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This book advances a novel way to resolve the central philosophical problem about the mind: how it is that consciousness or experience fits into a larger naturalistic picture of the world. The correct response to the problem, it is argued, is not to posit a realm of experience distinct from the physical, nor to deny the reality of phenomenal experience, nor even to rethink our understanding of consciousness and the language we use to talk about it. Instead, we should view the problem itself as having its origin in our ignorance of the relevant physical facts. This change of orientation is shown to be well motivated historically, empirically, and philosophically, and to have none of the side effects it is sometimes thought to have. The result is a philosophical perspective on the mind that has a number of far-reaching consequences: for consciousness studies, for our place in nature, and for the way we think about the relationship between philosophy and science.

This book has two Parts. Part I prepares the ground for this theory of rational free action by seeking to undermine the threat that physicalism presents to it. This it does this by challenging the cogency of the causal closure argument for physicalism in all of its forms. It shows that a dualistic philosophy of mind — one which holds that human mental states and their subjects cannot simply be identified with bodily states and human bodies respectively — is both metaphysically coherent and entirely consistent with known empirical facts concerning mental causation and causation in the physical domain. Part II defends a middle path between classical agent causalism and volitionism. It accords to volitions the status of basic actions, maintains that these are free and spontaneous exercises of the two-way power of the will, performed in the light of reason, and contends that agents are the causal source of all change in the world — with rational, free agents like ourselves having a special place in the causal order as unmoved movers, or initiators of new causal chains. Rather than accepting the notion of event causation as perfectly legitimate in the inanimate domain and representing agent causation as a sui generis phenomenon restricted to rational beings, in which an agent as such is a cause, it holds that all causation is causation by agents, but that agents can only cause things to happen by acting in suitable ways. And it says that what is special about rational agents is that they possess a distinctively rational power — the power of will or choice. It also defends a thoroughgoing externalism regarding reasons for action, holding these to be mind-independent worldly entities rather than the beliefs and desires of agents.

By definition, zombies would be behaviourally and physically just like us, but not conscious. If a zombie world is possible, then physicalism is false. Just as importantly, the seductive conception of phenomenal consciousness embodied by the zombie idea is fundamentally misconceived. One of this book’s two main aims is to bring out the incoherence of the zombie idea with the help of an intuitively appealing argument (the ‘sole-pictures argument’). The other is to develop a fresh approach to understanding phenomenal consciousness by exploiting two key notions: that of a ‘basic package’ of capacities which is necessary and sufficient for perception in the full sense; and that of ‘direct activity’, which, when combined with the basic package, is necessary and sufficient for perceptual consciousness. These definitions may apply to quite humble creatures, and even to suitably constructed artefacts.

What is the nature of consciousness? How is consciousness related to brain processes? This book discusses these topics. All chapters focus on consciousness in the “phenomenal” sense: looking at what it's like to have an experience. Consciousness has long been regarded as the biggest stumbling block for physicalism, the view that the mind is physical. This controversy has gained focus over the last few decades, and phenomenal knowledge and phenomenal concepts — knowledge of consciousness and the associated concepts — have come to play increasingly prominent roles in this debate. Consider Frank Jackson's famous case of Mary, the super-scientist who learns all the physical information while confined in a black-and-white room. According to Jackson, if physicalism is true, then Mary's physical knowledge should allow her to deduce what it's like to see in color. Yet it seems intuitively clear that she learns something when she leaves the room. But then how can consciousness be physical? Arguably, whether this sort of reasoning is sound depends on how phenomenal concepts and phenomenal knowledge are construed. For example, some argue that the Mary case reveals something about phenomenal concepts but has no implications for the nature of consciousness itself. Are responses along these lines adequate? Or does the problem arise again at the level of phenomenal concepts?

Elaborates a materialist view of consciousness. The central thesis of the book is that while conscious states are material, we humans have two quite different ways of thinking about them. We can think about them materially, as normal parts of the material world, but we can also think about them phenomenally, as states that feel a certain way. These two modes of thought refer to the same items in reality, but at a conceptual level they are distinct. By focusing on the special structure of phenomenal concepts, David Papineau is able to expose the flaws in the standard arguments against materialism, while at the same time explaining why dualism can seem so intuitively compelling. The book also considers the prospects for scientific research into consciousness, and argues that such research often promises more than it can deliver. Once phenomenal concepts are recognized for what they are, many of the questions posed by consciousness research turn out to be irredeemably vague.

Consciousness presents a problem. There are excellent reasons for believing that materialism, or physicalism, is the correct metaphysical view of our world, yet it is extremely difficult to see how conscious experiences, or qualia, can be incorporated into the materialist framework. Both aspects of the problem are defended. First, a positive argument for materialism is given, with responses to dualist objections. Second, objections are presented to most materialist attempts to explain consciousness – in particular, higher‐order theories, representationalism, and eliminativism. Finally, it is argued that to make genuine progress on this problem we need to delve deeper into the question of our cognitive access to our own experience. Thus the problems of intentionality and consciousness are not as separable as has often been thought.

Conceptual analysis is currently out of favour, especially in North America. This is partly through misunderstanding of its nature. Properly understood, conceptual analysis is not a mysterious activity discredited by Quine that seeks after the a priori in some hard‐to‐understand sense. It is, rather, something familiar to everyone, philosophers and non‐philosophers alike—or so I argue. Another reason for its unpopularity is a failure to appreciate the need for conceptual analysis. The cost of repudiating it has not been sufficiently appreciated; without it, we cannot address a whole raft of important questions.

I have always been suspicious of excessively abstract theorizing in philosophy. I think that an important test of metaphilosophical claims is whether they make good sense in the context of particular problems. The discussion in the book is, accordingly, anchored in particular philosophical debates. The basic framework is developed in the first three chapters via a consideration of the role of conceptual analysis in the debate over the doctrine in metaphysics known as physicalism, with digressions on free will, meaning, personal identity, motion, and change, and then applied in the last three chapters to current debates over colour and ethics.

Contains thirteen essays published by Barry Stroud between 1965 and 2000 on central topics in the philosophy of language and epistemology. In a volume that generally deals with the philosophical questions of meaning, understanding, necessity, and the intentionality of thought, there are some papers devoted to specific questions of Wittgenstein's philosophy, as well as papers on Quine, Searle, Davidson, and David Pears.

The tenor of the essays on meaning is critical of reductive attempts to elucidate meaning and understanding ‘from outside’—i.e. without summoning intentional vocabulary referring to what speakers mean and understand in relation to each other. In view of considerations regarding the indispensably semantical nature of explanatory accounts of meaning, an appeal to speakers’ conformity to linguistic practice must satisfy the requirements of a thick, semantical description of the meaning of words in a community. There will be no satisfactory theories of meaning solely in terms of non‐semantic, non‐intentional regularities. In the author's estimation, this idea runs close to Wittgenstein's treatment of ‘inner’ or ‘private’ objects. The first essay in this collection addresses the attribution of a ‘conventionalist’ position to Wittgenstein in summation of his thought on necessity and logical truth. The author looks askance at Michael Dummett's conventionalist reading of Wittgenstein and takes it to task accordingly. ‘Inference, Belief and Understanding’ (essay 2) re‐examines the question of being ‘forced’ to a conclusion in the context of Lewis Carroll's ‘What the Tortoise said to Achilles’. It is argued, here and throughout, that it is important to grasp the implications of the kind of regress besetting Achilles for a theory of understanding and the mind. The threat of regress is a key constraint on philosophical accounts of understanding viewed as a capacity possessed by the speaker. In his third essay ‘Evolution and the Necessity of Thought’, the author asks whether we can hold steadfast to a notion of necessity and an evolutionary or historical story of the acquisition of human knowledge. Wittgenstein's arguments against the existence of a private language are treated in the fifth and again, in more detail, in the final essay in this volume— the author notes his intention to look at the question relatively unencumbered by existing scholarship in the hope of drawing out the very idea of what Wittgenstein was doing in his philosophy. The collection of essays on Wittgenstein includes a study of Wittgenstein on meaning, understanding, and community (essay 6), which partly overlaps with an essay on translation that additionally revisits the problem of regress and its implications for semantic competence (essay 8). It is argued that the indeterminacy of meaning with respect to a certain class of facts has the consequence that meaning is indeterminate tout court only if those facts are the only available facts; but a ‘community practice’ view of meaning has no such consequence. A fuller treatment of some of these topics is given in ‘Mind, Meaning and Practice’ (essay 11), which examines the idea of meaning as use, and ostensive teaching in relation to Wittgenstein's discussion of meaning and distorted conception of the mental.

The essays on Quine (essay 7 and 10) consider the doctrine of physicalism and the question of conceptual schemes respectively. Searle's theory of intentionality (‘background’) supposes that there are attitudes that are mental, though pre‐intentional and non‐representational; considerations are brought against Searle in essay 9. The work on Davidson provides the renewed occasion for attacking the idea that linguistic competence or understanding is a matter of applying general rules or conventions to particular utterances (essay 12). A central theme of this book—the threat of regress and the pressure it exerts on semantic theory—is brought out with reference to the theory of understanding, which locates linguistic competence in the application of general knowledge to particular utterances. It is argued that such theories invariably fall foul of regress. A profitable semantic theory should combine the insight that explaining understanding and meaning is aptly fulfilled by invoking speakers’ abilities and knowledge, yet without positing additional mental entities, with a recognition that the abilities and knowledge in question go beyond mere relations between expressions.

If humans are purely physical, and the brain does the work formerly assigned to the mind or soul, then how can it fail to be the case that our thoughts and actions are determined by the laws of neurobiology, and that free will, moral responsibility, and reason itself are in jeopardy? Bringing together insights from both philosophy and neuroscience, this book defends a non-reductive version of physicalism whereby humans are (sometimes) the authors of their own thoughts and actions. One resource is an account of mind as embodied and constituted by action-feedback-evaluation-action loops in the environment, ‘scaffolded’ by culture. Another is a non-mysterious account of downward (mental) causation explained in terms of a complex, higher-order system exercising constraints on lower-level processes. These resources are utilized to take on two problems in philosophy of mind: the meaningfulness of language, and the causal efficacy of the mental. Solutions to these problems are a prerequisite to addressing the central problem of the book: how can biological organisms be free and morally responsible? The book argues that the real problem is not neurobiological determinism, but neurobiological reductionism. The relevant question is whether humans, as whole persons, exert downward causation over some of their own parts and processes. If all organisms do this to some extent, what needs to be added to this animalian flexibility to constitute free and responsible action? The keys are sophisticated language and hierarchically ordered cognitive processes allowing (mature) humans to evaluate their own actions, motives, goals, and moral principles.