Robbins Library Notes

Good morning, all!  Welcome back after the Thanksgiving holiday!

Today’s post is an announcement for an upcoming conference here at Harvard:

The Role of Consciousness in Thought
6 December 2008
Harvard University
CGIS, Room N-354

The speakers for this workshop are:

• Imogen Dickie (NYU/Toronto)
• Declan Smithies (The Ohio State University)
• Matthew Soteriou (University of Warwick)
• Cheryl Chen (Harvard University).

From the flyer:

How do our conscious states figure in our knowledge of our own minds, on the one hand, or in the knowledge of the world that we gain by perception, on the other? In the case of perception, we can learn that the traffic light is red by consciously seeing it, or that there is garbage nearby from consciously smelling it, or that a friend is approaching from consciously hearing her voice and her footsteps. But could we end up with exactly the same knowledge – or with any knowledge at all – if the perceptions were unconscious? In the case of self-knowledge, when we consciously calculate a sum or deliberate about what to do next, we can quite easily know that we are calculating or deliberating. Does the status of our calculation or deliberation as conscious have any role to play in securing this knowledge? This workshop will the explore the epistemic roles played by conscious experience in grounding knowledge.

Complete information and a schedule can be found via the link above.