Epiphenomenalism and knowledge
Defending Robinson’s Reply to the Self-Stultification Objection
Keywords:
mind, consciousness, epiphenomenalism, knowledgeAbstract
Epiphenomenalism is the view that mental events have no causal impact on physical events. One of the most potent objections to this view is the self-stultification objection, which aims to show that epiphenomenalism is incompatible with knowledge about our own experience. William Robinson (2006) argues that epiphenomenalism can escape charges of self-stultification by appealing to the common underlying cause between mental events and our reports of mental events. In this paper, I defend Robinson’s proposal against several objections raised by Dwayne Moore (2012). I conclude that Moore’s argu-ments fail to undermine Robinson’s solution to the self-stultification objection.
References
Block, Ned. 2002. “Concepts of Consciousness.” In Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings, edited by David John Chalmers, 206. New York: Oxford University Press.
Chalmers, David John. 2004. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. New York: Oxford University Press.
Jackson, Frank. 2002. “Epiphenomenal Qualia.” In Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings, edited by David John Chalmers, 273. New York: Oxford University Press.
Moore, Dwayne. 2012. “On Robinson’s Response to the Self-Stultifying Objection.” Review of Philosophy and Psychology 3 (4): 627–41.
Robinson, William. 2006. “Knowing Epiphenomena.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 13 (1–2): 85–100.
Nida-Rümelin, Martine, and Donnchadh O’Conaill. 2019. “Qualia: The Knowledge Argument.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Winter 2019 Edition. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-knowledge/.
Robinson, William. 2006. “Knowing Epiphenomena.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 13, nos. 1–2: 85–100.
Robinson, William. 2019. “Epiphenomenalism.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philos-ophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Summer 2019 Edition. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epiphenomenalism/
Rosenthal, David M. 1997. “A Theory of Consciousness.” In The Nature of Conscious-ness, edited by Ned Block, Owen J. Flanagan, and Guven Guzeldere. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2021 Tidsskrift for Medier, Erkendelse og Formidling
![Creative Commons License](http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-nd/4.0/88x31.png)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Creative Commons: CC by-nc-nd