Representationalism about experience

By Leeds, Stephen

Look at the screen before you and concentrate on the property of which you are putatively aware that makes it appropriate to call the screen white. This property ...

Perception

By Logue, Heather

If you want to get to grips with philosophy of perception, the best place to start is M.G.F. Martin’s entry on (you guessed it) perception! ...

Bodily sensations

By Martin, M.G.F.

Bodily sensations are those feelings, or sensory experiences, most intimately associated with one’s body: aches, tickles; feelings of pain and pleasure, of warmth, of fatigue. Many philosophers contrast ...

Vision

Why do things look to us as they do? This question, formulated by psychologist Kurt Koffka, identifies the main problematic of vision science. Consider looking at a black ...

Perception

By Martin, M.G.F.

Sense perception is the use of our senses to acquire information about the world around us and to become acquainted with objects, events, and their features. Traditionally, there ...

Physicalism

By Melnyk, Andrew

Physicalism is a view about the relationship between people’s mental properties and their physical properties. It claims that people’s mental properties are nothing over and above – nothing ...

Sensations

By Myin, Erik; Zahidi, Karim

Apart from the common use of ‘sensation’ to refer to bodily feelings, the word has been adopted by philosophers and scientists to talk about specific feelings arising from ...

Intentionality

Intentionality is the mind’s capacity to direct itself on things. Mental states like thoughts, beliefs, desires, hopes (and others) exhibit intentionality in the sense that they are always ...

Consciousness, Higher-Order Theories of

By Brown, Richard

Higher-order theories are theories of phenomenal consciousness. Phenomenal consciousness is the property of there being something that it is like for one to have an experience. Something that ...

Content: wide and narrow

Debates about wide and narrow content concern the representational contents of psychological states such as beliefs and desires. In the mid-twentieth century, it became common among philosophers to ...

Disjunctivism

By Fish, William

The disjunctivist claims that the mental states involved in a case of successful – “veridical” – perception of an object differ from those involved in a hallucinatory experience ...

Qualia

In contemporary discussions in the philosophy of mind, the terms quale and qualia (plural) are most commonly used to denote features of our conscious mental states ...

Molyneux problem

By Glenney, Brian

The Molyneux problem asks whether a newly sighted person might immediately identify shapes previously known only to touch, like cubes and spheres, by sight alone. Over three centuries ...