ISSN 1386-9795
11 papers in the library · 173 citations · publishing 2016-2026
Philosophical Explorations September 18, 2026 Sander van Eijkern
This paper argues that the predominant metaethical positions, namely, expressivism, naturalist realism, nonnaturalist realism, and error theory, treat normativity as explanatorily efficacious in thought and action only insofar as mental states mediate it. This reflects a mentalistic, representationalist conception of cognition and agency that restricts metaethical theorizing. To avoid this...
Philosophical Explorations September 4, 2026 Daniel S Shabasson
A commonly endorsed assumption about experience – a.k.a. ‘phenomenal consciousness’ – is what I call the intrinsic epistemicity thesis (‘the IE thesis’), according to which an experience E exists only if the subject is epistemically related to it. I argue that the IE thesis is unstable. It entails a worrisome circular ontological dependency relationship between an experience E and the subject’s...
Philosophical Explorations July 6, 2026 Krystyna Bielecka
This paper identifies a structural deficiency in Radical Enactivism called ‘the Content-Binding Problem’. REC distinguishes sharply between contentless basic cognition and content-involving sociolinguistic practices. This separation creates a difficulty in explaining how disparate cognitive formats integrate into a coherent whole. The integration process is often invisible during healthy...
Philosophical Explorations September 2, 2025 Robert Chis-Ciure 1 citation
This paper links mathematical consciousness science, particularly Integrated Information Theory (IIT), to Immanuel Kant's philosophy. Skeptics of IIT's theoretical foundation often target its fundamental identity between an experience and Φ-structure. My account brings in the Kantian notion that this identity is a constitutive a priori principle and responds to some objections by drawing on...
Philosophical Explorations May 4, 2018 Michael D Kirchhoff, Ian H. Robertson 95 citations
This paper starts by considering an argument for thinking that predictive processing (PP) is representational. This argument suggests that the Kullback–Leibler (KL)-divergence provides an accessible measure of misrepresentation, and therefore, a measure of representational content in hierarchical Bayesian inference. The paper then argues that while the KL-divergence is a measure of information,...
Philosophical Explorations May 4, 2018 Robert D. Rupert 40 citations
This paper engages critically with anti-representationalist arguments pressed by prominent enactivists and their allies. The arguments in question are meant to show that the “as-such” and “job-description” problems constitute insurmountable challenges to causal-informational theories of mental content. In response to these challenges, a positive account of what makes a physical or computational...
Philosophical Explorations May 4, 2018 Melanie G. Rosen 11 citations
When we dream, it is often assumed, we are isolated from the external environment. It is also commonly believed that dreams can be, at times, accurate, convincing replicas of waking experience. Here I analyse some of the implications of this view for an enactive theory of conscious experience. If dreams are, as described by the received view, “inactive”, or “cranially envatted” whilst...
Philosophical Explorations May 4, 2018 Jesse Kuokkanen, Anna‐Mari Rusanen 6 citations
We analyse Hutto & Myin's three arguments against computationalism [Hutto, D., E. Myin, A. Peeters, and F. Zahnoun. Forthcoming. “The Cognitive Basis of Computation: Putting Computation In Its Place.” In The Routledge Handbook of the Computational Mind, edited by M. Sprevak, and M. Colombo. London: Routledge.; Hutto, D., and E. Myin. 2012. Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds Without Content....
Philosophical Explorations May 4, 2018 Thomas Raleigh 5 citations
Enactivist (Embodied, Embedded, etc.) approaches in cognitive science and philosophy of mind are sometimes, though not always, conjoined with an anti-representational commitment. A weaker anti-representational claim is that ascribing representational content to internal/sub-personal processes is not compulsory when giving psychological explanations. A stronger anti-representational claim is...
Philosophical Explorations May 3, 2016 Marta Jorba, Dermot Moran 10 citations
This introduction presents a state of the art of philosophical research on cognitive phenomenology and its relation to the nature of conscious thinking more generally. We firstly introduce the question of cognitive phenomenology, the motivation for the debate, and situate the discussion within the fields of philosophy (analytic and phenomenological traditions), cognitive psychology and...
Philosophical Explorations May 3, 2016 Miguel Ángel Sebastián 5 citations
The well-known distinction between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness has moved away from the conceptual domain into the empirical one, and the debate now is focused on whether the neural mechanisms of cognitive access are constitutive of the neural correlate of phenomenal consciousness. In this paper, I want to analyze the consequences that a negative reply to this question has...