Dennett’s Theory of the Folk Theory of Consciousness

It is not uncommon to find assumptions being made about folk psychology in the discussions of phenomenal consciousness in philosophy of mind. In this article I consider one example, focusing on what Dan Dennett says about the “folk theory of consciousness.” I show that he holds that the folk believe that qualities like colors that we are acquainted with in ordinary perception are phenomenal qualities. Nonetheless, the shape of the folk theory is an empirical matter and in the absence of empirical investigation there is ample room for doubt. Fortunately, experimental evidence on the topic is now being produced by experimental philosophers and psychologists. This article contributes to this growing literature, presenting the results of six new studies on the folk view of colors and pains. I argue that the results indicate against Dennett’s theory of the folk theory of consciousness

Information Supply and Demand: Resolving Sterelny’s Paradox of Cultural Accumulation

Gene-Culture Coevolution (GCC) theory is an intriguing new entry in the quest to understand human culture. Nonetheless, it has received relatively little philosophical attention. One notable exception is Kim Sterelny’s (2006) critique which raises three primary objections against the GCC account. Most importantly, he argues that GCC theory, as it stands, is unable to resolve “the paradox of cultural accumulation” (151); that while social learning should generally be prohibitively expensive for the pupils, it nonetheless occurs as the principle means of disseminating novel information through a culture. Sterelny holds that this is best explained by supplementing the GCC models with strong cultural group selection pressures. I argue that this is not needed. To show this I elaborate upon Joseph Henrich and Francisco Gil-White’s (2001) information goods theory, developing it in terms of the market pressures that one would expect to find in an information economy. I indicate how such pressures contribute to an individual-level explanation of cultural accumulation that answers Sterelny’s concerns

Experimental Philosophy of Pain

The standard view of pains among philosophers today is that their existence consists in being experienced. The typical line of support offered for this view is that it corresponds with the ordinary or commonsense conception of pain. Despite this, a growing body of evidence from experimental philosophers indicates that the ordinary understanding of pain stands in contrast to the standard view among philosophers. In this paper, we will survey this literature and add to it, detailing the results of seven new studies on the ordinary understanding of pain using both questionnaire and corpus analysis methods

Language Police Running Amok

In this article I critique Kathleen Slaney and Michael Maraun’s (2005) addition to the ongoing philosophical charge that neuroscientific writing often transgresses the bounds of sense. While they sometimes suggest a minimal, cautious thesis–that certain usage can generate confusion and in some cases has–they also bandy about charges of meaninglessness, conceptual confusion, and nonsense freely. These charges rest on the premise that terms have specific correct usages that correspond with Slaney and Maraun’s sense of everyday linguistic practice. I challenge this premise. I argue that they have not shown that there are such specific correct usages; and, further, that even if they had, they fail to justify that their definitions are the correct ones

Ethical Dilemmas in Retrospective Studies on Genital Surgery in the Treatment of Intersexual Infants

Intersexual infants and infants with other genital abnormalities often receive genital surgery for sex assignment or for normalizing purposes. The wisdom and beneficence of these practices have been questioned by intersexual individuals, support groups, some doctors, and the media. Because the practices have been developed without long-term studies to evaluate them, pediatric urologists and parents of such children must face decisions with very little guidance from empirical support. In the face of ignorance about what is really the best medical response to intersexuality or genital abnormalities, some have argued for a moratorium on infant genital surgery until empirical studies are available. The urgent need for retrospective studies is now being recognized in medical journals. Because genital surgery may be appropriate and beneficent in some of these conditions, or in some degrees of these conditions, but not in others, retrospective studies must be devised to examine the degree of success of surgery for each of these conditions, or levels thereof

Structure and Norms: Investigating the Pattern of Effects for Causal Attributions

Research indicates that norms matter for ordinary causal attributions. Across a range of cases in which two agents jointly bring about an outcome by performing symmetric actions, but with one violating a norm while the other does not, causal ratings are higher for the norm-violating agent. A number of competing explanations of this effect have been offered in the literature. In a pair of recent papers, Kominsky et al. (2015) and Icard et al. (2017) make a strong case for one of these accounts—the counterfactual view—making novel predictions about the pattern of effects seen when the original type of case is expanded to include a contrast case without norms or when the causal structure is changed. They argue that while the counterfactual view is able to explain each of the predicted effects, the alternative accounts are only able to explain some of them. In this paper, I argue that this undersells the competing accounts. Further, I present new evidence suggesting that the expanded pattern of effects is quite different than predicted, and that it in fact coheres better with prominent alternative accounts in the literature than the counterfactual view

Experiencers and the Ambiguity Objection

It is often asserted that we should believe that phenomenal consciousness exists because it is pretheoretically obvious. If this is the case, then we should expect lay people to categorize mental states in roughly the way that philosophers do, treating prototypical examples of (supposed) phenomenally conscious mental states similarly. Sytsma and Machery (2010) present preliminary evidence that this is not the case. They found that participants happily ascribed seeing red to a simple robot but denied that the robot felt pain. The most prominent response to this work has been the ambiguity objection, which charges that participants were interpreting ascriptions of seeing red in a purely informational way, such that their attributions of “seeing red” to the robot do not speak to the question of whether they recognize the phenomenality of this state. Peressini (2014) pushes an especially interesting version of the objection, presenting new empirical evidence and suggesting that lay people do in fact have a concept of phenomenality. In this paper, I respond to Peressini’s objections, and the ambiguity objection more generally, arguing that the new data does not undermine Sytsma and Machery’s conclusion