An Account of Conscious Experience

FAIN: FA-54513-09

Anil K. Gupta
University of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, PA 15260-6133)

My project is to complete a book in which I develop an account of conscious experience. Two features separate the approach I am taking from those of others. First, I focus on the rational role of conscious experience. I bracket the concern, predominant in contemporary philosophy, with naturalism. Second, I work with a distinctive account of the rational role of experience. Experience, I argue, does not yield categorical entitlements to propositions; it yields instead conditional entitlements. My aim in the new book is to offer an account that explains how conscious experience plays this kind of rational role. The central notion in the account is that of presence. I argue that both subjective and objective entities can be present in conscious experience, but the distinction between the two is not given in experience. The entities present fix the subjective character of the experience--and hence its conditional rational role--but they do not determine categorical rational entitlements.

Associated Products

Conscious Experience: A Logical Inquiry (Book)
Title: Conscious Experience: A Logical Inquiry
Author: Anil Gupta
Abstract: The book aims to offer an account of conscious experience and of concepts that helps us understand empirical reasoning and empirical dialectic. The account offered possesses, it is claimed, two virtues. First, it provides great theoretical freedom. It allows the theoretician freedom to radically reconceive the world. The theoretician may, for example, begin with the conception that colors are genuine qualities of physical bodies and may, in light of empirical findings, shift to the conception that colors are not genuine qualities at all. Second, the account grants empirical reason a great power to constrain: empirical reason can force a particular conception of the self and the world on the rational inquirer. These seemingly contrary virtues are reconciled through a novel treatment of presentation and appearances in the account offered of conscious experience and a novel treatment of ostensive definitions in the account offered of concepts. The argument of the book is buttressed by a critical study of the principal approaches to experience and reason found in the philosophical literature.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: http://https://www.worldcat.org/title/conscious-experience-a-logical-inquiry/oclc/1032716075&referer=brief_results
Access Model: Not open access
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-0674987784
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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