THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Synthese, 2019

Multidisciplinary models aggregating ‘lower-level’ biological and ‘higher-level’ psychological and social determinants of a phenomenon raise a puzzle. How is the interaction between the physical, the psychological and the social conceptualized and explained? Using biopsychosocial models of pain as an illustration, I argue that these models are in fact level-neutral compilations of empirical findings about correlated and causally relevant factors, and as such they neither as-sume, nor entail a conceptual or ontological stratification into levels of description, explanation or reality. If inter-level causation is deemed problematic or if debates about the superiority of a par-ticular level of description or explanation arise, these issues are fueled by considerations other than empirical findings.

Science, Technology & Innovation …, 2011

Scientific Understanding: Philosophical Perspectives (edited by H. De Regt, S. Leonelli & K. Eigner)

Clinical Medicine, 2008

Scientific medicine has advanced by regarding our illnesses as the afflictions of organisms, and so minimising the distances between ourselves and other animals, and yet the huge and growing corpus of medical knowledge is itself dramatic evidence of how remote we are from all other organisms. It is possible that this, the paradox in my title, has something to do with another paradox of which we are all uncomfortably aware: that medicine, which has delivered increased life, health and comfort expectancy beyond our wildest dreams, is subject to criticism as never before. 1,2 The mystery in the title is the mystery of knowledge and its 'unreasonable effectiveness' in helping us to live longer, healthier and more comfortably. Knowledge Karl Popper described human knowledge as 'the greatest miracle in the universe'. 3 This is no exaggeration and yet we tend rather to take it for granted. What is extraordinary about knowledge is that it proposes the existence of objects, events or states of affairs that exceed our sense experiences. Even the seemingly most straightforward objects of knowledge-material objects-transcend the experiences we have of them. Supposing I see an object over there. What do I see? I see a cup. I see something that has a front, a back, an interior, an exterior, a weight, a density, a tensile strength and so on. But what do I actually see? All that is given to me in vision is a visible surface. The back, the inside, its interior, its weight, its density, its tensile strength, and so on are all inferred from my present experiences. And while I can check these things out by further exploration-by touch, for example, or measurement-a material object always has a residue that is not checked out against, exhausted by, or cashed out as experience. As the American philosopher Barry Stroud stated, our knowledge of objects is underdetermined by the sense experiences. 4 The objects of knowledge transcend their sensory basis. Or, to put this another way, knowledge transcends the body or organism. The mystery of knowledge is that it is effective as a guide to action, even though it has only the loosest connection with immediate experience. There is another important feature of knowledge. If knowledge transcends the sensory experience of indi

Academicus International Scientific Journal, 2016

It has often been claimed in contemporary philosophy that the scientific world-view will necessarily replace the view of the world provided by common sense. It may be argued, however, that common sense holds a sort of methodological primacy over the aforementioned scientific world-view. For example, the thesis of the indeterminacy of radical translation entails the impossibility of establishing what a scientific theory is talking about. We can say what a scientific theory deals with only by having recourse to our ordinary language, i.e., by assuming that we know and understand in advance what we are talking about normally, in our daily life. It follows that science cannot be conceived of as a form of knowledge which is totally independent of ordinary language and, therefore, alternative to it. According to such a stance, even scientific theories stem from the universe of meanings that belong to common language.

Spontaneous Generations a Journal For the History and Philosophy of Science, 2009

Spontaneous generations, 2009

How can we understand our human world, embedded as it is within the physical universe, in such a way that justice is done to both the richness, meaning and value of human life on the one hand, and what modern science tells us about the physical universe on the other hand? I argue that, in order to solve this problem, we need to see physics as being concerned only with a highly selected aspect of reality – that aspect which determines how events unfold – the causally efficacious aspect. Physics cannot describe the experiential, and if it is extended so that it does so, physical theory would cease to be explanatory. The human world can, however, be understood in terms of a different kind of explanation, which I call “personalistic”. This is not reducible to physical explanation. The world is, in short, riddled with what may be called “double comprehensibility”.

Philosophical Books, 1982