This essay surveys the varieties of disjunctivism about perceptual experience. Disjunctivism comes in two main flavours, metaphysical and epistemological.

"the incorrigibility thesis", The thesis that it is logically impossible to be mistaken about such things as whether I am now in pain or am seeing or seeming to see something red, Is very widely supposed to be false. I consider the arguments designed to show this, And argue that they all fail.

Many philosophical theories of self-knowledge can be understood as attempts to explain why self-ascriptions enjoy a certain kind of authority that other-ascriptions lack (the Authority Thesis). The aim of this paper is not to expand the stock of existing explanations but to ask whether the Authority Thesis can be adequately specified. To this end, I identify three requirements that must be met by any satisfactory specification. I conclude that the search for an adequate specification of the Authority Thesis leads to (...) a dilemma: it either yields an interpretation under which the thesis is philosophically interesting but false, or it produces an interpretation under which the thesis is actually true but of minor philosophical interest. (shrink)

In order to understand consciousness one would benefit from developing a more eclectic intellectual style. Consciousness is, as proposed by almost everyone except the stubborn reductionists, a truly mysterious concept. Its study and dissection merits a multidisciplinary approach. Waving this multidisciplinary flag has positively enlarged the discussion and neurologists, psychiatrists, mathematicians, and so on, have moved to the philosophy of mind arena, first with caution and now with a more powerful voice. Identifying what we mean by consciousness is a first (...) step even when we want to deny its existence. The link between consciousness and some other mental activity is a logical next step and there is abundant literature doing this, but not all of them differentiate among associated yet different phenomena. (shrink)

In his Meditations On First Philosophy, Descartes points out the awakedreaming indistinguishability problem, which calls into question the reliability of our knowledge about the external world. The argument can be understood as follows: P1) Nothing can rule out the subject being duped into believing she is in X when she is actually in Y. P2) A person can know that she is in Y only if there is something to rule out her being duped into believing she is in X (...) when she is actually in Y. C) Hence, the subject cannot know that she is in Y. The problem can be interpreted in the form of A1 where X represents a dream state and Y represents an awake state. It can also be interpreted in the form of A2 where X represents an awake state and Y represents a dream state. I define the problem in the form of A1 and A2. The problem also involves an epistemological aspect and a phenomenological aspect. The epistemological aspect concerns the question of whether dream states and awake states are fundamentally indistinguishable. If so, the problem would be irresolvable in principle and result in a great epistemic threat. The phenomenological aspect concerns how the experience appears to the subject and affects the judgment she makes about her current state. In order to fully resolve the problem, as I will argue, we need to show that both A1 and A2 are unsound and resolve both aspects of the problem. McGinn, Ichikawa, and Sosa try to resolve the awakedreaming indistinguishability problem by defending the imagination view of dreaming. Among the three, Ichikawa holds the strongest version, where he denies that percepts and beliefs occur in dreams; McGinn denies percepts occur in dreams while Sosa denies beliefs occur in dreams. I argue that their arguments, namely drawing a sharp distinction between percepts and images along with denying beliefs occur in dreams, are misguided. They fail to resolve any form or any aspect of the indistinguishability problem. My goal of this research is to reinvigorate the imagination view of dreaming. Instead of holding a sharp distinction between percepts and images along with denying belief occur in dreams, I attempt to bridge the gap between lucid dreaming and non-lucid dreaming to defend this view. I contend that the imagination view of dreaming, upon modification, can resolve the problem. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to give an account of the distinction between primary and secondary qualities in a way which allows the distinction a useful place in an explanation of scientific enquiry. this is done by modifying certain of locke's criteria for primacy, and by showing that this procedure has certain advantages over keith campbell's account of the distinction. in particular, i argue that primary qualities cannot be specified in a theory-neutral way, and that this has important consequences (...) for an account of scientific observation and the relation between the scientific and everyday images of the world. (shrink)