Papers by Elizabeth Schechter
The Routledge Handbook of Consciousness, 2018
Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Mind and Language, 2015
Many experimental findings with split-brain subjects intuitively suggest that each such subject h... more Many experimental findings with split-brain subjects intuitively suggest that each such subject has two minds. The conceptual and empirical basis of this duality intuition has never been fully articulated. This article fills that gap, by offering a reconstruction of early neuropsychological literature on the split-brain phenomenon. According to that work, the hemispheres operate independently of each other insofar as they interact via the mediation of effection and transduction—via behavior and sensation, essentially. This is how your mind and my mind interact with each other, however, giving rise to the intuition that a split-brain subject has two minds.
Sensory Integration and the Unity of Consciousness. MIT Press., 2014
The debate about the unity of consciousness in split-brain subjects has for the most part been pi... more The debate about the unity of consciousness in split-brain subjects has for the most part been pitched between two positions: that a split-brain subject has a single, unified stream of consciousness, or that she has two streams of consciousness, one associated with each hemisphere. A prima facie appealingly intermediate position, proposed most explicitly by Lockwood, is that a split-brain subject has a single but only partially unified consciousness. Philosophers have overwhelmingly rejected Lockwood’s proposal. This paper issues a prelimary defense of the partial unity model (PUM) of split-brain consciousness. I argue that the major philosophical objections to that model apply no more to it than they do to the conscious disunity or duality model. In particular, both models imply that a split-brain subject has two phenomenally conscious perspectives, and both raise questions about the relationship between having such a perspective and being a subject of experience.
Philosophical Studies, 2012
This paper concerns the role that reference to subjects of experience can play in individuating s... more This paper concerns the role that reference to subjects of experience can play in individuating streams of consciousness, and the relationship between the subjective and the objective structure of consciousness. A critique of Tim Bayne’s recent book indicates certain crucial choices that works on the unity of con- sciousness must make. If one identifies the subject of experience with something whose consciousness is necessarily unified, then one cannot offer an account of the objective structure of consciousness. Alternatively, identifying the subject of experience with an animal means forgoing the conceptual connection between being a subject of experience and having a single phenomenal perspective.
Mind and Language, 2012
Under experimental conditions, behavior suggesting dual agency is easily elicited from split-brai... more Under experimental conditions, behavior suggesting dual agency is easily elicited from split-brain subjects who usually behave in an unremarkable fashion. This article presents a model of split-brain agency that accounts for this apparent tension. Right and left hemisphere are associated with distinct agents, R and L, each of whose unity is grounded in the special inferential and experiential relations that its mental states bear to each other. These same relations do not hold interhemispherically; rather, unified behavior is largely the result of a split-brain subject’s having a single body, much of whose coordination in action is maintained by forces operating downstream of reasons and intentions and conscious experiences. The split-brain subject as a whole is still a unified agent as well, however, in virtue of R’s and L’s intentions bearing, with respect to one and the same body, those special causal powers that an individual’s intentions (and hers alone) bear to her body (and to her body alone).
Philosophical Psychology, 2012
European Journal of Philosophy, 2010
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 16, Jan 1, 2009
Journal of Consciousness …, Jan 1, 2006
Strawson (2006) claims that so long as we take the physical ultimates of the world to be non-expe... more Strawson (2006) claims that so long as we take the physical ultimates of the world to be non-experiential in nature, we will never be capable of explaining or understanding how human conscious experience can emerge from physical processes. He therefore urges ...
Books by Elizabeth Schechter
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Papers by Elizabeth Schechter
Books by Elizabeth Schechter