Dear All, Next Tuesday (21st), Michelle Montague, from the Univeristy of Texas at Austin, will give a talk entitled 'What is Given in Conscious Thought'. An abstract is attached below.
*There will be an official Moral Sciences Club Photograph beforehand, taken between New Court and the Paddock in St. John's College at 5.00pm.* The meeting will start at 5.15pm and will be held in the Fisher Building of St. John's College in either the Boys Smith Room, the Dirac Room, or the Castlereagh Room. As usual, the speaker will present for no longer than 45 minutes, followed by a discussion until 7.00pm. If you would like to go for dinner after the talk, then please let me know by noon on Tuesday. The termcard is available online: http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/news_events/moral_sci.html Regards, Daniel Brigham Secretary of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge *** In normal waking life there is a seemingly constant stream of consciousness. What is given in this stream? As a start, a world of objects and facts or states of affairs is given. But this givenness of objects and states of affairs essentially involves phenomenological givenness-it is only through phenomenological-experiential givenness that the world of objects and states of affairs can be given to us at all. I call the totality of what is given to one in a conscious episode 'the content' of that episode. So, I have a very inclusive conception of content according to which content can be categorized under three headings: phenomenological content, representational content, and external content. My concern in this paper is how these kinds of content are related in the particular case of conscious thought. I will assume that conscious thought necessarily involves cognitive-phenomenological content. Therefore, in asking about the relationship between the kinds of content involved in conscious thought I am asking the following questions: Is there a unique cognitive-phenomenal content associated with each representational content and relatedly, is there a unique cognitive-phenomenal content associated with each external content? First, it seems clear that there can be different cognitive-phenomenological contents associated with two thoughts with the same external content. The issue is more difficult for representational content. Since the representational content of thought necessarily involves concepts, I am interested in the relationship between concepts and cognitive-phenomenological content. The claim I wish to defend is that there is a strong internal connection between particular concepts (and concept possession) and particular types of cognitive-phenomenological content. That is, a given concept can only be associated with a certain range of cognitive-phenomenological properties. _____________________________________________________ Sent by the CamPhilEvents mailing list. To unsubscribe or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents Posts are archived here: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive
