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Experience, Ordinary and Philosophical

Sytsma, Justin and Fischer, Eugen (2023) Experience, Ordinary and Philosophical. [Preprint]

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Abstract

Common arguments for realism about phenomenal consciousness contend that this is a folk concept, with proponents expecting it to be lexicalised in ordinary language. In English, the word ‘experience’ is typically regarded as the best candidate. This predicts that ‘experience’ will be used to refer to mental states and episodes, not only in philosophical but also in ordinary discourse. We conduct a corpus study in order to assess this claim and to understand the actual use of the word in non-academic, academic, and philosophical discourse. In non-academic discourse, uses that refer to knowledge or sources of knowledge, and to public events, are found to dominate. Uses that refer to mental states or episodes dominate only in the philosophy of mind (and not even in philosophy at large).


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Item Type: Preprint
Creators:
CreatorsEmailORCID
Sytsma, Justin
Fischer, Eugene.fischer@uea.ac.uk0000-0003-2088-1610
Additional Information: Forthcoming in Synthese.
Keywords: experience, phenomenal consciousness, folk concept of consciousness, ordinary language philosophy, corpus analysis
Subjects: Specific Sciences > Cognitive Science > Consciousness
Depositing User: Justin Sytsma
Date Deposited: 10 May 2023 12:38
Last Modified: 10 May 2023 12:38
Item ID: 22086
Subjects: Specific Sciences > Cognitive Science > Consciousness
Date: 10 May 2023
URI: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/22086

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