To provide a full account of the ability to think “I”-thoughts, we need an explanation of the transition from implicitly self-related information to explicit self-representation. In the previous post, I argued that world-directed action and perception do not require explicit self-representation. This raises the question of when explicit self-representation does …
Anyone familiar with the philosophical literature on representation is familiar with the notion of misrepresentation. The standard view is that any robust notion of representation must make it possible to have misrepresentation. If something cannot misrepresent, it does not represent at all. At least not in the most interesting and …
In the previous post I argued that the self is a unity of immersion, participation, and coordination, the first-person stance at once lived, engaged, and underwritten. In this post I will say more about the concept of immersion. What is sometimes called a first-person perspective can consist of nothing more …
In my Philosophy of Mind class, we just finished reading D. Hutto and E. Myin (2013), Radicalizing Enactivism, MIT Press. One good thing about this book is the way it carefully distinguishes various “enactivist” theses. 1. The mind is embodied, embedded, enactive, extended causally; that is, the mind causally interacts …
This post ends with a brief discussion about anxiety about the internal. I take that anxiety to arise when we see strong arguments for the idea that theories cannot successfully posit non-reducible mental states that provide distinctive causal explanations. The idea that the causal powers producing our beliefs, actions and …
The announcement of my contributions says that they will in part concern my recent Keeping the World in Mind: Mental Representations and the Sciences of the Mind. The overriding theme of that book is the proper understanding of “representation” as it occurs in recent cognitive neuroscience, broadly understood. I argue …
Like other social animals, humans are status-conscious creatures, obsessed with hierarchy and rankings. This is obvious in the realm of finance, the entertainment industry, and academic reputation-chasing, but it also turns up in the more staid realms of theory. Psychology and ethology make frequent reference to the distinction between the …
