Preston Lennon

I work in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of cognitive science, and ethics. At the broadest level, I am interested in consciousness and thought. Questions I think about include: does thought have its own phenomenal character? What’s the relationship between what thoughts feel like and what they are about? How does our capacity for conscious thought relate to certain normative properties, such as our well-being or moral status? Could machines ever have conscious thoughts like ours, and how would that effect how we should treat them? What’s the connection between conscious thought and certain psychological capacities we have, e.g., working memory? What format does thought have, and does that format contribute to its phenomenology?

Publications

Curtis-Trudel, A. and P. Lennon. (forthcoming). Evaluating Representationalist Folk Mentalism About LLMs. Philosophy of AI.

Lennon, P. (forthcoming). The Value of Cognitive Experience. Australasian Journal of Philosophy. [preprint]

Lennon, P. (2025). Cognitive Phenomenology: In Defense of Recombination. Inquiry 68(2): 483-512. [preprint] [journal]

Lennon, P. (2024). Are Phenomenal Theories of Thought Chauvinistic? American Philosophical Quarterly 61(3): 199-213. [preprint] [journal]

Lennon, P. (2024). Athletes as workers. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 51(3): 476-495. [preprint] [journal]

Lennon, P. (2023). Aphantasia and Conscious Thought. In U. Kriegel (ed.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind vol. 3: 131-155. [preprint] [OUP page]

Lennon, P. (2023). In Defense of Cognitive Phenomenology: Meeting the Matching Content Challenge. Erkenntnis 88: 2391-2407. [preprint] [journal]

Smithies, D. P. Lennon, R. Samuels. (2022). Delusions and Madmen: Against Rationality Constraints on Belief. Synthese 200: 1-30. [preprint] [journal]

Works in Progress

Two papers on language models and beliefs (with André Curtis-Trudel)

A paper on consciousness and representational format (with Mason Westfall)

A paper on the science of consciousness and AI welfare

A paper on the relationship between the science of consciousness and the value of consciousness

A paper on the science of working memory and consciousness

A paper responding to Goff’s (2018) cognitive fine-tuning problem