[en] The primary goal of this paper is to provide substantial motivation for exploring an Acquaintance account of phenomenal consciousness, on which what fundamentally explains phenomenal consciousness is the relation of acquaintance. Its secondary goal is to take a few steps towards such an account. Roughly, my argument proceeds as follows. Motivated by prioritizing naturalization, the debate about the nature of phenomenal consciousness has been almost monopolized by representational theories (first-order and meta-representational). Among them, Self-Representationalism is by far the most antecedently promising (or so I argue). However, on thorough inspection, Self-Representationalism turns out not explanatorily or theoretically better than the Acquaintance account. Indeed, the latter seems to be superior in at least some important respects. Therefore, at the very least, there are good reasons to take the Acquaintance account into serious consideration as an alternative to representational theories. The positive contribution of this paper is a sketch of an account of consciousness on which phenomenal consciousness is explained partly in representationalist terms, but where a crucial role is played by the relation of acquaintance.
Disciplines :
Philosophy & ethics
Author, co-author :
Giustina, Anna ; Université de Liège - ULiège > Département de philosophie
Language :
English
Title :
An Acquaintance alternative to Self-Representationalism
For extremely helpful conversations on the topics of this paper I am grateful to Davide Bordini, Arnaud Dewalque, and Uriah Kriegel. I am particularly grateful to Uriah Kriegel and Matt Duncan for generous and extensive comments on a previous draft, as well as to two anonymous referees for Philosophical Studies. The paper also benefitted from being presented in the Brainstorming seminar at the University of Liège and in the online Monthly Phenomenology seminar.
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