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The Mismeasure of Consciousness: A Problem of Coordination for the Perceptual Awareness Scale

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Matthias Michel
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Abstract

As for most measurement procedures in the course of their development, measures of consciousness face the problem of coordination, that is, the problem of knowing whether a measurement procedure actually measures what it is intended to measure. I focus on the case of the Perceptual Awareness Scale to illustrate how ignoring this problem leads to ambiguous interpretations of subjective reports in consciousness science. In turn, I show that empirical results based on this measurement procedure might be systematically misinterpreted.

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Type
Cognitive Sciences
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 86 , Issue 5 , December 2019 , pp. 1239 - 1249
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

I am grateful to Anouk Barberousse, Pascal Ludwig, Eran Tal, and Peter Fazekas, for valuable comments and suggestions.

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