Reductions of Consciousness. From Husserl to Churchland

The author juxtaposes two extreme approaches to the relationship between consciousness and the physical world: phenomenological-idealistic (represented by Edmund Husserl) and radically naturalistic (represented by Paul Churchland). These two positions are interpreted in terms of opposite if symmetrical types of reduction (on the one hand, the reduction of the world to a sense for consciousness, and on the other hand, the reduction of consciousness to an element of the physical world). They emerge as two ways of abstracting from the ambivalence of ordinary experience, in which consciousness and the physical world are both mutually entangled and non-identical with each other. In conclusion, the author argues that contemporary philosophy, which follows both the idealistic and the naturalistic path, fails to solve the problem of this relationship.

Biology and Gettier’s Paradox

Gettier’s Paradox is considered a most critical problem for the presumably obvious philosophical view that knowledge is justified true belief. Such a view of knowledge, however, exposes the poverty of analytic philosophy. It wrongly assumes, for example, that knowledge must be conscious and explicit, and, to make matters worse, linguistic, as illustrated in Donald Davidson’s writings. To show why this philosophical view is wrong I will point to arguments by Ruth Barcan Marcus and, principally, Paul Churchland, as well as to work by the neuroscientist Paul Reber on intuitive knowledge. We will see, then, that much of our knowledge is neither explicit nor conscious, let alone linguistic. I will suggest that an approach that pays attention to biology is more likely to succeed in developing a proper account of our cognitive abilities. Thus, Gettier’s paradox becomes a mere curiosity.

What Gary Couldn’t Imagine

In this paper, I propose and defend an antiphysicalist argument, namely, the imagination argument, which draws inspiration from Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument, or rather its misinterpretation by Daniel Dennett and Paul Churchland. They interpret the knowledge argument to be about the ability to imagine a novel experience, which Jackson explicitly denies. The imagination argument is the following. Let Q be a visual phenomenal quality that is imaginable based on one’s phenomenal experience. (1) It is not possible to imagine Q solely based on complete physical knowledge. (2) If it is not possible to imagine Q solely based on complete physical knowledge, then physicalism is false. (3) Therefore, physicalism is false. Even though objections have been raised to this argument in the literature, there is, as far as I know, no explicit defense of it. I argue that the imagination argument is more plausible than the knowledge argument in some respects and less plausible in others. All things considered, it is at least as interesting and serious a challenge to physicalism as the knowledge argument is.

Viejo y nuevo pragmatismo

<p class='p1'>C.S. Peirce, fundador del pragmatismo, propuso una filosofía científica reformada que se rige por la máxima pragmática, que asocia el significado de un concepto con sus consecuencias experienciales. Sin embargo, con el tiempo, el pragmatismo evolucionó: de la articulación lógica, idealista-realista de Peirce, pasó por el pragmatismo más psicológico y nominalista de James, hasta llegar en nuestros días a Richard Rorty, quien propone, en nombre del pragmatismo, que el territorio metafísico y epistemológico que forma el centro tradicional de la filosofía se abandone, y que la filosofía se convierta en un género de literatura; mientras que, en el otro extremo, filósofos científicos como Paul Churchland y Stephen Stich también se describen así mismos como pragmatistas. Revisando la historia del pragmatismo desde Pierce y James, pasando por Dewey, Mead y Schiller hasta nuestros días, este artículo detalla la transmutación del viejo pragmatismo en el nuevo.</p>

Studying Perception

Empirical studies of perception must use the logic of everyday non-technical conceptions of perception as their unquestioned background. This is because the phenomena to be studied are defined and individuated on the basis of such basic understanding. Thus the methods of neurobiology exclude reductionist accounts from the outset, implicitly if not explicitly. It is further argued that the concepts of neural and mental representation, while not confused per se, presuppose a general picture where perception as a whole is viewed in the light of teleology. References are made to discussions by Bennett and Hacker, Paul Churchland, and Peter Winch.