Daniel C. Dennett (2016), Journal of Consciousness Studies 23(11–12), 65–72, Imprint Academic. The double issue opens with Keith Frankish’s target article “Illusionism as a theory of consciousness” (pp. 11–39), and was reprinted as Frankish (ed.), Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness (Imprint Academic, 2017).
Key takeaways
Registered from bibliographic records, not a reading. Nothing below is from the text.
- Search-engine records of the ResearchGate and Ingenta listings describe the abstract as using a parallel with stage magic to argue that illusionism, as Frankish articulates it, should be the front runner and a conservative theory to be developed in detail. I did not see the abstract verbatim.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-02 at the owner’s request for Dennett. It is listed for what it would say to the record’s consciousness thread: Dennett’s own adoption of Frankish’s word “illusionism” for the position of “Quining Qualia” (LIT-433) and “Facing Backwards” (LIT-397), both read. The record already holds the illusionist side in Frankish’s 2025 commentary (LIT-103, read in NOTE-143) and in Chalmers’s “Meta-Problem of Consciousness” (LIT-425), which argues that only strong illusionism dissolves the hard problem and that it is false. A reading should check whether this paper answers that kind of objection or only sets the burden of proof.
On the society-of-mind bridge (THEORY-043). Whether the paper bears on it cannot be said unread. If illusionism is the default, the THEORY’s narrowed question, whether a group has experience beyond agency, becomes the question whether a group has the illusion, that is, an introspective model that represents its states as phenomenal. That framing is mine.
Verification. Title, journal, volume, double issue and year: the Ingenta
Connect URL (volume 23, issue 11–12, article 5 of the issue), Frankish’s own
eprint of the target article (which gives “Journal of Consciousness Studies,
23(11-12): 11-39 (2016)” and the same issue’s Ingenta path, article 2), and
search-engine records of Google Scholar and ResearchGate. Pages 65–72 come
from the Google Scholar and ResearchGate records only; I could not open the
publisher’s page to confirm them. The brief’s citation agrees with all of
these. No DOI exists: Crossref has no record of it, and its JCS DOIs begin
with later volumes. published: is the year only. Not held in the Anthology
of the SOTA (grep of its literature.d for Dennett, the title and
“illusionism”: none).
Access tried on 2026-10-02: Ingenta Connect (HTTP 403 to curl and WebFetch); ResearchGate’s PDF link (HTTP 403); PhilPapers (HTTP 403, a bot challenge); Semantic Scholar’s API (HTTP 429, three tries with back-off); OpenAlex (daily budget exhausted); the Tufts Digital Library catalogue (no record under the title or “illusionism”); the Wayback Machine (connection closed by the proxy). No email address was sent to any service.
It carries no instruction for machine-learning practice, and it does not belong in the anthology.