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Mental States
There is controversy concerning the exact definition of the term.
- According to epistemic approaches, the essential mark of mental states is that their subject has privileged epistemic access while others can only infer their existence from outward signs.
- Consciousness-based approaches hold that all mental states are either conscious themselves or stand in the right relation to conscious states.
- Intentionality-based approaches, on the other hand, see the power of minds to refer to objects and represent the world as the mark of the mental.
- According to functionalist approaches, mental states are defined in terms of their role in the causal network independent of their intrinsic properties.