Consciousness in action

Author(s)

• Hurley, S. L. (Susan L.)

Bibliographic Information

Consciousness in action

S.L. Hurley

Harvard University Press, 2002

• : pbk

Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. 467-490) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

In this important book, Susan Hurley sheds new light on consciousness by examining its relationships to action from various angles. She assesses the role of agency in the unity of a conscious perspective, and argues that perception and action are more deeply interdependent than we usually assume. A standard view conceives perception as input from world to mind and action as output from mind to world, with the serious business of thought in between. Hurley criticizes this picture, and considers how the interdependence of perceptual experience and agency at the personal level (of mental contents and norms) may emerge from the subpersonal level (of underlying causal processes and complex dynamic feedback systems). Her two-level view has wide implications, for topics that include self-consciousness, the modularity of mind, and the relations of mind to world. The self no longer lurks hidden somewhere between perceptual input and behavioral output, but reappears out in the open, embodied and embedded in its environment. Hurley traces these themes from Kantian and Wittgensteinian arguments through to intriguing recent work in neuropsychology and in dynamic systems approaches to the mind, providing a bridge from mainstream philosophy to work in other disciplines. Consciousness in Action is unique in the range of philosophical and scientific work it draws on, and in the deep criticism it offers of centuries-old habits of thought.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: The Reappearing Self PART 1: ACTION AND THE UNITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS 1. Three Mistakes about Consciousness 2. Self-Consciousness, Spontaneity, and the Myth of the Giving 3. Unity, Objectivity, and Norms 4. Nonconceptual Self-Consciousness: Perspective, Access, and Agency 5. Unity, Neuropsychology, and Action PART 2: PERCEPTION AND ACTION 6. Wittgenstein on Practice and the Myth of the Giving 7. Content and Environment: Parallels between Perception and Action 8. Perception, Dynamic Feedback, and Externalism 9. Neuropsychology versus the Input-output Picture 10. Alternative Views of Perception and Action Appendix: Outline of the Arguments Bibliography Credits Index

by "Nielsen BookData"

• NCID: BA69356713
• ISBN:
  • 0674007964
• LCCN: 98012790
• Country Code: us
• Title Language Code: eng
• Text Language Code: eng
• Place of Publication: Cambridge, Mass. ; London
• Pages/Volumes: xii, 506 p.
• Size: 23 cm
• Classification:
  • DC21 : 153
  • NDC9 : 141.51
• Subject Headings:
  • LCSH : Perception
  • LCSH : Action theory
  • LCSH : Self