Imperfect Cognitions

This week's post is by Shao-Pu Kang, a n assistant professor at National Tsing-Hua University, Graduate Institute of Philosophy,  his recent publication Against an Epistemic Argument for Mineness in Review of Philosophy and Psychology .    Shao-Pu Kang  Suppose you see a sunrise. You are thrilled, feel a chill in the air, hear your inner voice saying “that’s magnificent,” imagine enjoying the view with your best friend, and think about your loved one. As you undergo these mental states, do you experience them as yours, even be fore you turn your attention to and reflect on them? This question lies at the heart of live debates about whether experiences come with a built-in sense of ownership, often called mineness: a pre-reflective awareness of one’s experiences as one’s own. In “Against an Epistemic Argument for Mineness,” I critically examine Marie Guillot’s novel attempt to defend typicalism, the view that all ordinary experiences have mineness.  Guillot star...

Henry Taylor My name is Henry Taylor and I have recently submitted my PhD in philosophy at Durham University. In this post, I would like to discuss some issues that I address in my paper ‘Is Attention Necessary and Sufficient for Phenomenal Consciousness?’ With some notable exceptions, attention has until relatively recently been neglected as a topic in its own right in analytic philosophy. This has occurred despite its widespread use in fields as diverse as aesthetics, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics. However, in the last few years this attitude has radically and suddenly shifted, and attention is one of the most exciting topics in contemporary philosophy of psychology. One of the most striking questions within this domain is whether it is possible to use attention to explain consciousness. Amongst many psychologists, and philosophers, there is hope that by studying consciousness in terms of attention, the problem of consciousness may turn out to be empirically tractable. ...