1 Grasping Properties I will present an argument for property dualism. The argument employs a distinction between having a concept of a property and grasping a property via a concept. If you grasp a property P via a concept C, then C is a concept of P. But the reverse does not hold: you may have a concept of a property without grasping that property via any concept. If you grasp a property, the...

e topic of phenomenal consciousness concerns what it means for mental states to be conscious states (as opposed to unconscious mental states) and what it means for such states to have phenomenal character, that is, to have properties in virtue of which there is " something it's like " for a subject to be in such a state. Traditional philosophical issues that phenomenal consciousness raises invo...

There are both externalist and internalist theories of the phenomenal content of conscious experiences. Externalists like Dretske and Tye treat the phenomenal content of conscious states as representations of external properties (and events). Internalists think that phenomenal conscious states are reducible to electrochemical states of the brain in the style of the type-type identity theory. In...

Is a phenomenal pain a conscious primitive or composed of more primitive phenomenal states? Are pain experiences necessarily or only contingently unpleasant? Here, I sketch how to answer such questions concerning intra-phenomenal metaphysics using the example of pain and unpleasantness. Arguments for a symmetrical metaphysical independence of phenomenal pain and unpleasant affect are presented,...

Representationalism, the view that phenomenal character supervenes on intentional content, has attracted a wide following in recent years. Representationalism can take various forms. Most representationalists have offered a form of reductive representationalism, according to which phenomenal character is itself intentional content of a certain sort.1 Such views promise to reduce the ‘hard probl...

In this paper I respond to a family of objections seeking to show that the phenomenal concept strategy must fail. Roughly, the strategy holds that antiphysicalist arguments, such as Kripke’s modal argument and Jackson’s knowledge argument, can be undercut by appealing to the unique features of phenomenal concepts. This idea is cashed out in various ways by different philosophers, but the thread...

The awareness of the phenomenal qualities of one's experiences can be considered as an instance of metacognition. Although some people take qualia (sensory qualities such as the redness of red) as salient features of phenomenal experience, others have expressed views that doubt or deny the central importance of qualia. How do such cognitive heterogeneities occur? What parameters influence them?...

There is almost unanimous consensus among the theorists of consciousness that the phenomenal character of a mental state cannot exist without consciousness. We argue for a reappraisal of this consensus. We distinguish two models of phenomenal consciousness: unitary and dual. Unitary model takes the production of a phenomenal quality and it's becoming conscious to be one and the same thing. The ...

Many ambiguous patterns elicit spontaneous alternations of phenomenal appearance. Attention is known to influence these phenomenal reversals, as do several other factors. We asked whether a shift of attention individually prompts each reversal of phenomenal appearance. By combining intermittent presentation with a proven method of attention control, we monitored phenomenal alternations in the c...