuity decreases in precision from the center of your visual field to the periphery, how your pain experiences come in different magnitudes, or how your temporal experience seems to flow in a continuous stream....
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
January 31, 2026
Alexander F G Maier, Naotsugu Tsuchiya
Structural descriptions of qualitative aspects of conscious experience (qualia) offer a rigorous empirical approach to study consciousness. Mathematical structures describing qualia can be mapped to mathematical structures derived from brain activity and underlying neuronal connectivity. That is, rather than merely identifying the co-occurrence of specific neuronal activity patterns with...
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
January 30, 2026
Johannes Kleiner
The Newman problem is a fundamental problem that threatens to undermine structural assumptions and structural theories throughout philosophy and science. Here, we consider the problem in the context of consciousness science. We introduce and discuss the problem, and explain why it is detrimental not only to structuralist assumptions, but also to theories of consciousness, if left unconsidered....
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
January 5, 2026
Jennifer Windt, Manuela Kirberg, Tomas Andrillon
This special issue unites original theoretical and empirical research on two topics that are gaining traction in cognitive neuroscience and psychology, but so far have small philosophical footprints: dreaming and waking mind wandering. While the fields of dream and mind wandering research are largely separate, phenomenological and neurophysiological similarities between waking mind wandering...
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
December 23, 2025
Tadahiro Taniguchi, Masafumi Oizumi, Noburo Saji et al.
1 citation
This perspective paper explores the bidirectional influence between language emergence and the relational structure of subjective experiences, termed qualia structure, and lays out a constructive approach to the intricate dependency between the two. We hypothesize that the emergence of languages with distributional semantics (e.g., syntactic-semantic structures) is linked to the coordination of...
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
December 22, 2025
M. Päßler, Adrien Doerig
Neurophenomenal structuralism posits that conscious experiences are defined relationally and that their phenomenal structures are mirrored by neural structures. While this approach offers a promising framework for identifying neural correlates of the contents of consciousness, we argue that merely establishing structural correspondences between neural and phenomenal structures is insufficient....
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
December 15, 2025
Luke Roelofs
Several debates about conscious experience make reference to its parts, aspects, components, or, as we might neutrally say, elements. Are these elements themselves experiences? Are they unified with each other, and if so how? Are they more basic than, or less basic than, the whole field of consciousness? Or are there not really any distinct elements within experience at all? But it is not...
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
December 10, 2025
Alistair M. C. Isaac
Core theoretical and methodological commitments for a structuralist science of phenomenal experience are articulated in sufficient detail to define a substantive, actionable research program. I argue that phenomenal experience is characterized by geometric, group-theoretic, and dynamic structure. Intuitively, these structures correspond to phenomenal quality spaces, perceptual constancies, and...
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
November 5, 2025
Valerie Bernard
The question as to whether imaginative experience involves phenomenal presence is increasingly a subject of philosophical debate. In contrast to many contemporary thinkers who hold that waking imaginative experience and dreaming involve a feeling of presence, Jean-Paul Sartre (1940/2004, 1936/2012) argues that the phenomenology of presence accompanies perception only. Sartre thus rejects both...
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
November 3, 2025
Miguel Ángel Sebastián
Phenomenal structuralism marks a significant shift in the study of consciousness, emphasizing the relational properties of experiential qualities rather than their intrinsic properties. This approach highlights how subjective qualities are organized and related, proposing that these structural relationships individuate such qualities within a multidimensional space. This paper focuses on the...