Conference Agenda

According to a widely shared belief, an explanation of phenomenal experience in terms of neural mechanisms is impossible in principle. The reason for this “Explanatory Gap” or “Hard Problem” is supposed to be that phenomenal experience cannot be captured in objective, functional terms.

Here, we will take three steps to avert this conclusion and show what an explanation of the qualitative character of phenomenal experience might look like.

Step I demonstrates that pivotal assumptions underlying the “Explanatory Gap” argument are unfounded. This means that it is possible to capture phenomenal states in functional terms and to solve the problem with the familiar methods of hypothesis development and -testing.

Step II presents a hypothesis how affective pain, a paradigmatic sort of phenomenal experience, can be captured in functional terms.

Step III presents empirical evidence corroborating this claim and indicates how this functional description can help to identify the neural mechanisms that explain affective pain experience.

We take this as proof of principle showing how the qualitative character of phenomenal experience can be explained. We conclude with some remarks on how this approach might contribute to future progress in the understanding of consciousness in general.

Most philosophical discussions of self-knowedge acknowledge that questions as to what we believe are often transparent to questions ‘about the world’. This means that in order to answer the question whether I believe that Madrid is smaller than Berlin, for example, I need to think about the respective sizes of Madrid and Berlin rather than about myself. However, consideration of the sizes of Madrid and Berlin will not help me answer the question what belief, if any, I already had when I was asked the question. This limit of transparency has been pointed out before. So, how do we go about answering questions about our pre-existing beliefs? I will argue that in typical cases our answers to such questions express our current attitude to our past reflections and judgements as we remember them. I will show how this account can augment earlier discussions of the matter and what implications it has for the epistemic status of self-knowledge (authority, immediacy etc.).

In this paper I defend the view that pretence plays an important role for the development of imagination and should be seen as primary to imagination. In particular, I argue against the view that pretence should be seen as identical to imagination, or that pretence is just a subtype of imagination (i.e. imagination plus behaviour) such that imagination is a prerequisite for pretence. Instead, I will argue that pretence should be seen as primary to imagination and provides an important foundation for the development of imaginative abilities. I draw three main distinctions between pretence and imagination: being a social ability, being behaviour based vs. purely mental and its connection with reality. I argue that while in pretence one pretends something which one knows not to be the case, pretence maintains a close connection with the current situation. I sketch a developmental trajectory from early pretence without imagination, to imagination in the context of pretence and finally, to full blown imagination outside of the context of pretence. In doing so, I aim to clarify the relationship of pretence and imagination, as well as highlight the developmental significance of pretence for thinking beyond the here and now.

Imaginative resistance—i.e., the difficulty of engaging with certain fictional scenarios—is a phenomenon that has been explained in many different ways. A paradigmatic case is Walton's (1994) morally repugnant story: “In killing her baby, Giselda did the right thing; after all, it was a girl.” This paper develops a skill-based account of imaginative resistance. It argues that the phenomenon stems from the cognitive effort required to engage with scenarios that are distant from our experiences or habitual patterns of imagination. The greater this distance, the more likely resistance is to arise, even for competent imaginers. Beyond knowledge-that a given fictional world is such and such, I highlight the importance of knowledge-how to engage with said world. I then explain how this distinction constitutes a novel version of contextualism with respect to the phenomenon of imaginative resistance (compare Stock 2005, Todd 2009). A key strength of this account is its ability to explain how imaginative resistance can be shaped over time, allowing individuals to train their imagination to either embrace or resist various scenarios.