Since 2011, Lycan is also distinguished visiting professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, where he continues to research, teach, and advise graduate students.
This philosophical tapestry is held together by several common threads, which among others include: the view that persons are complex systems composed of sub-personal systems, sub-sub-personal systems, etc., all the way down to sub-atomic functions; the view that natural teleology is ubiquitous, that there exists a non-ideal but nonetheless discernible evolved fit between human capacities and the environment; and the view that meaning in natural language manifests a logical form that at its core is truth-functional.
The appeal to teleology dissolves problems with earlier functionalist theories, especially those concerning consciousness.
Thus, Lycan defends a higher-order, inner sense theory of awareness, according to which attention mechanisms have the function of monitoring and integrating lower level psychological processes; a pronominal theory of subjectivity, according to which the subjective or perspectival nature of conscious states is a product of the utterly unique semantic role of introspective mental concepts (e.g., ‘I’); a representational theory of qualia, according to which sensory qualities are the intentional objects of sensory representations; and more.
Canons of epistemic value used to identify degrees of explanatory coherence are themselves justified by appeal to natural teleology.
Here, too, the requisite psycho-linguistic machinery coheres with Lycan's Homuncular Functionalism and, more generally, with the above common threads.