An important conceptual shift can be discerned within contemporary philosophy of perception. Whereas proponents of the idea that perceptual experience is contentful used to relate perceptual content to truth conditions, authors nowadays prefer to think of perception as evaluable for accuracy. This transition from truth to accuracy becomes particularly clear in the influential work of Susanna Siegel. Importantly, Siegel actually provides an extensive argument for this shift. Yet this article argues that this transition from truth to accuracy conditions is ill‐motivated, (...) confused and pernicious for the so‐called Content View, the view that all experience has truth or accuracy evaluable content. (shrink)

The paper offers an analysis of Protagoras’ fr. DK 80 B 1 and rejects the traditional reading of Protagoras as relativist. By considering the ipsissima verba that Protagoras makes use of in his passage, it is argued that alternative interpretations are possible, of which epistemological reism and psychological individualism are proposed. On a more general level, it is discussed to what extent Protagoras’ fragment contains descriptive rather than normative claim.

Actualmente se debate si el enfoque davidsoniano de la atribución intencional puede extenderse a casos de sujetos delirantes que sufren diversos trastornos psiquiátricos. En particular, respecto a los casos graves de esquizofrenia, se ha afirmado que debido a las características que presentan los sujetos diagnosticados, éstos no podrían satisfacer los requisitos de racionalidad estipulados por Davidson para ser considerados agentes intencionales. Por lo tanto, en tales casos no sería posible siquiera identificar los contenidos mentales de sus delirios. En este artículo (...) desafiaré esta perspectiva y, vinculando la discusión sobre racionalidad animal y racionalidad en sujetos con esquizofrenia, sostendré que, una vez revisados y matizados algunos principios del enfoque davidsoniano, éste puede extenderse gradual y legítimamente a sujetos con esquizofrenia, incluso en casos de gravedad. Asimismo, propondré dos estrategias metodológicas que permitan generar evidencia a favor de la atribución de –al menos– algunas creencias simples a estos sujetos, sin tener que dejar de tratarlos como agentes con algún grado de intencionalidad. (shrink)

Pictures are notably absent from the current debate about how to define lying. Theorists in this debate tend to focus on linguistic means of communication and do not consider the possibility of lying with photographs, drawings and other kinds of pictures. The aim of this paper is to show that such a narrow focus is misguided: there is a strong case to be made for the possibility of lying with pictures and this possibility allows for insights concerning the question of (...) how lying should be defined. (shrink)

The sensorimotor theory of vision and visual consciousness is often described as a radical alternative to the computational and connectionist orthodoxy in the study of visual perception. However, it is far from clear whether the theory represents a significant departure from orthodox approaches or whether it is an enrichment of it. In this study, I tackle this issue by focusing on the explanatory structure of the sensorimotor theory. I argue that the standard formulation of the theory subscribes to the same (...) theses of the dynamical hypothesis and that it affords covering-law explanations. This however exposes the theory to the mere description worry and generates a puzzle about the role of representations. I then argue that the sensorimotor theory is compatible with a mechanistic framework, and show how this can overcome the mere description worry and solve the problem of the explanatory role of representations. By doing so, it will be shown that the theory should be understood as an enrichment of the orthodoxy, rather than an alternative. (shrink)

Recent philosophical and empirical contributions strongly suggest that perception attributes determinable properties to its objects. But a characterisation of determinability via attributed properties is restricted to the level of content and does not capture the difference between perceptual belief and perception on this score. In this paper, I propose a formal way of cashing out the difference between determinable belief and perception. On the view presented here, determinability in perception distinctively involves homogeneous representation or representation that exhibits special sorts of (...) formal type variability. This formal characterisation, I suggest, goes beyond traditional approaches to analog representation and parallels a baseline notion of analog computation. (shrink)

This paper offers a novel argument against the phenomenal intentionality thesis (or PIT for short). The argument, which I'll call the extended mind argument against phenomenal intentionality, is centered around two claims: the first asserts that some source intentional states extend into the environment, while the second maintains that no conscious states extend into the environment. If these two claims are correct, then PIT is false, for PIT implies that the extension of source intentionality is predicated upon the extension of (...) phenomenal consciousness. The argument is important because it undermines an increasingly prominent account of the nature of intentionality. PIT has entered the philosophical mainstream and is now a serious contender to naturalistic views of intentionality like the tracking theory and the functional role theory (Loar 1987, 2003; Searle 1990; Strawson 1994; Horgan and Tienson 2002; Pitt 2004; Farkas 2008; Kriegel 2013; Montague 2016; Bordini 2017; Forrest 2017; Mendelovici 2018). The extended mind argument against PIT challenges the popular sentiment that consciousness grounds intentionality. (shrink)

This book develops a novel generalization of possible world semantics, called ‘world line semantics’, which recognizes worlds and links between world-bound objects (world lines) as mutually independent aspects of modal semantics. Addressing a wide range of questions vital for contemporary debates in logic and philosophy of language and offering new tools for theoretical linguistics and knowledge representation, the book proposes a radically new paradigm in modal semantics. This framework is motivated philosophically, viewing a structure of world lines as a precondition (...) of modal talk. The author provides a uniform analysis of quantification over individuals (physical objects) and objects of thought (intentional objects). The semantic account of what it means to speak of intentional objects throws new light on accounts of intentionality and singular thought in the philosophy of mind and offers novel insights into the semantics of intensional transitive verbs. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the representational theory of perception, on which the world is represented as being a certain way in perceptual experience, cannot explain how there can be a genuinely epistemic connection between experience and belief. I try to show that we are positively required to deny that perceptual consciousness is contentful if we want to make its fitness for epistemic duties intelligible. (So versions of the representational theory on which experience has a merely causal purchase on (...) belief are not considered.) But my aim is not just negative. I try to defeat representationalism in such a way as to motivate a robustly presentational theory of perception. According to such a theory, perceptions are relations not between a subject and a content but between a subject and an ordinary object (such that if the relation holds at t, an appropriate subject and object must exist at t, and the object must be presented to the subject). I end by sketching an account of perceptual experience that is meant to show that, contrary to a very popular misconception, there is a way to conceive perceptual consciousness as relational and presentational (not intentional and representational) that does not succumb to the celebrated ?myth of the Given? (shrink)

Brentano's Thesis that intentionality is the mark of the mental is central to analytic philosophy of mind as well as phenomenology. The contemporary discussion assumes that it is a formulation of an analytic definition of the mental. I argue that this assumption is mistaken. According to Brentano, many philosophical concepts can only be elucidated by perceiving their instances because these concepts are abstracted from perception. The concept of the mental is one of these concepts. We need to understand Brentano's Thesis (...) accordingly: It is a piece of advice on how to become introspectively aware of the distinctive feature of mental phenomena. On this understanding of Brentano's Thesis standard objections to it no longer arise. (shrink)

My topic is the intelligent guidance of action. In this paper I offer an empirically grounded case for four ideas: that [a] cognitive processes of practical reasoning play a key role in the intelligent guidance of action, [b] these processes could not do so without significant enabling work done by both perception and the motor system, [c] the work done by perceptual and motor systems can be characterized as the generation of information specialized for action guidance, which in turn suggests (...) that [d] the cognitive processes of practical reasoning that play a key role in the guidance of intelligent action are not the abstract, syllogistic ones philosophers often treat as the paradigm of practical reasoning. Rather, these cognitive processes are constrained by, and work well with, the specialized concepts outputted by perception and the feedback outputted by sensorimotor processes. (shrink)

Dretske has provided very influential arguments that there is a difference between our sensory awareness of objects and our awareness of facts about these objects—that there is a difference, for example, between seeing x and seeing that x is F. This distinction between simple and epistemic seeing is a staple of the philosophy of perception. Memory is often usefully compared to perception, and in this spirit I argue for the conditional claim that if Dretske’s arguments succeed in motivating the posit (...) of simple seeing, then parallel arguments should equally motivate a posit I call simple remembering. Simple remembering would be a conscious form of memory about an object or event which is prior to and independent of any beliefs the subject may or may not form about the object or event simply remembered. (shrink)

Recently, the thesis that experience is fundamentally a matter of representing the world as being a certain way has been questioned by austere relationalists. I defend this thesis by developing a view of perceptual content that avoids their objections. I will argue that on a relational understanding of perceptual content, the fundamental insights of austere relationalism do not compete with perceptual experience being representational. As it will show that most objections to the thesis that experience has content apply only to (...) accounts of perceptual content on which perceptual relations to the world play no explanatory role. With austere relationalists, I will argue that perceptual experience is fundamentally relational. But against austere relationalists, I will argue that it is fundamentally both relational and representational. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that, unlike proponents of Humean accounts of intentional action, Ockham can also answer the fundamental question of why we desire anything at all. For Ockham, desire cannot be the starting point of the explanation, since desire presupposes yet another kind of appetitive act that is objectual, or non-propositional, in its nature. Ockham calls this love (amor). It should become clear that Ockham's approach, even in his day, is not common. It is, however, (...) worthy of detailed examination because it furthers a deeper and more complete understanding of intentional action by shedding light on this more fundamental question. In his terminology, love is the most basic kind of unconditional willing, not least because it is purely objectual: we appreciate persons as ends, not as means. The explanation of intentional action has to start somewhere. And, for Ockham, it starts with love for persons. (shrink)

There is a widely held view that visual representations (images) do not depict negation, for example, as expressed by the sentence, “the train is not coming.” The present study focuses on the real-world visual representations of photographs and comic (manga) illustrations and empirically challenges the question of whether humans and machines, that is, modern deep neural networks, can recognize visual representations as expressing negation. By collecting data on the captions humans gave to images and analyzing the occurrences of negation phrases, (...) we show some evidence that humans recognize certain images as expressing negation. Furthermore, based on this finding, we examined whether or not humans and machines can classify novel images as expressing negation. The humans were able to correctly classify images to some extent, as expected from the analysis of the image captions. On the other hand, the machine learning model of image processing was only able to perform this classification at about the chance level, not at the same level of performance as the human. Based on these results, we discuss what makes humans capable of recognizing negation in visual representations, highlighting the role of the background commonsense knowledge that humans can exploit. Comparing human and machine learning performances suggests new ways to understand human cognitive abilities and to build artificial intelligence systems with more human-like abilities to understand logical concepts. (shrink)

The questions of whether episodic memory is a propositional attitude, and of whether it has propositional content, are central to discussions about how memory represents the world, what mental states should count as memories, and what kind of beings are capable of remembering. Despite its importance to such topics, these questions have not been addressed explicitly in the recent literature in philosophy of memory. In one of the very few pieces dealing with the topic, Fernández (2006) provides a positive answer (...) to the initial questions by arguing that the propositional attitude view of memory, as I will call it, provides a simple account of how memory possesses truth-conditions. A similar suggestion is made by Byrne (2010) when he proposes that perception and episodic memory have the same kind of content, differing only in degree. Against the propositional attitude view, I will argue that episodic memory does not have propositional content, and therefore, that it is not a propositional attitude. My project here is, therefore, mainly critical. I will show that, if empirical work is to inform our philosophical theories of memory in any way, we have good reasons to deny, or at least to be skeptical, of the prospects of the propositional attitude view of episodic memory. (shrink)

The current dispute between causalists and simulationists in philosophy of memory has led to opposing attempts to characterize the relationship between memory and imagination. In a recent overview of this debate, Perrin and Michaelian have suggested that the dispute over the continuity between memory and imagination boils down to the question of whether a causal connection to a past event is necessary for remembering. By developing an argument based on an analogy to perception, I argue that this dispute should instead (...) be viewed as a dispute about the nature of the attitudes involved in remembering and imagining. The focus on attitudes, rather than on causal connections, suggests a new way of conceiving of the relationship between memory and imagination that has been overlooked in recent philosophy of memory. (shrink)

Objetiva-se no presente artigo criticar a estratégia demonstrativa dos filósofos conceitualistas da percepção, McDowell e Brewer, em resposta ao argumento da granulação fina do conteúdo da experiência. A análise baseia-se em estudos sobre o papel da atenção seletiva e dos conceitos demonstrativos na percepção visual. Levine e Pylyshyn argumentam que um sistema visual primário provê uma referência direta e rastreia objetos em um período de tempo. É fundamental que tal mecanismo seja cognitivamente opaco, e assim, não apele a conceitos de (...) forma alguma. Se esta teoria estiver correta, então os conceitualistas falham ao responder ao argumento da granulação fina. (shrink)

This article is on a precise kind of color primitivism, ‘ostensivism.’ This is the view that it is in the nature of the colors that they are phenomenal, non-reductive, structural, categorical properties. First, I differentiate ostensivism from other precise forms of primitivism. Next, I examine the core belief ‘Revelation,’ and propose a revised version, which, unlike standard statements, is compatible with a yet unstated but plausible core belief: roughly, that there are interesting things to be discovered about the nature of (...) the colors. Finally, I show that ostensivism is the only view on color that can accommodate both proposed core beliefs. (shrink)

Naïve Realists hold that perceptual experience is a conscious relation to an object and its property-instances. In contrast, Representationalists hold that it is a conscious representational state with content, something which is accurate or inaccurate in certain conditions. The most common versions of Representationalism take perceptual content to be either general (Generalism) or singular in the object-place and otherwise consisting of attribution of properties (Singularism/Attributionism). Susanna Schellenberg has recently developed a version on which perceptual content is singular even in the (...) property-place in containing a de re mode of presentation of a property-instance (Particularism) (Schellenberg 2018). Particularism is explicitly motivated by its ability to capture certain Naïve Realist insights and it would be genuine progress if it were the best version of Representationalism. Then the debate between Naïve Realism and Representationalism would reduce to the debate over Disjunctivism. In this paper I show that Particularism faces a version of the problem of the Unity of Perceptual Content. Namely, its supporters haven’t told us how objects can be bound together with property-instances into a content such that it represents them and has accuracy-conditions. Furthermore, I argue that Particularists face an in-principle obstacle in solving it. In contrast, Attributionists can say that objects are bound together with properties into a content because the latter are attributed to the former. This establishes Attributionism as the only Representationalist game in town. But Attributionism can’t capture all Naïve Realist insights that the Particularists are after. Thus, the debate between Naïve Realism and Representationalism doesn’t reduce to the debate over Disjunctivism. (shrink)

I elaborate on Pylyshyn's definition of the cognitive impenetrability (CI) of early vision, and draw on the role of concepts in perceptual processing, which links the problem of the CI or cognitive penetrability (CP) of early vision with the problem of the nonconceptual content (NCC) of perception. I explain, first, the sense in which the content of early vision is CI and I argue that if some content is CI, it is conceptually encapsulated, that is, it is NCC. Then, I (...) examine the definitions of NCC and argue that they lead to the view that the NCC of perception is retrieved in a stage of visual processing that is CI. Thus, the CI of a state and content is a sufficient and necessary condition for the state and its content to be purely NCC, the CI?≡?NCC thesis. Since early vision is CI, the purely NCC of perception is formed in early vision. I defend the CI?≡?NCC thesis by arguing against objections raised against both the sufficient and the necessary part of the thesis. (shrink)

: Fodor argues that perceptual representations are a subset of iconic representations, which are distinguished from symbolic/discursive representations. Iconic representations are nonconceptual and they do not support the abilities afforded by concepts. Iconic representations, for example, cannot support object individuation. If someone thinks that perception or some of its parts has imagistic NCC, they face the following dilemma. Either they will have to accept that this NCC does not allow for object individuation, but it represents instead conglomerations of properties and (...) at some stage of visual processing it must interface with cognition and its conceptual capacities for the visual objects to be individuated. Or, they will have to hold that the imagistic, NCC of perception, allows for object individuation. I opt for the second thesis because I think there is strong empirical evidence that objects are individuated during early vision. I also think that early vision individuates objects by means of, what I had previously called nonconceptual perceptual demonstrative reference. I argue, first, why Fodor’s view that iconic NCC does not enable object individuation is false. I also argue, contra Fodor, that early vision allows the perception of the cardinality of sets of objects. Keywords : Early Vision; Analog Representations; Object Individuation; Arithmetic Cognition; Cardinality of Sets L'individuazione di oggetti mediante il contenuto iconico: come è rappresentata la numerosità nella rappresentazione iconica? Riassunto: Per Fodor le rappresentazioni percettive sono un sottoinsieme delle rappresentazioni iconiche, distinte dalle rappresentazioni simbolico/discorsive. Le rappresentazioni iconiche sono nonconcettuali e non supportano le abilità richieste dai concetti. Le rappresentazioni iconiche, per esempio, non supportano l'individuazione di oggetti. Se si pensa che la percezione o qualche sua parte abbia un contenuto nonconcettuale come immagine, si ci si imbatte nel seguente dilemma. O si accetta che il NCC non permetta di individuare oggetti, ma che rappresenti conglomerati di proprietà e che si interfacci con la cognizione e le sue capacità concettuali, per individuare gli oggetti visivi. O si dice che l'immagine, il NCC, della percezione consenta di individuare oggetti. Propendo per la seconda tesi, poiché penso che ci sia solida evidenza empirica per cui gli oggetti vengono individuati durante le prime fasi della visione, in cui l’individuazione avviene mediante quanto definito come riferimento dimostrativo del contenuto nonconcettuale percettivo. Chiarirò le ragioni per cui la concezione di Fodor, per cui il contenuto nonconcettuale iconico non supporta l’individuazione di oggetti, è falsa. Inoltre, contra Fodor, sosterrò che le prime fasi della visione permettono la percezione della cardinalità di insiemi di oggetti. Parole chiave: Prime fasi della visione; Rappresentazioni analogiche; Individuazione di oggetti; Cognizione aritmetica; Cardinalità degli insiemi. (shrink)

The Macpherson :24–62, 2012) argued that the perceptual experience of colors is cognitively penetrable. Macpherson also thinks that perception has nonconceptual content because this would provide a good explanation for several phenomena concerning perceptual experience. To have both, Macpherson must defend the thesis that the CP of perception is compatible with perception having NCC. Since the classical notion of CP of perception does not allow perception to have NCC, Macpherson proposes CP-lite. CP-lite makes room for an experience to have content (...) determined by concepts because the perceptual processes that produce the experience are affected by concepts rendering the experience, CP, while the same type of experience could have been had without any conceptual influences, in which case it would be CI. Macpherson then proceeds to show that CP-lite is compatible with some of the definitions of NCC. To do so, she argues that even when an experience is CP owing to the fact that it is produced by means of the mechanism posited by CP-lite, that is, through the interaction between bottom–up pure perception and top–down perceptual imagery, its content is NCC because it has the basic properties that characterize NCC. Based on this, Macpherson proceeds to criticize and undermine the definitions of NCC that are incompatible with CP-lite. In this paper, I argue that the possibility of CP-lite rests on the erroneous assumption that a state with conceptual content and a state with NCC can have the same phenomenology or content, and that the compatibility of CP-lite with NCC presupposes a view of NCC that does not conform to the usual construal of NCC. (shrink)

The distinction between perception and cognition has always had a firm footing in both cognitive science and folk psychology. However, there is little agreement as to how the distinction should be drawn. In fact, a number of theorists have recently argued that, given the ubiquity of top-down influences, we should jettison the distinction altogether. I reject this approach, and defend a pluralist account of the distinction. At the heart of my account is the claim that each legitimate way of marking (...) a border between perception and cognition deploys a notion I call ‘stimulus-control.’ Thus, rather than being a grab bag of unrelated kinds, the various categories of the perceptual are unified into a superordinate natural kind. (shrink)

Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 115, Issue 3pt3, Page 255-276, December 2015.

Object perception deploys a suite of perceptual capacities that constrains attention, guides reidentification, subserves recognition, and anchors demonstrative thought. Objects for perception—perceptual objects—are the targets of such capacities. Characterizing perceptual objects for multisensory perception faces two puzzles. First is the diversity of objects across sensory modalities. Second is the unity of multisensory perceptual objects. This paper resolves the puzzles. Objects for perception are structured mereologically complex individuals. Perceptual objects are items that bear perceptible features and have perceptible parts arranged to (...) form a unified whole. This circumscribes the targets of object perception where neutral talk concerning intentional objects and objects of perception cannot. Nonetheless, it is more permissive than identifying perceptual objects with material bodies, which excludes too much and leans too heavily on vision. The account thus is tailored to capture the role of objects in perception beyond vision: tactual, auditory, and olfactory objects are individuals with differing structures. Its flexibility also enables the account to accommodate shared objects for multisensory perception: multisensory perceptual objects are mereologically complex individuals with hybrid structure. For instance, one can bimodally perceive a common whole with parts accessible to one but not both modalities. Each sense provides a partial perspective on a complex whole that is perceptible through the coordinated use of multiple senses. Understanding perceptual objects as structured mereologically complex individuals thus provides a theoretically useful notion of an object for multisensory perception that resolves the puzzles of diversity and of unity. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to argue that the phenomenal similarity between perceiving and visualizing can be explained by the similarity between the structure of the content of these two different mental states. And this puts important constraints on how we should think about perceptual content and the content of mental imagery.

It has been argued recently that perception is indeterminate. But there are more than one ways of spelling out what this means. The standard line is that perceptual states attribute different probabilities to different propositions. I provide an alternative to this view, where it is not the attitude, but the content of perceptual states that is indeterminate, inasmuch as it consists of the representation of determinable properties. This view does justice to the more general claim that perception is indeterminate without (...) appealing to probability either in the attitude or in the content. (shrink)

Philosophers of music, like Charles Swann in Proust’s novel (Proust 1913/1992, p. 360), have traditionally found it difficult to utter the word ‘profound’ unironically. But this changed with Peter Kivy’s 1990 paper ‘The profundity of music’ The problem Kivy draws our attention to is this: we do call some musical works profound. However, Kivy argues, given that a work is profound only if it is about something profound and given that music (or ‘music alone’) is not about anything, this leads (...) to something of a paradox: how can music be profound if it is not about something profound. My aim in this paper is to argue that what makes a work profound is not that it is about something profound, but that it actively challenges any straightforward interpretative activity (while at the same time nudges you to keep on trying to interpret it). I argue that this line of argument is very much in tune with Kivy’s general theoretical commitment that “music alone isn’t about anything” (Kivy 1990, p. 245). (shrink)

Although some still advance reductive accounts of emotions—according to which they fall under a more familiar type of mental state—contemporary philosophers tend to agree that emotions probably constitute their own kind of mental state. Agreeing with this claim, however, is compatible with attempting to find commonalities between emotions and better understood things. According to the advocates of the so-called ‘perceptual analogy’, thinking of emotion in terms of perception can fruitfully advance our understanding even though emotion may not be reducible to (...) ordinary perception. In this paper, I spell out and motivate a different analogy—that between emotion and action—an analogy which I think can do some important theoretical work. In particular, it constitutes a theoretically fruitful way to think about core aspects of emotions and might in fact be employed to provide a better account of certain aspects of emotions than the one based on the perceptual analogy. Emotions might not be a matter of seeing the world a certain way, but a matter of behaving internally in response to it. In a slogan form: Emotion is the inward counterpart of bodily movement. (shrink)

The Radical Enactive/embodied view of Cognition, or REC, claims that all cognition is a matter of skilled performance. Yet REC also makes a distinction between basic and content-involving cognition, arguing that the development of basic to content-involving cognition involves a kink. It might seem that this distinction leads to problematic gaps in REC’s story. We address two such alleged gaps in this paper. First, we identify and reply to the concern that REC leads to an “interface problem”, according to which (...) REC has to account for the interaction of two minds co-present in the same cognitive activity. We emphasise how REC’s view of content-involving cognition in terms of activities that require particular sociocultural practices can resolve these interface concerns. The second potential problematic gap is that REC creates an unjustified difference in kind between animal and human cognition. In response, we clarify and further explicate REC’s notion of content, and argue that this notion allows REC to justifiably mark the distinction between basic and content-involving cognition as a difference in kind. We conclude by pointing out in what sense basic and content-involving cognitive activities are the same, yet different. They are the same because they are all forms of skilled performance, yet different as some forms of skilled performance are genuinely different from other forms. (shrink)

REC, or the radical enactive/embodied view of cognition makes a crucial distinction between basic and content-involving cognition. This paper clarifies REC’s views on basic and content-involving cognition, and their relation by replying to a recent criticism claiming that REC is refuted by evidence on affordance perception. It shows how a correct understanding of how basic and contentless cognition relate allows to see how REC can accommodate this evidence, and thus can afford affordance perception.

One can be reproached for not remembering. Remembering and forgetting shows who and what one values. Indeed, memory is constitutively normative. Theoretical approaches to memory should be sensitive to this normative character. We will argue that traditional views that consider memory as the storing and retrieval of mental content, fail to consider the practices we need for telling the truth about our past. We introduce the Radically Enactive view of Cognition, or REC, as well-placed to recognize the central role of (...) norms in remembering. Crucially, REC construes all remembering as “something we do”, and the most sophisticated forms of remembering as things we collectively do, answerable to socioculturally established practices. On this view our mnemonic performances cannot avoid re-shaping our collective ways of doing and seeing going forward. By REC’s lights therefore, the “is” of memory is “oughty” through and through. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we clarify the notion of immunity to error through misidentification with respect to the first-person pronoun. In particular, we set out to dispel the view that for a judgment to be IEM it must contain a token of a certain class of predicates. Rather, the importance of the IEM status of certain judgments is that it teaches us about privileged ways of coming to know about ourselves. We then turn to examine how (...) perception, as a state with nonconceptual content, can give rise to judgments that are IEM. On one view, the ‘inheritance model’ of immunity, perception gives rise to such judgments because perception itself is IEM. We argue that this model is misguided, and, instead, suggest and elucidate an alternative view: perception gives rise to judgments that are IEM by virtue of containing implicitly self-related or self-concerning information. (shrink)

Recently, a cottage industry has formed with the goal of analyzing reasoning. The relevant notion of reasoning in which philosophers are expressly interested is fixed through an epistemic functional description: reasoning—whatever it is—is our personal-level, rationally evaluable means of meeting our rational requirements through managing and updating our attitudes. Roughly, the dominant view in the extant literature as developed by Paul Boghossian, John Broome, and others is that reasoning is a rule-governed operation over propositional attitudes that results in a change (...) in attitude. In this paper, I argue that our personal-level operations over mental models and visuospatial imagery, which are representations in a non-propositional/analogue format, can be rationally evaluable processes of managing our attitudes and, thus, should be considered reasoning in the relevant sense. Furthermore, I show that if reasoning can occur through operations over mental models and imagery, then the dominant rule-following account mischaracterizes the cognitive operations and representational states assumed to be constitutive of reasoning and what grounds the rational status of a line of reasoning. (shrink)

Some have claimed that there are laws of appearance, i.e. in principle constraints on which types of sensory experiences are possible. Within a representationalist framework, these laws amount to restrictions on what a given experience can represent. I offer an in-depth defence of one such law and explain why prevalent externalist varieties of representationalism have trouble accommodating it. In light of this, I propose a variety of representationalism on which the spatial content of experience is determined by intrinsic features of (...) conscious subjects. I conclude by considering an externalist-friendly reworking of my proposal, but suggest that the success of such a reworking is dubious. (shrink)

Philosophers have traditionally held that propositions mark the domain of rational thought and inference. Many philosophers have held that only conceptually sophisticated creatures like us could have propositional attitudes. But in recent decades, philosophers have adopted increasingly liberal views of propositional attitudes that encompass the mental states of various non-human animals. These views now sit alongside more traditional views within the philosophical mainstream. In this paper I argue that liberalized views of propositional attitudes are so liberal that they encompass states (...) of all sorts of apparently mindless systems like circadian clocks in plants. I begin by arguing that on the most well-developed and widely endorsed theories of underived representation in philosophy, circadian clocks qualify as representations. I then argue that standard reasons for thinking that perceptual states and pictures have propositional content carry over to circadian clocks. Finally, I argue that circadian representations in plants play the kind of functional role that is widely taken to be partly constitutive of belief-like attitudes. So according to mainstream theories of representation, propositions, and attitudes, plants have propositional attitudes. Yet on other more traditional views, this conclusion would seem absurd. So, contrary to appearances, there is no shared, stable understanding of what propositional attitudes are in contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

Philosophers have traditionally held that propositions mark the domain of rational thought and inference. Many philosophers have held that only conceptually sophisticated creatures like us could have propositional attitudes. But in recent decades, philosophers have adopted increasingly liberal views of propositional attitudes that encompass the mental states of various non-human animals. These views now sit alongside more traditional views within the philosophical mainstream. In this paper I argue that liberalized views of propositional attitudes are so liberal that they encompass states (...) of all sorts of apparently mindless systems like circadian clocks in plants. I begin by arguing that on the most well-developed and widely endorsed theories of underived representation in philosophy, circadian clocks qualify as representations. I then argue that standard reasons for thinking that perceptual states and pictures have propositional content carry over to circadian clocks. Finally, I argue that circadian representations in plants play the kind of functional role that is widely taken to be partly constitutive of belief-like attitudes. So according to mainstream theories of representation, propositions, and attitudes, plants have propositional attitudes. Yet on other more traditional views, this conclusion would seem absurd. So, contrary to appearances, there is no shared, stable understanding of what propositional attitudes are in contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

The main thesis of this paper is that two prevailing theories about cognitive penetration are too extreme, namely, the view that cognitive penetration is pervasive and the view that there is a sharp and fundamental distinction between cognition and perception, which precludes any type of cognitive penetration. These opposite views have clear merits and empirical support. To eliminate this puzzling situation, we present an alternative theoretical approach that incorporates the merits of these views into a broader and more nuanced explanatory (...) framework. A key argument we present in favor of this framework concerns the evolution of intentionality and perceptual capacities. An implication of this argument is that cases of cognitive penetration must have evolved more recently and that this is compatible with the cognitive impenetrability of early perceptual stages of processing information. A theoretical approach that explains why this should be the case is the consciousness and attention dissociation framework. The paper discusses why concepts, particularly issues concerning concept acquisition, play an important role in the interaction between perception and cognition. (shrink)

This article offers an account of moods as distinctive kinds of personal level affective-evaluative states, which are both intentional and rationally intelligible in specific ways. The account contrasts with those who claim moods are non-intentional, and so also arational. Section 1 provides a conception of intentionality and distinguishes moods, as occurrent experiential states, from other states in the affective domain. Section 2 argues moods target the subject’s total environment presented in a specific evaluative light through felt valenced attitudes (the Mood-Intentionality (...) thesis). Section 3 argues some moods are experienced as rationally intelligible responses, and so epistemically appropriate, to the way ‘the world’ presents itself (the Mood-Intelligibility thesis). Finally, section 4 discusses the epistemology of moods. (shrink)

Those arguing for the existence of non-propositional content appeal to emotions for support, although there has been little engagement in those debates with developments in contemporary theory of emotion, specifically in connection with the kind of mental states that emotional experiences are. Relatedly, within emotion theory, one finds claims that emotional experiences per se have non-propositional content without detailed argument. This paper argues that the content of emotional experience is propositional in a weak sense, associated with aspectual experience and correctness (...) conditions. Furthermore, it provides an interpretation of purely-objectual emotional experiences which satisfies this weak view of propositional content. (shrink)

Typical emotions share important features with paradigmatic intentional states, and therefore might admit of distinctions made in theory of intentionality. One such distinction is between attitude and content, where we can specify the content of an intentional state separately from its attitude, and therefore the same content can be taken up by different intentional attitudes. According to some philosophers, emotions do not admit of this distinction, although there has been no sustained argument for this claim. In this article, I argue (...) that the way values figure in emotional experience qualifies the content of emotional experience such that the attitude-content distinction cannot be applied. (shrink)

A central claim in contemporary philosophy of mind is that the phenomenal character of experience is entirely determined by its content. This paper considers an alternative called Mode Intentionalism. According to this view, phenomenal character outruns content because the intentional mode contributes to the phenomenal character of the experience. I assess a phenomenal contrast argument in support of this view, arguing that the cases appealed to allow for interpretations which do not require positing intentional modes as phenomenologically manifest aspects of (...) experience. (shrink)

Call the idea that states of perceptual awareness have intentional content, and in virtue of that aim at or represent ways the world might be, the ‘Content View.’ I argue that though Kant is widely interpreted as endorsing the Content View there are significant problems for any such interpretation. I further argue that given the problems associated with attributing the Content View to Kant, interpreters should instead consider him as endorsing a form of acquaintance theory. Though perceptual acquaintance is controversial (...) in itself and in attribution to Kant, it promises to make sense of central claims within his critical philosophy. (shrink)

: This essay reconstructs and evaluates Aristotle’s argument in Nicomachean Ethics IX.9 that the happy person needs friends, in which Aristotle combines his well-known claim that friends are other selves with the claim that human perception is meta-perceptual: the perceiving subject perceives its own existence. After exploring some issues in the logic of perception, the essay argues that Aristotle’s argument for the necessity of friends is invalid since perception-verbs create referentially opaque contexts in which the substitution of co-referential terms fails.