The author explains key aspects of Spain’s polemical Age of Reason, particularly the uncertain shifts in scientific ideas, the developing confusion of philosophical attitudes, the controversial movements in literary theories, the popular ...

In this interview, James L. McClelland responds to questions regarding connectionist models of cognition, a theory inspired by information processing in the brain. McClelland explains the distinction between symbolic and non-symbolic processing for a better understanding of mental processes. He argues that connectionist models can perform the computations which we know the brain can perform. In addition, he responds to several general questions on the perspectives of computational models of cognition.

In a seminal 1977 article, Rumelhart argued that perception required the simultaneous use of multiple sources of information, allowing perceivers to optimally interpret sensory information at many levels of representation in real time as information arrives. Building on Rumelhart's arguments, we present the Interactive Activation hypothesis—the idea that the mechanism used in perception and comprehension to achieve these feats exploits an interactive activation process implemented through the bidirectional propagation of activation among simple processing units. We then examine the interactive activation (...) model of letter and word perception and the TRACE model of speech perception, as early attempts to explore this hypothesis, and review the experimental evidence relevant to their assumptions and predictions. We consider how well these models address the computational challenge posed by the problem of perception, and we consider how consistent they are with evidence from behavioral experiments. We examine empirical and theoretical controversies surrounding the idea of interactive processing, including a controversy that swirls around the relationship between interactive computation and optimal Bayesian inference. Some of the implementation details of early versions of interactive activation models caused deviation from optimality and from aspects of human performance data. More recent versions of these models, however, overcome these deficiencies. Among these is a model called the multinomial interactive activation model, which explicitly links interactive activation and Bayesian computations. We also review evidence from neurophysiological and neuroimaging studies supporting the view that interactive processing is a characteristic of the perceptual processing machinery in the brain. In sum, we argue that a computational analysis, as well as behavioral and neuroscience evidence, all support the Interactive Activation hypothesis. The evidence suggests that contemporary versions of models based on the idea of interactive activation continue to provide a basis for efforts to achieve a fuller understanding of the process of perception. (shrink)

The ubiquity of inner awareness thesis states that all conscious states of normal adult humans are characterised by an inner awareness of that very state. UIA-Backers support this thesis while UIA-Skeptics reject it. At the heart of their dispute is a recalcitrant phenomenological disagreement. UIA-Backers claim that phenomenological investigation reveals ‘peripheral inner awareness’ to be a constant presence in their non-introspective experiences. UIA-Skeptics deny that their non-introspective experiences are characterised by inner awareness, and maintain that inner awareness is only gained (...) when they explicitly introspect. Each camp has put forward a range of arguments designed to resolve this dispute, but I argue that none of these arguments has genuine dialectical purchase. This leads me to develop a compromise position that trades on the contribution that affordances can make to our phenomenology. According to the Affordance Model of inner awareness, all conscious states of normal adult humans are characterised by an affordance of introspectability. In line with the UIA-Skeptic, non-introspective experiences are not characterised by inner awareness. But against the traditional UIASkeptic, non-introspective experiences are characterised by an awareness of the opportunity for introspection. On this view, our capacity to gain inner awareness of our current experience is a ubiquitous feature of our phenomenology. I show how the Affordance Model respects the driving phenomenological intuitions of both the UIA-Backers and the traditional UIA-Skeptics, and suggest that it is able to explain why neither camp achieves an accurate description of how inner awareness figures in their phenomenology. (shrink)

It’s relatively easy to say that the debates about whether trans and intersex women athletes deserve full and equal inclusion in women’s sport is a contentious contemporary issue. I’ve already argued for the legal, ethical, and scientific basis for full and equal inclusion of trans and intersex women in women’s sport. In this paper, I want to analyze what I take to be a representative selection of recent arguments against full and equal inclusion of trans and intersex women in women’s (...) sport. In short, these arguments tend to be based on mere assumption, unsupported “common sense,” straw arguments, fallacious question begging, and a number of hypotheticals and unsupported counterfactuals rather than established fact. Essentially, they’re based on a lot of “ifs.”. (shrink)

Our successful engagement with the world is plausibly underwritten by our sensitivity to affordances in our immediate environment. The considerable literature on affordances focuses almost exclusively on affordances for bodily actions such as gripping, walking or eating. I propose that we are also sensitive to affordances for mental actions such as attending, imagining and counting. My case for this ‘Mental Affordance Hypothesis’ is motivated by a series of examples in which our sensitivity to mental affordances mirrors our sensitivity to bodily (...) affordances. Specifically, subjects perceive opportunities to perform a mental action and their doing so leads, under the right conditions, to the automatic preparation of that action. I conclude by sketching a mental affordance research program that would reinforce my case for the Mental Affordance Hypothesis and establish its ramifications for a number of debates across philosophy and psychology. (shrink)

Accounting firms are reporting the use of Artificial Intelligence in their auditing and advisory functions, citing benefits such as time savings, faster data analysis, increased levels of accuracy, more in-depth insight into business processes, and enhanced client service. AI, an emerging technology that aims to mimic the cognitive skills and judgment of humans, promises competitive advantages to the adopter. As a result, all the Big 4 firms are reporting its use and their plans to continue with this innovation in areas (...) such as audit planning risk assessments, tests of transactions, analytics, and the preparation of audit work-papers, among other uses. As the uses and benefits of AI continue to emerge within the auditing profession, there is a gradual awakening to the fact that unintended consequences may also arise. Thus, we heed to the call of numerous researchers to not only explore the benefits of AI but also investigate the ethical implications of the use of this emerging technology. By combining two futuristic ethical frameworks, we forecast the ethical implications of the use of AI in auditing, given its inherent features, nature, and intended functions. We provide a conceptual analysis of the practical ethical and social issues surrounding AI, using past studies as well as our inferences based on the reported use of the technology by auditing firms. Beyond the exploration of these issues, we also discuss the responsibility for the policy and governance of emerging technology. (shrink)

The inequitable distribution of domestic and caring labour in different-sex couples has been a longstanding feminist concern. Some have hoped that having both partners at home during the COVID-19 pandemic would usher in a new era of equitable work and caring distributions. Contrary to these hopes, old patterns seem to have persisted. Moreover, studies suggest this inequitable distribution often goes unnoticed by the male partner. This raises two questions. Why do women continue to shoulder a disproportionate amount of housework and (...) childcare despite economic and cultural gains? And why is there a widespread one-sided misrepresentation within different-sex couples about how domestic and caring work is distributed between the two partners? We answer these questions by appealing to affordance perception – the perception of possibilities for action in one's environment. We propose an important gender disparity in the perception of affordances for domestic tasks such as the dishwasher affording emptying, the floor affording sweeping and a mess affording tidying. We argue that this contributes not only to the inequitable distribution of domestic labour but to the frequent invisibility of that labour. We explore the consequences of this hypothesis for resistance and social change. (shrink)

Agents are continually faced with two related selection problems: i) the problem of selecting what to do from a space of possible behaviours; ii) the problem of selecting what to attend to from a space of possible attendabilia. We have psychological mechanisms that enable us to solve both types of problem. But do these mechanisms follow different principles or work along the same lines? I argue for the latter. I start from the theory that bodily action is supported by a (...) sensitivity to affordances. Strong evidence suggests that affordances feature in our perception of the world and that affordance perception can trigger the neural preparation of the afforded act. An agent can thus see a teapot as grippable and their doing so can automatically ready a gripping response. Something affords attending for an agent just in case it is a possible target of their focal attention. I argue that we are sensitive to these attentional affordances in much the same way. First I argue that we perceive things as attendable. Second I argue that our doing so can trigger the preparation of shifts in focal attention. My case for this is based on a variety of phenomenological, neurological and behavioural parallels between our sensitivity to bodily affordances and our sensitivity to attentional affordances. This yields a unified account with specific implications for our understanding of attention and affordance perception and general implications for our understanding of how the mind solves selection problems. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine the scientific, legal, and ethical foundations for inclusion of transgender women athletes in competitive sport, drawing on IOC principles and relevant Court of Arbitration for Sport decisions. We argue that the inclusion of trans athletes in competition commensurate with their legal gender is the most consistent position with these principles of fair and equitable sport. Biological restrictions, such as endogenous testosterone limits, are not consistent with IOC and CAS principles. We explore the implications for recognizing (...) that endogenous testosterone values are a ‘natural physical trait’ and that excluding legally recognized women for high endogenous testosterone values constitutes discrimination on the basis of a natural physical trait. We suggest that the justificatory burden for such prima facie discrimination is unlikely to be met. Thus, in place of a limit on endogenous testosterone for women, we argue that ‘legally recognized gender’ is most fully in line with IOC and CAS principles. (shrink)

What occurs in the mind of an expert who is performing at their very best? In this paper, I survey the history of debate concerning this question. I suggest that expertise is neither solely a mastery of the automatic nor solely a mastery of intelligence in skilled action control. Experts are also capable of performing automatic actions intelligently. Following this, I argue that unconscious-thought theory (UTT) is a powerful tool in coming to understand the role of executive, intelligent action control (...) in the fluidly automatic performance of expertise. Relying on a body of empirical evidence concerning the cognitive structures and perceptual strategies employed by experts, I show that the realm of skilled action is an ideal environment within which the powers of unconscious cognitive processing can have positive effects on action. I conclude that experts rely upon unconscious thinking in the production of intelligently automatic skilled actions. (shrink)

Studies in the psychology of visual expertise have tended to focus on a limited set of expert domains, such as radiology and athletics. Conclusions drawn from these data indicate that experts use parafoveal vision to process images holistically. In this study, we examined a novel, as-of-yet-unstudied class of visual experts—architects—expecting similar results. However, the results indicate that architects, though visual experts, may not employ the holistic processing strategy observed in their previously studied counterparts. Participants (n = 48, 24 architects, 24 (...) naïve) were asked to find targets in chest radiographs and perspective images. All images were presented in both gaze-contingent and normal viewing conditions. Consistent with a holistic processing model, we expected two results: (1) architects would display a greater difference in saccadic amplitude between the gaze- contingent and normal conditions, and (2) architects would spend less time per search than an undergraduate control group. We found that the architects were more accurate in the perspectival task, but they took more time and displayed a lower difference in saccadic amplitude than the controls. Our research indicates a disjunctive conclusion. Either architects are simply different kinds of visual experts than those previously studied, or we have generated a task that employs visual expertise without holistic processing. Our data suggest a healthy skepticism for across-the-board inferences collected from a single domain of expertise to the nature of visual expertise generally. More work is needed to determine whether holism is a feature of all visual expertise. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become a much-discussed subject in the business world. The Internet has become one of the main tools for CSR information disclosure, allowing companies to publicise more information less expensively and faster than ever before. As a result, corporations are increasingly concerned with communicating ethically and responsibly to the diversity of stakeholders through the web. This paper addresses the main question as whether CSR information disclosure on corporate websites is influenced by country of origin and/or industry (...) sector. Analysing the websites of 127 corporations from emerging countries, such as Brazil, Chile, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Thailand and South Africa, it becomes evident that both country of origin and industry sector have a significant influence over CSR information disclosure on the web (CSRIDOW). Based on the data studied, country of origin has a stronger influence over CSRIDOW than industry sector. (shrink)

Este artigo objetiva fazer um resgate histórico da infância no Brasil a partir do período denominado filantrópico-higienista até os dias atuais. Inicia com o Movimento da Escola Nova, com a instauração sutil das formas de disciplinarização. Logo, a introdução da Psicologia nas políticas públicas se ..

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s anti-war speech, “Beyond Vietnam,” is a noteworthy example of deliberation by dissent from the margins. Attention is given to the formation of his moral argument from similitude, its foundation in metaphor and archetypal imagery, and how it shifted perspective to enable the introduction of alternative lines of argument. King’s argumentation, as it worked rhetorically toward making the war debatable, exhibited key features of deliberative dissent, including catachresis, contingency, perspective, and incommensurability.

The paper considers the importance of culture for achieving universal dialogue. It clarifies the meanings of the terms “culture” and “art”, focusing on their historical transformations, and on the historical development of the history of art and archaeology, two academic disciplines which investigate art and culture. The recognition of the meanings is treated here as a basic initiating and necessary step in investigating intercultural dialogue.

The goal of this article is to present the dissertation research which studies the Olympian Zeus’ temples built during the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. The intention is to understand how Olympia was responsible for the origin and dissemination of Olympian Zeus´cult through the Greek world. From the poleis survey that consecrated these temples to the deity and by the mapping of the cult in association to textual informations we will discuss the Olympios epiteth and the name Olympieion, the spacial (...) configuration of the Olympian Zeus sanctuaries and the relationship of the cult and the tyranny. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This study examined how lifestyle factors and gender affect kidney allocation to transplant patients by 99 British and Singaporean participants. Thirty hypothetical patients were generated from a combination of six factors and randomly paired four times. Participants saw 60 patient pairings and, in each pair, chose which patient would receive treatment priority. A Bradley-Terry model was used to derive coefficients for each factor per participant. A mean factor score was then calculated across all participants for each factor. Participants gave (...) lower priority to patients who drank more, were overweight, smoked more and exercised less. A patient’s diet and gender had no significant effect on allocation. There were no significant cross-cultural differences. There were moderate correlations between participants’ self-reported pre- and post-experiment ordering of decision criteria, and these measures and factor coefficients, suggesting a modest level of decision-making consistency. Between participants, moderate levels of concordance with respect to factor importance were observed for self-reported orderings of factors, and weaker agreement for model-derived coefficients. Very similar results were obtained for both British and Singaporean participants, and the implications of the findings are discussed. (shrink)

PRO-Mueve Relaciones Sanas(PRO-Mote Healthy Relationships) is a gender-based violence and dating violence prevention program targeted at adolescents. The program has been designed to be implemented during three consecutive courses [from the first to third year of Spanish mandatory secondary education (ESO)] in 8 annual sessions, imparted by university students who have been previously trained and supervised by university professors. The present study evaluates the effects of the program after the first year of implementation through a quasi-experimental design (Intervention GroupN= 181; (...) Quasi-control groupN= 62;Mage= 12.11; SDage= 0.57; 54.7% girls) and assesses whether there are gender differences in the outcomes. The results obtained evidenced a significant reduction in benevolent sexism in the intervention group compared to the quasi-control group. Regarding hostile sexism, it was found to increase significantly in the quasi-control group, while it remained stable in the intervention group. Thus, there were significant differences between both groups after the intervention. Likewise, romantic love myths were found to decrease significantly, and knowledge about gender-based violence increased significantly in the intervention group between the two time points assessed, although there were no significant differences with the quasi-control group. No gender differences in the outcomes of the program were observed. The obtained results supported the efficacy of the program during the first year of intervention in the first course of the ESO and laid the foundation for the following phases of intervention. (shrink)

To understand Self-Representationalism you need to understand its family. Self-Representationalism is a branch of the Meta-Representationalist family, and according to theories in this family what distinguishes conscious mental representations from unconscious mental representations is that conscious ones are themselves the target of a mental meta¬-representational state. A mental state M1 is thus phenomenally conscious in virtue of being suitably represented by some mental state M2. What distinguishes the Self-Representationalist branch of the family is the claim that M1 and M2 must (...) be the same token mental state, so a mental state is phenomenally conscious in virtue of suitably representing itself. This Self-Representationalist branch of the family divides into further branches, giving us specific implementations of the Self-Representationalist approach. But before asking whether we should adopt Self-Representationalism, and in what form, we should reflect on why Meta-Representationalism is an attractive family in the first place. After all, Self-Representationalist theories trade on their family name, claiming to deliver on the promises that drive the Meta-Representationalist approach. The two most important promises of Meta-Representationalism are: a) the promise of capturing the transitivity of consciousness and; b) the promise of rendering consciousness naturalisable. I discuss each in turn. (shrink)

One of the dominant behavioral markers of visual-expert search strategy, Holistic Visual Processing (HVP), suggests that experts process information from a larger region of space in conjunction with a more focused gaze pattern in order to improve search speed and accuracy. To date, extant literature suggests that visual search expertise is domain specific, including HVP and its associated behaviors. The current study is the first to use eye tracking to directly measure the HVP strategies of two expert groups, radiologists and (...) architects, in comparison to one another and a novice control. In doing so, we replicated and extended this prior research: visual expertise is domain specific. However, our eye tracking data indicate that contrary to this prior work, HVP strategies are transferable across domains. Yet, despite the transfer of HVP strategies, there is neither reduced search time nor greater accuracy in visual search outside of an expert’s domain. Therefore, our data suggest that HVP behaviors are a particular form of visual search mechanism that, outside of an expert’s native search-ecology, are not necessarily conducive to more general visual search success. It is in addition to explicit knowledge of an expert’s domain, how to search, and where to search, that HVP strategies are their most effective for visual search success. (shrink)

Many employers assess their workforces with gendered and racialized imagery that can put groups of workers and applicants at a disadvantage in the labor market. Based on 78 interviews with white employers in Atlanta, the author reveals that some employers use a complex but widely shared stereo-type of Black working-class women as single mothers to typify members of this group. These employers use this single-mother image to explain why they think Black women are poor workers, why they think Black women (...) are reliable workers, and why they think Blacks are poorly prepared for the labor market. In focusing on these white employers' claims, the author concentrates not on the well-documented out-comes of labor market discrimination, such as differential rates of pay and promotion, but on how employers construct and use the images that may from the basis of it. This is especially relevant amid current attacks on affirmative action programs. (shrink)

Perhaps a part of what makes expertise so inspiring to the curious researcher is the possibility of appropriating the structural components of skilled action to draw a roadmap towards their achievement that anyone might be able to follow. Accordingly, the purpose of this essay is to shed light upon the role that creativity plays in the production and environment of skilled action to that foregoing end. In doing so, I suggest that the lessons to be learned from recent empirical research (...) on creativity has much to offer to the cognitive science of skill and expertise. Experts are able to bring their intelligence to bear in controlling fast and seemingly automatic actions by utilizing a form of control often called ‘intelligent automaticity.’ In this spirit, I argue that the environment of intelligently automatic action control curates a similarly ideal environment for the processes of creativity. Moreover, insofar as creativity is ideally operative within the environment of expert action control, I argue further that creativity functions as one representative form of ‘intelligence’ embedded within otherwise fluid, and automatic expert actions. Creativity is able to do so even without conscious representation through the powers of incubated cognition. (shrink)

This paper attempts a sympathetic comparison between John Dewey and Richard Rorty. In particular I establish the ways in which both Dewey's and Rorty's aesthetical modes require qualitative starting points (or some indeterminate-event trajectory) as a condition for any poetic/novel movement into the future. I show how Dewey's notions of "indeterminate situation," highlighted in his event-metaphysics, resonates with Rorty's notion of metaphor, and that finally Rorty does in fact (wittingly or not) harbor a place for the noncognitive and nonlinguistic via, (...) interestingly enough, a linguistic device. How Rorty uses his notion of metaphor (inspired by Donald Davidson's groundbreaking work) starts very much to take on the feel of what Dewey meant by "primary experience." My emphasis, then, falls on the necessity to both of their respective pragmatic positions of a qualitative starting point (QSP). In this way, the troubling dualism that has developed between experience and language starts to dissolve. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility has become a much-discussed subject in the business world. The Internet has become one of the main tools for CSR information disclosure, allowing companies to publicise more information less expensively and faster than ever before. As a result, corporations are increasingly concerned with communicating ethically and responsibly to the diversity of stakeholders through the web. This paper addresses the main question as whether CSR information disclosure on corporate websites is influenced by country of origin and/or industry sector. (...) Analysing the websites of 127 corporations from emerging countries, such as Brazil, Chile, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Thailand and South Africa, it becomes evident that both country of origin and industry sector have a significant influence over CSR information disclosure on the web . Based on the data studied, country of origin has a stronger influence over CSRIDOW than industry sector. (shrink)

This article queries Winch's view that moral issues are particular, subjective, context-dependent and not open to generalizations. Drawing on examples from film and literature, Winch believes he can prove first, that the universalisability principle is idle and second, that morality is wrongly conceived as a guide to moral conduct. Yet, neither example proves his point. Quite the contrary, they show that we face moral dilemmas only when moral theory fails to provide an answer to moral problems. Therfore, it is not (...) the case, as Winch suggests, that moral issues have a force independent of moral theory. The article questions a general trend in contemporary moral theory that argues that abstract principles are inconsistent with the actual way we live our lives. Footnotes1 In memory of Irving Velody 1936–2000. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the difference between event‐conditionals and premise‐conditionals. An event‐conditional contributes to event structure: it modifies the main clause event; a premise‐conditional structures the discourse: it makes manifest a proposition that is the privileged context for the processing of the associated clause. The two types of conditional clauses will be shown to differ both in terms of their ‘external syntax’ and in terms of their ‘internal syntax’. The peripheral structure of event conditionals will be shown to lack the (...) functional head Force, which encodes illocutionary force. Event conditionals are merged inside the IP of the matrix clause. Premise‐conditionals contain the head Force and they are merged outside the associated CP. (shrink)

Some claim that we are phenomenally aware of our experiences as being our own. Different theorists offer different accounts of how pervasive this sense of mineness is, but what unites them is the claim that such a quality of experience exists. In this paper, I suggest that a compelling case for the existence of the sense of mineness has not yet been made. I then introduce four impediments that any such case must overcome: the Epistemic Impediment; the Representation Impediment; the (...) Function Impediment; and the Malfunction Impediment. Although none of these constitutes a knock-down objection to the thesis that experiences are characterised by a sense of mineness, they each highlight a challenge that advocates of the sense of mineness must address. I propose that any case for mineness should be assessed relative to its ability to overcome these impediments. (shrink)

In this paper we focus on a kind of perceptual states that we call perceptual motivations, that is, perceptual experiences that plausibly motivate us to act, such as itching, perceptual salience and pain. Itching seems to motivate you to scratch, perceiving a stimulus as salient seems to motivate you to attend to it and feeling a pain in your hand seems to motivate actions such as withdrawing from the painful stimulus. Five main accounts of perceptual motivation are available: Descriptive, Conative, (...) Imperativist, Reflexive and Dual Content views. Some of these have been developed in detail and others are natural extensions of existing views. However, we argue that none provides a satisfactory account of the target perceptual states. Driven by the failings of each account, we identify three conditions that any satisfactory theory of perceptual motivation must meet: Direct Motivational Force, Non-Obligatory Force and Intention-Independent Influence. Then we offer an account that attempts to fulfil these conditions: the Affordance Model. This model of perceptual motivation is premised on the claim that each of the target states involves the perception of a specific affordance for action and the triggering of Automatic Motor Initiations (AMIs). We suggest that AMIs can explain the motivational force of these perceptual states. (shrink)

Conservatives claim that all phenomenal properties are sensory. Liberals countenance non-sensory phenomenal properties such as what it’s like to perceive some high-level property, and what it’s like to think that p. A hallmark of phenomenal properties is that they present an explanatory gap, so to resolve the dispute we should consider whether experience has non-sensory properties that appear ‘gappy’. The classic tests for ‘gappiness’ are the invertibility test and the zombifiability test. I suggest that these tests yield conflicting results: non-sensory (...) properties lend themselves to zombie scenarios but not to inversion scenarios. Which test should we trust? Against Carruthers & Veillet (2011), I argue that invertibility is not a viable condition of phenomenality. In contrast, being zombifiable is credibly necessary and sufficient for phenomenality. I conclude that there are non-sensory properties of experience that are ‘gappy’ in the right way, and that liberalism is therefore the most plausible position. (shrink)

I consider the role of cognitive modeling in cognitive science. Modeling, and the computers that enable it, are central to the field, but the role of modeling is often misunderstood. Models are not intended to capture fully the processes they attempt to elucidate. Rather, they are explorations of ideas about the nature of cognitive processes. In these explorations, simplification is essential—through simplification, the implications of the central ideas become more transparent. This is not to say that simplification has no downsides; (...) it does, and these are discussed. I then consider several contemporary frameworks for cognitive modeling, stressing the idea that each framework is useful in its own particular ways. Increases in computer power (by a factor of about 4 million) since 1958 have enabled new modeling paradigms to emerge, but these also depend on new ways of thinking. Will new paradigms emerge again with the next 1,000‐fold increase? (shrink)

Phenomenal consciousness presents a distinctive explanatory problem. Some regard this problem as ‘hard’, which has troubling implications for the science and metaphysics of consciousness. Some regard it as ‘easy’, which ignores the special explanatory difficulties that consciousness offers. Others are unable to decide between these two uncomfortable positions. All three camps assume that the problem of consciousness is either easy or hard. I argue against this disjunction and suggest that the problem may be ‘tricky’—that is, partly easy and partly hard. (...) This possibility emerges when we recognise that consciousness raises two explanatory questions. The Consciousness Question concerns why a subject is conscious rather than unconscious. The Character Question concerns why a conscious subject’s experience has the phenomenology it has rather than some other. I explore the possibility of one or other of these explanatory challenges being hard and the other easy, and consider the dialectical ramifications this has for all sides of the debate. (shrink)