58. William Lycan | Epistemology, Mind

What happens to skeptical arguments once we treat them as credibility comparisons, and can higher-order theories really explain why some mental states feel conscious?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestWilliam Lycan is an American philosopher and Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His work has focused on a range of philosophical issues, but especially on mind, epistemology, and language.2. Interview SummaryBased on the transcript , the interview ranges across G. E. Moore-style “common sense” replies to skepticism and broader questions about philosophical method, before turning to consciousness and intentionality. Lycan (introduced as a philosopher emeritus at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and author of books including Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction and Consciousness and Experience) explains that his aim isn’t to declare common sense “incorrigible,” but to distill a more modest Moorean technique and apply it one issue at a time. Central to that technique is a claim about how deductive arguments function: they force a “credibility comparison” between the premises and the negation of the conclusion, so that skeptical arguments can be answered by weighing their premises against everyday knowledge claims (“I know my name,” “I have hands,” etc.) rather than pretending the skeptic will be dialectically “refuted” once and for all.A second thread concerns why so many philosophical disputes feel like stalemates. Lycan is sympathetic to the thought that we often end up talking past each other—partly because the subject matter is complicated and ordinary language “runs out,” making verbal disputes and equivocations hard to avoid. He treats familiar debates (like internalism vs. externalism about justification) as cases where different, importantly connected notions may be traveling under a single label, and he suggests that real progress sometimes requires sharpening vocabulary rather than insisting there must be a single “fact of the matter” that one side uniquely captures. He also defends a fairly traditional role for intuitions—framed as “intellectual seemings”—arguing that if they count for nothing, then much of philosophy loses its evidential foothold, even while conceding that particular intuitions can be explained away (confusion, bias, etc.). Relatedly, he gestures at contextualist/interest-relative pressures on “knows”: raising the practical stakes (how much you’d bet, how severe the consequences of being wrong are) can legitimately change which knowledge attributions sound right, without this automatically vindicating the skeptic’s strongest conclusion.In the philosophy of mind portion, Lycan defends a higher-order approach to consciousness: a lower-level mental state counts as conscious in part because it is represented by a higher-order state, and he discusses how this differs from nearby views that locate consciousness “in” the higher-order state itself. He also describes refining his own view by separating higher-order “introspection” from mere attention—an adjustment prompted by work with a student, and by how attention is treated in neuroscience. On adjacent theories, he treats Bernard Baars’s global workspace idea as broadly friendly to higher-order representation (though he’s cautious about the current state of the empirical literature), and he sketches global workspace as an “accessibility” story about availability for reasoning and control. Finally, he reiterates a broad intentionalist inclination—inclined to treat mental states (even affective ones like anxiety, and paradigmatic sensations like pain) as having representational content—then briefly contrasts this with David Papineau’s more recent view of sensory experience as only contingently representational (a view Lycan hadn’t yet read in its newest form).3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:40 - Moorean response05:53 - Applications of the response07:04 - Arguments and common-sense08:49 - Skeptical rejoinder17:20 - Bradley's argument against time19:48 - Permissive epistemology?24:21 - Disputes as not substantive34:15 - Verbal disputes still important35:45 - Updating language36:45 - Philosophical progress41:50 - Philosophical issues as pervasive44:35 - Intuitions49:08 - Intuitions as evidence54:51 - Epistemic contextualism57:58 - Epistemic contextualism and Moore1:01:25 - Higher-order representation1:05:00 - Ways to reject the argument1:06:58 - Alternative conceptions of higher-order theories1:09:56 - Global workspace theory1:12:12 - All consciousness as representational1:14:04 - Papineau on representation1:17:27 - Can perception be reflexive?1:19:15 - Value of philosophy1:21:11 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe