NED BLOCK

Department of Philosophy,
New York University
Room 405
5 Washington Place
New York, NY 10003

tel: (212) 998-8322
fax: (212) 995-4179
or (212) 475-2338

e-mail: ned.blockATSIGNnyu.edu

Photo by Winston Chang

NED BLOCK (Ph.D., Harvard), Silver Professor of Philosophy, Psychology and Neural Science, came to NYU in 1996 from MIT where he was Chair of the Philosophy Program. He works in philosophy of mind and foundations of neuroscience and cognitive science and is currently writing a book on consciousness. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Senior Fellow of the Center for the Study of Language and Information, a Sloan Foundation Fellow, a faculty member at two NEH Institutes and two NEH Seminars, the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Science Foundation; and a recipient of the Robert A. Muh Alumni Award in Humanities and Social Science from MIT. He is a past president of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, a past Chair of the MIT Press Cognitive Science Board, and past President of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. The Philosophers' Annual selected his papers as one of the "ten best" in 1983, 1990, 1995 and 2002. He is co-editor of The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates (MIT Press, 1997). The first of two volumes of his collected papers, Functionalism, Consciousness and Representation, MIT Press came out in May, 2007. Click to see the website for the Australian National University Workshop, 2003: Themes from Ned Block. In 2008-2009, he will be Distinguished Visiting Professor, University of Hong Kong, Townsend Visitor, University of California at Berkeley, Smart Lecturer, at ANU, Efron Symposiast, Pomona College, and Distinguished Visitor, University of Warwick. Some of his recent papers are available below.

Articles in Handbooks and Encyclopedias

"Consciousness"(in R. Gregory (ed.) Oxford Companion to the Mind, second edition 2004) Russian version here

"Qualia" (in R. Gregory (ed.) Oxford Companion to the Mind, second edition, 2004)

"Consciousness" (in Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, edited by Lynn Nadel. New York, NY, Nature Publishing Group, 2003.)

"Holism, Mental and Semantic" (in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1998)

"Semantics, Conceptual Role" (in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1998)

"What is Functionalism?" (a revised version of the entry on functionalism in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy Supplement, Macmillan, 1996)

"The Mind as the Software of the Brain" (An Invitation to Cognitive Science, edited by D. Osherson, L. Gleitman, S. Kosslyn, E. Smith and S. Sternberg, MIT Press, 1995)

"Qualia" (from S. Guttenplan (ed) A Companion to Philosophy of Mind, Blackwell: Oxford, 1994)

Online Papers

“Functional Reduction”, forthcoming in a festschrift for Jaegwon Kim, Supervenience in Mind, edited by Terry Horgan, Marcelo Sabates and David Sosa.This paper argues that the functional reduction picture of reductive explanation, a picture shared by proponents such as David Lewis and opponents such as Jaegwon Kim, David Chalmers and Frank Jackson, misses an important insight in the reductionist point of view

”Consciousness, Accessibility and the Mesh between Psychology and Neuroscience,” in Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30, published in 2008 but backdated to 2007, 481-548, along with 32 commentaries (available here) by Balog, Burge, Byrne Hilbert & Siegel, Clark & Kiverstein, Gopnik, Grush, Harman, Hulme & Whitely, Izard Quinn & Most, Jacob, Kentridge, Koch & Tsuchiya, Kouider, Gardelle & Dupoux, Lamme, Landman & Sligte, Lau & Persaud, Laureys, Levine, Lycan, Malach, McDermott, Naccache & Dehaene, O’Regan & Myin, Prinz, Rosenthal, Sergent & Rees, Shanahan & Baars, Snodgrass & Lepisto, Spener, Tye and Van Gulick; and author’s replies. How can we disentangle the neural basis of phenomenal consciousness from the neural machinery of the cognitive access that underlies reports of phenomenal consciousness? We can see the problem in stark form if we ask how we could tell whether representations inside a Fodorian module are phenomenally conscious. The methodology would seem straightforward: find the neural natural kinds that are the basis of phenomenal consciousness in clear cases when subjects are completely confident and we have no reason to doubt their authority, and look to see whether those neural natural kinds exist within Fodorian modules. But a puzzle arises: do we include the machinery underlying reportability within the neural natural kinds of the clear cases? If the answer is ‘Yes’, then there can be no phenomenally conscious representations in Fodorian modules. But how can we know the answer? The suggested methodology requires an answer to the question it was supposed to answer! The paper argues for an abstract solution to the problem and exhibits a source of empirical data that is relevant, data that show that in a certain sense phenomenal consciousness overflows cognitive accessibility. The paper argues that we can find a neural realizer of this overflow if assume that the neural basis of phenomenal consciousness does not include the neural basis of cognitive accessibility and that this assumption is justified (other things equal) by the explanations it allows.

“Wittgenstein and Qualia”, Philosophical Perspectives 21, 1, 2007: 73-115, edited by John Hawthorne. Wittgenstein (in notes published first in 1968) endorsed one kind of inverted spectrum hypothesis and rejected another. This paper argues that the kind of inverted spectrum hypothesis that Wittgenstein endorsed (the “innocuous” inverted spectrum hypothesis) is the thin end of the wedge that precludes a Wittgensteinian critique of the kind of inverted spectrum hypothesis he rejected (the “dangerous” kind). The danger of the dangerous kind is that it provides an argument for qualia, where qualia are (for the purposes of this paper) contents of experiential states that cannot be fully captured in natural language. I will pinpoint the difference between the innocuous and dangerous scenarios that matters for the argument for qualia, give arguments in favor of the coherence and possibility of the dangerous scenario, and try to show that some standard arguments against inverted spectra are ineffective against the version of the dangerous scenario I will be advocating. I will also agree with what I think is Wittgenstein’s position that the kind of inverted spectrum hypothesis he rejected lets qualia in the door. At one crucial point, I will rely on a less controversial version of an argument I gave in Block (1999). Wittgenstein’s views provide a convenient starting point for a paper that is much more about qualia than about Wittgenstein.

"Max Black’s Objection to Mind-Body Identity", in Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, II, edited by Dean Zimmerman with replies by John Perry and Stephen White, Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 3-78. White’s reply here. Table of Contents here. Also in Torin Alter and Sven Walter (eds.), Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge, Oxford University Press, 2006, 249-306. (Amusingly, the simultaneous OUP publications of this article were copy-edited by different copy-editors, leading to slightly different versions.) The mind-body identity theorist says phenomenal property Q = brain property B. But in stating or thinking this identity claim, don’t we have to have a further, unreduced, phenomenal property that serves as a mode of presentation of Q? This paper argues that this suspicion underlies both Jackson’s Knowledge Argument and the famous glimpse of an argument that J. J. C. Smart ascribed to Max Black. The argument is presented, dissected and refuted.

"Bodily Sensations as an Obstacle for Representationism", in Pain: New Essays on Its Nature and the Methodology of Its Study, edited by Murat Aydede, MIT Press, 2005, 137-142

Review of Alva Noë, Action in Perception, The Journal of Philosophy, CII, 5, May 2005, 259-272.

"Two Neural Correlates of Consciousness" This is a longer version of a paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol (9), 2, February 2005 The shorter published version is here. This paper was the top download from the Trends in Cognitive Sciences web site of 2005 and was on ScienceDirect’s list of the Top 25 Hottest Articles of January-March, 2005 in the category of Neuroscience.

Review (or click here) of Pat Churchland’s Brain-wise, Science 301, 2003, p. 1328

"Mental Paint" in Reflections and Replies, a book of essays on Tyler Burge, with replies by Burge, edited by Martin Hahn and Bjorn Ramberg and published by MIT Press, 2003. Here is Burge's reply to this paper (perhaps slightly different from the published version).

"Do Causal Powers Drain Away?" Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. 67, No. 1 (July 2003), pp. 110-127, with a reply by Jaegwon Kim, "Blocking Causal Drainage and other Chores with Mental Causation".

"Spatial Perception via Tactile Sensation", (or here) Trends in Cognitive Sciences Volume 7, Issue 7, July 2003, Pages 285-286. This is a reply to Susan Hurley and Alva Noë, "Neural plasticity and consciousness". (Note: the journal incorrectly reversed the noun phrases in the title.) Hurley's and Noë's reply to me, "Neural plasticity and consciousness: Reply to Block" from the August, 2003 issue.

"The Harder Problem of Consciousness", PDF version, from The Journal of Philosophy XCIX, No. 8, August 2002, 1-35. The version that came out in The Journal of Philosophy was shortened considerably because of space limitations in the journal. Some of the cuts have been restored in the version here. (This version appeared in Disputatio 15, November 2003.) For critiques, see Brian McLaughlin, "A Naturalist-Phenomenal Realist Response To Block's Harder Problem", Philosophical Issues, 13, (2003):163-204 (The version linked to here may be slightly different from the published version.), and Jakob Hohwy, "Evidence, Explanation, and Experience: On the Harder Problem of Consciousness" Journal of Philosophy, Volume CI, Number 5, May 2004 pp. 242-254 (Again, the version linked to here may be slightly different from the published version.)

"Some Concepts of Consciousness" In Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings, David Chalmers (ed.) Oxford University Press, 2002.

"Paradox and Cross Purposes in Recent Work on Consciousness". This is an expanded and revised version of a commentary on all the papers in a special issue of Cognition (April, 2001) on the state of the art in the neuroscience of consciousness. (The special issue has come out separately: Stan Dehaene, ed., The Cognitive Neuroscience of Consciousness, M.I.T. Press, 2001) Two philosophers–Dan Dennett and I–were asked to comment on all the scientists' papers. (We both made some comments on each others' papers as well). Dennett's paper is available by clicking here. If you want to see the papers that Dennett and I commented on, see Cognition, Volume 79, Issues 1-2, Pages 1-237 (April 2001)

"Behaviorism Revisited". This is a comment on J. K. O_Regan. and Alva Noë, "A Sensorimotor Account of Vision and Visual Consciousness" The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 2001 (24:5).

"Sexism, Racism, Ageism and the Nature of Consciousness", in The Philosophy of Sydney Shoemaker, Philosophical Topics, 26, 1 and 2, 1999. Edited by Richard Moran, Jennifer Whiting, and Alan Sidelle.

"Conceptual Analysis, Dualism and the Explanatory Gap" (with Robert Stalnaker) The Philosophical Review, January, 1999.

"Is Experiencing Just Representing?" (in a symposium on Michael Tye in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, September, 1998).

"How Not to Find the Neural Correlate of Consciousness" (in a volume of Royal Institute of Philosophy lectures edited by Anthony O'Hear, 1998).

"Anti-Reductionism Slaps Back" Appeared in Mind, Causation, World, Philosophical Perspectives 11, 1997, 107-133.

"On a Confusion about a Function of Consciousness" (link to uncorrected proof on BBS web site) The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1995. There is a more up to date version of this in Block, Flanagan and G|zeldere, The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates (MIT Press, 1997) The replies to the second round of critiques, "Biology versus computation in the study of consciousness", Behavior and Brain Sciences 20:1, 159-165, 1997, are available here. The critics in this round are Joseph Bogen, Selmer Bringsjord, Derek Browne, David Chalmers, Denise Gamble, Daniel Gilman, Güven Güzeldere and Murat Aydede, Bruce Mangan, Alva Noë, Ernst Pöppel, David Rosenthal, A.H.C. van der Heijden, P.T.W. Hudson and A.G. Kurvink. Their critiques are available here.

"How Heritability Misleads about Race" (Cognition 56, 1995: pp. 99-128).

Shortened version of "How Heritability Misleads about Race", "Race, Genes and IQ", or here (Boston Review, 1996).

"What is Dennett's Theory a Theory of?" (Philosophical Topics 22, 1 and 2, 1994, pp. 23-40).

"An Argument for Holism", in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, Vol XCIV, 1995, p.151-169.

"Mental Pictures and Cognitive Science" (The Philosophical Review, Volume 92, 4, Oct. 1983, pages 499-541.) Accessing this paper requires a password. The paper is available without the password from JSTOR, (along with past issues of this and other philosophy journals up to about five years ago) although you may not be able to get it without a university account or a paid subscription.

"Psychologism and Behaviorism", PDF version; from The Philosophical Review LXXXX, No. 1, January 1981, 5-43.