Knowledge Tree
Sydney Shoemaker
Facts (19)
Sources
Self-Consciousness - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy plato.stanford.edu Jul 13, 2017 11 facts
claimSydney Shoemaker's proposed connection between self-awareness and rationality is intended to apply only to cases of belief revision that qualify as exercises in rational investigation.
claimSydney Shoemaker (1984b) argues that postulating an introspective awareness of the self as the self fails to explain all self-knowledge because if inner perception revealed an object to be F, one could only judge that they are F if they already took themselves to be that perceived object, which presupposes prior non-perceptual self-knowledge.
claimSydney Shoemaker argued in his 1984 work 'Personal Identity: A Materialist’s Account' for a materialist perspective on personal identity.
claimSydney Shoemaker argues that rational subjects must be self-conscious to avoid being self-blind regarding their beliefs, as rational belief revision requires awareness of one's own belief-desire system.
claimSydney Shoemaker argues that a rational creature in pain will typically desire to be rid of that pain, which requires the creature to believe that it is in pain, a belief that is inherently self-conscious.
claimSydney Shoemaker (1984b, 1986) argues that if there is an introspective awareness of the self as an object, it should be understood as a form of self-perception, but he also contends that introspection is not a form of perception, meaning we do not introspectively perceive the self.
claimSydney Shoemaker (1986) asserts that if there is an awareness of the self, it is philosophically significant because it could ground self-knowledge, first-person reference, and the immunity to error of certain first-person thoughts.
claimSydney Shoemaker formulated the concept of 'immunity to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun' (IEM), defining an error of misidentification as occurring when one knows a particular thing 'a' to be 'F' and judges that 'b' is 'F' because one mistakenly believes 'a' is identical to 'b'.
claimSydney Shoemaker (1984b) argues that viewing introspective self-knowledge as based on the perception of an object implausibly opens up first-person thought to errors of misidentification, as it entails that self-knowledge is based on an identification of the self.
claimSydney Shoemaker (1994) argues against the possibility of 'self-blindness,' which is the idea that a rational creature with necessary concepts could be unaware of its own sensations or beliefs.
quoteSydney Shoemaker wrote in 1994: "in an important class of cases the rational revision or adjustment of the belief-desire system requires that we undertake investigations aimed at determining what revisions or readjustments to make […] What rationalizes the investigation are one’s higher-order beliefs about what one believes and has reason to believe."
Moving Forward on the Problem of Consciousness - David Chalmers consc.net 2 facts
referenceDavid Chalmers notes that sophisticated arguments for type-A materialism exist in philosophical literature, specifically citing works by Sydney Shoemaker (1975) and Stephen White (1986).
referenceSydney Shoemaker (1990) provides a functionalist account of incorrigibility that relies on the interdefinition of pains and pain-beliefs.
Consciousness, Physicalism, and Panpsychism - R Discovery discovery.researcher.life May 1, 2013 2 facts
claimSydney Shoemaker's 'subset' account of realization offers a possibility for panpsychists to explain macrosubjects as part of a microsubject whole.
perspectivePanpsychists could potentially avoid the combination problem by endorsing an intelligible form of emergence, such as Sydney Shoemaker's account of emergence or realization, which posits the existence of 'micro-latent' powers alongside 'micro-manifest' ones.
Consciousness (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy/Fall 2025 ... plato.stanford.edu Jun 18, 2004 1 fact
claimThe validity of the absent or inverted qualia argument against functionalism is a subject of controversy among philosophers, with contributions from Sydney Shoemaker (1981), Daniel Dennett (1990), and Peter Carruthers (2000).
Consciousness and Cognitive Sciences journal-psychoanalysis.eu 1 fact
referenceSydney Shoemaker published 'Functionalism and qualia' in Philosophical Studies in 1975.
Non-physicalist Theories of Consciousness cambridge.org Dec 20, 2023 1 fact
claimDispositionalism is the view that fundamental physical properties are nothing more than brute dispositions or potentials, a position argued by philosophers such as Sydney Shoemaker (1980) and Stephen Mumford (2004).
Dualism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy/Winter 2016 Edition) plato.stanford.edu Aug 19, 2003 1 fact
claimDerek Parfit (1970, 1984) and Sydney Shoemaker (1984) accept David Hume's bundle theory as physicalists.