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?
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1. Guest
William 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 Summary
Based 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 Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:54 - The hard problem
06:51 - Dualism
10:06 - Panpsychism
12:44 - Panpsychist rejoinders
15:28 - Modal structure
24:13 - Modal structure of neurophysiology
27:22 - Description-sensitivity
32:00 - Identity
34:52 - Type identity theory
36:27 - Boltzmann brains
39:17 - Correlations vs. identity
43:54 - Phenomenal concepts
45:56 - Zombies and inverts
50:07 - A priori reasoning
51:47 - Color experience
57:38 - Are colors real?
1:02:39 - Other senses
1:04:41 - Unity of consciousness
1:09:41 - Unconscious mental states
1:12:29 - Animal consciousness
1:15:48 - Vagueness
1:16:55 - Functionalism
1:20:48 - Artificial intelligence
1:21:28 - Paul Thagard’s approach
1:25:51 - Progress
1:27:11 - Value of philosophy
1:28:32 - Conclusion
