Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science
November 1, 2014
Justin Sytsma
17 citations
Many philosophers and brain scientists consider explaining consciousness a major unsolved problem, with phenomenal consciousness seen as especially challenging. The belief that this phenomenon exists often relies on the claim that its existence is obvious in ordinary perceptual experience. This motivates studying people's intuitions about consciousness. Researchers in experimental philosophy have investigated how lay people understand and attribute mental states thought to be phenomenally conscious. This article discusses the philosophical concept of phenomenal consciousness and reviews work on whether non-experts possess this concept.
Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science
January 1, 2025
Mikel Jimenez, Antonio Prieto, José Antonio Hinojosa et al.
16 citations
The study of consciousness faces unique challenges because it investigates subjective experience, which is accessible only from a first-person perspective, unlike objective third-person phenomena in other sciences. This article reviews historical and contemporary efforts to measure consciousness and its absence, focusing on two main approaches: objective performance-based measures and subjective report-based measures of awareness. It compares their advantages and disadvantages, evaluates them against methodological criteria, and discusses transforming both into a common sensitivity measure (d') for comparison. New approaches are explored, including Bayesian models to support claims of absent awareness and machine-learning decoding models, alongside future challenges such as measuring qualia—the qualitative contents of awareness.
Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science
January 1, 2024
Pablo López-silva, Miguel Núñez De Prado-Gordillo, Victor Fernández-castro
4 citations
Delusions are a varied phenomenon across psychiatric conditions, especially common in schizophrenia. A core philosophical debate, the typology problem, asks what kind of mental state underlies delusional reports—whether they are beliefs (doxastic) or something else (anti-doxastic). This paper critically reviews the scattered literature on this issue. It clarifies two main philosophical approaches (interpretivism and functionalism) and introduces new subcategories: revisionist and non-revisionist doxastic views, and commonsensical and non-commonsensical anti-doxastic views. The analysis concludes by highlighting fundamental unresolved challenges in the debate, which has implications for experimental psychiatry and psychotherapy development.
Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science
May 1, 2012
Andrew Melnyk
3 citations
This review examines the philosophical debate between materialism and dualism about the mind. Materialism, the dominant view in cognitive science, holds that mental states are entirely constituted by physical states, while dualism denies this. Philosophers have refined these positions using concepts like realization and supervenience, distinguishing varieties such as eliminative materialism, substance dualism, and emergentism. They have also clarified how empirical evidence can support materialism. The article presents major objections to materialism, which serve as arguments for dualism, focusing on two features of mental states that materialism struggles to explain: intentionality (the aboutness of mental states) and phenomenal consciousness (the subjective experience of what it is like to be in a mental state).
Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science
January 1, 2026
Florestan Delcourt, Henry R Cowan, Jordan Sibéoni et al.
Disturbances of the self in schizophrenia are often described at two levels: a pre-reflective, minimal sense of self and a reflective, narrative self. This integrative review examines how these two levels may be linked. Three theoretical models are presented: the Structural model, which suggests minimal self-disorders hierarchically cause narrative disturbances and the schizophrenia phenotype; the Dialectical model, which emphasizes reciprocal interactions between the two levels with both pathogenic and salutogenic effects; and the Contextual model, which considers social, territorial, and biological dimensions. Empirical studies directly testing these links are scarce and preliminary. The literature suggests promising directions for future research and clinical applications.