Citation: Bayne, Tim and Shea, Nicholas (2021) Bayne, T. & Shea, N. (2020), ‘Consciousness, Concepts, and Natural Kinds’, Philosophical Topics 48(1), 65-84. Philisophical Topics, 48 (1). pp. 65-84.
Creative Commons: Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Abstract
We have various everyday measures for identifying the presence of
consciousness, such as the capacity for verbal report and the intentional control of behaviour. However, there are many contexts in which these measures are difficult (if not impossible) to apply, and even when they can be applied one might have doubts as to their validity in determining the presence/absence of consciousness. Everyday measures for identifying consciousness are particularly problematic when it comes to ‘challenging cases’—human infants, people with brain damage, non-human animals, and AI systems. There is a pressing need to identify measures of consciousness that can be applied to challenging cases. This
paper explores one of the most promising strategies for identifying and validating such measures—the natural kind strategy. The paper is in two broad parts. Part I introduces the natural kind strategy, and contrasts it with other influential approaches in the field. Part II considers a number of objections to the approach, arguing that none succeeds.
Metadata
| Creators: | Bayne, Tim and Shea, Nicholas (0000-0002-2032-5705) and |
|---|---|
| DOI: | doi.org/10.5840/philtopics20204814 |
| Official URL: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/48628586 |
| Subjects: | Philosophy |
| Keywords: | Consciousness, Concepts and Natural Kinds |
| Divisions: | Institute of Philosophy |
| Collections: | London Philosophy Papers |
| Dates: |
|
| References: | Allport, A. 1988. What concept of consciousness? In A. Marcel and E. Bisiach (Eds.) Consciousness in Contemporary Science. Oxford: OUP. Ball, D. 2009. There are no phenomenal concepts. Mind, 118: 935-62. Balog, K. 2009. Phenomenal concepts. In B. McLaughlin, A. Beckermann & S. Walter (Eds.) Oxford Handbook in the Philosophy of Mind. Oxford University Press, pp. 292-312. Bayne, T. 2010. The Unity of Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bayne, T., Hohwy, J. & Owen, A.M. 2016. Are there levels of consciousness?, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20/6: 405-13. Birch, J. Unpublished. Invertebrate Consciousness: Three Approaches. Block, N. (2007). Consciousness, accessibility, and the mesh between psychology and neuroscience. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 30(5), 481-498. Boyd, R. 1991. Realism, anti-foundationalism and the enthusiasm for natural kinds. Philosophical Studies, 61(1-2): 127–148. Carey, S. 1991. Knowledge acquisition: Enrichment or conceptual change? In S. Carey and R. Gelman (Eds.), The Epigenesis of Mind: Essays on Biology and Cognition. Erlbaum, Hillsdale. Carruthers, P. 2018. Comparative psychology without consciousness. Consciousness and Cognition, 63; 47-60. Casali, A. G., Gosseries, O. & Rosanova, M. et al. 2013. A theoretically based index of consciousness independent of sensory processing and behavior, Science and Translational Medicine, 5: 198ra105. DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.3006294. Casarotto, S., Comanducci, A. & Mario, R. et al. 2016. Stratification of unresponsive patients by an independently validated index of brain complexity. Annals of Neurology, 80/5: 718-29. Chalmers, D. 1996. The Conscious Mind. New York: OUP. 24 Chalmers, D. 2003. The content and epistemology of phenomenal belief. In Q. Smith and A. Jokic (Eds.) Consciousness: New Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Churchland, P.S. 1988. Reduction and the neurobiological basis of consciousness. In A.J. Marcel and E. Bisiach (Eds.) Consciousness in Contemporary Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 273-304. Crane, T. 2005. Papineau on phenomenal concepts. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 71/1: 155-62. Dainton, B. 2000. Stream of Consciousness. London: Routledge. Dehaene,S., Lau, H. & Kouider, S. 2017. What is consciousness, and could machines have it? Science, 358(6362): 486-92. Dehaene, S. & Naccache, L. 2001. Towards a cognitive neuroscience of consciousness: basic evidence and a workspace framework. Cognition, 79: 1-37. Dehaene, S., Changeux, J.-P. & Naccache, L. 2011. The Global Neuronal Workspace Model of Conscious Access: From Neuronal Architectures to Clinical Applications. In S. Dehaene and Y. Christen (Eds.) Characterizing Consciousness: From Cognition to the Clinic? Research and Perspectives in Neurosciences. Springer-Verlag Berlin, pp. 55-84. Faivre, N., Mudrik, L., Schwartz, N. and Koch, C. 2014.Multisensory Integration in complete unawareness: Evidence from audiovisual congruency priming, Psychological Science, 25/11: 2006-2016. Faugeras, F. Rohaut, B. & Weiss, N. et al. 2012. Even related potentials elicited by violations of auditory regularities in patients with impaired consciousness. Neuropsychologia, 50: 403-18. Godfrey-Smith, P. 2020. Varieties of subjectivity. Philosophy of Science. Goff, P. 2011. A posteriori physicalists get our phenomenal concepts wrong. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 89/2: 191-209. Goff, P. 2015. Real acquaintance and physicalism. In P. Coates and S. Coleman (Eds.) Phenomenal Qualities. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 25 Goff, P. 2017. Consciousness and Fundamental Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goksan, S. et al. 2015. fMRI reveals neural activity overlap between adult and infant pain, eLife 4, e06356. Gosseries, O., Di, H., Laureys, S., Boly, M. 2014. Measuring consciousness in severely damaged brains. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 37: 457-78. Griffiths, P. E. 1999. Squaring the circle: natural kinds with historical essences. In. R. A. Wilson (ed) Species: New Interdisciplinary Essays. Cambridge, M.A, MIT Press, pp. 209-228. Horgan, T. and Tienson, J. 2001. Deconstructing new wave materialism. In C. Gillett and B. Loewer (Eds.) Physicalism and its Discontents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hu, L. & Iannetti, G. 2016. Painful issues in pain prediction. Trends in Neurosciences, 39/4: 212-20. Huang, Z. et al. 2018. Brain imaging reveals covert consciousness during behavioral unresponsiveness induced by propofol, Scientific Reports, 8, 13195. Irvine, E. 2013. Consciousness as a Scientific Concept: A Philosophy of Science Perspective. Dordrecht: Springer. King, J.R., Faugeras, F., Gramfort, A. 2013. Single-trial decoding of auditory novelty responses facilitates the detection of residual consciousness, Neuroimage, 83: 726-38. Kitcher, P. 1988. The child as parent of the scientist. Mind and Language, 3: 217-28. Kouider, S. et al. 2013. A neural marker of perceptual consciousness in infants. Science, 340: 376-80. Kripke, S. 1980. Naming and Necessity. Oxford: Blackwell. 26 Kuhn, T. S. 1964. A function for thought experiments. In The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change. University of Chicago Press. pp. 240-265. Levine, J. 2006. Phenomenal concepts and the materialist constraint. In T. Alter & S. Walter (Eds.), Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge: New Essays on Consciousness and Physicalism. Oxford: OUP, pp. 145-166. Loar, B. 1990. Phenomenal states. Philosophical Perspectives, 4: 81-108. Loar, B. 1997. Phenomenal states [second version]. In N. Block, O. Flanagan, & G. Güzeldere (Eds.) The Nature of Consciousness. London/Cambridge MA: MIT Press, pp. 597-616. Macdonald, C. 2004. Mary meets Molyneux: The explanatory gap and the individuation of phenomenal concepts, Noûs, 38/3: 503-524. Millikan, R. G. 1998. A common structure for concepts of individuals, stuffs, and real kinds: More mama, more milk, and more mouse. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 21(1), 55-65. Mudrik, L., Faivre, N. and Koch, C. 2014. Information integration without awareness, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18(9): 488-96. Nida-Rümelin, M. 2007. Grasping phenomenal properties. In T. Alter & S. Walter (Eds.) Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press. Papineau, D. 2002. Thinking About Consciousness. Oxford: OUP. Perry, J. 2001. Knowledge, Possibility, and Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Phillips, I. 2014-a. Experience of and in time, Philosophy Compass, 9/2: 131-44. Phillips, I. 2014-b. The temporal structure of experience. In D. Lloyd and V. Arstila (Eds.) Subjective Time: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Temporality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Phillips, I. 2018. The methodological puzzle of phenomenal consciousness, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 373 (1755), 20170347. 27 Scott, R.B., Samaha, J., Chrisley, R. & Dienes, Z. 2018. Prevailing theories of consciousness are challenged by novel cross-modal associations acquired between subliminal stimuli, Cognition, 175: 169-85. Seeff, L. B. 2009. The history of the “natural history” of hepatitis C (1968–2009). Liver International, 29(s1), 89-99. Shea, N. 2012. Methodological encounters with the phenomenal kind, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 84(2): 307-44. Shea, N. & Bayne, T. 2010. The vegetative state and the science of consciousness, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 61: 459-84. Sitt, J. et al. 2014. Large scale screening of neural signatures of consciousness in patients in a vegetative or minimally conscious state. Brain, 137, 2258-2270. Sundström, P. 2011. Phenomenal concepts. Philosophy Compass, 6/4: 267-81. Thagard, P. 1992. Conceptual Revolutions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tononi, G. 2008. Consciousness as integrated information: a provisional manifesto. The Biological Bulletin, 215(3), 216-242. Tracey, I. 2011. Can neuroimaging studies identify pain endophenotypes in humans? Nature Reviews Neurology, 7: 173-81. Travers, E., Frith, C. & Shea, N. 2018. Learning rapidly about the relevance of visual cues requires conscious awareness, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Philosophy, 71/8: 1698-1713. Trogdon, K. 2017. Revelation and physicalism. Synthese, 194/7: 2345–2366. Tye, M. 2000. Consciousness, Color, and Content. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Tye, M. 2009. Consciousness Revisited: Materialism without Phenomenal Concepts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wiser, M. & Carey, S. 1983. When heat and temperature were one. In D. Gentner and A. Stevens (Eds.), Mental Models. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 267-97. |