According to unconscious perception hypothesis (UP), mental states of the same fundamental kind as ordinary conscious seeing can occur unconsciously. The proponents of UP often support it with empirical evidence for a more specific hypothesis, according to which colours can be seen unconsciously (UPC). However, UPC is a general claim that admits of many interpretations. The main aim of this paper is to determine which of them is the most plausible. To this end, I investigate how adopting various conceptions of (...) colour and perceptual phenomenal character affects UPC’s resilience to objections. This brings me to the conclusion that the most plausible reading of UPC is the one according to which the phenomenal character of colour perception (i) is constituted by colours qua primitive mind-independent qualities of the environment and (ii) is not essentially tied to consciousness. My conclusion not only identifies the most plausible interpretation of UPC, but also highlights and supports an unorthodox version of the relational theory of perception, which is a perfectly viable yet so far overlooked stance in the debate about unconscious perception. (shrink)

Dreams provide a compelling problem for sensorimotor enactivists like Alva Noë: they seem to replicate our perceptual experiences without sensorimotor interaction with distal sensory stimuli. Noë has responded by saying that dreams actually fail to replicate perceptual experiences in virtue of their lack of detail and stability. Noë's opponents have replied by pointing out that some dreams are richly detailed and stable, and that instability and a lack of detail in dreams can anyway be explained in terms of the underlying (...) neural activity. In this paper, I develop how the sensorimotor enactivist should respond: dreams fail to replicate perceptual experiences because they are exhausted by what shows up at a given moment in phenomenal consciousness, while perceptual experiences go beyond this to include everything accessible via sensorimotor exploration. This difference permeates all levels of experience, so that dreams can't even replicate perceptual experiences of simple shapes and colors. Further, unlike detail and stability, there are not obvious neural explanations of this phenomenal difference. (shrink)

Perception of a property (e.g. a colour, a shape, a size) can enable thought about the property, while at the same time misleading the subject as to what the property is like. This long-overlooked claim parallels a more familiar observation concerning perception-based thought about objects, namely that perception can enable a subject to think about an object while at the same time misleading her as to what the object is like. I defend the overlooked claim, and then use it to (...) generate a challenge for a standard way of thinking about the relationship between visual experience and rational belief formation. Put informally, that view holds that just as we can mislead others by saying something false, illusory experience misleads by misrepresenting how things stand in the world. I argue that we ought to abandon this view in favour of some radical alternative account of the relationship between visual experience and rational belief formation. (shrink)

The paper argues -- against the standard view in metaphysics -- that the existence of ordinary objects like tomatoes is (near-enough) established by the fact that such things are apparently encountered in perception.

The non-transitivity of the relation looks the same as has been used to argue that the relation has the same phenomenal character as is non-transitive—a result that jeopardizes certain theories of consciousness. In this paper, I argue against this conclusion while granting the premise by dissociating lookings and phenomenology; an idea that some might find counter-intuitive. However, such an intuition is left unsupported once phenomenology and cognitive access are distinguished from each other; a distinction that is conceptually and empirically grounded.

In this article I argue for a novel theory of representational content, which I call ‘subjective externalism’. The view combines an internal, subjective constraint on the attribution of thought content which traditionally underpins internalist theories of thought, and an external, objective constraint on the attribution of thought content which traditionally underpins externalist theories of thought. While internalism and externalism are mutually inconsistent, the constraints to which each theory is committed are not. It is this realization that opens up the conceptual (...) space for subjective externalism, according to which the correct attribution of thought content to an individual is essentially constrained by her nonrepresentational relations to objective manifest properties in her wider reality. (shrink)

Recently, it has been objected that naïve realism is inconsistent with an empirically well-supported claim that mental states of the same fundamental kind as ordinary conscious seeing can occur unconsciously (SFK). The main aim of this paper is to establish the following conditional claim: if SFK turns out to be true, the naïve realist can and should accommodate it into her theory. Regarding the antecedent of this conditional, I suggest that empirical evidence renders SFK plausible but not obvious. For it (...) is possible that what is currently advocated as unconscious perception of the stimulus is in fact momentaneous perceptual awareness (or residual perceptual awareness) of the stimulus making the subject prone to judge in some way rather than another, or to act in some way rather than another. As to the apodosis, I show that neither the core of naïve realism nor any of its main motivations is undermined if SFK is assumed. On the contrary, certain incentives for endorsing naïve realism become more tempting on this assumption. Since the main motivations for naïve realism retain force under SFK, intentionalism is neither compulsory nor the best available explanation of unconscious perception. (shrink)

This paper defends the view that one's own mental states are metaphysically privileged vis-à-vis the mental states of others, even if only subjectively so. This is an instance of a more general view called Subjectivism, according to which reality is only subjectively the way it is. After characterizing Subjectivism in analogy to two relatively familiar views in the metaphysics of modality and time, I compare the Subjectivist View of the Mental with Egocentric Presentism, a version of Subjectivism recently advocated by (...) Caspar Hare. I argue that the Subjectivist View of the Mental goes a considerable way towards solving certain long-standing philosophical puzzles having to do with the unity of consciousness, the contents of self-awareness and the intransmissibility of experiential knowledge through testimony. (shrink)

Pautz has argued that the most prominent naive realist account of hallucination—negative epistemic disjunctivism—cannot explain how hallucinations enable us to form beliefs about perceptually presented properties. He takes this as grounds to reject both negative epistemic disjunctivism and naive realism. Our aims are two: First, to show that this objection is dialectically ineffective against naive realism, and second, to draw morals from the failure of this objection for the dispute over the nature of perceptual experience at large.

Episodic memory (memories of the personal past) and prospecting the future (anticipating events) are often described as mental time travel (MTT). While most use this description metaphorically, we argue that episodic memory may allow for MTT in at least some robust sense. While episodic memory experiences may not allow us to literally travel through time, they do afford genuine awareness of past-perceived events. This is in contrast to an alternative view on which episodic memory experiences present past-perceived events as mere (...) intentional contents. Hence, episodic memory is a way of coming into experiential contact with, or being again aware of, what happened in the past. We argue that episodic memory experiences depend on a causal-informational link with the past events being remembered, and that, assuming direct realism about episodic memory experiences, this link suffices for genuine awareness. Since there is no such link in future prospection, a similar argument cannot be used to show that it also affords genuine awareness of future events. Constructivist views of memory might challenge the idea of memory as genuine awareness of remembered events. We explain how our view is consistent with both constructivist and anti-causalist conceptions of memory. There is still room for an interpretation of episodic memory as enabling genuine awareness of past events, even if it involves reconstruction. (shrink)

Recent neo-Anscombean work in praxeology (aka ‘philosophy of practical reason’), salutarily, shifts focus from an alienated 'third-person' viewpoint on practical reason to an embedded 'first-person' view: for example, the 'naive rationalizations' of Michael Thompson, of form 'I am A-ing because I am B-ing', take up the agent's view, in the thick of action. Less salutary, in its premature abandonment of the first-person view, is an interpretation of these naive rationalizations as asserting explanatory links between facts about organically structured agentive processes (...) in progress, followed closely by an inflationary project in 'practical metaphysics'. If, instead, praxeologists chase first-personalism all the way down, both fact and explanation vanish (and with them, the possibility of metaphysics): what is characteristically practical is endorsement of nonpropositional imperatival content, chained together not explanatorily, but through limits on intelligibility. A connection to agentive behavior must somehow be reestablished—but this can (and can only) be done ‘transcendentally’: through a constraint on shifts between the first- and third-person views, inaccessible within any single viewpoint. (shrink)

Critical discussion of Susanna Schellenberg's account of hallucination and perceptual evidence.

'Post this letter!' does not entail 'Post this letter or drink up my wine!' (the Ross Paradox) because one can be in a state with the content of the former without being in a state with the content of the latter; in turn, because the latter can rationalize drinking up my wine but the former cannot; in turn, because practical rationalization flows toward one's present situation, in contrast with the flow of theoretical rationalization from one's present situation. Formally, this is (...) implemented with a semantics for imperatives involving a partition to set up an issue of significance and a proposition to establish how to settle it. I characterize a series of languages and language-games to implement all this, and appeal to an 'endorsement-theoretic' conception of modals as quantifiers over mental states to explain why 'You must post this letter' does not entail 'You must either post this letter or drink up my wine'. (shrink)

According to Perceptual Fundamentalism we can have justified perceptual beliefs solely in virtue of having perceptual experiences with corresponding contents. Recently, it has been argued that Perceptual Fundamentalism entails that it is possible to gain an a priori justified belief that perception is reliable by engaging in a suppositional reasoning process of a priori bootstrapping. But I will show that Perceptual Fundamentalists are not committed to a priori bootstrapping being a rational reasoning process. On the most plausible versions of Perceptual (...) Fundamentalism, a priori bootstrapping cannot be used to rationally support anti-sceptical beliefs about the reliability of perception. Moreover, seeing why Perceptual Fundamentalists are not committed to a priori bootstrapping will help us to better understand the nature of the perceptual entitlements that Perceptual Fundamentalists posit, or at least should posit. (shrink)