Philosophers have traditionally drawn a sharp distinction between phenomenal and intentional states. Phenomenal states are states with phenomenal or subjective character – something it’s like to be in them. The clearest examples of phenomenal states are perceptions, emotions, and sensations, which involve specific qualitative or sensory characters. Intentional states, such as beliefs, are menta...

1. The relevance of science to philosophy What is philosophical naturalism? Most fundamentally, presumably, it is the view that natural science constrains philosophy, in the following sense. The concerns of the two disciplines are not simply disjoint, and science takes the lead where the two overlap. At the very least, then, to be a philosophical naturalist is to believe that philosophy is not ...

Intentionality is most broadly characterized as mind’s directedness upon something. This broad characterization accords with our sense of the mind’s “openness to the world,” as Tim Crane (2008) puts it, or of the mind’s self-transcendence in apprehending an object, as a phenomenologist might put it. Such language captures the ordinary belief that one is directly and without mediation aware of o...

Opinion is still divided over the role that internal world models can play in autonomous behaviour. Researchers who dispute the necessity of such models often have a restricted view of how they are constituted and may associate the whole enterprise of modelling with the dubious practices of GOFAI. However, this paper pursues Roitblat's approach 1] in developing a more general and less assumptio...

Carruthers (2000; 2005) provides a general defence of reductive representationalism about phenomenal consciousness while critiquing first-order theories of the sort proposed by Baars (1988), Tye (1995), Dennett (2001), and others (thereby motivating a form of higher-order account). The present paper defends first-order theories against that attack.

This paper is a response to Weber’s (2020) call for further debate on the (potential) contribution of agential realism understanding content and functioning accounting information systems (AIS) (Weber, 2020). Contrary conclusions, we suggest that can make important contributions AIS studies. In order realize such have acknowledge metaphysical framework rather than theory or epistemology. Its po...

This thesis is an examination and critique of naturalistic representational theories of phenomenal character. Phenomenal character refers to the distinctive quality that perceptual and sensational experiences seem to have; it is identified with 'what it is like' to undergo experiences. The central claims of representationalism are that phenomenal character is identical with the content of exper...

Pure qualia representationalism, as I construe it in this paper, is the view that all qualia can be accounted for in terms of the representational content of sensations. This view is motivated by naturalism about qualia. I argue against this thesis by showing that so-called intransitive bodily sensations such as pains, tickles, itches, orgasms, etc., are intransitive precisely because their qua...

According to the self-representational theory of consciousness – selfrepresentationalism for short – a mental state is phenomenally conscious when, and only when, it represents itself in the right way. In this paper, I consider how selfrepresentationalism might address the alleged explanatory gap between phenomenal consciousness and physical properties. I open with a presentation of selfreprese...