David Rosenthal, in his Higher-Order Thought (HOT) theory of consciousness, argues that it is a higher-order thought to the effect that the subject is in a conscious state that makes one conscious of his or her own mental states. In this paper, I argue that since phenomenal consciousness can be vague and Rosenthal’s HOT cannot, HOT is not a necessary condition of phenomenal consciousness. I use primarily Ned Blocks’ refrigerator hum case and Sartre’s example of non-positional awareness to argue that the threshold which determines the degree of first-person awareness necessary for a mental state to be conscious is vague itself, therefore consciousness is a vague concept. HOT cannot accommodate for borderline cases of phenomenal consciousness, therefore it cannot be a necessary condition of all conscious mental states. This is especially relevant in the discussion of non-human animal consciousness, as HOT theories such as Carruthers have been used to deny non-human animal consciousness on the basis of the on/off feature of such representational theories.

This paper explores and evaluates the famous Mary case put forward by Frank Jackson in support of what he calls the knowledge argument against physicalism. After laying out Jackson’s position, I set out to determine whether certain previous physicalist attempts at undermining it have been successful. Finding that they have not, I use their shortcomings to inform the construction of a new position, one which I argue renders the Mary case at odds with itself and frees physicalism from the knowledge argument’s grasp.

Thesis (Revise). / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Georgetown University, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.

Undergraduate honors paper--Mount Holyoke College, 2007. Dept. of Philosophy. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 106-107).

<p>One of the central questions in the philosophy of sounds and hearing is the question of space: what spaces or locations, if any, do sound perceptions make one aware of? When I hear a sound, do I perceive the direction of the sound? The direction (or distance) of the sound's source? The boundaries or dimensions of the space the sound is produced in, or of the source itself? And if sound perceptions do make one aware of space, then with what level of determinacy?</p> <p>In the first chapter of this essay, I describe my approach to sounds and hearing, and state what I take to be the fundamental challenges for any view of sound perception. For one, I take the everyday experience of sounds to be one of the most significant obstacles to an account of sound perception, and one that has scarcely been recognized as such. In everyday hearing, we are not the least bit concerned with sounds. We use sounds to gather information about the behaviour of their sources, which are typically the object of our attention whenever we perceive a sound. If I hear the sound of a car honking or a person speaking, I immediately pay attention to the car and how I can avoid it, or to the person and the meaning they intend to communicate. In everyday hearing, our awareness of sounds is similar to our awareness of windowpanes while watching the goings on outside. Consequently, the everyday experience of sounds is problematic as a model of sound perception.</p> <p>In the second and third chapters, I discuss the two most popular views of sound perception in the philosophical literature, the remote view and the non-spatial view. Since these views have received much attention in the literature, I spend more time raising objections to them in chapter III than describing them in chapter II. One of the principle aims of this essay is to make the case that both of these views are mistaken, despite the valuable insights contained in each.</p> <p>In the fourth and fifth chapters, I discuss the medial view. While the idea that sounds are sound waves located in a medium is the predominant view of sounds themselves in auditory science and the history of philosophy, the view that we hear sounds to be located in the medium has received little attention. Some objections to the medial view have been raised, which I address in chapter V, but very little has been said to defend or even describe the medial view. Part of the motivation for this essay is that I am struck by the fact that the medial view, which would seem to follow naturally from auditory science and the history of philosophy, has been so little discussed. Consequently, the bulk of this essay is dedicated to a description and defence of the medial view.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

A particularly intriguing aspect of personal identity is the staying power of the first arguments. Many of the earliest arguments have remained influential to contemporary theories, even if they sometimes go unacknowledged. One of the most prominent of those long-lived theories comes from Descartes. In this paper I establish the intellectual background, framework, and implications of Cartesian dualism. With this theory in mind I examine Derek Parfit’s We Are Not Human Beings. Despite his denial dualism’s relevance, Parfit’s argument for personal identity contains Cartesian Dualism within it. His examples, definitions, and “intuitions” are compatible, if not more supportive of the Cartesian philosophy. To have the strongest argument that we are not human beings Parfit needs dualism - even if he will not directly acknowledge it.

Proponents of the Extended Mind Thesis (EMT) argue that the mind literally extends into the world because mental states literally extend into the world. But the arguments presented in favour of these claims are compatible with a much weaker conclusion, expressed as the Extended Machinery of Mind Thesis (EMMT) that secures only the extension of the enablers of mental states. What is required is a mark of the mental that can settle the constitutive versus enabling issue. Both sides of the debate accept non-derived content as a necessary condition on a state‘s being mental but this cannot settle the constitution versus enabling issue, meaning the debate has stagnated because there are no decisive moves left to make. Thus, the strongest move for the EM theorist to make is to reject non-derived content as the mark of the mental and seek an alternative. Because enactivism rejects the representational view of mind then if it can be made to work as an account of mentality it offers promise with regard to the formation of a new mark of the mental on which a genuinely interesting EMT can be based.

Mind and World is written in a Wittgensteinian spirit. It is a work whose aim is to address a specific philosophical discomfort. John McDowell diagnoses a tension between the urge for what he describes as 'minimal empiricism' and its apparent impossibility. Minimal empiricism is defined as the idea that constraint is exercised on our thought by the world through experience. In his view, minimal empiricism stands in tension with the fact that conceptually unstructured impressions can have no rational bearing on our beliefs and judgements. This tension forces an oscillation between two equally unattractive positions: the Myth of the Given and coherentism. McDowell's aim is to dissolve this apparent tension which he sees as resting on the more basic assumption of a dualism between reason and nature. Through his invocation of 'second nature' he aims to present a naturalised Platonism in which man's occupation of the space of reasons can be seen as an aspect of his animal nature, not as something essentially alien to us. The thesis starts by outlining McDowell's attempt to escape the oscillation he detects between the Myth of the Given and coherentism. In Chapter One, the content of Mind and World is briefly laid out. The underlying dualism of reason and nature on which the oscillation is said to rest is considered and the resources he employs in his attempt to escape it discussed. These resources include his metaphysical rejection of sideways-on accounts of understanding. The second chapter reinforces the first by isolating and defining a number of key concepts in McDowell's picture. The material discussed here is largely drawn from works other than Mind and World. Three key assumptions are isolated: the rejection of sideways-on accounts of understanding, the de re nature of singular thought and the fully conceptual nature of experience. These assumptions are shown to play a pivotal role in his philosophy by considering his work on Aristotle and Descartes. McDowell aims to provide a 'therapeutic dissolution' of the oscillation between the Myth of the Given and coherentism. In order to be successful it must meet (at least) three criteria which emerge from his writings. These criteria are discussed alongside attempts by other philosophers to escape the oscillation that McDowell detects. The third chapter develops, in broad outline, the argument of the thesis. Two lines of thought are traced from the three central elements of McDowell's view identified in the second chapter. The first stems from his rejection of sideways-on accounts of understanding, whilst the second arises from the object-dependence of singular thought. The picture in Mind and World incorporates what Julian Dodd has termed a 'modest identity theory of truth'. Put simply, an identity theory states that facts are true propositions, and the theory is modest if facts are taken to be composed of senses. McDowell himself explicitly accepts that his picture is committed to a modest identity theory, though its exact nature is unclear from his writings. McDowell's semantic externalism appears to provide an account in which singular senses are object-dependent. Thoughts are composed of these senses, and so are dependent on objects in the world for their content. One would expect that facts too (which are true possible thoughts) would be object-dependent. After all they are composed of object-dependent entities, namely senses. Such a position encourages the idea that objects are explanatorily independent of facts. In Kit Fine's terminology, propositions about objects 'ground' propositions about senses. However, this idea stands in tension with McDowell's rejection of sideways-on accounts of understanding. He claims that the world is composed of facts and that reality does not exist beyond the conceptual realm. Such a position suggests that objects exist only derivatively from their role in facts: "objects figure in the world by figuring in facts, which are true thinkables" [McDowell (1999a) p94. My italics]. In other words, that propositions about facts 'ground' propositions about objects. Since 'grounding' is an asymmetric notion, there is a tension in McDowell's picture which needs to be resolved. Chapter Four examines McDowell's Kantian account of objects. Objects are derived from facts. McDowell is not committed to a substantial semantic externalism in which, when we investigate whether our terms have a reference, we look at the world to see whether there is an object corresponding to our sense of the term. Instead, McDowell's semantic externalism is truistic: once a sense appears in a fact, no further questions can be asked about the reference of the term. The sense's figuring in a true possible thought ensures that there is a reference. There can be no sense without reference because objects are derived from facts (which are true possible thoughts). The conception of objects that McDowell offers, however, fails to sustain important common-sense realist intuitions. Looked at as an account of empirical objects (rather than formal objects, such as mathematical ones), there are deficiencies which can be brought out. His account can be challenged on the grounds that it is unable to allow that sapient and sentient environments have a common ontology. The discussion is framed as a dialogue between a common-sense realist and a McDowellian thinker. This provides for responses to the reasoning to be considered at every appropriate point. These responses are, in the end, not sufficient to allow his account to meet the realist intuitions. He has therefore failed to provide an account based on mere reminders of common-sense truisms. His account of objects is revisionary and must be either replaced or defended by positive arguments. The quietist's claim that only negative arguments are needed to defend his position is undermined once the position abandons common-sense realism. In Chapter Five the focus shifts back to the overall argument laid out in Chapter Three. It might be thought that McDowelPs particular conception of objects is a peripheral error. If this were the case, since his basic account has not been shown to abandon common-sense realism, his revisionary conception of objects could simply be dropped. This line of thought is countered. I present the arguments of two commentators to show the strength of my objection. Mark Sainsbury argues that McDowell should not maintain a substantial form of semantic externalism if he stands firm to his rejection of sideways-on accounts of understanding. Ruth Millikan argues that McDowelPs commitment to a substantial form of semantic externalism stands in tension with his account of sense, which is a central element in his rejection of sideways-on accounts of understanding. The tension which concerns these commentators needs to be addressed. The conception of objects considered in Chapter Four is required. It provides McDowell's explanation of how his rejection of sideways-on accounts of understanding is consistent with his semantic externalism. The final chapter concludes the argument of the thesis. It is shown that McDowell's theory (as it stands) fails to meet his therapeutic aspirations. In particular he has failed to meet two of the three therapeutic requirements attributed to him in Chapter Two. His conception of objects is revisionary and his picture does not avoid the appearance of an insurmountable problem in world-directed thoughts. Its failure to provide for common-sense realism means that he can no longer avail himself of the quietist strategy which disavows the need to provide positive arguments for its conclusions. Therapeutic dissatisfaction with his picture is the result. The argument of this thesis is then located within a broader philosophical landscape.

This thesis introduces and explores a novel construct for studying human beliefs in social science: doxastic spaces. These flexible analytical devices are demonstrated as capturing three key properties of beliefs which are difficult to depict through other formats: the relational, relative, and reflexive properties of beliefs. The doxastic-space paradigm developed by this thesis is likewise shown to enable new and insightful theories about belief formation and change. Two such theories cultivated herein are quantized evidence theory (QET) and entropy-based social learning (EBSL). These theories prioritise not only the evidential bases of beliefs, but also the cognitive limitations on memory and attention that people face in constructing and updating beliefs about their worlds. Such bases and limitations underscore not only the role that context has to play in sculpting beliefs, but also the reciprocal function of beliefs in helping to determine and demarcate context. Part of that context is discussed as being other people relevant in social judgment and learning situations. And interplay between beliefs and context is used to aid explanation for unstable tendencies in neglectful cognition. The work mixes theoretical and empirical investigation of the doxastic-space framework, and suggests that it may serve social science by working to not only forge deeper comprehension of belief dynamics but also to operate as a platform for interdisciplinary exchange.