fragments of consciousness

A taxonomy of philosophy

Now back to philosophy.  Or at least, to philosophical taxonomy. David Bourget and I are finalizing a new project for access to online work in philosophy.  To a very rough first approximation it will be like MindPapers generalized to all of philosophy, although there will be many significant differences (it will be less ambitious in some respects, more ambitious in others).  More on that when it goes public, hopefully within the next month or so.

One part of the project is a classification scheme, under which any paper in philosophy can be classified in up to three areas.  The idea is that at least eventually, the classification scheme should be about as fine-grained as the MindPapers scheme.  Philosophy is divided up into five clusters (Metaphysics and Epistemology, Value Theory, Science Logic and Mathematics, History of Western Philosophy, Other Philosophical Traditions).  Each cluster is divided into six or more fields (in M&E, for example, these are Epistemology, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Action, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Religion).  Each field is divided into 5-10 areas (in Philosophy of Mind, for example, these are Consciousness, Intentionality, Perception, Metaphysics of Mind, Epistemology of Mind, Mental States and Processes, and Misc).  Then each area can be divided into up to ten topics, and up to ten subtopics of each in turn (in roughly the way that the main areas of philosophy of mind are divided into topics and subtopics in Mindpapers).

With help from a number of others, including consultants in a wide range of areas, we've made a very rough first attempt at a taxonomy.  Unsurprisingly, this taxonomy is better-developed in some areas than others.  And even in areas where it is reasonably well-developed, many tricky decisions have to be made.  Eventually, we will have ongoing projects for the refinement and development of these categories, with systematic consultation.  For now, however, we're trying to get things up to scratch for a first draft.

At the moment, the various areas of M&E (apart from philosophy of religion) are developed to a fair degree of detail, though there is still work to be done.  Value Theory and Science/Logic/Mathematics are more patchy.  Some fields in these clusters (such as Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality, Philosophy of Education, and Philosophy of Social Sciences) are hardly subdivided at all, while other areas (such as General Philosophy of Science, Social and Political Philosophy, and many other areas in these clusters) are extremely patchy and incomplete.  As for History of Philosophy, we've decided not to subdivide this for now beyond a few obvious groupings, and then categories for a few individuals in each period (these were settled by mechanically choosing those with more than n entries with their name in the title in the database, followed by a small amount of tweaking), although we may well subdivide these further eventually.  And we haven't made any attempt to subdivide the Other Philosophical Traditions.

For now, I'm calling for feedback from the philosophical community, either via e-mail or via comments on this blog.  Especially valuable will be thoughts on categories that we've missed, on ways to structure categories that don't yet have much structure, and on better ways of structuring things in tricky cases.  The field structure is largely set (though perhaps not irrevocably), but the area structure is still a work in progress in many cases, and topics and subtopics are still very much in progress.  In many cases what we have has been compiled partly from our own sense of the fields, partly from Internet sources (the Stanford Encyclopedia has been valuable), and partly from feedback from others, but all three of these things have been more extensive and useful in some fields than in others.  So further feedback will be very useful at this stage.  For now, our aim is to fill in structure in the first three main clusters, though thoughts about the other two clusters are also welcome.  Of course we probably won't be able to follow every suggestion, but we'll at least give every reasonable suggestion some consideration.

Some methodology: we'd like to stick to 5-10 subcategories per category where possible, as this makes the system much more usable (and there are also relevant technological constraints).  Of course sometimes there will be fewer (especially at the topic/subtopic level), and some topics may not have subtopics at all, especially in smaller areas.  In a few cases it seems unavoidable to have more subcategories, but this shouldn't happen too often.  Typically, finest-grained categories will have around 15-100 papers in them.  More than this calls for further division, while less than this calls for less division.  For now, we don't want to go beyond five levels.  A given category can be crosslisted under multiple parent categories, marked withn asterisk in the taxonomy.  Each crosslisted category has a primary parent category under which it is listed without an asterisk, though in some cases this selection is fairly arbitrary.  For many purposes the choice of primary parent category won't matter much, as the relevant papers can show up in multiple places.

Of course there are many ways to produce a taxonomy like this, and this is just one way.  For a start, the system is produced by analytic philosophers and has a bias toward carving things as an analytic philosopher would.  Still, we'd like the system to be useful to continental philosophers and those in other traditions.  Continental philosophy is covered to a considerable extent under 19th and 20th century philosophy, and there's a separate field under "Other Philosophical Traditions" both to capture contemporary work that doesn't fit well elsewhere, and to provide a way to mark continental papers for those who are looking for them.  There's no reason why papers from continental and other traditions can't be included under the first three clusters too, though, and we're open to using categories that will help make that possible.  Even from within an analytic perspective, of course many taxonomies are possible, but as always some choices need to be made.  We're not suggesting that this is a definitive taxonomy (it's just something to make a website more useful), and we'd look forward to seeing other taxonomic attempts by others.  And again, keep in mind that what we have currently is extremely preliminary and is highly sketchy and inexpert in some fields.

With that in mind, all constructive feedback by e-mail or in the comments is welcome.  Feedback from those with expertise in relevant areas is especially welcome, and non-anonymous comments are especially appreciated.  Again, here's the draft taxonomy.  Thanks in advance,

The problem of consciousness meets "Intelligent Design"

It had to happen eventually.  The "hard problem" of consciousness is being invoked in favor of anti-Darwinist ideas such as "Intelligent Design".  Here's a key quote from an already infamous New Scientist article:

"According to proponents of ID, the "hard problem" of consciousness - how our subjective experiences arise from the objective world of neurons - is the Achilles heel not just of Darwinism but of scientific materialism. This fits with the Discovery Institute's mission as outlined in its "wedge document", which seeks "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies", to replace the scientific world view with a Christian one."

The reporter contacted me to ask for a comment when she was writing the article.  I told her that like many other scientists and philosophers (even people like Steven Pinker!), I have serious doubts about the possibility of a materialist explanation of consciousness, but that those doubts do little to support a religious agenda or intelligent design.  I declined to be quoted on the record, though, because of the danger of being taken out of context as supporting the movement.  Perhaps this was a mistake, as the article doesn't do a good job of separating the issues.  I'd hate to see the consciousness/materialism issue and the design/theism issue run together in the popular imagination.  As Peter Hankin says amusingly at Conscious Entities:

"Oh boy: if there was one thing the qualia debate didn't need, it was a large-scale theological intervention. Dan Dennett must be feeling rather the way Guy Crouchback felt when he heard about the Nazi-Soviet pact: the forces of darkness have drawn together and the enemy stands clear at last!"

Anyway, let's get things straight.  The problem of consciousness is indeed a serious challenge for materialism.  In fact, I think it's a fatal problem for materialism, as I've argued at length here and there.  But it simply isn't a problem for Darwinism in the same way. Even if one rejects materialism about consciousness, Darwinism can accommodate the resulting view straightforwardly.

The simplest way to see this is to note that the "hard problem" does nothing to suggest that consciousness doesn't lawfully depend on physical processes, at least in the sense that certain physical states are reliably associated with certain states of consciousness in our world.  Even if materialism is rejected, there is still good reason to believe that there is such a dependence, via laws of nature that connect physical processes and consciousness.  But if so, there is no problem at all with the idea that evolution can select certain physical states, which yield certain states of consciousness.  If interactionist dualism (on which consciousness has a causal role) is true, evolution might even select for certain states of consciousness because of their beneficial effects. And if epiphenomenalism (on which consciousness has no causal role) is true, consciousness can still arise by evolution as a byproduct.  Perhaps the thought that consciousness is a byproduct is unattractive, but if so the problem lies with epiphenomenalism, not with evolution.

So I think there is very little support for anti-Darwinist ideas to be found here. I think there's also not much support for theist ideas: of course traditional theism requires that materialism be false, but the falsity of materialism does little to positively suggest that theism is true.  As for intelligent design, I'm on the record as saying that I can't rule out the hypothesis that we're living in a computer simulation, so I suppose that it follows that I can't rule out the hypothesis that our world is designed.  But there's not much here to support traditional theism or to oppose Darwinism, and whatever support there is doesn't come from the problem of consciousness.  In any case, I hope that these issues remain firmly separated, as they should.

Mind and Consciousness: Five Questions

A nice recent development in philosophy publishing is the "5 Questions" series, in which philosophers in various fields offer personal and autobiographical ruminations.  Snippets from a few of these volumes are available online, including formal philosophy, foundations of physics, normative ethics, philosophy of mathematics, political philosophy, and a few others.

The latest in the series is Mind and Consciousness: 5 Questions, edited by Patrick Grim, with an impressive cast of contributors.  I've now written a draft of my contribution to this volume.  This is mainly autobiographical rambling and metaphilosophical pronouncement rather than philosophy per se, so it won't be to everyone's tastes.  But any thoughts are welcome.  I see that the contributions by David Rosenthal and Michael Tye are also available online.

Congrats to Jonathan Schaffer

Congratulations to my colleague Jonathan Schaffer, who has been awarded the APA's 2008 article prize for the best article published by someone under 40 in the last two years, for his article "Knowing the Answer".  In addition, Jonathan has been awarded the AAP's prize for the best article published in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy in 2007, for "From Nihilism to Monism".  That's quite a double!

Jonathan is the second ANU philosopher to win the APA article prize in the last few years, following Alan Hajek in 2004.  Once one combines this with Kim Sterelny's Jean Nicod Prize, Bob Goodin's election to the British Academy, Daniel Stoljar's acclaimed book and forthcoming PPR book symposium, and Frank Jackson's election as a Companion of the Order of Australia, these are good times for ANU philosophers.  Our new junior philosophers are no slouches either, with Susanna Schellenberg having papers accepted to Journal of Philosophy and Mind, and Nic Southwood having papers accepted to Ethics and Nous and a book accepted by Oxford University Press, both within about a year of getting their Ph.D.

Travel wrap-up

I've recently returned from five weeks of philosophy travel: Seoul (for the World Congress of Philosophy), Beijing (a couple of lectures and some Olympics), Kirchberg (the Wittgenstein conference on Reduction on Elimination), Syracuse (the SPAWN conference on perception), Krakow (the European Congress of Analytic Philosophy), and Dubrovnik (a workshop on Consciousness and Thought).  I've put photos from the five conferences online: Seoul, Kirchberg, Syracuse, Krakow, Dubrovnik.  I've also put online photos from three July events in Australia: the AAP in Melbourne, a workshop on the representational and relational character of perceptual experience here at ANU, and the Jack Smart lecture by Brian Skyrms.

In addition, I've put online Powerpoint for the wrap-up talks I gave at the ANU and Dubrovnik conferences, R&R and The Critique of Pure Thought, and for the commentary I gave at Syracuse (on Jesse Prinz on attention): Is There Consciousness Outside Attention?  Some of these may turn into papers at some point, but for now the Powerpoint will do.

Back in the saddle

I'm back in Canberra after a month of traveling in the US and Canada: Pasadena, Buffalo, Toronto, Brown, New York, Rutgers, Texas, Arizona. The highlight was the consciousness conference in Tucson, which had superb sessions on consciousness vs attention, local vs global neural correlates of consciousness, brain imaging as mind reading, first-person methods and the richness of consciousness, and many others. Various blog posts on the conference have been posted by John Derbyshire, Anand Rangarajan, and Eric Schwitzgebel (and here). I've posted some photos here.

Having turned 42 since returning, I've also posted some photos from my Life, the Universe, and Everything party.

Supersizing the Mind

Andy Clark's book Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension is being published by Oxford University Press later this year. Among other things, this book fleshes out and defends the ideas put forward in our joint 1998 article "The Extended Mind". It includes a comprehensive (and I think largely compelling) set of replies to the various objections to the extended mind thesis that have been raised over the last decade, and also has a lot on applications of the extended mind idea within cognitive science.

I've written a foreword to the book, which I've just put online. The foreword will also form the basis for my talk in the Barwise Prize session at the Pacific APA meeting later this week. Of course this short piece doesn't go into remotely the depth of Andy's book, but it gives some elements of my current take on the extended mind thesis, ten years after publication of the original article.

Philosophy teams

Some frivolity for the new year. Some of you may know about the fish philosophers and the bird philosophers:

Fish philosophers: Adrian Haddock, Kelly Roe, Nathan Salmon, Scott Sturgeon, J.D. Trout, Jennifer Whiting. (Borderline case: Ellery Eells.) Captain: Bill Fish.

Bird philosophers: Tim Crane, Antony Eagle, Alicia Finch, Mike Martin, Chris Peacocke, Rob Sparrow. (Borderline cases: Gabe and Susanna Seagull.) Captain: Alexander Bird.

There are also:

Occupation philosophers: Lynne Baker, Alex Barber, Bill Brewer, John Gardner, Cliff Hooker, Jeff King, Ray Monk, Graham Priest, Sydney Shoemaker, Peter Singer, Ken Taylor. (Captain: Steve Jobs?)

Body-part philosophers: Justin D'Arms, Philippa Foot, Michael Hand, R.M. Hare, H.L.A. Hart, Cathy Legg, Louis Loeb.

Colour philosophers: Max Black, Jessica Brown, Ian Gold, T.H. Green, Thomas Pink, Wolfgang Schwarz, Anita Silvers, Ming Tan, Roger White. (Captain: Hue Price?)

Then there are the autological philosophers: Jack Smart, Kit Fine, Stephen White. And the heterological philosophers: Max Black, Steven Gross, Alva Noe. (I leave aside hard cases such as Crispin Wright and Joe Heterological.) And the philosophers whose name are sentences: Lynda Burns, Immanuel Kant, Benson Mates, Adam Pautz, John Shook, Jeff Speaks.

More philosophers for these categories, and more categories?

Jobs at ANU

Two advertisements for positions at ANU have just appeared in Jobs for Philosophers.    The first is for post-doctoral fellowships associated with the Centre for Consciousness:

The Philosophy Program, Research School of Social Sciences, seeks to appoint one or more research-only Postdoctoral/Research Fellows (Level A/B). The fellows will be appointed in association with Professor David Chalmers’ Federation Fellowship project on ‘The Contents of Consciousness’, and/or in association with other projects in the Program in related areas. Candidates should hold a Ph.D. in philosophy or a related discipline prior to appointment, and should specialize in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, the philosophy of language, metaphysics, and/or epistemology. Appointment will be for up to three years. The Program will consider proposals to fill the positions by secondment, and particularly welcomes applications from women. Send applications (reference: CASS4400), preferably by e-mail (Word, rtf, or pdf format) to jobs@anu.edu.au, or by mail to: Applications Officer, Human Resources Division, Chancelry 10A, Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia. Full details are available at http://consc.net/fellows.html. [Formal information is available here and here.]  Closing date: November 30, 2007.

The second is for continuing positions in the RSSS Philosophy Program (abbreviated version here):

The Philosophy Program, Research School of Social Sciences, seeks to make continuing appointments, 1 or 2 depending on rank.  Appointment will be offered at Levels B through E2 (Assistant to Full Professor, salary package: $66,764-$131,929 plus 17% super), depending on qualifications and experience.  This is an opportunity for outstanding scholars to take up an ongoing research position in a program with a major international profile and a very strong graduate program.  Applications are invited in any area of philosophy consonant with work currently being done in the Philosophy Program, but preference for one of the positions may be given to Social & Political Theory. Applicants must, except in exceptional circumstances, be willing and able to make a major contribution to one or more of the overarching themes  around which the work of the School is organized.  The Research School of Social Sciences particularly welcomes applications from women. The beginning dates are negotiable. Further particulars are available here.

Re the continuing positions: these full-time permanent research positions (tenurable after a few years, in the case of a junior appointment) are of course very attractive, and applications/enquiries from distinguished philosophers are encouraged. The information regarding rank of the continuing positions in the ad and on the ANU website is confusing, but these should be treated as an open rank positions.   The JFP ad doesn't list a closing date, but the ANU ad lists a closing date of November 19 (9 days from now).  I don't know how serious this closing date is, but it would be a good idea to send applications as soon as possible.  Note that e-mail applications are accepted for both positions.

MindPapers

I'm pleased to announce the launch of MindPapers, an online bibliography of around 18,000 published papers and online papers in the philosophy of mind.  The site grew out of a combination of my old bibliography and my old page of online papers, but it is much bigger than both, and it has many new capabilities.

The expansion and new capabilities are thanks to David Bourget -- ANU graduate student, pure representationalist pioneer, and programmer extraordinaire.  David added many new tools (which are outlined here, along with a history of the site) for importing papers from various sources, and also added many new tools for using the website.  Some of the tools available to users of the website include (i) links and citation information throughout, (ii) highly flexible navigation, display, and search options, (iii) the ability to submit and edit entries, (iv) automated off-campus proxy access to commercial sites, and (v) a lot of cool statistical information.

The bibliography has also roughly doubled in size.  There is an all-new section on the philosophy of perception, and the other sections are restructured and expanded throughout.  The philosophy of mind parts include new subsections on such topics as what it is like, conceptual analysis and a priori entailment, Searle's biological naturalism, neutral monism, idealism and phenomenalism, phenomenal intentionality, conscious thought, temporal consciousness, consciousness of agency, bodily experience, attention and consciousness, unconscious states, thinking, interpretivism, intentional objects, collective intentionality, formulating physicalism, realization, various subtopics of personal identity, mental acts, various subtopics of self-knowledge, robotics, folk concepts and folk intuitions, language and thought, various subtopics of the philosophy of neuroscience, as well as around 50 subtopics of the philosophy of perception.  In the science of consciousness section, there are new subsections on binocular rivalry, visual pathways, neglect and extinction, schizophrenia, anosognosia, vegetative states and coma, the minimally conscious state, synesthesia, hypnosis, meditation, drugs and consciousness, other altered states, verbal reports and heterophenomenology, Eastern and contemplative approaches, and a few others.

Although MindPapers subsumes the old page of online papers, we have retained a distinct front-end for Online Papers on Consciousness, both for continuity with the old version, and because this site has a somewhat different emphasis: free online papers only, and structured in a way that is somewhat more oriented to issues about consciousness and cognitive science, and somewhat less to academic philosophy.  Everything available under online papers can also be found under MindPapers, however, by setting the viewing options appropriately.

I encourage everyone to try things out.  There will certainly be errors, bugs, and missing items: if you find these, please notify us using the tools on the site.  People with published and/or online papers in relevant areas might start by searching on their own names to see if there's anything we've missed.  Any suggestions for further development are welcome.

Update: The site went down for a while overnight, probably due to all the traffic from around the web, but it's up and running again now.

Bits and pieces

• An initial announcement and call for papers has been issued for next year's "Toward a Science of Consciousness" conference in Tucson, April 8-12.  Confirmed plenary speakers at this point include: Andy Clark, Stan Dehaene, Alison Gopnik, Stuart  Hameroff, Christof Koch, Adrian Owen, Eric Schwitzgebel, Rupert Sheldrake, Susanna Siegel, Wolf Singer, Frank Tong, Michael Tye, and numerous others, with more still to come.


• Congratulations to the five current ANU graduate students -- Ben Blumson, Jacek Brzozowski, Yuri Cath, Ole Koksvik, and Dan Marshall -- who have had articles accepted at leading philosophy journals in the last month or two.  Berit has details.


• RIP Alex, the African Grey parrot trained by my Arizona ex-colleague Irene Pepperberg.  I'm now even sorrier that I didn't take up Irene's invitation to "meet the A-man" before she left for MIT.


• My philosophical humor page has been updated.  Additions include Rachael Briggs' modal logic version of "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend".

Recent collections on consciousness

I've been meaning to do some posts about a number of recent interesting books on consciousness and related topics, but I haven't gotten a chance.  So rather than do a series of separate posts, I thought I'd do a single post here about a number of books that are worth checking out.  I'll devote this post to collections, and save single-authored books for another post somewhere down the line.

The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, edited by Max Velmans and Susan Schneider.  This is a really impressive volume containing about 55 substantial articles, roughly evenly divided between the philosophy and the science of consciousness, written by many of the leading people in the field.  I've read a number of the articles already, and they are terrific.  For someone wanting a comprehensive yet in-depth guide to the field, there probably isn't a better single source.

The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness, edited by Philip Zelazo, Morris Moscovitch, and Evan Thompson.  A similar volume, but containing 31 chapters mostly on the science of consciousness.  This has especially strong coverage in psychology and cognitive science, although it's somewhat lighter on neuroscience and philosophy (just four overview articles on the philosophy of consciousness).  I haven't read many of the chapters yet, but the quality seems to be high.

(Completing a triumvirate, there is also an Oxford Companion to Consciousness, edited by Tim Bayne and  Axel Cleeremans, forthcoming in a year or two.  This will probably have the most comprehensive coverage of neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology of the three, in a format of around 250 shorter articles, encyclopedia-style.)

Expressivism, Pragmatism, and Representationalism

I've just gotten back from a road trip to Sydney for the "Expressivism, Pragmatism, and Representationalism" conference (along with half a day at the "Moral Cognition and Meta-Ethics" conference).  I've put some photos online, as have Berit and Joe.  Joe also has a report on the first day.

The purpose of the conference was to bring together various "pragmatist" and "expressivist" (e.g. those of Blackburn, Brandom, Gibbard, Price) approaches to truth and meaning, and to contrast them with more traditional "representational" approaches.  As a flat-footed representationalist, I thought that the conference would be something like going to an interesting foreign country, but what struck me was that most of what the pragmatists had to say was quite congenial to representationalism.  Some amateurish thoughts on these issues follow.

Susan Hurley

Susan Hurley died yesterday.  Susan was a creative philosopher and a force of nature.  She was a major contributor to the philosophy of mind, the foundations of cognitive science, and social and political philosophy.  Her 1998 book Consciousness in Action is full of ideas and insights that can't be found elsewhere.

I first met Susan at the Tucson and Brussels consciousness conferences in 2000, and got to know her better on visits to Oxford and at the Santa Cruz summer institute in 2002 (here's a photo).  We agreed on very little, but she was terrific company, and her ideas always repaid close attention.  My paper with Tim Bayne, "What is the Unity of Consciousness?", started life in part as a commentary on Susan's work in a symposium at the Brussels ASSC conference in 2000.   She was a frequent visitor to the ANU, and last year was offered a professorship here, although to our disappointment she ended up moving to Bristol instead. At the time of her death Susan had a contract for a book on the boundaries of the mind, co-authored with Alva Noe, in the book series I edit at Oxford University Press.  I suppose that this book will now never see the light of day.

Susan was passionate about everything that she did, and had an unquenchable appetite for living and thinking.  She treated her repeated battles with cancer as inconveniences that should not get in the way of doing philosophy.  A month before she died, Susan organized a big conference on perception, action, and consciousness at Bristol, which by all accounts was a big success.  She was due to visit ANU in early September and give a talk.  Characteristically, she kept up this plan until near the end.  It was only last Sunday that she e-mailed me to cancel, saying "I still hope that maybe I can make it there someday, but that may not be probable given my illness".  She will be missed.

X-Phi meets A-Phi

The "Experimental Philosophy Meets Conceptual Analysis" last week was a lot of fun -- one of the most stimulating conferences I've been to for some time.  I've posted photos, and the Powerpoint for my wrap-up talk "X-Phi Meets A-Phi" (some of which is summarized below).  Here the A stands for "armchair" or "a priori", as you please.  See the experimental philosophy page and the experimental philosophy blog for some background on the issues, and see also Alex Plakias's conference recap on the Go Grue blog.

The conference had something of a tag-team wrestling format, alternating X-Phi speakers (in the 'red corner") with A-Phi speakers (in the blue corner).  The X-Phi speakers were Steve Stich (with a nice overview of his work on disagreement over the intuitions that analytic philosophers often appeal to, in epistemology, the philosophy of language, and ethics), Josh Knobe (who outlined experimental work on people's intuitions about consciousness, suggesting that they're willing to ascribe nonphenomenal states much more freely than phenomenal states), John Doris (who used empirical work on the role of social processes in moral thinking to support a socially-extended view of cognition), Alex Plakias (on empirical work on moral disagreement) and Adina Roskies (on the implications of acquired sociopathy for moral internalism).  The A-Phi speakers were Frank Jackson (on conceptual analysis as a kind of experimental philosophy), Michael Smith (on pure and applied conceptual analysis, responding to various aspects of the X-Phi critique), Farid Masrour (on the relevance of the distinction between prima facie and ideal intuitions), Jeanette Kennett (who responded to Adina on empirical arguments against internalism), and, I suppose, me.

In the end there was a lot more agreement than disagreement, though there were certainly some contentious issues along the way.  Given the emphasis on conceptual analysis, it's not surprising that different concepts of experimental philosophy were distinguished.  For a start, one needs to distinguish experimental philosophy from empirical philosophy simpliciter, where the key distinction is the focus on data about philosophically relevant intuitions and judgments.  Farid also usefully distinguished "positive" from "negative" experimental philosophy.  The former, typified by Josh Knobe's work on intentional action, tries to find interesting patterns in people's application of concepts to cases, drawing out conclusions about the way those concepts work.   The latter, typified by the work of Steve Stich and colleagues on Getter and Kripke intuitions, tries to find cross-group or cross-cultural differences in philosophically relevant intuitions, with a view to potentially undermining the appeal to these intuitions in traditional philosophy.

We also brought some experimental philosophy to bear on the relationship between experimental philosophy and conceptual analysis.   In my talk I presented a series of vignettes ranging from (a) someone asking a number of other people for judgments about intentional action to (b) someone asking one other person for such judgments to (c) someone asking themselves for such judgments, and polled the audience on whether each counts as experimental philosophy, or as conceptual analysis.  The numbers slid gradually from (a) to (c), suggesting a pretty strong continuity.  The moral is that positive experimental philosophy, at least, seems fairly continuous with conceptual analysis, though with more than one subject and performed in the third-person mode.

Conference wrap-up

I'm back now from two enjoyable weeks of conferences.  I've posted some photos from the Norms and Analysis conference in Sydney (along with the ANU-Sydney-Kyoto Probability workshop) and have also posted the Powerpoint for my talk, "Moral Relativism and Conceptual Analysis" (my first-ever venture into meta-ethics).  Kenny Easwaran has posted Rachael Briggs' marvelous limerick summary of the N&A conference, and Carrie Jenkins has also posted some comments.   In addition, I've posted photos from the Australasian Association of Philosophy conference, and have posted the Powerpoint for my presidential address, "From the Aufbau to the Canberra Plan".

Canberra update

I've been back in Canberra for a while now.  The month away was a lot of fun, with the highlight being a memorable week in the Caribbean (including a marvelous match between the West Indies and England in Barbados in front of a full house of local fans), and the lowlight being the loss of my laptop in Atlanta airport.  As a result, I've lost my photos from the (excellent) Boise conference on metametaphysics and from the Caribbean, but I've posted some photos from the subsequent conference on formal epistemology in Oklahoma.

Here at ANU, conference season is warming up.  Last Friday saw an enjoyable workshop on "The Epistemology of Experience" with talks by Carrie Jenkins, Jim Pryor, Declan Smithies, and Nico Silins.  Carrie has posted a summary and Ole Koksvik has posted some photos.  Coming up June 15 is a workshop on "Phenomenology and Intentionality" featuring Bill Lycan, Adam Pautz, and Susanna Siegel.  The conference on "Experimental Philosophy Meets Conceptual Analysis" will be July 18-20, preceded by an undergraduate workshop July 17.  Interested undergraduates from Australasian universities should e-mail me.  In addition, there are a small number of open 20-minute slots for submitted papers at the main conference.  People with suitable papers on experimental philosophy should get in touch with me.  There are also a number of other conferences coming up in other bits of Australasia.  The AAP website has a fairly extensive list.  Note that the AAP conference in Armidale July 1-6 (at which I'm supposed to give the presidential address, tentatively entitled "From the Aufbau to the Canberra Plan") has extended its deadline for submissions to May 31.

Elsewhere on the web: I recently did a video interview with John Horgan (author of The End of Science and various other books and articles), which has just been posted on the Bloggingheads website.  My webcam skills are revealed to be fairly shaky, but otherwise the interview seems to have come out OK.  It's also worth checking out Jerry Fodor's entertaining review of the "Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism?" collection by Galen Strawson et al, in which Fodor comes surprisingly close to endorsing a form of property dualism with fundamental laws connecting physical processes and consciousness.

A month in the north

I'm about to head off for a month in the northern hemisphere.  The itinerary includes Boise (for the Metametaphysics conference), San Francisco (for the APA), UC Riverside, UC Davis, Harvard/MIT, Yale, NYU, the Caribbean, Georgia State, and Oklahoma (for the "Why Formal Epistemology?" conference).  Apart from the two new states at the end, the highlight will be a week in the West Indies for the World Cup, taking in matches in Grenada (Australia vs New Zealand), Barbados (England vs West Indies), and St. Lucia (semi-final).  Fingers crossed for no more murders!

Experimental Philosophy Meets Conceptual Analysis

This is advance notice of a conference on "Experimental Philosophy Meets Conceptual Analysis", to be held at ANU on July 18-20, 2007.  The focus of the conference will be on recent work on experimental philosophy, especially the experimental study of philosophical intuitions, and its relationship to more traditional philosophical methods such as conceptual analysis.  Speakers will include John Doris, Joshua Knobe, Stephen Stich, Frank Jackson, Michael Smith, and me.  The conference is open to all and attendance is free, but if you plan to attend, please e-mail Maire Ni Mhorda at maire [at] coombs.anu.edu.au.

The conference will be part of what is shaping up to be a very busy conference season in Australia.  At ANU alone, apart from this conference, there will likely be a conference on basic knowledge in late May or early June, a conference on reasons and rationality in August, and possibly something on perception in June.  At Sydney there will be conferences on Norms and Analysis on June 26-28, on Expressivism, Pragmatism and Representationalism August 29-31, and on Moral Cognition and Meta-Ethics from August 31 to September 2.  Of course there is the Australasian Association of Philosophy, to be held on July 1-6.  There will also be the World Congress of Neuroscience in Melbourne July 12-17 and the International Society for Research on the Emotions in Brisbane July 11-15.  I'm sure there are many others I've missed -- feel free to make additions in the comments.

Consciousness in the news

The mind-body problem has been in the news lately.  A couple of weeks ago, Time magazine had a special issue on mind and brain, with a lead story by Steven Pinker on the mystery of consciousness, along with brief sidebar articles on consciousness by Bernard Baars, Dan Dennett, Antonio Damasio, Michael Gazzaniga, Colin McGinn.  Now the New Yorker has just published a long article by Larissa MacFarquhar on Pat and Paul Churchland (not online, unfortunately), with a lot of nice biographical and sociological background and some philosophical discussion along the way.  I talked to Larissa for this article a year or two ago, when it was a general article on the problem of consciousness, and a fair amount of philosophical background on consciousness has survived into the final version.

Job ads

As mentioned earlier, 2-3 permanent research positions in the Philosophy Program in the ANU Research School of Social Sciences are being advertised.  The ad is now available.  Inquiries and applications are welcome.  The deadline is March 1.

Another job ad: PSYCHE, the e-journal on consciousness, has been taken under the wing of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness.  It is now looking for two executive editors, one for broadly philosophical and/or theoretical work, the other for empirical work.  The deadline is February 15.

Cowboy ontology

Last week I was at the Arizona Ontology Conference, held at the White Stallion Ranch outside Tucson.  This was a memorable occasion, with some philosophy papers interspersed among the horseback riding, hiking, and other cowboy activities.  (As a bonus, there was a freak snowstorm on the Sunday evening, delaying my flight back by a day.)  Joe Salerno has put some great photos online, and I've put some online as well, while Berit Brogaard has a report on some of the philosophy.  Thanks to Laurie Paul for putting such an excellent event together.  (Update: still more photos from Brian Fiala, Andy Egan, and Benj Hellie and Jessica Wilson.)

I gave my paper on "Ontological Anti-Realism" at the conference, with excellent comments by Jonathan Schaffer (who has given permission to put them online).  One of Jonathan's points is that I "half succeed" because my view yields "half-realism": realism about the fundamental but not the nonfundamental.  I'm happy enough with the half-realism, as this is more or less the line I take in the paper.  But it's worth noting that the realism about the fundamental need only be a metaphysical realism, where reality objectively and determinately has a certain fundamental nature.  This needn't be an ontological realism, where this fundamental nature involves a domain of fundamental objects having fundamental properties (it might be, on some versions of the view, but the framework doesn't require it).

Jonathan also gives three interesting arguments against the distinction between ordinary and ontological existence assertions of a sentence, at least construed as involving a difference in truth-conditions (as opposed to pragmatic correctness conditions).  I think these arguments can be answered, but in any case it turns out that Jonathan and I were interpreting the claim that there is such a distinction in different ways: on my reading it's compatible with the claim that these assertions have different underlying logical form (e.g. involving covert variables), while on Jonathan's reading it is not.  So where Jonathan proposes what he takes to be an alternative to the distinction, involving covert variables for furnishing functions, I'd happily endorse this proposal as an implementation of the distinction as I construe it.  In any case the exchange and the discussion at the conference were very useful, and I hope to have a revised version of the paper online before long.

Ontological Anti-Realism

A new paper for the new year: "Ontological Anti-Realism".  This is a descendant of my talk on "Ontological Indeterminacy" from the 2005 ANU Metametaphysics conference.  The paper is destined to appear in the collection Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), which I'm co-editing with David Manley and Ryan Wasserman, and which will include the six papers from the ANU conference along with six others.  In the meantime, I'll be giving the paper at a conference on ontology in Arizona later this month, and at another metametaphysics conference in Idaho at the end of March.  The current version is still a rough draft, and comments are welcome.

Propositions and Attitude Ascriptions

Another new online paper: "Propositions and Attitude Ascriptions: A Fregean Account".  This lays out the two-dimensional account of Fregean senses and propositions that I now favor (this is a change from the view in "On Sense and Intension"), and uses this to give an account of propositional attitude ascription (one that is mostly compatible with the remarks on this subject in "The Components of Content" but which goes beyond this and is much more detailed).  Along the way I address a number of standard puzzles about attitude ascriptions.  In my favorite part of the paper, the Fregean hierarchy of senses is reconstructed in 2-D terms.  In the last section of the paper, I respond to Scott Soames' objections (in his book Reference and Description) to my earlier account of attitude ascriptions.

The paper is still a draft and comments are very welcome.  The typesetting is still a work in progress.  I've just returned to using LaTeX after many years away and I'm sure there are plenty of errors.

Lectures and symposia

Two interesting sets of lectures that appear to be tied to forthcoming books are online: Robert Brandom's Locke Lectures on "Between Saying and Doing: Toward an Analytic Pragmatism" and Tim Williamson's Hempel Lectures on "The Philosophy of Philosophy".  The latter are accompanied by a full book manuscript.

In addition, there are two new PSYCHE symposia on consciousness-related topics.  There's a symposium on Gregg Rosenberg's book A Place For Consciousness (previously discussed here), with seven papers, and a symposium on Consciousness and Self-Representation, with four papers, four commentaries, and an introduction.

Nida-Rumelin on grasping phenomenal properties

One of the most interesting papers in the Alter and Walter collection is Martine Nida-Rümelin's "Grasping Phenomenal Properties", which gives a new argument against the materialist thesis that phenomenal properties are physical properties. Nida-Rümelin's argument uses the two-dimensional apparatus at various points in an auxiliary role, but she argues that her argument requires weaker and less controversial assumptions than my two-dimensional argument.  Here I'll look into this a bit.  (It might be worth looking at these two papers first, if you're not familiar with the issues.)

Nida-Rümelin's argument runs roughly as follows.

(1) A person who grasps a property via two distinct concepts is in a position to rationally judge that those concepts are necessarily coextensive.

(2) Phenomenal properties are grasped via phenomenal concepts.

(3) Any physical property can be grasped via a physical concept, by someone with relevant physical background knowledge.

(4) No amount of physical background knowledge puts one in a position to rationally judge that a phenomenal concept and a physical concept are necessarily coextensive.
______________________

(5) No phenomenal property is a physical property.

Ramsey + Moore = God

Here's a short paper co-authored with my colleague Alan Hájek:  "Ramsey + Moore = God".  The idea is that it follows from versions of the Ramsey test and Moore's paradox that rational subjects should accept all instances of 'If p, then I believe p', and 'If I believe p, then p', so they should accept that they are omniscient and infallible.  Of course there is more that could be said about various things here, but we went for the short-and-sweet model.  The paper is forthcoming in Analysis.

Discussions elsewhere

Elsewhere on the web, there have been a number of recent discussions that may be of interest to readers of this weblog, some of which I've been involved with.  Berit Brogaard  has made a number of interesting posts about two-dimensionalism: e.g. Chalmers on De Re Epistemic Ascriptions, 2Dism and Epistemic Extension, Modal Adverbials, and Another 2D Puzzle.  The last two of these have had lively discussions that have clarified a number of issues.  Eric Schwitzgebel posted on Chalmers on "Modal Rationalism", again with a lively and useful discussion thread.  Pete Mandik's work-in-progress blog has hosted a discussion of Brendan Ritchie's paper "Dualism and the Limits of Conceivability", as well as a lively thread on Hyperbolic Mary.  Wo has a post on Conceivably Possible Zombies.  Esa Diaz Leon has a post on Stoljar on actors and zombies and two on my paper "Phenomenal Concepts and the Explanatory Gap".  Robert Howell at Brain Pains has two posts on Daniel Stoljar's "Categorical Phenomenalism", with a reply by Stoljar.   As always, Conscious Entities has a lot of interesting material on consciousness.  And Mixing Memory has a fine zombie music video.

Update: See also a very interesting exchange between John Bengson, Adam Pautz, and others at Close Range on Being Aware of Uninstantiated Universals.  Also, Berit has a new post on 2D and Context-Sensitive Predicates.

Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge

I just received my copy of Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowlege: New Essays on Consciousness and Physicalism, edited by Torin Alter and Sven Walter.  There have been quite a few collections of new papers on consciousness in recent years, but I think this is the best of them.  It's focused on what has become the central set of issues in the debate over materialism and dualism about consciousness: namely, the epistemic and ontological gaps between the physical and the phenomenal, and the role that phenomenal concepts play in grounding these gaps.  I'd say that every paper in this book is important, and that collectively the papers in the book greatly advance our understanding of these topics.

The first section on the knowledge argument has a number of special treats: Knut Nordby, the achromat color scientist, with a piece on what it's like to be in Mary's situation; Lawrence Nemirow, author of the original defence of the ability hypothesis concerning the knowledge argument, rebutting all the objections to the hypothesis that have sprung up in recent years; Dan Dennett with his "RoboMary" response to the knowledge argument; and an exchange between Frank Jackson and Torin Alter on whether representationalism undermines the knowledge argument (Jackson says yes, Alter no).

The second half of the book has a number of papers right at the leading edge of the debate over phenomenal concepts.  Janet Levin and David Papineau set out definitive versions of their well-known materialist views of phenomenal concepts, including replies to objections.  Joe Levine and I have papers raising problems for any materialist account of phenomenal concepts.  John Hawthorne raises problems for the sort of "direct reference" account of phenomenal concepts that I and many others favor.  Finally, there is a terrific set of three papers on arguments for dualism and the role of phenomenal concepts therein.  Stephen White defends the property dualism argument and Ned Block argues against it, both with a lot of attention to the conceptual foundations.  And Martine Nida-Rümelin has a new and important argument for dualism, one that is based on a two-dimensional analysis but is quite different from the 2-D arguments that I and others have put forward.

The editors are to be congratulated for putting together such a superb book.  I expect that the papers in it will shape much of the debate on these topics in the coming years, and I strongly recommend that anyone interested in these issues take a look at it.

Jobs at ANU

A number of positions are being advertised at ANU.  We are about to advertise 2-3 permanent positions in the RSSS Philosophy Program. These positions will be advertised as open rank, and while permanent RSSS positions typically go to senior candidates, a more junior appointment is not out of the question.  Of course these research-only positions are almost unique within philosophy, and the academic environment in the Philosophy Program is unmatched.  Inquiries from distinguished philosophers are welcome -- feel free to send an e-mail to me or to other members of the Program.

At the same time, we are also advertising 2-3 postdoctoral positions in the Centre for Consciousness.  Two of these positions will be attached to my Federation Fellowship project on "The Contents of Consciousness", and one will be attached to a newly-funded ARC project on "The High-Level Structure of Consciousness", directed by me, Ned Block, and Susanna Siegel.  More details about these positions can be found here.  (Note in particular that these positions aren't limited to people working directly on consciousness or even to philosophers of mind.  Note also the misprinted reference number in the JFP ad.)  Again, inquiries are welcome.

All this terrific news for ANU philosophy comes in combination with the good news that Frank Jackson is stepping down as director of the Research School of Social Sciences to once again become a regular member of the Philosophy Program, where he will be full-time apart from a period each year in Princeton (as Brian Leiter reports).  Frank has done an extraordinary job as director, but it will be great to have him around more.  After a recent review of the whole RSSS, it is good to see that things are moving in such a positive direction.