In our wakeful conscious lives, the experience of time and dynamic temporal phenomena—such as continuous motion and change—appears to be ubiquitous. How is it that temporality is woven into our conscious experience? Is it through perceptual experience presenting a series of instantaneous states of the world, which combine together—in a sense which would need to be specified—to give us experience of dynamic temporal phenomena? In this paper, I argue that this is not the case. -/- Several authors have recently proposed (...) dynamic snapshot models of temporal experience— such as Prosser and Arstila, building upon Le Poidevin— according to which perceptual experience has no temporal content of a non‐zero extent. I argue that there is an absence of motivation for such a view; I develop and defend the claim that perceptual experience minimally presents something of some non‐zero temporal extent as such. (shrink)

З огляду на демократизацію письма та взаємне накладання дискурсів в сучасному медійному середовищі, поетичне ставлення до мови виявляється можливим шляхом осмислення ваги слова, усвідомлення мови не як прозорого медіуму, а як активного середовища мислення. Такий підхід можливий в результаті переосмислення феномену поезії, відштовхуючись від ідей прагматичної поетики П. Арсеньєва. Розвінчуючи романтичне уявлення про поета як медіума між богом і читачем, а також критикуючи уявлення Дж. Остіна про мову як засіб впливу на іншого, П. Арсеньєв, втім, розуміє поетичне висловлювання як спосіб (...) політичного впливу на слухача, чим обмежує простір можливостей екзистенції, що відкривається цим висловлюванням. Концепція поетичного акту як способу розмикання мови, що розробляється автором на основі філософії мови М. Гайдеґґера та Ф.-В. фон Геррманна, є спробою розробити відповідне розуміння поезії та обійти обмеження концепції прагматичної поетики. (shrink)

The paper argues that no second order theory is ontologically commited to anything beyond what its individual variables range over.

A claim for minimalism about ‘real’ on the model of minimalism about ‘true’. The article, in effect, develops J.L. Austin’s remark that with ‘real’, the negative ‘wears the trousers’. The development is then exploited for a proposed elucidation of Plato’s discussion of the fields of knowledge and belief in his Republic. It is proposed that Plato was striving for something whose futility was a leading theme of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy.

I raise a problem for common-factor theories of experience concerning the demonstrative thoughts we form on the basis of experience. Building on an insight of Paul Snowdon 1992, I argue that in order to demonstratively refer to an item via conscious awareness of a distinct intermediary the subject must have some understanding that she is aware of a distinct intermediary. This becomes an issue for common-factor theories insofar as it is also widely accepted that the general, pre-philosophical or ‘naïve’ view (...) of experience does not accept that in normal perceptual cases one is consciously aware of non-environmental (inner, mental) features. I argue then that the standard common-factor view of experience should be committed to attributing quite widespread referential errors or failures amongst the general, nonphilosophical populace – which seems an unattractively radical commitment. After clarifying the various assumptions I am making about experience and demonstrative thoughts, I consider a number of possible responses on behalf of the common-factor theorist. I finish by arguing that my argument should apply to any common-factor theory, not just avowedly ‘indirect' theories. (shrink)

The long history of theorizing about perception divides into two quite distinct and irreconcilable camps, one that takes sensory experience to show us external reality just as it is, and one that takes such experience to reveal our own mind. I argue that we should reject both sides of this debate, and admit that the phenomenal character of experience, as such, reveals little about the nature of the external world and even less about the mind.

According to ‘direct social perception’ (DSP) accounts of social cognition, perception may be ‘smart’ enough on its own to inform us about other people’s emotions. Some DSP advocates suggest that ‘smart’ social perception should be conceived along ‘enactive’ lines. In this paper, I suggest that DSP needs social perception to have representational content. This seems in tension with the main versions of enactivism, which deny that perception is representational. I thus present the following challenge to ‘enactive’ versions of DSP: either (...) they show how perception can have the requisite smartness without representational content, which I doubt that they can, or they embrace the orthodox idea that perceptual experiences have representational contents. I also suggest that DSP defenders, whether or not they want to be enactivists, can cheerfully accept the latter idea. (shrink)

Your evidence constrains your rational degrees of confidence both locally and globally. On the one hand, particular bits of evidence can boost or diminish your rational degree of confidence in various hypotheses, relative to your background information. On the other hand, epistemic rationality requires that, for any hypothesis h, your confidence in h is proportional to the support that h receives from your total evidence. Why is it that your evidence has these two epistemic powers? I argue that various proposed (...) accounts of what it is for something to be an element of your evidence set cannot answer this question. I then propose an alternative account of what it is for something to be an element of your evidence set. 1 Introduction 2 The elements of one's evidence set are propositions 3 Which kinds of propositions are in one's evidence set? 3.1 Doxastic accounts of evidence 3.2 Non-doxastic accounts of evidence 4 Elaborating and defending the LIE CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

This paper sets out a novel response to the ‘screening off problem’ for naïve realism. The aim is to resist the claim (which many naïve realists accept) that the kind of experience involved in hallucinating also occurs during perception, by arguing that there are causal constraints that must be met if an hallucinatory experience is to occur that are never met in perceptual cases. Notably, given this response, it turns out that, contra current orthodoxy, naïve realists need not adopt any (...) particular view about the psychological nature of hallucinatory experience to handle the screening off problem. Consequently, room opens up for naïve realists to endorse whatever theory of hallucinatory experience seems to best capture the distinctive nature of such episodes. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAlthough philosophers have often insisted that specular perception is illusory or erroneous in nature, few have stressed the reliability and indispensability of mirrors as optical instrumen...

It is often assumed that when we see common opaque objects in standard light this is in virtue of seeing their facing surfaces. Here I argue that we should reject that claim. Either we don't see objects' facing surfaces, or—if we hold on to the claim that we do see such things—it is at least not in virtue of seeing them that we see common opaque objects. I end by showing how this conclusion squares both with our intuitions and with (...) the facts of vision science. (shrink)

Midwest Studies In Philosophy, Volume 44, Issue 1, Page 92-116, December 2019.

Neurosis can be interpreted as a methodological condition which any aim-pursuing entity can suffer from. If such an entity pursues a problematic aim B, represents to itself that it is pursuing a different aim C, and as a result fails to solve the problems associated with B which, if solved, would lead to the pursuit of aim A, then the entity may be said to be "rationalistically neurotic". Natural science is neurotic in this sense in so far as a basic (...) aim of science is represented to be to improve knowledge of factual truth as such (aim C), when actually the aim of science is to improve knowledge of explanatory truth (aim B). Science does not suffer too much from this neurosis, but philosophy of science does. Much more serious is the rationalistic neurosis of the social sciences, and of academic inquiry more generally. Freeing social science and academic inquiry from neurosis would have far reaching, beneficial, intellectual, institutional and cultural consequences. (shrink)

Many take the possibility of hallucinations to imply that a relationalist account, according to which perceptual experiences are constituted by direct relations to ordinary mind-independent objects, is false. The common reaction among relationalists is to adopt a disjunctivist view that denies that hallucinations have the same nature as perceptual experiences. This paper proposes a non-disjunctivist response to the argument from hallucination by arguing that the alleged empirical and a priori evidence in support of the possibility of hallucinations is inconclusive. A (...) corollary upshot of the article is that whether hallucinations are possible or not is still an open empirical question. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 8, Issue 3, pp 231 - 244 Here I cast some doubt on Professor Coliva’s interpretive claim that Moore’s “Proof of an external world” is addressed to idealism, not skepticism, and explore the consequences for our understanding of the final paragraphs of the paper. In response to Professor Leite, I examine the disagreement between us on whether the global skeptical hypotheses can be refuted by ordinary evidence. Finally, after analyzing the logic of the skeptical argumentation, I attempt (...) an answer to Professor Stroud’s question about the staying power of the representative theory of perception. (shrink)

McDowell has argued that external world scepticism is a pressing problem only in so far as we accept, on the basis of the argument from illusion, the claim that perceiving that p and hallucinating that p involve a highest common factor.

_ Source: _Volume 8, Issue 3, pp 208 - 222 Penelope Maddy claims that we can have no evidence that we are not being globally deceived by an evil demon. However, Maddy’s Plain Inquirer holds that she has good evidence for a wide variety of claims about the world and her relation to it. She rejects the broadly Cartesian idea that she can’t be entitled to these claims, or have good evidence for them, or know them, unless she can provide (...) a defense of them that starts from nowhere. She likewise rejects the more limited demand for a defense that makes use only of considerations that do not concern the world outside of her mind. She allows that some considerations about the world can be appealed to perfectly appropriately as fully adequate evidence in favor of other considerations about the world. So why can’t the Plain Inquirer rule out global skeptical hypotheses by producing evidence against them that depends upon other considerations about the world? Is there good reason for singling out global skeptical hypotheses such as _I am not being deceived by an evil demon_ as requiring a different kind of treatment? Considerations about epistemic asymmetry and epistemic circularity, as well as Wittgensteinian considerations about the relation between evidence and the real-world and human background context, all lead to the conclusion that there is not. (shrink)

Hillary Putnam has famously argued that we can know that we are not brains in a vat because the hypothesis that we are is self-refuting. While Putnam's argument has generated interest primarily as a novel response to skepticism, his original use of the brain in a vat scenario was meant to illustrate a point about the "mind/world relationship." In particular, he intended it to be part of an argument against the coherence of metaphysical realism, and thus to be part of (...) a defense of his conception of truth as idealized rational acceptability. Putnam's conclusions about the scenario are, however, actually out of line with central and plausible aspects of his own account of the relationship between our minds and the world. Reflections on semantics give us no compelling reason to suppose that claims like "I am a brain in a vat" could not turn out to be true. (shrink)

In this article, I oppose the view that knowledge is a species of belief, and argue that belief should be defined in terms of knowledge, instead of the other way round. However, I reject the idea that the concept of knowledge has a primary or basic role or position in our system of mental and logical concepts, because I reject the hierarchical conception of philosophical analysis implicit in this idea. I approach the topic of knowledge and belief from a discussion (...) of Richard Holton’s views about facts and factive verbs. (shrink)

John Locke:When we set before our eyes a round globe of uniform colour, v.g. gold, alabaster or jet, it is certain that the idea thereby imprinted in our mind is of a flat circle, variously shadowed, with several degrees of light and brightness coming to our eyes. But we having, by use, been accustomed to perceive what kind of appearance convex bodies are wont to make in us, what alterations are made in the reflections of light by the difference of (...) the sensible figures of bodies: the judgment presently, by an habitual custom, alters the appearances into their causes.H.H. Price:…. a distant hillside which is full of protuberances, and slopes upwards at quite a gentle angle, will appear flat and vertical….. This means that the sense-datum, the colour expanse which we sense, actually is flat and vertical. (shrink)

John Locke:When we set before our eyes a round globe of uniform colour, v.g. gold, alabaster or jet, it is certain that the idea thereby imprinted in our mind is of a flat circle, variously shadowed, with several degrees of light and brightness coming to our eyes. But we having, by use, been accustomed to perceive what kind of appearance convex bodies are wont to make in us, what alterations are made in the reflections of light by the difference of (...) the sensible figures of bodies: the judgment presently, by an habitual custom, alters the appearances into their causes.H.H. Price:…. a distant hillside which is full of protuberances, and slopes upwards at quite a gentle angle, will appear flat and vertical….. This means that the sense-datum, the colour expanse which we sense, actually is flat and vertical. (shrink)

Many philosophers have assumed, without argument, that Wittgenstein influenced Austin. More often, however, this is vehemently denied, especially by those who knew Austin personally. We compile and assess the currently available evidence for Wittgenstein’s influence on Austin’s philosophy of language. Surprisingly, this has not been done before in any detail. On the basis of both textual and circumstantial evidence we show that Austin’s work demonstrates substantial engagement with Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. In particular, Austin’s 1940 paper, ‘The Meaning of a Word’, (...) should be construed as a direct response to and development of ideas he encountered in Wittgenstein’s Blue Book. Moreover, we argue that Austin’s mature speech-act theory in How to Do Things with Words was also significantly influenced by Wittgenstein. (shrink)

There is a widespread assumption that ordinary language philosophy was killed off sometime in the 1960s or 70s by a combination of Gricean pragmatics and the rapid development of systematic semantic theory. Contrary to that widespread assumption, however, contemporary versions of ordinary language philosophy are alive and flourishing, but going by various aliases—in particular (some versions of) "contextualism" and (some versions of) "experimental philosophy". And a growing group of contemporary philosophers are explicitly embracing the methods as well as the title (...) of ordinary language philosophy and arguing that it has been unfairly maligned and was never decisively refuted. In this overview, I will outline the main projects and arguments employed by contemporary ordinary language philosophers, and make the case that updated versions of the arguments made by ordinary language philosophers in the middle of the twentieth century are attracting renewed attention. (shrink)

I was amazed to read that Professor Galen Strawson, who took up philosophy in 1972 at Cambridge, was then given to understand that the nine propositions he lists in ‘The depth(s) of the twentieth century’ (2010: 607) were generally considered to be true. I took up philosophy in 1960 in Oxford, and I was not given to understand any such thing. It is not obvious that there was a sea change with regard to these themes in the 12 years between (...) 1960 and 1972. By 1972 I had been teaching at Oxford for 6 years, and I observed no such change – only the lamentable rise of Davidsonian truth-conditional semantics and Dummett’s anti-realist theory of meaning, which progressively undermined and ultimately destroyed a flourishing milieu of first rate analytic philosophy at Oxford. But, I admit, Cambridge is another place. (shrink)

Many of the objects that we perceive have an important characteristic: When they move, they change shape. For instance, when you watch a person walk across a room, her body constantly deforms. I suggest that we exercise a type of perceptual constancy in response to changes of this sort, which I call structure constancy. In this paper I offer an account of structure constancy. I introduce the notion of compositional structure, and propose that structure constancy involves perceptually representing an object (...) as retaining its compositional structure over time. I argue that compositional structure is represented in visual phenomenology, and I also assemble empirical evidence in support of the claim that compositional structure is recovered by the visual system. Finally, I draw out consequences of this account. I argue that structure constancy has implications for the predictive capacities of perception, and that the phenomenon places important constraints on viable accounts of both the format and reference frame of visual experience. (shrink)

What method should we use to determine the nature of perceptual experience? My focus here is the Kantian thought that transcendental arguments can be used to determine the nature of perceptual experience. I set out a dilemma for the use of transcendental arguments in the philosophy of perception, one which turns on a comparison ofthe transcendental method with the first-personal method of early analytic philosophy, and with the empirical methods of much contemporary philosophy of mind. The transcendental method can avoid (...) this dilemma only if it commits to our possessing a capacity for imaginative reflection, one which is capable of identifying certain formal properties of experience.This result indicates some of the commitments which must be made if transcendental arguments are to be used in the philosophy of perception, and it has implications for those views that take the philosophy of perception to be autonomous of the empirical science of perception. (shrink)

In natural language, looks-talk is used in a variety of ways. I investigate three uses of ‘looks’ that have traditionally been distinguished – epistemic, comparative, and phenomenal ‘looks’ – and endorse and develop considerations in support of the view that these amount to polysemy. Focusing on the phenomenal use of ‘looks’, I then investigate connections between its semantics, the content of visual experience, and the metaphysics of looks. I argue that phenomenal ‘looks’ is not a propositional attitude operator: We do (...) not use it to ascribe propositional attitudes to subjects, but to directly ascribe looks to objects, where looks are relational properties. However, I go on to argue that, given the way we use phenomenal ‘looks’, these relational properties are ultimately best understood as phenomenal relational properties, i.e. in terms of relations involving experiences. Along the way, I endorse Byrne’s argument against Jackson’s claim that phenomenal ‘looks F’ only takes predicates for colour, shape, and distance, and raise the issue of compositionality for the resulting view according to which phenomenal ‘looks F’ is context-dependent in a way that allows it to take a vast range of predicates. I conclude by arguing that these considerations concerning the natural language use of ‘looks’, and in particular its phenomenal use, are water on the mills of phenomenal intentionalism, a position in the philosophy of perception according to which experiences are propositional attitudes with phenomenal looks-contents. (shrink)

Originating from philosophy and science, many different ideas have made their way into educational policies. Educational policies often take such ideas completely out of context, and enforce them as general norms to every aspect of education; even opposing ideals make their way into school’s curricula, teaching techniques, assignments, and procedures. Meanwhile, inside the actual classrooms, teachers and students are left in limbo, trying to comply with, techniques, evaluation forms and a growing technical educational vocabulary. Here I would like to propose (...) an antidote to this absurdity by reminding us what teachers and students already know. Such an antidote can be found in J. L. Austin’s speech act theory. In this paper, I propose we revisit speech act theory and treat it as an educational theory. That might help us dismantle false dichotomies troubling education for decades. The point is not that the discussion over educational policies and priorities should stop, but that it should be kept in appropriate perspective. A modified speech act theory can help us facilitate such a perspective. (shrink)

The argument from illusion attempts to establish the bold claim that we are never perceptually aware of ordinary material objects. The argument has rightly received a great deal critical of scrutiny. But here we develop a criticism that, to our knowledge, has not hitherto been explored. We consider the canonical form of the argument as it is captured in contemporary expositions. There are two stages to our criticism. First, we show that the argument is invalid. Second, we identify premises that (...) can be used to make the argument valid. But we argue that the obvious fixes are problematic. If our arguments are successful, we show that the argument from illusion is even more difficult to defend than is commonly acknowledged. (shrink)

Koopman’s book revolves around the notion of transition, which he proposes is one of the central ideas of the pragmatist tradition but one which had not previously been fully articulated yet nevertheless shapes the pragmatist attitude in philosophy. Transition, according to Koopman, denotes “those temporal structures and historical shapes in virtue of which we get from here to there”. One of the consequences of transitionalism is the understanding of critique and inquiry as historical pro...

Medical educators invoke professionalism as a core competency in curricula. This paper criticizes classic definitions. It also identifies some negative traits of medicine as a profession. The call to professionalism is naive nostalgia. Straightforward didactics in professionalism cannot do the desired work in medical education. The most we can say is that students should adopt the good aspects of professionalism and the profession should stop being some of what it has been. This is a platitude. If the notion is to (...) be more than shallow, each student and practitioner will have to engage in much dialogue, reflection and refinement over many years. (shrink)

Recent experimental studies indicate that epistemically irrelevant factors can skew our intuitions, and that some degree of scepticism about appealing to intuition in philosophy is warranted. In response, some have claimed that philosophers are experts in such a way as to vindicate their reliance on intuitions—this has become known as the ‘expertise defence’. This paper explores the viability of the expertise defence, and suggests that it can be partially vindicated. Arguing that extant discussion is problematically imprecise, we will finesse the (...) notion of ‘philosophical expertise’ in order to better reflect the complex reality of the different practices involved in philosophical inquiry. On this basis, we offer a new version of the expertise defence that allows for distinct types of philosophical expertise. The upshot of our approach is that wholesale vindications or rejections of the expertise defence are shown to be unwarranted; we must instead turn to local, piecemeal investigations of philosophical expertise. Lastly, in the spirit of taking our own advice, we exemplify how recent developments from experimental philosophy lend themselves to this approach, and can empirically support one instance of a successful expertise defence. (shrink)

Much contemporary ontological inquiry takes place within the so-called ‘Quinean tradition’ but, given that some aspects of Quine’s project have been widely abandoned even by those who consider themselves Quineans, it is unclear what this amounts to. Fortunately recent work in metaontology has produced two relevant results here: a clearer characterisation of the metaontology uniting the aforementioned Quineans, most notably undertaken by Peter van Inwagen, and a raft of criticisms of that metaontology. In this paper I critique van Inwagen’s Quinean (...) metaontology, finding that certain challenges, supplemented by pressure to reflect more closely Quine’s work, should drive Quineans to adopt a stronger metaontology incorporating more of Quine’s radical views. I conclude that while van Inwagen’s Quineanism is problematic there are prospects for a viable, more wholeheartedly Quinean, metaontology. (shrink)

The paper asserts that the post-modern rejection of “modern” theoretical accounts including ethical-theoretical accounts as unacceptable meta-narratives would concur with an Aristotelian critique of contemporary ethical theories. Hence and Aristotelian critique will be similar to a post-modern critique. The paper sketches an account of what post-modernism in philosophy is and shows its similarity to Aristoteleanism in rejecting “modern” approaches in a significant way since an Aristotelian approach uses different criteria for what counts as ethical knowledge. The paper suggests that if (...) one follows the lead of Aristotle outlined in Book One Chapter Three of the Nichomachean Ethics applied ethics can be seen as similar to what Aristotle called “Rhetoric,” for in the Rhetoric Aristotle shows how one should engage in discourse about issues of the just and the good. The final section addresses the problem of how an Aristotelian approach can avoid the relativism of post-modernism. (shrink)

In this review article, I introduce a classification of metaphysical and epistemological forms of disjunctivism and critically discuss the essays on disjunctivism in the philosophy of perception, the philosophy of action and epistemology that are published in Fiona Macpherson and Adrian Haddock’s collection 'Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge' (Oxford University Press, 2008).

Farben sind für uns sowohl objektive, als auch phänomenale Eigenschaften. In seinem Buch argumentiert Fabian Dorsch, daß keine ontologische Theorie der Farben diesen beiden Seiten unseres Farbbegriffes gerecht werden k ann. Statt dessen sollten wir akzeptieren, daß letzterer sich auf zwei verschiedene Arten von Eigenschaften bezieht: die repräsentierten Reflektanzeigenschaften von Gegenständen und die qualitativen Eigenschaften unserer Farbwahrnehmungen, die als sinnliche Gegebenheitsweisen ersterer fungieren. Die Natur der Farben gibt einen detaillierten Überblick über die zeitgenössischen philosophischen und naturwissenschaftlichen Theorien der Farben und (...) bietet sich aufgrund seines systematischen und umfassenden Charakters auch als ein seminar- oder vorlesungsbegleitendes Textbuch an. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Almost thirty years after its initial use in the Brundtland Report, the concept of “sustainability” has become ubiquitous within business, with virtually every company division across a broad range of industries developing “sustainable” models and practices. While the original Brundtland idea of sustainable development has the potential to do much good in guiding business practice, this potential is being undermined by the systematic misuse, misunderstanding, and flawed application of the concept in many business settings. Under the guise of sustainability, business (...) is being asked to do both less than and more than what should be required by a commitment to sustainable development. As a result, serious ethical and practical questions go unanswered, questions that must be addressed before sustainability can become a meaningful business strategy. This address situates sustainable business within its original context of sustainable development and argues against attempts to convert sustainability either into a narrow concept of risk management or into a broad concept of social responsibility. It then lays out a sustainability research agenda that helps us understand how to create businesses that can meet present and future needs without jeopardizing future generations via the destruction of the biosphere. (shrink)

P.F. Strawson argued that ‘mature sensible experience (in general) presents itself as … an immediate consciousness of the existence of things outside us’ (1979: 97). He began his defence of this very natural idea by asking how someone might typically give a description of their current visual experience, and offered this example of such a description: ‘I see the red light of the setting sun filtering through the black and thickly clustered branches of the elms; I see the dappled deer (...) grazing in groups on the vivid green grass…’ (1979: 97). In other words, in describing experience, we tend to describe the objects of experience – the things which we experience – and the ways they are when we are experiencing them. Some go further. According to Heidegger. (shrink)

Kolb discusses postmodern architectural styles and theories within the context of philosophical ideas about modernism and postmodernism. He focuses on what it means to dwell in a world and within a history and to act from or against a tradition.

Experimental philosophy’s much-discussed ‘restrictionist’ program seeks to delineate the extent to which philosophers may legitimately rely on intuitions about possible cases. The present paper shows that this program can be (i) put to the service of diagnostic problem-resolution (in the wake of J.L. Austin) and (ii) pursued by constructing and experimentally testing psycholinguistic explanations of intuitions which expose their lack of evidentiary value: The paper develops a psycholinguistic explanation of paradoxical intuitions that are prompted by verbal case-descriptions, and presents two (...) experiments that support the explanation. This debunking explanation helps resolve philosophical paradoxes about perception (known as ‘arguments from hallucination’). (shrink)

Our beliefs utilize various sources: perception, memory, induction, etc. We trust these sources to provide reliable information about the world around us. My dissertation investigates how this trust could be justified. Chapter one introduces background material. I argue that justification rather than knowledge is of primary epistemological importance, discuss the internalism/externalism debate, and introduce an evidentialist thesis that provides a starting point/framework for epistemological theorizing. Chapter two introduces a puzzle concerning justification. Can a belief source provide justification absent prior justification (...) for believing it's reliable? Any answer appears to either make justifying the reliability of a source intellectually unsatisfying or all together impossible. Chapter three considers and rejects a plethora of proposed solutions to our puzzle. Investigating these solutions illustrates the need to further investigate evidence, evidence possession, and evidential support. Chapter four discusses the metaphysics of evidence. I argue that evidence always consists of a set of facts and that fact-proposition pairs stand in confirmation relations isomorphic to those holding between pairs of propositions. Chapter five argues that justification requires what I call actually connected possession of supporting evidence: a subject must be aware of supporting evidence and of the support relation itself. Chapter six argues that the relation constitutive of a set of facts being justificatory evidence is a sui generis and irreducible relation that is knowable a priori. Chapter seven begins by showing how Richard Fumerton's acquaintance theory meets the constraints on a theory of justification laid down in previous chapters. I modify the theory so as to: make room for fallible foundational justification, and allow inferential justification absent higher-order beliefs about evidential connections. Chapter eight applies the developed theory of justification to our initial puzzle. I show how my modified acquaintance theory is in a unique position to vindicate the idea that necessarily a source provides a person with justification only if she is aware of evidence for the reliability of that source. However, this awareness of evidence for a source's reliability falls short of a justified belief and thereby avoids impalement from our dilemma's skeptical horn. (shrink)

I develop and argue for a novel theory of the mental state of identity confusion. I also argue that this mental state can corrupt the proper function of singular terms in linguistic communication. Finally, I propose a theory according to which identity confusion should be treated as a the source of a new sort of linguistic performance error, similar to malapropism, slips of the tongue, and so-called intentional obfuscation (inducing false belief by manipulating language in specific ways). -/- Going into (...) a bit more detail, I start by arguing that contemporary analytic philosophy, and philosophy of language in particular, has been dominated by a ‘puzzle-driven’ methodology. This tradition, I claim, seeks to provide a coherent system for describing semantic features of all conceivable cases where a speaker is confused about the identity or distinctness of an object. On my view, identity confusion is a mental state of an agent who either believes falsely that a is identical to b or believes falsely that a is not identical to b. I show how many influential arguments in philosophy – e.g., Kripke on semantic reference and speaker’s reference – are invalidated because of false assumptions about the state of identity confusion. -/- More positively, I assume an ‘explanation-driven’ approach, combining strands in Gricean intentionalism and Ruth Millikan’s teleosemantics. On this view, confused speakers are ‘sub-optimal’: their mental state disrupts the proper function of the relevant singular terms in their idiolects. Furthermore, I flesh out a theoretically fruitful notion of ‘edenic reference,’ which idealizes away from confusion in defining the optimal or stabilizing function of singular terms. I argue that speakers must satisfy certain broadly cognitive constraints if their utterances are to play a role in explaining the maintenance of a practice of using a singular term in a linguistic community. (shrink)

My main aim is to clarify what we mean by ‘look’ sentences such as (1) below – ones that we use to talk about visual experience: -/- (1) The ball looked red to Sue -/- This is to help better understand a part of natural language that has so far resisted treatment, and also to help better understand the nature of visual experience. -/- By appealing to general linguistic principles I argue for the following account. First, we use (1) to (...) talk about an event. Second, we use the verb ‘look’ to specify the kind of event about which we are talking – it is a looking event. Third, we use the subject ‘the ball’ to specify a stimulus of the event – something that looks some way in the event. Fourth, we use the adjunct ‘to Sue’ to specify an experiencer of the event – someone to whom things look some way in the event. Finally, we use the complement ‘red’ to specify a way of the event – a way in which the event occurs (I take ways of occurring to be properties of events). Which way do we use ‘red’ in (1) to specify? I argue: the maximally specific way w such that the following is generically true: looking events whose stimulus is red occur in way w (it is important that this is understood generically: this is what does much of the work in explaining our use of (1) and other ‘look’ sentences). Putting this together, what we mean by (1) is: there was a looking event whose stimulus was the ball, whose experiencer was Sue, and which occurred in the maximally specific way that looking events occur when their stimulus is red. -/- This account of how we use ‘red’ in (1) is one of the most interesting aspects of my thesis. It extends to an account of how we use ‘proud’ in ‘John walks proud’, ‘as if he is American’ in ‘John talks as if he is American’, ‘like a duck’ in ‘John sounds like a duck’, and so on. In each case we use the expression in question to specify a way: the maximally specific way proud people walk, the maximally specific way American people talk, and so on. So the study of ‘look’ sentences has much to tell us about the functioning of many other English language constructions, and suggests that ways have a significant role to play in the semantics of natural language – a fact that has not yet been sufficiently recognised by linguists or philosophers of language. -/- My thesis also has implications for the philosophy of perception. One of the central questions about perception is: What is the nature of visual experience? What is it, for example, for a ball to look red to Sue? My thesis offers an answer: What it is for the ball to look red to Sue is for whatever it is that we mean by ‘The ball looks red to Sue’ to be the case, and what we mean by ‘The ball looks red to Sue’ is that there is a looking event whose stimulus is the ball, whose experiencer is Sue, and which is occurring in a certain way. It thus delivers an adverbial account of visual experience, one that has the resources to better deal with problems that are traditionally thought to be decisive against adverbial accounts. (shrink)