Keith Frankish (2025), Adaptive Behavior 34(1), 17–21 (2026 issue; special issue on Walter Veit’s A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness) — DOI-10.1177/10597123251359198
Key takeaways
- Veit’s Darwinian, function-first account of animal consciousness belongs to the post-Cartesian (illusionist) paradigm. Frankish argues it slips back into Cartesianism by keeping “qualia” talk and by letting hedonic valence motivate “in virtue of its feel”, which posits a private “bureau de change” where value is felt. Since the paradigms are incommensurable, he says, irreducible subjectivity must be dropped entirely.
Seeded from the abstract and a skim, before the reading in NOTE-143. What follows is what the work says about itself.
In A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness, Walter Veit gives a Darwinian framework for consciousness. He separates its dimensions, maps their distribution across species, and traces them to an ancient system of hedonic valence that evolved for action selection in early animals. Frankish places this within a “post-Cartesian” paradigm that treats consciousness as a complex functional state open to ordinary science, as opposed to the Cartesian focus on irreducibly subjective qualia and the hard problem. He detects residual Cartesianism in Veit’s use of “qualia” and in the suggestion that valenced states do their work through their “feel”, which implies a private “Cartesian bureau de change” where intrinsic value is felt. He urges Veit to be thoroughly functionalist, since the two paradigms are incommensurable.
Standing in the record
Filed from the 2026-09-26 sweep of the papers-feed tracker for philosophy: 40 seconds of active reading over 1 session. It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-143 is the close reading of 2026-09-26, and it placed the work: Active — worth reading as a five-page statement of the illusionist case against residual “feel” talk in evolutionary accounts of valence, and best read together with Veit’s reply (LIT-105), which answers it point by point. It argues rather than demonstrates: the central premise, that anything causally efficacious is functionally definable and so cannot be irreducibly subjective, is asserted in one paragraph (p. 18).
When seeded, before the reading in NOTE-143, the entry gave a priority for a deeper reading: low — t=40 s, but it is a short commentary whose argument the skim essentially captures.
What the seeding asked a deeper reading to check (NOTE-143 is that reading):
- A crisp statement of the illusionist, functionalist pole, useful as a foil to LIT-135 (Seth’s biological naturalism, which keeps a real explanatory gap in play) and to LIT-185 (IIT, whose axioms Frankish says rest on introspection).
- The “bureau de change” argument generalizes to any account on which valence motivates by its feel, including proposals about AI welfare that turn on valenced experience (LIT-120, LIT-111).
- Read Veit’s reply in the same special issue, if there is one (Veit’s “Pathological Complexity and the Function of Consciousness in Nature: Part 2”, Adaptive Behavior 2026, turned up in search and may be it; unverified).
Access when seeded: journals.sagepub.com returned 403. Read the published version (CC BY, 5 pp.) deposited in White Rose Research Online (eprint 237708): abstract, keywords, Introduction, “The Cartesian Paradigm”, “The Post-Cartesian Paradigm”, “Veit’s Darwinian Standard”, “The Pull of Cartesian Gravity” “A Cartesian Bureau de Change?”, Conclusion and notes. Online 15 Jul 2025 per Crossref; the print issue is 2026.