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 …
The Minds Online conference has begun, and our first session will be open for discussion through September 4. It is on the theme of Social Cognition, and includes the following papers: Tony Jack and Jared Friedman (Case Western Reserve): “Mapping cognitive structure onto the landscape of philosophical debate: an empirical framework …
In 1890 William James introduced the metaphor of the “stream of consciousness” into Western psychology: “Consciousness… is nothing jointed; it flows. A ‘river’ or ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, …
I will conclude this series of posts by saying something about why I think cognitive phenomenology is significant. The basic idea is that phenomenology in general is connected to epistemology, value theory, and semantics via the notion of awareness, and cognitive phenomenology in particular is connected to these areas via …
According to Mill “pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends.” This does not imply that the good life is a degrading one, fit for swine, however, at least partly because there are “pleasures of the intellect, of the feelings and imagination, and of the moral …
In my first post I isolated Irreducibility as the main thesis in dispute about cognitive phenomenology: Irreducibility: Some cognitive states put one in phenomenal states for which no wholly sensory states suffice. In this post I am going to write about the role introspection should play in helping us decide …
