Russell’s Representationalism about Consciousness: Reconsidering His Relationship to James
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: While Russell famously rejected the pragmatist theory of truth, recent scholarship portrays his post-prison accounts of belief and knowledge as resembling James’s. But deeper divisions in fact persisted between Russell and James concerning the nature of mind. I argue 1) that Russell’s neutral monist approach to consciousness in The Analysis of Mind constitutes an early form of representationalism in that he took states to be phenomenally conscious partly in virtue of (truly) representing an antecedent (typically just-passed) sensation; 2) that although James also saw representation (typically of expected kinaesthetic sensation) as a crucial component of consciousness, he contended that representation is a matter of affording future-directed action control that aligns with the agent’s interests; and 3) that what divides these contrasting approaches to consciousness and representation is precisely what Russell would continue to reject in the pragmatist theory of truth, namely the productive role James assigned to an agent’s interests.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it