With the Minds Online conference now in the rearview mirror we are back to regular programming here at Brains, including two upcoming journal symposia and visits from the authors of several new and forthcoming books: Beginning tomorrow, Tuesday 10/11, Carl Gillett will blog for several days about his book Reduction and Emergence in …
Imperativism works well for sprained ankles. Pains are a diverse bunch, though, and pain science presents a number of interesting cases. Much of my book is taken up with defusing potential counterexamples. These fall into three classes, which I’ll take in order of seriousness.
Yesterday I gave a broad outline of the view in my book. But why be an imperativist? I came to imperativism via reflection on the biological function of pain. Most accounts treat pain as a signal of damage. That has always seemed wrong to me — both false to experience and …
Thanks to John Schwenkler for the invitation to guest-blog this week about my book What the Body Commands: The Imperative Theory of Pain (MIT Press 2015). My book is devoted to defending pure imperativism about pains. Imperativism is the claim that pains are akin to imperatives in ordinary language.
A special issue of New Ideas in Psychology on Explaining Representation, edited by Marcin Miłkowski and Konrad Talmont-Kaminski is just out, with contributions by Bill Ramsey, Paweł Gładziejewski, Rob Clowes and Dina Mendonça, Wayne Christensen and John Michael, Witold Hensel, Krystyna Bielecka, Paweł Grabarczyk and myself. Some of the contributions are based on talks …
In my previous post, I referred several times to the state view/content view distinction. As has been argued by authors such as Byrne (2005) or Crowther (2006), the distinction is problematic for nonconceptualists to the extent that they want to make a claim about perceptual content. For central pro-nonconceptualist arguments …
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 …
