TSA Colloquium June 25
Date and time: June 25, 15:00–18:00 (CEST)
Format: Hybrid
Location: 24.202, Mercè Rodoreda building, Campus Ciutadella
And on Zoom. Please register to obtain the link.
Speakers:
- Miguel Ángel Sebastián (UNAM)
- Matheus Valente (UNED)
Everyone welcome. To register, email [email protected]
Program
15:00–16:10 - Miguel Ángel Sebastián
16:10–16:20 - break
16:20–17:30 - Matheus Valente
17:30 - Wrap-up
Abstracts
Miguel Ángel Sebastián – Consciousness as a Cognitive Resource: Perspectival Information Beyond Egocentric Encoding
Consciousness is often treated as philosophically significant but cognitively inert: a feature of experience that raises familiar metaphysical and epistemological puzzles without playing a distinctive functional role. Against this picture, the paper begins from the claim that phenomenal states carry perspectival, self-locating content: not just information about how the world is, or where objects are relative to the body, but information about the subject’s position within a world.
The paper asks what a cognitive system gains by operating on this type of information rather than on egocentric encoding alone. Egocentric representations are powerful tools for sensorimotor control, spatial orientation, and action guidance. Yet perspectival information may support forms of cognitive organization that are not exhausted by body-relative representation. In particular, it can help explain how information from different cognitive domains is integrated around a single subject, how situations are represented as fields of practical possibilities, and how deliberation remains anchored to the agent across imagined or counterfactual scenarios. The aim is not to deny the importance of egocentric encoding, but to clarify what perspectival content may add to it.
Matheus Valente – Against Guises
A popular strategy for puzzles about indexical and first-personal (de se) attitudes distinguishes what an attitude is about from how it is held, and traces the puzzles to the second: not to a difference in content, but to the guise or mode of presentation under which singular propositions are grasped.
I offer two arguments against the strategy. The first, drawing from Giovanni Merlo's (2025) reworking of Prior's "Thank goodness" argument, forces the guise theorist to grant that a subject may intelligibly hold quite different attitudes towards a and b while knowing full well that a is b. The second forces her to grant that a mere change of perspective — learning only where, when, or who one is, without thereby learning any new proposition — can produce new evidence about how the objective world is. Both arguments pinpoint a hallmark of content difference just where the guise theorist can give us only a difference in guise.
Since such views are the absolutist rival to Lewisian relativism, it might look like I’m arguing for the latter view. But I’m not. I’ll close the talk by showing how another absolutist option survives — what Torre and Weber (2021) call “Russellian Absolutism”, reflecting Russell's own way of cashing out his distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description: we grasp singular propositions only about what we are acquainted with, which for Russell was barely more than ourselves and our present conscious states, everything else given by description. The very narrowness that made the view look hopeless is what lets it do so much work. Because singular propositions reach only as far as the self and the present, the differences treated elsewhere as shifts of perspective come out as differences in what is believed — a unified solution to the indexical puzzles that retains the traditional theory of attitudes as binary relations to absolute propositions, with neither relativized contents nor guises. Its supposed embarrassment is its advantage. Or so I shall argue.
Work produced with the support of a 2025 Leonardo Grant for Scientific Research and Cultural Creation, from the BBVA Foundation. The Foundation takes no responsibility for the opinions, statements and contents of this project, which are entirely the responsibility of its authors.