Many philosophers and scientists take perceptual experience, whatever else it involves, to be representational. In ‘The Silence of the Senses’, Charles Travis argues that this view involves a kind of category mistake, and consequently, that perceptual experience is not a representational or intentional phenomenon. The details of Travis’s argument, however, have been widely misinterpreted by his representationalist opponents, many of whom dismiss it out of hand. This chapter offers an interpretation of Travis’s argument from looks that it is argued presents (...) a genuine and important challenge to orthodox representational views of experience. Whilst this challenge may not be insurmountable, it places a substantial burden upon the representationalist to explain not only how experiences come to have the contents that they do, but how those contents come to feature in our conscious mental lives. (shrink)

In a recent article, Fridland characterises a central capacity of skill users, an aspect she calls ‘control’. Control, according to Fridland, is evidenced in the way in which skill users are able to marshal a variety of mental and bodily resources in order to keep skill deployment operating fluidly and appropriately. According to Fridland, two prevalent contemporary accounts of skill—Stanley & Krakauer’s and Hubert Dreyfus’s —fail to account for the features of control, and do so necessarily. While I agree with (...) Fridland that features of control represent desiderata for a satisfactory characterisation of the capacity of skills to respond to perturbations, I argue that her account is limited in two ways; first it is applicable only to a particular class of skills I call motor skills, leaving other classes of skills unaccounted for; second, she employs a problematic distinction that rules out the automatic and pre-reflective use of discursive, propositional cues in skill deployment. I put forward a critical elaboration of Fridland’s account based on two more general characteristic features of skills I call opportunistic robustness and normative sensitivity. I suggest that these features avoid the difficulties isolated, while preserving the substance of Fridland’s account of control. (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)

Over the past years McDowell’s conceptualist theory has received mixed phenomenological reviews. Some phenomenologists have claimed that conceptualism involves an over-intellectualization of human experience. Others have drawn on Husserl’s work, arguing that Husserl’s theory of fulfillment challenges conceptualism and that his notion of “real content” is non-conceptual. Still others, by contrast, hold that Husserl’s later phenomenology is in fundamental agreement with McDowell’s theory of conceptually informed experience. So who is right? This paper purports to show that phenomenology does not have (...) to choose between any of these positions. Central to the outline I offer is that there are multiple approaches to non-conceptual content in play today. By separating them we can begin to oversee the diversity of phenomenological contributions to the debate about non-conceptual content. I conclude that current literature presents us with at least three sound phenomenological accounts of non-conceptual content, but also that these are generally not incompatible with conceptualism. (shrink)

The contemporary view of the relationship between conscious and unconscious intentionality consists in two claims: unconscious propositional attitudes represent the world the same way conscious ones do, and both sets of attitudes represent by having determinate propositional content. Crane has challenged both claims, proposing instead that unconscious propositional attitudes differ from conscious ones in being less determinate in nature. This paper aims to evaluate Crane's proposal. In particular, I make explicit and critique certain assumptions Crane makes in support of his (...) asymmetry, and argue for a conditional claim: if Crane is right that unconscious intentional states are indeterminate, this suggests that conscious intentional states are indeterminate in a similar fashion as well. (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)

In ‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, McDowell revisits the main themes of Mind and World in order to make two important corrections: first, he does not longer believe that the content of perceptual...

In Mind and World, John McDowell provided an influential account of how perceptual experience makes knowledge of the world possible. He recommended a view he called “conceptualism”, according to which concepts are intimately involved in perception and there is no non‐conceptual content. In response to criticisms of this view (especially those from Charles Travis), McDowell has more recently proposed a revised account that distinguishes between two kinds of representation: the passive non‐propositional contents of perceptual experience – what he now calls (...) “intuitional content” – and the propositional contents of judgment – what he now calls “discursive content.” In this paper, I criticize McDowell's account of intuitional content. I argue that he equivocates between two different notions of intuitional content. These views propose different, and incompatible, ways of understanding how a perceiver makes a judgment based on perceptual experience. This is because these two views result from an underlying indeterminacy as to what, if anything, McDowell now means by “conceptual” when he makes claims that intuitional content is conceptual. (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)

McDowell recently renounced the assumption that the content of any knowledgeable, perceptual judgement must be included in the content of the knowledge grounding experience. We argue that McDowell’s introduction of a new category of non-inferential, perceptual knowledge is incompatible with the main line of argument in favour of conceptualism as presented in Mind and World [McDowell, John. 1996. Mind and World. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press]. We reconstruct the original line of argument and show that it rests on (...) the assumption that a specific model of justification, the Comparison Model, must apply to all cases of non-inferential, perceptual knowledge. We then show that the Comparison Model cannot be applied to McDowell’s new category of non-inferential, perceptual knowledge. As a consequence, McDowell is in need of an alternative model of justification and an alternative argument for conceptualism. We propose such an alternative model of justification based on McDowell’s reading of Sellars, but argue that the model only serves to make the need for an alternative motivation for conceptualism more urgent. (shrink)

It is today acknowledged by many that the debate about non-conceptual content is a mess. Over the past decades a vast collection of arguments for non-conceptual content piled up in which a variety of conceptions of what determines a state’s content is being used. This resulted in a number of influential attempts to clarify what would make a content non-conceptual, most notably Bermúdez’s classic definition, Heck’s divide into ‘state’ and ‘content’ conceptualism and Speaks’s ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’ non-conceptualism. However, these interpretations, (...) I argue, like the majority of non-conceptualist arguments, rest on a misconception of the conceptualist viewpoint. This has brought about an imbalance of the conceptualism/non-conceptualism dichotomy that has not been properly brought into view. This paper proceeds as follows: I first outline the central tenets of the conceptualist doctrine. Subsequently, I show that most of the main arguments of the past decades for non-conceptual content have l.. (shrink)

In previous work, I have suggested a doxastic account of perceptual experience according to which experiences form a kind of belief: Beliefs with what I have called “phenomenal” or “looks-content”. I have argued that this account can not only accommodate the intuitive reason providing role of experience, but also its justificatory role. I have also argued that, in general, construing experience and perceptual beliefs, i.e. the beliefs most directly based on experience, as having different contents best accounts for the defeasibility (...) of experiential reasons. In this paper, I shall have a closer look at the evidential or inferential relation between looks-propositions and the contents of perceptual beliefs and argue for a form of what I shall call “Pollockianism” about experiential reasons: such reasons are good unless defeated. Questions to be investigated include: Does the resulting picture of perceptual justification contain an externalist element? Is it compatible with Bayesianism? And how does it do with respect to problems that have been raised for other forms of Pollockianism such as dogmatism or phenomenal conservatism? (shrink)

I argue that ordinary confabulation is a side-effect of an interpretive faculty that makes sense of the world by rationalising our experience within the context of a personal and cultural narrative. However, I argue that a hyperactivity of the same process manifests as schizotypy—latent schizophrenic tendencies—that can lead to extreme dissociation of interpretation from experience. I first give a phenomenological account of the process of interpretation, arguing that it is enacted through the creation of conceptual cognitive content from an originary (...) non-conceptual experience. I then ground this account in empirical evidence, showing how our direct perception is moulded and adapted as it is conceptualised to fit our individual and collective expectations. Finally, I argue that hyperactive over-interpretation results in schizotypic dissociation, thus suggesting that schizophrenia should be understood as a disorder of interpretation, the extreme end of a spectrum that includes ordinary confabulation. (shrink)

Tomamos como certo que os nossos sentidos nos colocam em contato com o ambiente ao nosso redor. Enquanto caminhamos em uma rua, vemos obstáculos que temos de contornar ou remover. Mesmo de costas, podemos ouvir a bicicleta que se aproxima e dar passagem. Em suma, por meio de experiências perceptivas (visuais, auditivas, olfativas etc.), ficamos conscientes de objetos ou eventos que estejam ocorrendo ao nosso redor. Além disso, com base no que percebemos, podemos formar e manter crenças acerca do ambiente (...) e, assim, adquirir conhecimento perceptivo acerca do mundo. A importância desse conhecimento acerca do que está ao nosso alcance perceptivo é inestimável para a nossa sobrevivência e a condução de nossos projetos cotidianos. Contudo, podemos querer saber (1) se de fato temos acesso ao mundo físico circundante por meio das nossas experiências perceptivas, e (2) se e como essas experiências justificam as nossas crenças acerca do que percebemos. Esses problemas são centrais para a epistemologia da percepção, embora não sejam os únicos. Nessa entrada, abordaremos esses dois problemas. (shrink)

This paper answers a philosophical challenge that emerges when we problematize the seemingly trivial "fact" that, on the one hand, through our senses we are presented with a realm that is not of our own making; while, on the other hand, various perceivers are acquainted with diverse presentations of this realm, depending on their perspective and cognitive machinery. The challenge is dubbed here the problem of presentations. The paper draws on the idea of situation-dependent properties proposed by Susanna Schellenberg. However, (...) the paper takes the notion of situation more seriously and introduces a number of basic notions borrowed from situated cognition—a cluster of ideas that have recently emerged in the philosophy of mind. These make it possible to introduce the perceiver in such a way as not to endanger the objective character of situation-dependent properties. Thought of this way, situation-dependent properties are in turn described as the building blocks of presentations. (shrink)

En este artículo se presentan algunas consideraciones relativas al debate sobre si el contenido de la experiencia perceptiva es o no conceptual. En particular, se pretende formular una crítica general al proyecto conceptualista de John McDowell apelando a algunas de sus asunciones de fondo –asunciones relativas a los requisitos que toda teoría sobre la relación entre percepción y juicio ha de cumplir, y que en su caso le conducen a considerar necesaria la tesis de que los contenidos de la percepción (...) son conceptuales. Se argumentará que la postura desarrollada por Husserl en Erfahrung und Urteil ofrece una alternativa en la cual se cumplen aquéllos requisitos sin necesidad de apelar a conceptos en el nivel de los contenidos perceptivos. Finalmente, se sugerirá que la perspectiva genética husserliana permite ofrecer un retrato de la experiencia perceptiva que, a diferencia del de McDowell, permite respetar ciertas intuiciones que parecen relevantes acerca de la misma.In this paper I present some considerations on the debate about whether the contents of perceptual experiences are conceptual or not. In particular, I intend to formulate a general critique to John McDowell’s conceptualist project appealing to some of its background assumptions –assumptions regarding the requirements that any theory about the relation between perception and judgment should meet, and which lead him to take as necessary the thesis that the contents of perception are conceptual. It will be argued that the stance expounded by Huserl in Erfahrung und Urteil offers an alternative in which those requirements are met without the need to appeal to concepts at the level of the contents of perception. Finally, I will suggest that the Husserlian genetic perspective, unlike McDowell’s stance, ends up offering a picture of perceptual experience that can accommodate certain intuitions about it that seem relevant. (shrink)

Keskityn siihen miten Leibnizilla yksittäiset mielihyvän tai mielipahan tiedostamattomat havainnot voivat kasautua tai tiivistyä ja muodostaa vähitellen tunteita, joista tulemme tietoisiksi.

Many philosophers have held that perceptual experience is fundamentally a matter of perceivers being in particular representational states. Such states are said to have representational content, i.e. accuracy or veridicality conditions, capturing the way that things, according to that experience, appear to be. In this thesis I argue that the case against representationalism — the view that perceptual experience is fundamentally and irreducibly representational — that is set out in Charles Travis’s ‘The Silence of the Senses’ (2004) constitutes a powerful, (...) but much misunderstood and neglected argument against this prevailing philosophical orthodoxy. -/- In chapter 2, I present an interpretation of Travis’s arguments that poses a dilemma for the representationalist concerning the indeterminacy and availability of perceptual content. Chapters 3 and 4 evaluate a variety of arguments in favour of such content based upon the nature of appearances, or ‘looks’, including those by Byrne (2009), Siegel (2010) and Schellenberg (2011b), each of which I find to be problematic. Finally, chapters 5 and 6 examine the relationship between representational content and phenomenal character, i.e. what perceptual experience is subjectively like, outlining some potential responses to Travis’s anti-representationalism. These include the external individuation of content and self-knowledge, and the operation of perceptual discriminatory capacities (the latter of which does not necessarily favour a representationalist account of experience). -/- I conclude that Travis’s arguments establish substantive constraints upon the nature and role of perceptual content. Moreover, I argue that the debate centres less upon the existence of such content than its explanatory role, particularly in relation to phenomenal character and the contents of other mental states: belief, intention, thought, knowledge, and so on. This in turn highlights the need for representationalists to better clarify the role of the contents their theories posit, and why such theories constitute a better explanation of the relevant phenomena than the corresponding non-representational view.. (shrink)

It has long been a common assumption that perceptual experience has representational content. Yet, in “The Silence of the Senses”, Charles Travis challenges this widely-accepted assumption by arguing that perceptual experience cannot determine which content it represents and therefore cannot be representational. It constitutes a significant threat to conceptualism, which usually accepts the assumption. Challenged by Travis, John McDowell reformulated his conceptualism by arguing that conceptualism is in fact compatible with perceptual experience being non-representational. However, I find this response of (...) McDowell hardly satisfactory. Instead, I argue that McDowell’s reformulation of conceptualism is faced with great difficulties and doesn’t sufficiently addresses Travis’ argument. I then attempt to develop a different response to Travis. By referring to Siegel, I argue that by regarding anticipation as constitutive of perceptual experience, conceptualists avoid Travis’ critique while retaining the idea of perceptual experience being representational. (shrink)