Consciousness as a natural kind and the methodological puzzle of consciousness

Henry Taylor

doi:10.1111/mila.12413

Consciousness as a natural kind and the methodological puzzle of consciousness

Henry Taylor

Philosophy

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Abstract

A new research programme conceives of consciousness as a natural kind. One proposed virtue of this approach is that it can help resolve the methodological puzzle of consciousness, which involves distinguishing consciousness from cognitive access. The present paper raises a novel problem for this approach. The problem is rooted in the fact that we may have misclassified episodes of consciousness as not episodes of consciousness. I argue that conceiving of consciousness as a natural kind cannot distinguish consciousness from cognitive access.

Original language	English
Journal	Mind & Language
Early online date	7 Apr 2022
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1111/mila.12413
Publication status	E-pub ahead of print - 7 Apr 2022

Keywords

cognitive access
consciousness
global workspace theory
methodological puzzle
natural kinds
recurrent processing

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10.1111/mila.12413

taylorh2021consciousness
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Cite this

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Consciousness as a natural kind and the methodological puzzle of consciousness

Abstract

Keywords

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