title: Consciousness: explaining the phenomena.
creator: Carruthers, Peter
subject: Cognitive Psychology
subject: Philosophy of Mind
description: Can phenomenal consciousness be given a reductive natural explanation? Many people argue not. They claim that there is an 'explanatory gap' between physical and/or intentional states and processes, on the one hand, and phenomenal consciousness, on the other. I reply that, since we have purely recognitional concepts of experience, there is indeed a sort of gap at the level of concepts; but this need not mean that the properties picked out by those concepts are inexplicable. I show how dispositionalist higher-order thought (HOT) theory can reductively explain the subjective feel of experience by deploying a form of 'consumer semantics'. First-order perceptual contents become transformed, acquiring a dimension of subjectivity, by virtue to their availability to a mind-reading (HOT generating) consumer system.
publisher: Cambridge University Press
contributor: Walsh, Denis
date: 2002
type: Book Chapter
type: PeerReviewed
format: text/html
identifier: http://cogprints.org/2235/1/Explaining-the-phenomena.htm
identifier:   Carruthers, Peter  (2002) Consciousness: explaining the phenomena.  [Book Chapter]     
relation: http://cogprints.org/2235/