Philosophy Program
Prof Frank Jackson
Australian Research Council Discovery Grants
Belief Singular Versus Beliefs Plural
with Associate Professor David-Braddon-Mitchell, University of Sydney.
2006 – 2010, total funding from ARC $84, 919.
Summary
Realism about belief is now close to orthodoxy in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. The major problems with instrumentalism and behaviourism are widely recognised. However certain views about how the brain processes information strongly suggest that we should think in terms of belief singular and not beliefs plural. If this is right, a major rethinking of our theorising – both at the everyday and at more sophisticated levels – about the role of belief in mind and action is called for. The idea that we have individual beliefs is ubiquitous in our theories of mind, action and rationality. This project will undertake the needed major rethinking.
Outcomes
Material from this project has been reported in named lectures at Brown University, University of Vermont, and University of Nebraska at Lincoln; in graduate seminars at Princeton University; and in publications in leading journals and collections by both Chief Investigators, and prospectively in the second edition of their The Philosophy of Mind and Cognition, Blackwell, 2007. A book coming out of Jackson's Blackwells lectures at Brown that incorporates work from this project is in process.
Conscious Experience and the Hegemony of Representation
with Professor Daniel Stoljar, Australian National University. 2006 – 2008. Total funding from ARC $97, 551.
Summary
Mental states are above all representational states: belief represents how we take things to be, perception how experience represents things to be, desire how we would like things to be and so on. We will show how a full appreciation of this fact allows us to solve the perennial puzzle of consciousness.
Outcomes
Material from this project has been reported in named lectures at Brown University, University of Vermont, and University of Nebraska at Lincoln; in graduate seminars at Princeton University by Jackson and in graduate seminars at Harvard University by Stoljar; and in publications in leading journals and collections by both Chief Investigators. A book coming out of Jackson's Blackwells lectures at Brown that will build on some of these results is in process.
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