Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T01:05:43.050Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Learning to Appreciate the Gray Areas: A Critical Notice of Anil Gupta’s “Conscious Experience”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2020

Eric Hochstein
Eric Hochstein*
Affiliation:
University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
*
Email: ehochstein@uvic.ca
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Anil Gupta’s Conscious Experience: A Logical Inquiry provides an impressive and novel account of rational justification based on conscious experience which is used as a foundation for a new theory of empiricism. In this critical notice, I argue that Gupta’s project is fascinating, but is often hampered by a lack of sufficient philosophical justification and clarity regarding some essential features of his project, as well as a lack of engagement with relevant scientific domains that would directly bear on it, such as computational neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, and cognitive psychology. This limits the sort of logical inquiry available to him in problematic ways.

Keywords

Consciousnessconscious experiencerationalitylogical inquirycognitive scienceneurosciencepsychology
Type
Critical Notice
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 50 , Issue 6 , August 2020 , pp. 801 - 813
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Canadian Journal of Philosophy

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anderson, Michael. 2007. “Evolution of Cognitive Function Via Redeployment of Brain Areas.” The Neuroscientist 13: 13–21.10.1177/1073858406294706CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Anderson, Michael. 2008. “Circuit Sharing and the Implementation of Intelligent Systems.” Connection Science 20 (4): 239–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderson, Michael 2010. Neural Reuse: A Fundamental Organizational Principle of the Brain.” Behaviorial and Brian Science 33: 245–313.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Barwich, Ann-Sophie. 2017. “Up the Nose of the Beholder? Aesthetic Perception in Olfaction as a Decision-Making Process.” New Ideas in Psychology 47: 157–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barwich, Ann-Sophie. 2019. “Conscious Experience: A Logical Inquiry, by Anil Gupta.” Philosophia (August 2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-019-00111-6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blouw, Peter, and Eliasmith, Chris. 2018. “Using Neural Networks to Generate Inferential Roles for Natural Language.” Frontiers in Psychology 8 (2335): 1–14.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Churchland, Patricia Smith. 1988. “Reduction and the Neurobiological Basis of Consciousness.” In Consciousness in Contemporary Science, edited by Marcel, A. J. and Bisiach, E., 273–304. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Churchland, Patricia Smith and Churchland, Paul Montgomery. 2013. “What Are Beliefs?” In The Neural Basis of Human Belief Systems, edited by Krueger, Frank and Grafman, Jordan. Hove, East Sussex: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Dehaene, Stanislas, and Cohen, Laurent. 2007. “Cultural Recycling of Cortical Maps.” Neuron 56 (2): 384–98.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Eliasmith, Chris. 2005. “A New Perspective on Representational Problems.” Journal of Cognitive Science 6: 97–123Google Scholar
Eliasmith, Chris. 2013. How to Build a Brain: A Neural Architecture for Biological Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199794546.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eliasmith, Chris, and Anderson, Charles. 2003. Neural Engineering: Computation, Representation, and Dynamics in Neurobiological Systems. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Heyes, Cecilia. 2018. Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.10.4159/9780674985155CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hohwy, Jakob. 2007. “Functional Integration and the Mind.” Synthese 159: 315–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kuhn, Thomas. 1976. “Scientific Revolutions as Changes of World View.” In Can Theories be Refuted ? Edited by Harding, Sandra G., 133–54. Dordrecht, Nether.: Reidel.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Patterson, Karalyn, and Plaut, David. 2009. “Shallow Draughts Intoxicate the Brain”: Lessons from Cognitive Science for Cognitive Neuropsychology.” Topics in Cognitive Science 1 (1): 39–58.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Strohman, Richard. 2000. “Genetic Determinism as a Failing Paradigm in Biology and Medicine.” In Promoting Human Wellness: Frontiers for Research, Practice and Policy, edited by Jamner, Margaret Schneider and Stokols, Daniel. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Thomson, G., and Macpherson, F.. 2017. “Adelson’s checker-shadow illusion.” In The Illusions Index, edited by Macpherson, F.. https://www.illusionsindex.org/ir/checkershadow.Google Scholar
Wilkes, Kathleen. 1984. “Is Consciousness Important?” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 35 (3): 223–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar