Typically, nonconceptualism is introduced in terms of concept possession. Take for instance, the first claim from the recently updated SEP entry on nonconceptual content: The central idea behind the theory of nonconceptual mental content is that some mental states can represent the world even though the bearer of those mental …
First off, I want to thank John Schwenkler for inviting me to contribute a few posts on my new book, Modest Nonconceptualism: Epistemology, Phenomenology, Content, this week. As I’m sure readers of the Brains blog are well aware, there is an intricate debate over whether perceptual experience is conceptual or …
This final post addresses an obvious puzzle: why is reflective thinking sensory based? We can, after all, think about all sorts of abstract nonsensory topics. We think about God, the size of the universe, the mental states of other people, the validity of arguments, arithmetical facts and other mathematical entities, …
Most psychologists who study human reasoning have converged on some or other version of dual-systems theory. System 1 is a set of systems that are supposed to be fast, inflexible, and unconscious in their operations, issuing in the initial intuitions many of us have when presented with a novel reasoning …
Yesterday I sketched an argument for believing that all access-conscious thinking is sensory based. But suppose this conclusion is wrong. Suppose there is some sort of workspace in which amodal (nonsensory) thoughts – judgments, goals, decisions, intentions, and the rest – can become active and be conscious. What would one …
One argument for the view that all access-consciousness depends upon sensory representations is an inference to the best explanation (or rather, a series of them) that brings together recent work on consciousness with recent work on working memory. The argument builds on the findings of Bernard Baars, Stanislas Dehaene, and …
Many thanks to John Schwenkler for this opportunity to talk about some of my recent work, especially my book The Centered Mind: What the Science of Working Memory Shows Us About the Nature of Human Thought, published earlier this year by Oxford University Press. In this post I’ll sketch the …
