• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

RUSSELLIAN ACQUAINTANCE AND PHENOMENAL CONCEPTS A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY BY DONOVAN ERIC WISHON MARCH, 2012 © 2012 by Donovan Wishon. All Rights Reserved. Re-distributed by Stanford University under license with the author. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/ This dissertation is online at: http://purl.stanford.edu/pv232zn4664 ii I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. John Perry, Primary Adviser I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Krista Lawlor, Co-Adviser I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Mark Crimmins I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Dagfinn Foellesdal I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. David Beisecker Approved for the Stanford University Committee on Graduate Studies. Patricia J. Gumport, Vice Provost Graduate Education This signature page was generated electronically upon submission of this dissertation in electronic format. An original signed hard copy of the signature page is on file in University Archives. iii ABSTRACT This dissertation develops a novel acquaintance-based version of the phenomenal concepts strategy for defending neurobiological accounts of consciousness against recent dualist arguments, and in the course of doing so, it explores the role that acquaintance plays in singular reference, cognition, and perception. Chapter 1 provides a careful exposition of Bertrand Russell’s crucial notion of “acquaintance”, or direct conscious awareness. It argues that acquaintance is an experiential relation that grounds singular reference and that is more fundamental than, and is an enabling condition for, our knowledge of truths about things. But contrary to widespread philosophical interpretation, Russell does not hold that acquaintance safeguards a subject from misidentifying the objects of his or her acquaintance. Nor does it reveal the essential nature of such objects or provide subjects with a foundation of certain or infallible knowledge on which all of our ordinary and scientific knowledge of the world rests. Chapter 1 also shows how these widespread misconceptions about acquaintance arise from standard misreading of Russell’s famous “On Denoting”. Chapter 2 argues that if we view acquaintance relations as the right sort of direct information relations, then we can avoid problematic naïve realist and disjunctivist theories of perceptual experience. It also advances “the problem of phenomenal indiscriminability” for disjunctivism, which challenges it to provide an epistemologically and metaphysically adequate account of non-veridical perceptual experience. The apparent inability of disjunctivism to do so suggests that it cannot fully respect “the explanatory role of experience”. Chapter 2 also explains how the informational character of perceptual experience allows us to be direct realists about the content of perceptual iv experience. Lastly, it maintains that perceptual experience has a “two-faced presentational character” which that allows us to hold on to the idea that the subjective, qualitative character of perceptual experience is a feature of the experiential state itself. Chapter 3 presents the five main recent dualist arguments against physicalism: Chalmers’ zombie argument, Jackson’s knowledge argument, Kripke’s modal argument, Levine’s explanatory gap argument, and Chalmers’ two-dimensional argument. It also explains how the phenomenal concepts strategy promises to show why there is a distinctive epistemic gap between consciousness and the physical, but no corresponding ontological gap. Lastly, it argues against popular demonstrative-recognitional and constitutional models of phenomenal concepts by showing that neither one adequately captures our epistemic situation with respect to consciousness. Finally, Chapter 4 contends that phenomenal concepts are special concepts of neurobiological/experiential states with a distinctive cognitive role: their reference is fixed by an inner demonstration to states to which we stand in special causal- informational relations—acquaintance relations—where these special relations are tied to special epistemic methods and capacities for picking up information about the states to which we are related and that provide us with distinctive conceptions of them. But these special acquaintance relations do not have epistemic or semantic features that threaten neurobiological accounts of consciousness. They do, however, explain why dualist intuitions seem powerful, even though they are mistaken. The main upshot is that we can (at least in principle) reconcile our everyday conceptions of ourselves as conscious beings with our scientific understanding of ourselves as complex biological organisms (and ultimately as complex physical systems). v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Bertrand Russell once said that “the good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge”. In writing this dissertation, I have done my best to lead such a good life. And while I cannot say for sure I have achieved any great success in attaining genuine knowledge about conscious experience, I can honestly say that I strove with all of my mental might to squeeze out what insights I could about such matters. In contrast, I have no doubt whatsoever that my time writing this dissertation was inspired by love. Thus, I dedicate this dissertation to my beautiful, wonderful wife Christy, whose love, patience, friendship, encouragement, and support gave me the strength and focus to see this project to its completion. Whatever I have accomplished in the pursuit of knowledge herein is as much her achievement as mine, though of course every shortcoming is mine alone. I want to offer my deepest thanks to my advisors and mentors John Perry and Krista Lawlor. A graduate student is lucky to find even one advisor who makes an impact on their life in the way that both have made an impact on me. They showed me more patience, kindness, encouragement, and dedication than I had ever hoped to find in an advisor, let alone in two. I would not be the philosopher I am today without their insightful feedback, sage advice, sincere generosity, and (seemingly) limitless energy. I hope that I will one day be half the philosopher, teacher, mentor, and person that each of them is. I will be forever thankful for having the true fortune of calling both of them my friends. I also owe a great deal of gratitude to Dagfinn Føllesdal, Mark Crimmins, and especially David Beisecker. I have learned an immense amount from them, and my dissertation would be vastly weaker without their insightful comments, daunting challenges, and wise guidance—not to mention the often lengthy discussions I had with vi each of them on an impressive range of philosophical topics. David gets special thanks for first introducing me to the deep mysteries of consciousness and for stoking my passion to get to the bottom of them. I honestly could not have hoped for a better dissertation committee. In addition, I want to thank the following people for providing feedback about, comments on, discussions about, and/or encouragement regarding various parts of this dissertation: John Searle, John Campbell, Todd Jones, Ken Taylor, David Hills, Paul Skokowski, Thomas Ryckman, Anna-Sara Malmgren, Michael Friedman, Graciela De Pierris, Russell Wahl, Bernard Linsky, Ian Proops, Kepa Korta, Galen Strawson, Michelle Montague, David Papineau, Michael Tye, Bruce Glymour, Christopher Hom, David Chalmers, Eric Schwitzgebel, Dan Giberman, Luis Cheng-Guajardo, Matthew Darmalingum, Wes Holliday, Ralf Bader, Eliot Michaelson, and Dikran Karagueuzian. I also want to thank Stanford University and my many friends, peers, and students there. I would also like to thank the audiences of the 2011 Bertrand Russell Society Annual Meeting, my Fouth-Year Talk at Stanford, my talk for the Center for the Explanation of Consciousness and the “Interdisciplinary Approaches to Consciousness” Geballe Workshop at Stanford, and my talk for “Perry Fest” here at Stanford. On each occasion, I received invaluable feedback on my project. I am also very grateful to my family for their constant love and support. In particular, I’d like to thank my mother Sharon, stepfather Ray, brother Jeremiah, mother- in-law Vicky, father-in-law Tom, cats Socrates and Osiris, ferret Loki, and especially my very silly son Dylan for helping to keep me (mostly) sane while in graduate school. Lastly, I’d like to thank Bertrand Russell for inspiring me in so many ways… vii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT………………………………………………………….. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………. vi INTRODUCTION §1 ANTECEDENT PHYSICALISM…………………………………………. 1 §2 CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE REEMREGENCE OF DUALISM……… 4 §3 RUSSELLIAN ACQUAINTANCE……………………………………….

Load more

  286

Copy Link