Experiences and beliefs are different sorts of mental states, and are often taken to belong to very different domains. Experiences are paradigmatically phenomenal, characterized by what it is like to have them. Beliefs are paradigmatically intentional, characterized by their propositional content. But there are a number of crucial points where these domains intersect.

Traditionally, perceptual experiences—for example, the experience of seeing a cat—were thought to have two quite distinct components. When one sees a cat, one’s experience is “about ” the cat: this is the representational or intentional component of the experience. One’s experience also has phenomenal character: this is the sensational component of the experience. Although the intentional and sensational components at least typically go together, in principle they might come apart: the intentional component could be present without the sensational component or vice versa. Recently a number of philosophers have argued that this picture of perception is incorrect. According to them, the sensational component of a perceptual experience cannot vary independently of its intentional component: the phenomenal character of a perceptual experience is entirely determined by the experience’s propositional content—that is, by what it represents. Usually this is supposed to hold also of “bodily sensations”: experiences of pain, twinges, tickles, and the like. The phenomenal character of such experiences, it is claimed, is likewise entirely determined by their propositional contents. This view comes in a number of variants, and also goes under a number of names:

ith no language at all may all entertain the same concepts--and we may hope to have a zoologically unified cognitive science. Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science 152 Frelinghuysen Road Piscataway, NJ 08854-8020 galliste@ruccs.rutgers.edu In recent years, the Whorfian hypothesis has enjoyed a revival in anthropology, psychology and linguistics, fueled in appreciable measure by studies on cross-cultural correlations between variations in spatial language use and variations in performance on seemingly simple tests of spatial conceptualization [6-9]. In English, the "south end of a horse headed north" is a humorous locution because it seems to choose an absurdly awkward frame of reference in which to indicate the end of the horse that is meant. Telling someone to look at the tree upslope of them--in lieu of telling them to look at the tree in front of them---strikes most Europeans as a similarly awkward. It uses an allocentric (other centered) frame in a context where an egocentric (subj

This essay is a sustained attempt to bring new light to some of the perennial problems in philosophy of mind surrounding phenomenal consciousness and introspection through developing an account of sensory and phenomenal concepts. Building on the information-theoretic framework of Dretske (1981), we present an informational psychosemantics as it applies to what we call sensory concepts, concepts that apply, roughly, to so-called secondary qualities of objects. We show that these concepts have a special informational character and semantic structure that closely tie them to the brain states realizing conscious qualitative experiences. We then develop an account of introspection which exploits this special nature of sensory concepts. The result is a new class of concepts, which, following recent terminology, we call phenomenal concepts: these concepts refer to phenomenal experience itself and are the vehicles used in introspection. On our account, the connection between sensory and phenomenal concepts is very tight: it consists in different semantic uses of the same cognitive structures underlying the sensory concepts, such as the concept of red. Contrary to widespread opinion, we show that information theory contains all the resources to satisfy internalist intuitions about phenomenal consciousness, while not offending externalist ones. A consequence of this account is that it explains

The question ‘Is cognition linguistic? ’ divides recent cognitive theories into two antagonistic groups. Sententialists claim that we think in some language, while advocates of non-linguistic views of cognition deny this claim. The Introspective Argument for Sententialism is one of the most appealing arguments for sententialism. In substance, it claims that the introspective fact of inner speech provides strong evidence that our thoughts are linguistic. This article challenges this argument. I claim that the Introspective Argument for Sententialism confuses the content of our thoughts with their vehicles: while sententialism is a thesis about the vehicles of our thoughts, inner speech sentences are the content of auditory or articulatory images. The rebuttal of the introspective argument for sententialism is shown to have a general significance in cognitive science: introspection does not tell us how we think.

It has often been thought that our knowledge of ourselves is different from, perhaps in some sense better than, our knowledge of things other than ourselves. Indeed, there is a thriving research area in epistemology dedicated to seeking an account of self-knowledge that would articulate and explain its difference from, and superiority over, other knowledge. Such an account would thus illuminate the descriptive and normative difference between selfknowledge and other knowledge. 1 At the same time, self-knowledge has also encountered its share of skeptics—philosophers who refuse to accord it any descriptive, let alone normative, distinction. In this paper, we argue that there is at least one species of self-knowledge that is different from, and better than, other knowledge. It is a specific kind of knowledge of one’s concurrent phenomenal experiences. Call knowledge of one’s own phenomenal experiences phenomenal knowledge. Our claim is that some (though not all) phenomenal knowledge is different from, and better than, non-phenomenal knowledge. In other words, phenomenal knowledge

Despite the current resurgence of modest forms of mind-body dualism, traditional Cartesian immaterial-substance dualism has few if any defenders. This paper argues that no convincing case has been against substance dualism, and that standard objections to it can be credibly answered. I have been a materialist about the mind for forty years, since first I considered the mind-body issue. In all that time I have seen exactly one argument for mind-body dualism that I thought even prima facie convincing. 1 And like many other materialists, I have often quickly cited standard objections to dualism that are widely taken to be fatal, e.g. [Lycan 187: 2-3]—notoriously the dread Interaction Problem. My materialism has never wavered. Nor is it about to waver now; I cannot take dualism very seriously. Being a philosopher, of course I would like to think that my stance is rational, held not just instinctively and scientistically and in the mainstream but because the

this paper, however, our focus will be on the version of eliminativism that takes intentional states as its target. by removing irrational beliefs or making them aware of subconscious desires; there are no such things. And, obviously, if eliminativism is right, then as Fodor insists, many cognitive psychologists ought to "do [their] science in some other way...." Or at least, they "should stop spending the taxpayer's money." (1990, p. 202-3) Although advocates of eliminativism are not always as clear or careful as one might wish, they are typically inclined to make four distinct claims that might be formulated as follows: (1) `Belief,' `desire' and other familiar intentional state expressions are among the theoretical terms of a commonsense theory of the mind. This theory is often called `folk psychology'. (2) Folk psychology is a seriously mistaken theory. Many of the claims it makes about the states and processes that give rise to behavior, and many of the presuppositions of those claims, are false. (3) A mature science that explains how the mind/brain works and how it produces the behavior we observe will not refer to the commonsense intentional states and processes invoked by folk psychology. Beliefs, desires and the rest will not be part of the ontology of a mature scientific psychology. (4) The intentional states of commonsense psychology do not exist. It is clear that the first of these claims is a crucial presupposition of the second. After that, the putative relations among the claims gets a bit murky. It sometimes appears that both friends and foes of eliminativism assume that (2) can be used to establish (4). And, of course, if (4) is right then (3) comes pretty much for free. For if beliefs and desires don't exist then surely a mature science has no busine...

. I discuss two forms of the thesis that to have a sensation is to token a sentence in a language of thought--what I call, following Georges Rey, the sensational sentences thesis. One form of the thesis is a version of standard functionalism, while the other is a version of the increasingly popular thesis that for a sensation to have qualia is for it to have a certain kind of intentional content--that is, intentionalism. I defend the basic idea behind the sensational sentences thesis, and argue that the intentionalist version is either false or collapses into the standard functionalist thesis. 1 Introduction Many philosophers and cognitive scientists believe that thinking consists in tokening sentences of an inner mental language, a "language of thought". Some have argued that the scope of this language is wider than we might have expected---that we not only think in a language of thought, but also sense in one. In this paper, I want to explain what this thesis means, clearly set out...

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