Abstract
There is a tendency to assimilate so called “consciousness studies” to studies of the phenomenology of experience, and it seems to me that this is a shame. It is a shame, I think, because there is no such thing as a legitimate phenomenology of experience whereas there certainly is such a thing as consciousness. So long as people assimilate studies of consciousness to studies of phenomenal experience, they are side stepping the real issues – the ones for another lifetime.
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Notes
- 1.
The next few paragraphs are adapted from “Accidents,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association November 2012.
- 2.
- 3.
The predecessors of unicepts in my writings were called “empirical concepts.” The next paragraphs make clear why I have withdrawn that term favor of “unicepts.”
- 4.
In Millikan (2010) I explain why this remark applies not only to proper names and names of empirical properties and relations but to most kind terms as well.
- 5.
When this question concerns reidentification of kinds, its relevance and importance is not obvious unless the right sort of realism about kinds has been introduced. I have argued for an ontology of “real kinds” that separates them sharply from classes and makes clear why there both are and must be many alternative ways to recognize the members of any real kind, making the question of correct reidentification central (Millikan 1984, 1998, 2005, 2009, and especially 2010).
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“The visual field, I think, is simply the pictorial mode of visual perception, and it depends in the last analysis not on conditions of stimulation but on conditions of attitude. The visual field is a product of the chronic habit of civilized men of seeing the world as a picture.” Gibson (1952), p. 148.
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Millikan, R.G. (2014). An Epistemology for Phenomenology?. In: Brown, R. (eds) Consciousness Inside and Out: Phenomenology, Neuroscience, and the Nature of Experience. Studies in Brain and Mind, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6001-1_2
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