Attribution functionalism

People rely on functional information when deciding which mental states to attribute to an entity. Some researchers claim that nonfunctional bodily cues also independently shape ordinary attributions of phenomenally conscious mental states—such as seeing red or feeling pain. Across two studies, I show that the key embodiment experiments systematically confound bodily cues with unbalanced inferences about function: Their “embodied” conditions embed richer functional affordances than their controls. Once this error is identified, little compelling evidence remains against extreme attribution functionalism, the view that functional information alone proximally guides attributions of both non-phenomenal and phenomenal mental states.