Abstract: Some propose that the question of how you know that James is angry can be adequately answered with the claim that you see that James is angry. Call this the Perceptual Hypothesis. Here, I examine that hypothesis. I argue that there are two different ways in which the Perceptual Hypothesis could be made true. You might see that James is angry by seeing his bodily features. Alternatively, you might see that James is angry by seeing his anger. If you (...) see that James is angry in the first way, your knowledge is inferential. If you see that James is angry in the second way, your knowledge is not inferential. These are different ways of knowing that James is angry. So the Perceptual Hypothesis alone does not adequately answer the question of how you know that fact. To ascertain how you know it, we need to decide whether or not you saw his anger. This is an epistemological argument. But it has consequences for a theory of perception. It implies that there is a determinate fact about which features of an object you see. This fact is made true independently of what you come to know by seeing. In the final section of the paper, I seek to undermine various ways in which the claim that you see James' anger may be thought implausible. (shrink)

Some materialists argue that we can eliminate mental entities such as sensations because, like electrons, they are theoretical entities postulated as parts of scientific explanations, but, unlike electrons, they are unnecessary for such explanations. As Quine says, any explanatory role of mental entities can be played by "correlative physiological states and events instead." But sensations are not postulated theoretical entities. This is shown by proposing definitions of the related terms, 'observation term,' and 'theoretical term,' and then classifying the term 'sensation.' (...) The result is that although 'sensation' is a theoretical term, it is also a reporting term because it is used to refer to phenomena we are aware of. Consequently sensations are not postulated and cannot be eliminated merely because they are unnecessary for explanation. (shrink)

Feyerabend and others have been defending for some time the thesis that even observation sentences depend for their meanings on the thegries in which they play a role. According to the most radical version of this thesis, if two theories contain incompatible theoretical statements, then even if the observation terms and sentences associated with the two theories are the same, these terms and sentencesmeansomething different, according as they are associated with one theory or the other. This claim has made it (...) hard to see how, on this view, any two theories could be said to compete, or be incompatible, or be comparable on the basis of observation.The whole dispute over this claim seems highly suspect to begin with. For look at the philosophical terms in which it is couched. On the one hand there is the notion of the “meaning” of a term or sentence, whose status as a useful tool of philosophical analysis has been in serious question for the past two or three decades. (shrink)