Philosophy
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Item Consciousness and Mental Quotation: An intrinsic higher-order approach(2013) Picciuto, Vincent; Carruthers, Peter; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The guiding thought of this dissertation is that phenomenally conscious mental states consist in an appropriate pair of first-order and higher-order representations that are uniquely bound together by mental quotation. In slogan form: to be conscious is to be mentally quoted. Others before me have entertained the idea of mental quotation, but they have done so with the aim of putting mental quotation to work as part of the "phenomenal concept strategy" (Papineau, 2000; Balog, Block, 2006; Balog 2012). Their purpose was importantly different from mine. According to those theorists, mental quotation is entirely introspective. On their views, a mental quotation is supposed to be a unique concept that we sometimes use to think about our own conscious states. Conscious states are assumed to be already conscious in virtue of some independent factor, or factors. Mental quotations are not supposed to be that in virtue of which conscious states are conscious. In contrast, this dissertation proposes that mentally quoting an appropriate first-order state is what makes a conscious state conscious in the first-place. Treating consciousness as existing in a higher-order thought that mentally quotes first-order sensory contents has immediate explanatory dividends. It explains several of the classic puzzles of consciousness as well as solving a set of puzzles to which existing higher-order theorists fail to respond. This includes what many see as an insurmountable problem for existing views: the problem of higher-order misrepresentation. If the higher-order component of a conscious state is quotation-like, the gap is filled between the state represented and the higher-order state that makes the state conscious. Rather than targeting a numerically distinct state from afar, as an extrinsic higher-order representation does, a mental quotation latches onto the very target state itself. The target state is enveloped and thereby becomes a component of the higher-order state, and it is the complex, the quotational state as a whole, that is the conscious state. What emerges from the guiding thought is a novel self-representational (or intrinsic higher-order) model of consciousness, described at the intentional level, which is immune to challenges facing existing views.Item How Many Minds? Individuating Mental Tokens in the Split-Brain Subject(2009) Schechter, Elizabeth; Carruthers, Peter; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The "split-brain" cases raise numerous difficult and fascinating questions: questions about our own self-knowledge, about the limits of introspection and phenomenology, about personal identity, and about the nature of consciousness and of mind. While the phenomenon is therefore of relevance to many areas of psychological inquiry, my dissertation explores the split-brain studies from the perspective of theoretical psychology. The dissertation uses the split-brain cases to develop criteria for individuating mental tokens, and then applies those criteria back to the split-brain subjects themselves, ultimately arguing that split-brain subjects have two minds and two streams of consciousness apiece. Because the dissertation defends a particular account of the constitutive conditions for mental tokens against competing functionalist accounts, it also ends up being about the proper form for functionalist theories of the mental to take. I argue throughout that psychofunctionalists who are realists about mental phenomena should accept that the constitutive conditions for mental tokens are partly neural. In particular I argue that, within an organism, multiple neural events that sustain mental phenomena causally independently of each other in some relevant sense cannot be identified with a unique mental token, regardless of how unified that organism's behavior may seem.