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The idea that we can understand key aspects of the metaphysics of consciousness by understanding conscious states as having a presentational character plays an essential role in the phenomenological tradition beginning with Brentano and Husserl. In this paper, the author explores some potential consequences of this connection for contemporary discussions of the ontology of consciousness in the world. Drawing on Hintikka's analysis of epistemic modality, the author argues that the essential presentational character of consciousness can be seen as accounting for the familiar failure of substitutivity of identicals in intensional contexts of conscious presentation and further provides for an ontology of conscious presentation that avoids metaphysically problematic commitments to "special" intentional objects. The author next considers how the irreducibility of intensional contexts, if grounded in the presentational character of consciousness, also may provide for a kind of irreducibility of the "first-person" perspective to third-person or objective description across possible worlds. Finally, drawing on Chalmers' "two-dimensionalist" semantic framework, the author argues that attention to the presentational aspect of consciousness as thus understood, while it provides significant motivation for the existence of the "hard problem" of the irreducibility of consciousness to physical and structural description, is nevertheless consistent with a globally monist, rather than dualist, ontology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some contemporary discussion about the explanation of consciousness substantially recapitulates a decisive debate about reference, knowledge, and justification from an earlier stage of the analytic tradition. In particular I argue that proponents of a recently popular strategyfor accounting for an explanatory gap between physical and phenomenal facts — the so-called 'phenomenal concept strategy' — face a problem that was originally fiercely debated by Schlick, Carnap, and Neurath. The question that is common to both the older and the contemporary discussion is that of how the presence or presentation ofphenomenal experiences can play a role injustifying beliefs or judgments about them. This problem is, moreover the same as what was classically discussed as the problem of acquaintance. Interestingly, both physicalist and non-physicalist proponents of the phenomenal concept strategy today face this problem. I consider briefly some recent attempts to solve it and conclude that, although it isprimafacie very plausible that acquaintance exists, we have, as yet, no good account of it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]