Knowing What It’s Like

This paper deals with self-knowledge as it applies to the contents of phenomenally conscious states. I argue that a plausible view of our epistemic situation with respect to the phenomenal character of our conscious states rules out various kinds of proposals for identifying phenomenal character with external properties. This paper comes at the issue of representationalism about phenomenal character from the angle of what is involved in self-knowledge of phenomenal character. The main problem, as developed here, is that externalist theories of phenomenal character are inherently vulnerable to “Frege cases,” in which we can internally distinguish our representational states even though they pick out the same external property. By pinning our experience on the identity of the referent of our perceptual states, the theory undermines our intimate self-knowledge of experience.

On the Nonstandard Duality Theory of Locally Convex Spaces

This paper continues the nonstandard duality theory of locally convex, topological vector spaces begun in Section 5 of [3]. In Section 1, we isolate an external property, called the pseudo monad, that appears to be one of the central concepts of the theory (Definition 1.2). In Section 2, we relate the pseudo monad to the Fin operation. For example, it is shown that the pseudo monad of a µ-saturated subset A of *E, the nonstandard model of the vector space E, is the smallest subset of A that generates Fin (A) (Proposition 2.7).The nonstandard model of a dual system of vector spaces is considered in Section 3. In this section, we use pseudo monads to establish relationships among infinitesimal polars, finite polars (see (3.1) and (3.2)) and the Fin operation (Theorem 3.7).