In this paper, I outline a disjunctivist proposal for understanding the intentionality of perceptions and hallucinations within a naïve realist framework. For the case of genuine perceptual experience, naïve realists can endorse a version of the view that their intentionality is phenomenally-grounded: perceptual experiences have intentionality in virtue of being relations of conscious acquaintance to aspects of the mind-independent environment. By contrast, hallucinations have intentionality dependently or derivatively, in virtue of their indiscriminability from, or similarity with respect to, perceptual experiences. (...) Within this proposal, naïve realists can allow that perceptions and hallucinations have a property in common – that of being intentionally directed at apparently mind-independent entities – whilst having wholly different metaphysical natures. (shrink)

This paper is a contribution to the philosophical debate on visual blur from a relationalist perspective. At the same time, it offers a methodological reflection on the adequacy of explanations of phenomenal similarities and differences among perceptual experiences. The debate on seeing blurrily has been shaped by two implicit assumptions concerning our explanations of differences and similarities between experiences of seeing blurrily and other experiences. I call those assumptions into question, and argue that we do not need to provide a (...) unified explanation of the character of blurry experiences for our account to be adequate. The diversity of blurry experiences supports a different, pluralist approach to explanations of how things appear to subjects. (shrink)

Although meritorious, Naïve Realism faces theoretical issues stemming from the lack of clarity in the concepts forming its propositions and the relevant (but not usually acknowledged) diversity of its theses. In this paper, my goal is to provide a groundwork that mitigates these theoretical complications. One such distinction concerns its subject matter, in particular, whether it deals with the nature of perceptual episodes or their phenomenology. My first goal is to acknowledge such distinctions by delimiting the former option, which I (...) refer to as “Ontological Naïve Realism”. To accomplish this, I proposed a distinctively minimal version of this position. However, a thorough characterization of the acquaintance relation was necessary for its postulation, which revealed a diversity of the corresponding relations/predicates. This informed the postulation of the minimal thesis and thus the definition of Ontological Naïve Realism. Based on this definition, I also proposed a novel classification and taxonomy of the relevant forms of Ontological Naïve Realism, based on the width of the attribution of naïve-realistic features and whether or not they identify perceptions/illusions to acquaintance instantiations. (shrink)

Naive realism in philosophy of perception is the view that (successful) perception involves a direct relation between perceiving subjects and the world. The naive realist says that your perception of a cat on the mat is a worldly relation which is partially constituted by the cat and the mat; a spatio-temporal chunk of the world is presenting itself to you. Recently, Elijah Chudnoff and John Bengson have independently developed an extension of this view to intellectual experiences, or intuitions, for traditionally (...) a priori domains. We argue that this view, which we call ‘Intuitional Naive Realism’ (INR), will not have the epistemic advantages that Chudnoff and Bengson claim that it does. In perception, but not intuition, there is a deeper explanation of what makes it the case that one experience is constituted by the world while another is not. Whether or not INR is true, then, it does no interesting epistemological work for traditionally a priori domains. (shrink)

In this paper I show how the way experience presents things to us can be treated without attributing a representational content to experience. The basic claim that experience can present us with more things than the range of things available to us in thought is neutral with respect to the choice between a content account of experience and a naïve content-free account. I show how Meyer's theory of expectations in accounting for our experience of music supports the naïve account. Expectations (...) provide an account of the conditions that enable things to be salient in experience as targets for attention. Expectations do not provide a content to experience. (shrink)

Much of the discussion of Naive Realism about veridical experience has focused on a consequence of adopting it—namely, disjunctivism about perceptual experience. However, the motivations for being a Naive Realist in the first place have received relatively little attention in the literature. In this paper, I will elaborate and defend the claim that Naive Realism provides the best account of the phenomenal character of veridical experience.

Naïve realism (also called ‘relationalism’ or ‘object view’) is becoming increasingly popular, but the specific outline of its commitments remains often underspecified by proponents and misunderstood by critics. Naïve realism is associated with two claims, both concerning genuine, veridical perceptual experience (where this excludes hallucinations). Constitutive Claim (CC): The phenomenal character of perception is (partly) constituted by the mind-independent objects in one’s surrounding and their properties. Relational Claim (RC): Perception is a relation to mind-independent objects in the environment and their (...) properties. Some philosophers use the two claims interchangeably while talking about naïve realism, while others use only one or the other, although they do not explicitly discuss if the other claim is also a core commitment of naïve realism, or if naïve realism can be held without the other claim. This raises the question of how RC and CC relate to one another, together with the most pressing question of what each claim ultimately commits one to. After discussing the shortcomings of alternative interpretations, I argue that naïve realism should be understood as committed to, first and foremost, RC. This should be understood as a claim about the phenomenal character of perception, rather than about its nature, structure or essence (whatever that means). CC, on the other hand, should be understood as a corollary of RC. This doesn’t only offer a better characterisation of how naïve realists understand phenomenal character: it also helps us understand how we can simultaneously claim that the object of perception is a constitutive element of perception, while also allowing for it to play a causal role in determining perception. (shrink)

This is a critical discussion of the accuracy-first approach to epistemic norms. If you think of accuracy (gradational or categorical) as the fundamental epistemic good and think of epistemic goods as things that call for promotion, you might think that we should use broadly consequentialist reasoning to determine which norms govern partial and full belief. After presenting consequentialist arguments for probabilism and the normative Lockean view, I shall argue that the consequentialist framework isn't nearly as promising as it might first (...) appear. (shrink)

The central thesis of robust virtue epistemology (RVE) is that the difference between knowledge and mere true belief is that knowledge involves success that is attributable to a subject's abilities. An influential objection to this approach is that RVE delivers the wrong verdicts in cases of environmental luck. Critics of RVE argue that the view needs to be supplemented with modal anti-luck condition. This particular criticism rests on a number of mistakes about the nature of ability that I shall try (...) to rectify here. (shrink)

The mechanistic model depicts scientific explanations as involving the discovery of multi-level, organized components that constitute a target phenomenon. Meanwhile, sensorimotor enactivism purports to offer a scientifically informed account of perceptual experience as a skill-laden interactive relationship, constitutively involving both perceiver and world, rather than as an agent-bound representation of the world. Insofar as sensorimotor enactivism identifies an empirically tractable phenomenon – skillful agent-world interaction – and mechanistic explanation establishes the subpersonal components of this phenomenon, the two approaches allow for (...) a fruitful division of labor in investigating perceptual experience. On closer inspection, however, two challenges arise. First, the “representation challenge” arises because promising attempts to set out implementational details of our sensorimotor interaction with the world implicate cognitive representations, creating tension with sensorimotor enactivism’s nonrepresentational commitments. Second, the “reconstitution challenge” arises when mechanistic explanation not only uncovers the components of some established phenomenon but plays a role in “reconstituting” this phenomenon. This means that, through investigating mechanisms, perceptual experience may be reconceived such that its constituents are wholly organism-bound. We explore both challenges to the compatibility of mechanism and sensorimotor enactivism and examine possible solutions. The result is a clearer understanding of the tensions and opportunities for learning between the frameworks. (shrink)

Plausibly, any adequate theory of perception must (a) solve what Alva Noë calls 'the problem of perceptual presence,' and (b) do justice to the direct realist idea that what is given in perception are garden-variety spatiotemporal particulars. This paper shows that, while Noë's sensorimotor view arguably satisfies the first of these conditions, it does not satisfy the second. Moreover, Noë is wrong to think that a naïve realist approach to perception cannot handle the problem of perceptual presence. Section three of (...) this paper develops a version of naïve realism that meets both of the adequacy conditions above. This paper thus provides strong considerations in favor of naïve realism. (shrink)

Perception is a central means by which we come to represent and be aware of particulars in the world. I argue that an adequate account of perception must distinguish between what one perceives and what one's perceptual experience is of or about. Through capacities for visual completion, one can be visually aware of particular parts of a scene that one nevertheless does not see. Seeing corresponds to a basic, but not exhaustive, way in which one can be visually aware of (...) an item. I discuss how the relation between seeing and visual awareness should be explicated within a representational account of the mind. Visual awareness of an item involves a primitive kind of reference: one is visually aware of an item when one's visual perceptual state succeeds in referring to that particular item and functions to represent it accurately. Seeing, by contrast, requires more than successful visual reference. Seeing depends additionally on meta-semantic facts about how visual reference happens to be fixed. The notions of seeing and of visual reference are both indispensable to an account of perception, but they are to be characterized at different levels of representational explanation. (shrink)

It is widely held that the content of perceptual experience is propositional in nature. However, in a well-known article, “Is Perception a Propositional Attitude?”, Crane has argued against this thesis. He therein assumes that experience has intentional content and indirectly argues that experience has non-propositional content by showing that from what he considers to be the main reasons in favour of “the propositional-attitude thesis”, it does not really follow that experience has propositional content. In this paper I shall discuss Crane’s (...) arguments against the propositional-attitude thesis and will try to show, in contrast, that they are unconvincing. My conclusion will be that, despite all that Crane claims, perceptual content could after all be propositional in nature. (shrink)

According to Brandom, perceptual knowledge is the product of two distinguishable capacities: the capacity to reliably discriminate behaviorally between different sorts of stimuli, and the capacity to take up a position in the game of giving and asking for reasons. However, in focusing exclusively on the entitlements and commitments of observation reports, rather than on perception itself, Brandom passes over a conception of perceptual experience as a sort of contentful mental state. In this article, I argue that this is a (...) blind spot, which makes Brandom’s account of perceptual knowledge unable to properly accommodate the phenomenon of seeing aspects. (shrink)

This paper makes explicit the basic problem perfect hallucinations pose for perceptual naive realists, more fundamental than the well‐trodden Screening‐off Problem. The deeper problem offers the basis for an overarching classification of the available naive‐ realist‐friendly approaches to perfect hallucinations. In the course of laying out the challenges to the different types of response, the paper makes a case for the superiority of a particular approach to perfect hallucinations, on which they would be understood as a special kind of perceptual (...) anomaly—arising from a secondary mode of perceptual processing. (shrink)

Is property-awareness constituted by representation or not? If it were, merely being aware of the qualities of physical objects would involve being in a representational state. This would have considerable implications for a prominent view of the nature of successful perceptual experiences. According to naïve realism, any such experience—or more specifically its character—is fundamentally a relation of awareness to concrete items in the environment. Naïve realists take their view to be a genuine alternative to representationalism, the view on which the (...) character of such experiences is constituted by representation. But naïve realists must admit qualities or property instances as items of awareness if they are to remain wedded to common sense, and the nature of property-awareness may smuggle constitutive representation into the naïve realist account of character. I argue that whether property-awareness involves representation, and consequently whether naïve realism is distinct from representationalism or not, depends on what qualities are fundamentally. On universalist and nominalist accounts, property-awareness turns out to involve representation. Not so under tropism. (shrink)

How could perceptual experiences reveal matters of essentiality? Answering this question is crucial for vindicating a thesis about the epistemic import of experience, commonly known as Revelation. The thesis comes in a weak and a strong version. Only on the strong one could it make up an authoritative piece of common sense. But this version also seems to demand too much of our experiences, namely that they can reveal essentiality. However, the impression that our experiences are not suited for this (...) turns out to be due to a non-mandatory assumption about how the revelation of essentiality would work. (shrink)

Naïve realism is the view that veridical experiences are fundamentally relations of acquaintance to external objects and their features, and multidisjunctivism is the conjunction of naïve realism and the view that hallucinatory experiences don’t share a common fundamental kind. Multidisjunctivism allegedly removes the screening-off worry over naïve realism, and the relevant literature suggests that multidisjunctivism is one of the naïve realist responses to the worry. The present paper argues that the multidisjunctive solution is implicitly changing the subject, so the impression (...) that the multidisjunctivist is addressing the screening-off problem is illusory. (shrink)

In apparent motion experiments, participants are presented with what is in fact a succession of two brief stationary stimuli at two different locations, but they report an impression of movement. Philosophers have recently debated whether apparent motion provides evidence in favour of a particular account of the nature of temporal experience. I argue that the existing discussion in this area is premised on a mistaken view of the phenomenology of apparent motion and, as a result, the space of possible philosophical (...) positions has not yet been fully explored. In particular, I argue that the existence of apparent motion is compatible with an account of the nature of temporal experience that involves a version of direct realism. In doing so, I also argue against two other claims often made about apparent motion, viz. that apparent motion is the psychological phenomenon that underlies motion experience in the cinema, and that apparent motion is subjectively indistinguishable from real motion. (shrink)

The notion of the absolute time-constituting flow plays a central role in Edmund Husserl’s analysis of our consciousness of time. I offer a novel reading of Husserl’s remarks on the absolute flow, on which Husserl can be seen to be grappling with two key intuitions that are still at the centre of current debates about temporal experience. One of them is encapsulated by what is sometimes referred to as an intentionalist (as opposed to an extensionalist) approach to temporal experience. The (...) other centres on the thought that temporal experience itself necessarily unfolds over time. I show how some of Husserl’s more enigmatic-sounding remarks about the absolute flow become intelligible if they are read as attempts to accommodate both these intuitions at the same time. However, I also question whether Husserl ultimately provides good reasons for preferring his intentionalist approach to a rival extensionalist one. (shrink)

I interpret the anti-idealist manoeuverings of the second half of Moore's 'The refutation of idealism', material as widely cited for its discussion of 'transparency' and 'diaphanousness' as it is deeply obscure. The centerpiece of these manoeuverings is a phenomenological argument for a relational view of perceptual phenomenal character, on which, roughly, 'that which makes the sensation of blue a mental fact' is a non-intentional relation of conscious awareness, a view close to the opposite of the most characteristic contemporary view going (...) under the transparency rubric. The discussion of transparency and diaphanousness is a sidelight, its principal purpose to shore up the main line of argumentation against criticism; in those passages all Moore argues is that the relation of conscious awareness is not transparent, while acknowledging that it can seem to be. (shrink)

Seeking to avoid the typical binary choices between symbolic representations and no representations, or between functionally decomposable psychological processes and no psychological processes, or between direct perception of mind-independent physical properties and indirect perception of sense data, this article proposes that even a clear-thinking friend of Gibson can accept that perception of the environment is mediated by appearances and that such appearances are produced by functionally decomposable, rule-instantiating psychological processes. In so doing, it avoids both hyper-intellectualization of the perceptual process (...) and the positing of sense data as immediate objects of perception. It considers notions of perceptual mediation from classical Gestalt psychology, while referencing recent phenomenological arguments showing that perception does not simply conform to mind-independent physical properties. Perception presents objects and scenes under a phenomenal aspect, in a manner suitable to be action-guiding. Finally, it examines neuroscientific decompositions of Gibsonian information pickup mechanisms, finding that such mechanisms are reasonably described as effecting processes of construction. As a separate point, such mechanisms are usefully described as including subpersonal, non-symbolic representations and processes of information integration. (shrink)

The argument from appearance for the content view or intentionalism attracts a lot of attention recently. In my paper, I follow Charles Travis to argue against the key premise that representational content can be ‘read off’ from a certain way that a thing looks to a subject. My arguments are built upon Travis’s original objection and a reinterpretation of Rodrick Chisholm’s comparative and noncomparative uses of appearance words. Byrne, Schellenberg and others interpret Travis’ ‘visual looks’ as Chisholm’s comparative use, and (...) appeal to the noncomparative use as an alternative to avoid Travis’s objection. I demonstrate that they misunderstand both Chisholm and Travis. Both the comparative use and the noncomparative use are semantic notions, while ‘visual looks’ is a metaphysical one. Although Chisholm’s appearance objectivism –– that appearance expressions attribute appearances to ordinary objects –– is close to ‘visual looks’, appearance objectivism is not exceptional to the noncomparative use as Byrne interprets. In the end, I also show that Byrnean’s conception of distinctive visual gestalt cannot exclude contrary representational contents, because a distinctive visual gestalt can be shared by different kinds of things. Besides, Byrne and others do not explain why a distinctive visual gestalt should be presented as ‘being instantiated’. Therefore, I conclude that representational content cannot be read off from a certain way that a thing looks to a subject; the argument from appearance thus fails. (shrink)

Christopher Hill's Perceptual experience is a must‐read for philosophers of mind and cognitive science. Here I consider Hill's representationalist account of spatial perception. I distinguish two theses defended in the book. The first is that perceptual experience does not represent the enduring, intrinsic properties of objects, such as intrinsic shape or size. The second is that perceptual experience does represent certain viewpoint‐dependent properties of objects—namely, Thouless properties. I argue that Hill's arguments do not establish the first thesis, and then I (...) raise questions about the Thouless‐property view and its role in Hill's defense of representationalism. (shrink)

Externalist representationalism is touted as a superior rival to naïve realism, and yet a careful analysis of the externalist representationalist's analysis of our ordinary perceptual experiences shows the view to be far closer to naïve realism than we might have expected. One of the central advertised benefits of representationalist views in general is that they are compatible with the idea that ordinary, illusory and hallucinatory perceptual experiences are of the same fundamental kind. Naïve realists are forced to deny the ‘common (...) fundamental kind claim’ and adopt disjunctivism. However, I argue that externalist representationalism is also a version of disjunctivism. Consequently, one of the main rivals to naïve realism turns out not to be a rival at all. (shrink)

Externalist representationalists claim that the phenomenal character of a visual perceptual experience is determined by the representational content of that experience. Their deployment of the idea that perceptual experience is transparent shows that they account for representational content with reference to the properties which are represented – the properties out there in the world. I explain why this commits the externalist representationalist to objectivism and realism about colour properties. Colour physicalism has proved to be the position of choice for externalist (...) representationalists. However, my aim in this paper is to demonstrate that the proponent of the view which combines externalist representationalism with colour physicalism is unable to account for the phenomenal character of colour hallucination. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

Early twentieth-century philosophers of perception presented their naïve realist views of perceptual experience in anti-Kantian terms. For they took naïve realism about perceptual experience to be incompatible with Kant’s claims about the way the understanding is necessarily involved in perceptual consciousness. This essay seeks to situate a naïve realist account of visual experience within a recognisably Kantian framework by arguing that a naïve realist account of visual experience is compatible with the claim that the understanding is necessarily involved in the (...) perceptual experience of those rational beings with discursive intellects. The resultant view is middle way between recent conceptualist and non-conceptualist interpretations of Kant, holding that the understanding is necessarily involved in the kind of perceptual consciousness that we, as rational beings, enjoy whilst allowing that the relations of apprehension which constitute perceptual consciousness are independent of acts of the understanding. (shrink)

According to non-conceptualist interpretations, Kant held that the application of concepts is not necessary for perceptual experience. Some have motivated non-conceptualism by noting the affinities between Kant's account of perception and contemporary relational theories of perception. In this paper I argue (i) that non-conceptualism cannot provide an account of the Transcendental Deduction and thus ought to be rejected; and (ii) that this has no bearing on the issue of whether Kant endorsed a relational account of perceptual experience.

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)

According to intentionalism, perceptual experience is a mental state with representational content. When it comes to the epistemology of perception, it is only natural for the intentionalist to hold that the justificatory role of experience is at least in part a function of its content. In this paper, I argue that standard versions of intentionalism trying to hold on to this natural principle face what I call the “defeasibility problem”. This problem arises from the combination of standard intentionalism with further (...) plausible principles governing the epistemology of perception: that experience provides defeasible justification for empirical belief, and that such justification is best construed as probabilification. After exploring some ways in which the standard intentionalist could deal with the defeasibility problem, I argue that the best option is to replace standard intentionalism by what I call “phenomenal intentionalism”. Where standard intentionalism construes experiences as of p as having the content p, phenomenal intentionalism construes experiences as of p as having “phenomenal” or “looks contents”: contents of the form Lp. (shrink)

According to the Perceptual Analysis of Emotional Expression, behaviors express emotions by making them perceptually manifest. A smile is an expression of joy because an observer who sees a smile can see joy. A pout is an expression of grief because an observer who sees a pout can see grief. And a growl is an expression of anger because an observer who hears a growl can hear anger. The idea is not simply that expressions can enable the perception of emotion, (...) but that expressions essentially do so. In the course of defending this analysis against challenges, I develop a novel account of the relationship between language and expression. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a new version of the acquaintance view of the nature of introspection of phenomenal states. On the acquaintance view, when one introspects a current phenomenal state of one's, one bears to it the relation of introspective acquaintance. Extant versions of the acquaintance view neglect what I call the phenomenal modification problem. The problem, articulated by Franz Brentano in his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, is that drawing introspective attention to one's current conscious experience may modify (...) its phenomenology. Failing to take phenomenal modification into account affects the adequacy of extant versions of the acquaintance view. The purpose of this paper is to develop a better version, the integration account, that meets the phenomenal modification challenge while preserving the merits of other versions. (shrink)

How does perceptual experience disclose the world to our view? In the first introductory section, I set up a contrast between the representational and the purely relational conception of perceptual experience. In the second section, I discuss an argument given by Charles Travis against perceptual content. The third section is devoted to the phenomenon of perceptual constancy: in 3.1 I describe the phenomenon. In 3.2 I argue that the description given suggests a phenomenological distinction that can be deployed for a (...) defence of content. In 3.3 I compare and contrast my view of perceptual content with that of Susanna Schellenberg : 55–84, 2008). Finally, I support my conception of content by means of an argument that links content to the way in which the mind-independent nature of material objects is manifest in perceptual experience. (shrink)

How does perceptual experience disclose the world to us? According to the content view (CV), visual perceptual consciousness entails representational content. According to pure relationalism, perception is a non‐representational relation between a subject and an object. In this article, I argue that CV‐theorists are implicitly committed to the claim that there is an element of generality in perception, and I show how pure relationalists would emphasize the particularity of perception, instead of its generality. But I also argue that there are (...) good epistemological and phenomenological reasons for thinking that there is generality in perception. In particular, I focus on Brewer's purely relationalist account and I argue that it either fails to satisfy important phenomenological and epistemological requirements, or it introduces generality in a way that makes it collapse into CV. I contend that construing the debate between CV and pure relationalism in light of particularity and generality advances our understanding of how perceptual experience discloses the world to us, as well as strengthening the standing of CV. (shrink)

When a subject has perceptually grounded knowledge, she typically knows how she knows what she knows, and is able to appeal to perceived items and her own experiences in reason-giving practices. What explains this ability? In this paper I focus on vision, and I submit that paradigmatic cases of visual perceptual knowledge are such that, when a subject acquires knowledge that p by seeing that p, she also acquires tacit knowledge that she sees that p; I also argue that the (...) truth of this thesis is grounded in phenomenological facts concerning awareness and self-awareness. (shrink)

Siegel has argued that visual experience has content. Ivanov has convincingly shown that there is a confusion in Siegel’s argument between perception presenting property-instances and perception presenting properties as being instantiated. According to Ivanov, whether a revised version of Siegel’s argument succeeds depends on the metaphysics of sensible qualities. I argue that Ivanov’s argument rests on a mistake, and I conclude by suggesting how we might go about arguing for or against perceptual content.

In Anti-Individualism and Knowledge Jessica Brown criticises views of content that combine Fregean Sense and anti-individualism. Brown assumes that all Fregean theories are motivated by a picture of the rational thinker as someone who will always have transparent access to the simple inferential consequences of his thoughts. This picture, Brown argues, is incompatible with anti-individualism about content. While traditional Fregean theories have indeed had such motivation, Brown’s mistake is in attributing this motivation to the modern Fregean anti-individualist. My goal in (...) this paper is to bring to light a different, and seldom discussed, motivation for Fregean views of content which is immune to Browns objections. (shrink)

Intuitively, when all goes well, we adopt beliefs based on inference because we realize that their truth is established by the truth of the involved premises. If this intuitive picture of our successful reasoning is correct, then it must be possible that our reasoning is motivated by our sensitivity to the soundness of the involved inference. This paper argues that such a view of ideal reasoning can only be upheld if we accept the minority view that the proper inferential role (...) of our thoughts is individuated in terms of object dependent Fregean senses. I consider respectively Millian, Guise–Fregean, and object dependent Fregean views, and show how only the latter view provides a picture of our theoretical reasoning where sensitivity to soundness can be what motivates a subject’s reasoning. (shrink)

Representationalist theories of experience face the problem that two sets of compelling intuitions seem to support the contrary conclusions that we should ascribe, respectively, singular contents and general contents to experience. Susanna Schellenberg has, in a series of articles, argued that we can conserve both sets of intuitions if we award a central explanatory role to the notions of gappy-contents and content-schemas in our theory of experience. I argue that there is difficulty in seeing how gappy-contents and content-schemas can fulfil (...) the explanatory role envisioned for them by Schellenberg. The central problem is that both gappy-contents and contentschemas lack truth-conditions. Schellenberg attempts to support her view by suggesting an analogy between the role of content-schemas in our account of experience and the role of Kaplan’s notion of character in our account of demonstrative statements. However, I show that this analogy breaks down at crucial places when it is explored in detail. Hence, gappy-contents and content-schemas cannot fill the explanatory roles that the representationalist awards to fully truth-evaluable contents. Therefore, Schellenberg’s theory provides no way for the representationalist to conserve both sets of competing intuitions. (shrink)

What capacities for discrimination must a subject possess in order to entertain singular thoughts? Evans has suggested that a subject must be able to discriminate his referent from all other entities in order to be able to do so; what he calls Russell's Principle. Evans' view has few followers, and he has been repeatedly accused of presenting no argument in its favour. In this paper I present what I take to be Evans' argument. I suggest that he has been misinterpreted (...) as introducing Russell's Principle for the purpose of fixing reference. Rather, he introduces it in order to ensure that our conceptual capacities have the functional complexity to allow for objective thought. I suggest that the logical types of our thought are constituted by their inferential potential and argue that, even though singular thought may be possible without the satisfaction of Russell's Principle, singular thought that forms part of an objective world view is not. (shrink)

It is commonly supposed that perceptual representations in some way embed concepts and that this embedding accounts for the phenomenon of seeing-as. But there are good reasons, which will be reviewed here, to doubt that perceptions embed concepts. The alternative is to suppose that perceptions are marks in a perceptual similarity space that map into locations in an objective quality space. From this point of view, there are at least three sorts of seeing-as. First, in cases of ambiguity resolution, the (...) schematicity of the figure leaves us with a choice as to where in perceptual similarity space to place a mark. Second, in cases where expertise affects perception, the accumulation of perceptual landmarks permits a more precise placement of a mark in perceptual similarity space. Third, extensive experience with an object allows similarity to that object to serve as an acquired dimension in perceptual similarity space, which in turn affects the relative similarities of other objects. This is an open access publication. (shrink)

In recent years, many philosophers have supposed that perceptual representations have propositional content. A prominent rationale for this supposition is the assumption that perceptions may justify beliefs, but this rationale can be doubted. This rationale may be doubted on the grounds that there do not seem to be any viable characterizations of the belief-justifying propositional contents of perceptions. An alternative is to model perceptual representations as marks in a perceptual similarity space. A mapping can be defined between points in perceptual (...) similarity space and points in an objective quality space. The correctness of perceptual representation can then be defined as a kind of accuracy of mapping rather than as the truth of a proposition. The phenomenon of seeing-as can be accounted for as a matter of the location of marks in perceptual similarity space relative to other marks in perceptual similarity space. Perceptual representations, on this account, will not justify beliefs, but they may nonetheless guide judgment. (shrink)

A central question, if not the central question, of philosophy of perception is whether sensory states have a nature similar to thoughts about the world, whether they are essentially representational. According to the content view, at least some of our sensory states are, at their core, representations with contents that are either accurate or inaccurate. Tyler Burge’s Origins of Objectivity is the most sustained and sophisticated defense of the content view to date. His defense of the view is problematic in (...) several ways. The most significant problem is that his approach does not sit well with mainstream perceptual psychology. (shrink)

Naïve Realists think that the ordinary mind-independent objects that we perceive are constitutive of the character of experience. Some understand this in terms of the idea that experience is diaphanous: that the conscious character of a perceptual experience is entirely constituted by its objects. My main goal here is to argue that Naïve Realists should reject this, but I’ll also highlight some suggestions as to how Naïve Realism might be developed in a non-diaphanous direction.

I argue that we should question the orthodox way of thinking about epistemological disjunctivism. I suggest that we can formulate epistemological disjunctivism in terms of states of seeing things as opposed to states of seeing that p. Not only does this alternative formulation capture the core aspects of epistemological disjunctivism as standardly formulated, it has two salient advantages. First, it avoids a crucial problem that arises for a standard formulation of epistemological disjunctivism—the basis problem. And second, it is less committed (...) than standard formulations are in the metaphysics of perception. (shrink)