{"title":"Russell’s Representationalism about Consciousness: Reconsidering His Relationship to James","authors":"Alexander Klein","doi":"10.1353/rss.2023.a904085","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:While Russell famously rejected the pragmatist theory of truth, recent scholarship portrays his post-prison accounts of belief and knowledge as resembling James’s. But deeper divisions in fact persisted between Russell and James concerning the nature of mind. I argue 1) that Russell’s neutral monist approach to consciousness in The Analysis of Mind constitutes an early form of representationalism in that he took states to be phenomenally conscious partly in virtue of (truly) representing an antecedent (typically just-passed) sensation; 2) that although James also saw representation (typically of expected kinaesthetic sensation) as a crucial component of consciousness, he contended that representation is a matter of affording future-directed action control that aligns with the agent’s interests; and 3) that what divides these contrasting approaches to consciousness and representation is precisely what Russell would continue to reject in the pragmatist theory of truth, namely the productive role James assigned to an agent’s interests.","PeriodicalId":41601,"journal":{"name":"RUSSELL-THE JOURNAL OF THE BERTRAND RUSSELL STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"RUSSELL-THE JOURNAL OF THE BERTRAND RUSSELL STUDIES","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rss.2023.a904085","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"PHILOSOPHY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract:While Russell famously rejected the pragmatist theory of truth, recent scholarship portrays his post-prison accounts of belief and knowledge as resembling James’s. But deeper divisions in fact persisted between Russell and James concerning the nature of mind. I argue 1) that Russell’s neutral monist approach to consciousness in The Analysis of Mind constitutes an early form of representationalism in that he took states to be phenomenally conscious partly in virtue of (truly) representing an antecedent (typically just-passed) sensation; 2) that although James also saw representation (typically of expected kinaesthetic sensation) as a crucial component of consciousness, he contended that representation is a matter of affording future-directed action control that aligns with the agent’s interests; and 3) that what divides these contrasting approaches to consciousness and representation is precisely what Russell would continue to reject in the pragmatist theory of truth, namely the productive role James assigned to an agent’s interests.
期刊介绍：
Russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies is published semiannually, in the summer and the winter, by The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster University. Both print and electron ic editions are published. From 1971 until 1999 Russell was titled Russell: the Journal of the Bertrand Russell Archives and was published first by McMaster University Library Press (1971–96) and then by McMaster University Press (1997–99). The ISSN of the print edition is 0036-0163; that of the electronic edition, 1913-8032. Russell is published with the assistance of grants from the Aid to Journals programme of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and from McMaster’s Faculty of Humanities.
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