Consciousness, concepts and content

Abstract

Concepts figure prominently in the defense and elaboration of representational accounts of phenomenal consciousness. Indeed, any adequate defense of (reductive) representationalism will require an appeal to so-called phenomenal concepts to deflect a group of related anti-physicalist (and hence anti-representationalist) arguments. What's more, an elaboration of representationalism requires a detailed account of the representational content of phenomenally conscious experience.

The goal of this dissertation is to contribute to the defense and elaboration of representationalism as it relates to concepts, first with a defense of demonstrative/recognitional accounts of phenomenal concepts (and a defense of the more general physicalist strategy in which they figure); and second, with the development of a partially conceptual account of perceptual experience.