Metaphysics of Science vs. Metaphysics for Science: Scientific and Philosophical Frameworks

Part I of the book clears space for later work and supplies a key theoretical platform. To get us started, I briefly sketch the outlines of the scientific views to highlight how they differ from philosophical accounts of reduction /emergence; and to broach a diagnosis of how the dislocation between …

Livestream available for a conference on “Non-physicalist View of Consciousness” (May 24-26)

This coming week the University of Cambridge will host a conference on Non-physicalist Views of Consciousness, supported by the New Directions in the Study of the Mind project: Consciousness has been one of the stumbling blocks for physicalist theories of the mind. Much effort has been dedicated to finding the …

What is an Attitude?

Edouard Machery University of Pittsburgh Philosophers have mostly focused on the practical implications of the recent psychological research on biases (racism, sexism, etc.) and, more generally, on attitudes (e.g., political attitudes). As is by now well known, this impressive body of work is based on novel indirect measures such as …

Belief, willpower, and implicit bias

Keith Frankish Visiting Research Fellow, The Open University www.keithfrankish.com Jo sincerely affirms that black people are no less trustworthy than white people. Yet despite this, she consistently behaves in ways that reflect the assumption that black people are less trustworthy — subtly adjusting her behaviour towards black people across a …

Conceptualism Can’t Account for the Phenomenology of Hallucination

The argument from fineness of grain is probably the most discussed argument for nonconceptualism. (To name but a few discussants: Peacocke 1998, 2001a, 2001b; McDowell 1994, 1998, Brewer 1999, 2005, Tye 2005, Coliva 2003, Kelly 2001a, 2001b, Veillet 2014.) To account for the fine-grained phenomenal character of visual experience in …

Why all conscious thinking is sensory-based

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, …

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