Rocco J. Gennaro
University of Southern Indiana
Functionalist What matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material
Rocco J. Gennaro is a philosopher at the University of Southern Indiana working on higher-order theories of consciousness, the family of views holding that a mental state becomes conscious when it is represented by a further, higher-order mental state. Gennaro defends a self-representational variant, on which a conscious state represents both its object and, in the same mental act, itself as being in that state, rather than requiring a numerically distinct higher-order state to do the representing.
With Peter Carruthers, Gennaro co-maintains the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s survey entry on higher-order theories, substantially revised in January 2026, which lays out the competing versions of the view, inner sense theory, Rosenthal’s actualist higher-order thought theory, Carruthers’ dispositionalist version, and self-representational hybrids, along with the standard objections each faces, including the misrepresentation problem and questions about which non-human and artificial systems could in principle satisfy the theory’s requirements.
Known for. Higher-order thought theory and its self-representational variants
Coverage on this site
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Rocco J. Gennaro is listed with the other functionalists and computationalists, who hold that what matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material. The theory family behind that position is set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.