Philosophical Psychology
March 3, 2006
Jennifer Matey
10 citations
David Rosenthal's higher-order thought (HOT) theory is one of the most widely argued for of the higher-order accounts of consciousness. I argue that Rosenthal vacillates between two models of the HOT theory. First, I argue that these models employ different concepts of ‘state consciousness’; the two concepts each refer to mental state tokens, but in virtue of different properties. In one model,...
Philosophical Psychology
December 1, 1997
Warren S. Brown
Donald MacKay's description of the embodiment of an efficacious conscious mind is reviewed as a version of non‐reductive physicalism. Particular focus is given to MacKay's analysis of the emergence of consciousness in the capacity for self‐evaluation which results from informational feedback regarding the results of action. Unique to MacKay's posthumously published Gifford Lectures is his...
Philosophical Psychology
June 1, 1996
Shaun Gallagher, Andrew N. Meltzoff
337 citations
Recent studies in developmental psychology have found evidence to suggest that there exists an innate system that accounts for the possibilities of early infant imitation and the existence of phantom limbs in cases of congenital absence of limbs. These results challenge traditional assumptions about the status and development of the body schema and body image, and about the nature of the...
Philosophical Psychology
June 1, 1996
Valerie Gray Hardcastle
2 citations
Connectionist views in psychology and neuroscience give the impression that there is no one place in the brain into which all information funnels. If these impression are accurate, then we will have great difficulty picking out a point in neuronal or psychological time at which phenomena become conscious. If so, pointing to one place in which we are conscious of a particular event and expecting...
Philosophical Psychology
June 1, 1996
Huib Looren de Jong
In this comment, a picture of ERP research is sketched that is slightly different from Hardcastle's account, in that it emphasises the functional characterisation of ERP components rather than the neurophysiological connections. It is suggested that selection pressure of ERP work on cognitive and neurophysiological theories and vice versa is a more apt metaphor for intertheoretical relations in...
Philosophical Psychology
1995
Antti Revonsuo
148 citations
In this paper I develop the thesis that dreams are essential to an understanding of waking consciousness. In the first part I argue in opposition to the philosophers Malcolm and Dennett that empirical evidence now shows dreams to be real conscious experiences. In the second part, three questions concerning consciousness research are addressed. (1) How do we isolate the system to be explained...
Philosophical Psychology
1995
Allin Cottrell
2 citations
Owen Flanagan's arguments concerning qualia constitute an intermediate position between Dennett's “disqualification” of qualia and the thesis that qualia represent an insurmountable obstacle to constructive naturalism. This middle ground is potentially attractive, but it is shown to have serious problems. This is brought out via consideration of several classic areas of dispute connected with...
Philosophical Psychology
1994
William Epstein, Gary Hatfield
34 citations
The Gestalt psychologists adopted a set of positions on mind‐body issues that seem like an odd mix. They sought to combine a version of naturalism and physiological reductionism with an insistence on the reality of the phenomenal and the attribution of meanings to objects as natural characteristics. After reviewing basic positions in contemporary philosophy of mind, we examine the Gestalt...
Philosophical Psychology
1993
Thomas Natsoulas
70 citations
The present article distinguishes three kinds of accounts of direct (reflective) awareness (i.e. awareness of one's mental occurrences causally unmediated by any other mental occurrence): mental‐eye theory, self‐intimational theory and appendage theory. These aim to explain the same phenomenon, though each proposes that direct (reflective) awareness occurs in a fundamentally different way....
Philosophical Psychology
1993
David Rosenthal
45 citations
Theories of what it is for a mental state to be conscious must answer two questions. We must say how we're conscious of our conscious mental states. And we must explain why we seem to be conscious of them in a way that's immediate. Thomas Natsoulas (1993) distinguishes three strategies for explaining what it is for mental states to be conscious. I show that the differences among those...
Philosophical Psychology
1988
Natika W Newton
3 citations
John Searle has argued that one can imagine embodying a machine running any computer program without understanding the symbols, and hence that purely computational processes do not yield understanding. The disagreement this argument has generated stems, I hold, from ambiguity in talk of ‘understanding’. The concept is analysed as a relation between subjects and symbols having two components: a...