Lecture by William Lycan

As used in contemporary philosophy and psychology, “consciousness” has several different uses; at least, there are different kinds of consciousness, and theories “of consciousness” have been directed towards disparate phenomena.  Some of the phenomena are empirical and tractable to a degree, while others are almost purely philosophical and unilluminated by science.  Three of the latter are:  (1) sensory qualities, such as the color of a visual after-image; (2) the intrinsic subjectivity of experience, the specialness of the point of view intrinsic to our awareness of our own mental states; and (3) the “explanatory gap” between neurophysiological states and our experiences feeling to us as they do.  But each of the philosophical issues is illuminated by a philosophical theory of internal representation.

William Lycan is William Rand Kenan, Jr. Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of North Carolina and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Connecticut. His research is in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and epistemology, and he is a foundational figure for many contemporary scholars who engage these topics. Lycan is author of Logical Form in Natural Language (Bradford Books / MIT Press, 1984), Knowing Who (with Steven Boër, Bradford Books / MIT Press, 1986), Consciousness (Bradford Books / MIT Press, 1987), Judgement and Justification (Cambridge University Press, 1988), Modality and Meaning (Kluwer Academic Publishing, Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy series, 1994), Consciousness and Experience (Bradford Books / MIT Press, 1996), Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge, 1999),  Real Conditionals (Oxford University Press, 2001), and On Evidence in Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2019).