The Metaphysics of Sensation Psychological Nominalism & the Reality of Consciousness - Ray Brassier

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Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

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Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: owner ruling 2026-07-11: institutional recordings released except fee-charging course content; lane recent-institutional -> recent-institutional-released). Series: standalone. Source: audio original (.mp3).

Timestamped map

These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:00

  All awareness of abstract entities, and made all awareness even more particular, is a linguistic affair. This is the definition, the canonical definition of psychological novelism given by Sellers in his 1936 lecture, Imprisonment and the False Way of Mind. For philosophers of a realist stance, psychological novelism…

• 00:08:55

  And this is all that Sellers needs in a way to get his... to gain critical purchase of the relationship between thinking and sensing. So, cognitive awareness for Sellers then will be a linguistic affair because it involves being aware of something as something. Such awareness requires conceptualization and concepts…

• 00:16:18

  Here's a quote from Seltzer. From Language of Thought and its Communication. Instead of analysing the intentionality or aboutness of verbal behaviour in terms of its expressing or being used to express classically conceived thoughts or beliefs... By classically conceived thoughts or beliefs, he means in a way that…

• 00:25:13

  Why should this be so? Onceller's account, the ought-to-be's and ought-to-do's which condition all our thinking and acting, constitutes the linguistic framework within which we live. This framework furnishes the resources for all justification and evaluation. Although claims made within the framework can be assessed…

• 00:33:08

  Formal properties include all of an object's causal, dispositional, and structural properties. They are conceptual. I mean, causal, you know, what would the object's, you know, its causal powers, what it makes happen. Dispositional, its properties. Propentities, I mean, a pane of glass that is disposed into shatter…

• 00:40:53

  represented to be known by the subject, whose states they are. So, now we come to Sellers' so-called brain argument. So, although current sensations are revealed, although current contents are revealed through sensation, sensation reveals to us the occurrence, contents, the content property of things. Sensation itself…

• 00:48:44

  It's an intrinsic quality. A currentness, the fact that this is a, it's a kind of a pure actuality. And finally, homogeneity. So, what Sellers then does is, postulates, postulates what he calls sensor, as theoretical entities, which occur as the components of absolute processes, traversing the nervous systems…

• 00:58:21

  The content remains as something I don't know. So he wants to be able to integrate form and content, and to be able to, um, he wants to find the attraction upon the content of reality. And I think his account is immensely attractive and plausible, um, but I think it falters at the level of, um, his analysis…