Qualia internalism is the thesis that qualia are intrinsic to their subjects: the experiences of intrinsic duplicates (in the same or different metaphysically possible worlds) have the same qualia. Content externalism is the thesis that mental representation is an extrinsic matter, partly depending on what happens outside the head. Intentionalism (or representationalism) comes in strong and wea...

With its historical roots in the phenomenological perspective of philosophers such as Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, embodied cognition has been able to address classically problematic issues in cognitive science. In this paper I examine the model of visual consciousness put forth by Alva Noë and J. Kevin O’Regan, and the model of learning and skill acquisition put forth by Hubert Dr...

Many philosophers and psychologists have attempted to elucidate the nature of mental representation by appealing to notions like isomorphism or abstract structural resemblance. The ‘structural representations’ that these theorists champion are said to count as representations by virtue of functioning as internal models of distal systems. In his 2007 book, Representation Reconsidered, William Ra...

Does the existence of body representations undermine the explanatory role of the body? Or do certain types of representation depend so closely upon the body that their involvement in a cognitive task implicates the body itself? In the introduction of this special issue we explore lines of tension and complement that might hold between the notions of embodiment and body representations, which re...

Introduction Consciousness is best understood in context, as one element of an interactive waking state in which the greater part of cognitive processing takes place in a nonconscious fashion. But if conscious and nonconscious processing are combined in the waking state, what distinguishes the former form the latter, what is consciousness, and what is its purpose? The answer to the second quest...

Modern neuroscience is providing novel ways to measure the effects of pain. Engagingly, some of its techniques provide pictorial representations of brain activity, enabling the easy communication of complex processes. This new representationalism seems to promise great hope for the future of pain research. We are persuaded of the scientific benefits that might result by those passionate about t...

Consider the color character of your visual experience a gray patch. We communicate about this with following ‘looks’ sentence:(1) The patch looks to you.Perhaps, then, we can better understand what it is have by examining meaning (1). And if method extends other characters experience, then learn in general through study sentences. This “semantic approach” promised title Wylie Breckenridge's th...

The frame problem is the difficulty of explaining how non-magical systems think and act in ways that are adaptively sensitive to context-dependent relevance. Influenced centrally by Heideggerian phenomenology, Hubert Dreyfus has argued that the frame problem is, in part, a consequence of the assumption (made by mainstream cognitive science and artificial intelligence) that intelligent behaviour...

We humans and other animals continuously construct and maintain our grasp of the world by using astonishingly small snippets of sensory information. Recent studies in nonlinear brain dynamics have shown how this occurs: brains imagine possible futures and seek and use sensory stimulation to select among them as guides for chosen actions. On the one hand the scientific explanation of the dynamic...

1. Consciousness certainly is connected with awareness. In fact, some people would say the two terms are synonyms. To be conscious of something is to be aware of it. Conscious mental states are those we are aware of. From these simple platitudes comes the motivation, or intuitive support for theories of consciousness built on the notion of representation, whether it be representation of the con...