Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- PART I PHILOSOPHY AND CONSCIOUSNESS
- 1 Consciousness and conscious properties
- 2 Identity, supervenience, reduction and emergence
- 3 Reductive and non-reductive physicalisms
- 4 Representationalist theories of conscious properties
- PART II NEUROSCIENCE AND CONSCIOUSNESS
- PART III PHILOSOPHY, NEUROSCIENCE AND CONSCIOUSNESS
- Concluding semi-scientific postscript
- Appendix Functional neuroanatomy
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Representationalist theories of conscious properties
from PART I - PHILOSOPHY AND CONSCIOUSNESS
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- PART I PHILOSOPHY AND CONSCIOUSNESS
- 1 Consciousness and conscious properties
- 2 Identity, supervenience, reduction and emergence
- 3 Reductive and non-reductive physicalisms
- 4 Representationalist theories of conscious properties
- PART II NEUROSCIENCE AND CONSCIOUSNESS
- PART III PHILOSOPHY, NEUROSCIENCE AND CONSCIOUSNESS
- Concluding semi-scientific postscript
- Appendix Functional neuroanatomy
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
A considerable amount of cross-disciplinary discussion between philosophers and scientists about conscious properties has occurred in the past twenty years. While all the cross-disciplinary discussion has yet to yield much consensus, it has yielded a set of working assumptions, shared by most neuroscientists and philosophers, about their kind (for want of a better word). One of these working assumptions is the representationalist understanding of conscious properties. Neuroscientists look for empirical support for conscious properties representa-tionally understood; philosophers assess whether a representational understanding of conscious properties successfully captures all the features of conscious properties.
In contemporary philosophy, three versions of representationalism dominate discussion: computational representationalism, higher-order representational-ism and self-representationalism. Philosophical critics of representationalism focus either on the alleged differences between the three versions of represen-tationalism or on alleged problems that attach to every version of representationalism no matter how construed. A serious challenge comes from qualitative properties: if representationalism is correct, then qualitative properties must be representational. But they appear on all counts not to be representational properties. Similarly, subjective perspectivity appears not to be exhaustively analysed as the unity of represented content. These criticisms are discussed here in a philosophical context. Subsequent to introducing the neuroscientific evidence that has been discovered, we return to discuss them further in later chapters.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Philosophy, Neuroscience and Consciousness , pp. 77 - 99Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2010