Eric Schwitzgebel

speaker

445 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2011 last heard Jun 2011

Eric Schwitzgebel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

No recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

New Books in Philosophy · Eric Schwitzgebel, “Perplexities of Consciousness” (MIT Press, 2011) · 15 Jun 2011 podcast

I'm here.

Thanks for having me, Kerry.

So I got my PhD from UC Berkeley in 1997.

And most of my work at that time was on, or my dissertation was on, connections between developmental psychology and philosophy of science and philosophy of mind.

And I got interested in the question of how well children know their own minds.

And I was very influenced by Alison Gopnik and John Flavel, who were at Berkeley and Stanford.

who thought that children had very poor knowledge of their own stream of experience and their own beliefs and desires, and generally had very poor theories of mind.

So one of the things that I got interested in as a result of that was the extent to which adults have substantially better knowledge of their stream of experience.

I guess that was kind of what launched me into this.

This kind of a suspicion that in the philosophical tradition, there's a, stemming from Descartes especially, there's this optimism about our knowledge of our stream of experience, especially.

In the 20th century, we came to be rather doubtful about our knowledge of things like our motives, our unconscious desires,

the causes of our behavior and that sort of thing.

But one of the things that philosophers seem to still be optimistic about and that psychologists, for the most part, haven't really systematically studied recently has been our knowledge of our own current stream of experience, you know, read here now, or that I'm feeling pain, or that I'm having an image with a certain content.

Those kinds of things I thought had not been

looked at very well, and I thought maybe children weren't so good at that.

Well, John Flavel has this wonderful series of studies where he is trying to get children to just describe the contents of their thoughts.

So, for example, one of the things that he does is he has...

He puts a bell under a desk and then he says, I'm going to ring the bell.

And then he waits, I think, five seconds and then rings the bell.

Right.

Showing 1–20 of 445 · page 1 of 23