Spectator In The Cartesian Theater
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Spectator in the Cartesian Theater
Author: Peter Slezak
language: en
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Release Date: 2023-08-01
The “Cartesian Theater” is Dennett’s famous metaphor for the idea that a homunculus or “little man” watches the screen on which our thoughts appear. However, contrary to much academic teaching and scholarship, Spectator in the Cartesian Theater: Where Theories of Mind Went Wrong since Descartes shows that Descartes was not guilty of this fallacy for which he has been blamed. In his physiological writings neglected by philosophers, Descartes explained that the pseudo-explanation arises not from what is included in our theory of consciousness, but rather from what is missing. We fail to notice that the theory is incomplete because we are intuitively doing part of the explanatory work. That is, we are the spectators in the Cartesian Theater. With detailed critiques, Peter Slezak shows that Searle’s Chinese Room Argument, Kripke’s theory of proper names, Davidson’s semantics of natural language and Kosslyn’s theory of visual imagery rely on what is intuitively meaningful to us rather than what follows from the theory. Slezak offers a novel solution to the elusive logic of the Cogito argument, showing it to be akin to the Liar Paradox. Since Descartes’ perplexity is our own, this shows how the subjective certainty of consciousness and the mind-body problem can arise for a physical system. An intelligent computer would think that it isn’t one.
Oxford Studies in Epistemology Volume 6
Author: Tamar Szabó Gendler
language: en
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Release Date: 2019-01-10
Oxford Studies in Epistemology is a biennial publication which offers a regular snapshot of state-of-the-art work in this important field. Under the guidance of a distinguished editorial board composed of leading philosophers in North America, Europe, and Australasia, it publishes exemplary papers in epistemology, broadly construed. Topics within its purview include: - traditional epistemological questions concerning the nature of belief, justification, and knowledge, the status of scepticism, the nature of the a priori, etc; - new developments in epistemology, including movements such as naturalized epistemology, feminist epistemology, social epistemology, and virtue epistemology, and approaches such as contextualism; - foundational questions in decision-theory; - confirmation theory and other branches of philosophy of science that bear on traditional issues in epistemology; - topics in the philosophy of perception relevant to epistemology; - topics in cognitive science, computer science, developmental, cognitive, and social psychology that bear directly on traditional epistemological questions; - work that examines connections between epistemology and other branches of philosophy, including work on testimony and the ethics of belief. Anyone wanting to understand the latest developments at the leading edge of the discipline can start here.
The Self and its Defenses
This book presents a theory of the self whose core principle is that the consciousness of the self is a process of self-representing that runs throughout our life. This process aims primarily at defending the self-conscious subject against the threat of its metaphysical inconsistence. In other words, the self is essentially a repertoire of psychological manoeuvres whose outcome is self-representation aimed at coping with the fundamental fragility of the human subject. This picture of the self differs from both the idealist and the eliminative approaches widely represented in contemporary discussion. Against the idealist approach, this book contends that rather than the self being primitive and logically prior, it is the result of a process of construction that originates in subpersonal unconscious processes. On the other hand, it also rejects the anti-realistic, eliminative argument that, from the non-primary, derivative nature of the self, infers its status as an illusory by-product of real neurobiological events, devoid of any explanatory role.