Dartnall claims that visual short-term memory stores nonconceptual content , in the form of compressed images. In this paper I argue against the claim that NCC can be stored in VSTM. I offer four reasons why NCC cannot be stored in visual memory and why only conceptual information can: NCC lasts for a very short time and does not reach either visual short-term memory or visual long-term memory; the content of visual states is stored in memory only if and when (...) object-centered attention modulates visual processing and this modulation signifies the onset of the conceptualization of that content; only categorical high-level information that characterizes conceptual content and not metric and precise iconic information that characterizes NCC can be stored in visual memory for long periods; and if NCC were stored in visual memory then this would allow recognitional judgments pertaining to NCC—one could recognize the precise shade of a color that one had seen before. However NCC does not allow such recognitional judgments. (shrink)

Perceptual experiences justify beliefs—that much seems obvious. As Brewer puts it, “sense experiential states provide reasons for empirical beliefs” (this volume, xx). In Mind and World McDowell argues that we can get from this apparent platitude to the controversial claim that perceptual experiences have conceptual content: [W]e can coherently credit experiences with rational relations to judgement and belief, but only if we take it that spontaneity is already implicated in receptivity; that is, only if we take it that experiences have (...) conceptual content. (1994, 162) Brewer agrees. Their view is sometimes called conceptualism; nonconceptualism is the rival position, that experiences have nonconceptual content. One initial obstacle is understanding what the issue is. What is conceptual content, and how is it different from nonconceptual content? Section 1 of this paper explains two versions of each of the rival positions: state (non)conceptualism and content (non)conceptualism; the latter pair is the locus of the relevant dispute. Two prominent arguments for content nonconceptualism—the richness argument and the continuity argument—both fail (section 2). McDowell’s and Brewer’s epistemological defenses of content conceptualism are also faulty (section 3). Section 4 gives a more simple-minded case for conceptualism; finally, some reasons are given for rejecting the claim—on one natural interpretation—that experiences justify beliefs. (shrink)

According to the conceptualist view in the philosophy of perception, we must possess concepts for all the objects, properties and relations which feature in our perceptual experiences. In this paper, I investigate the possibility of developing an argument against the conceptualist view by appealing to the notion of attention. In Part One, I begin by setting out an apparently promising version of such an argument, a version which appeals to a link between attention and perceptual demonstrative concept possession. In Part (...) Two, however, I show how the conceptualist can challenge what appears to be the key premise of the argument, and I go on to describe, in Part Three, an important further difficulty which we face if we attempt to overcome this challenge in a particular way. My conclusion will be that the conceptualist's challenge to the argument is convincing and hence that the argument remains inconclusive. (shrink)

A blindfolded clairvoyant walks into a room and immediately knows how it is arranged. You walk in and immediately see how it is arranged. Though both of you represent the room as being arranged in the same way, you have different experiences. Your experience doesn’t just represent that the room is arranged a certain way; it also visually presents the very items in the room that make that representation true. Call the felt aspect of your experience made salient by this (...) contrast its presentational phenomenology. Many philosophers have observed that perceptual experiences have presentational phenomenology. In this paper I explore its nature, scope, and significance. I argue that in addition to perceptual experiences, presentational phenomenology can be found in intuitive, introspective, imaginative, and recollective experiences. I also argue that presentational phenomenology is epistemologically significant: it plays a central role in explaining why the experiences that have it justify beliefs and give us knowledge. (shrink)

I defend both conceptualists and nonconceptualists against an attack which has been leveled at them by critics such as Byrne (Perception and conceptual content In: Steup M, Sosa E (eds) Contemporary debates in epistemology. Blackwell, Malden, pp 231-250, 2005), Speaks (Philos Rev 114:359–398, 2005), and Crowther (Erkenntnis 65:5–276, 2006). They distinguish a ‘state’ reading and a ‘content’ reading of ‘(non)conceptual’ and argue that many arguments on either side support only the respective state views, not the respective content views. To prepare (...) the ground for my defense, I argue for an understanding of the state view in terms of concept exercise rather than concept possession and provide an overview of versions of conceptualism and nonconceptualism of different strengths. I then argue that conceptualists and nonconceptualists tacitly accept a so-called ‘state-to-content’ principle, show that existing defenses of this principle fail, and provide a new defense of it. It draws on the sources of the nonconceptualism debate, viz. the need to do justice both to the phenomenology of experience and to its epistemological role and to account for the existence of perceptual content and thought content. I argue that epistemological considerations together with considerations from the subject’s perspective support the claim that conceptual thought has conceptual and propositional content, whereas nonconceptual experience has nonconceptual and non-propositional content. (shrink)

In Mind and World, John McDowell argues against the view that perceptual representation is non-conceptual. The central worry is that this view cannot offer any reasonable account of how perception bears rationally upon belief. I argue that this worry, though sensible, can be met, if we are clear that perceptual representation is, though non-conceptual, still in some sense 'assertoric': Perception, like belief, represents things as being thus and so.

The overall aim of this two-part article is to provide a supplement to ability theories of practice in terms of a defense of the following thesis: In situations of social interaction, individuals’ ability to act appropriately sometimes depends on their exercise of the ability directly to perceive normative states. In this Part I, I introduce ability theories of practice and motivate my thesis. Furthermore, I offer an analysis of normative states as response-dependent properties. Last, I work out and defend an (...) account of direct perception that is compatible with individuals being able directly to perceive various everyday phenomena. Drawing on this account, I show in part II, that normative states are sometimes directly perceptible too. (shrink)

(2014). Nonconceptualism and the cognitive impenetrability of early vision. Philosophical Psychology: Vol. 27, No. 5, pp. 621-642. doi: 10.1080/09515089.2014.893386.

John McDowell claims that perception provides reasons for empirical beliefs. Perceptual reasons, according to the author of Mind and World, can be identified with passively “taken in” facts. Concepts figure in the acts of acquiring perceptual reasons, even though the acts themselves do not consist in judgments. Thus, on my reading, McDowell’s account of reasons-acquisition can be likened to Descartes’ account of the acquisition of ideas, rather than to Kant’s theory of judgment as an act by means of which one’s (...) cognition comes to be endowed with objective validity. However, unlike Descartes, McDowell does not acknowledge the skeptical challenge which his conception of reasons-acquisition might face. He contends that perception is factive without arguing for the background assumption on which it rests. Hence, as I suggest in my article, the McDowellian claim that perception provides reasons for empirical beliefs is not sufficiently warranted. (shrink)

I offer a reconstruction of Brentano's view of inner consciousness and show how Brentano prevented a regress of higher-order mental acts.

In David Lewis’s famous ‘Many, but Almost One’, he argues that when objects of the same kind share most of their parts, they can be counted as one. I argue that mereological overlap does not do the trick. A better candidate is overlap in function. Although mereological overlap often goes hand-in-hand with functional overlap, a functional approach is more accurate in cases in which mereology and function are teased apart. A functional approach also solves a version of the problem of (...) the many that Lewis thought was immune to the Almost-One solution. (shrink)

In the past twenty years, issues about the relationship between perception and thought have largely been framed in terms of the question of whether the contents of perception are nonconceptual. I argue that this debate has rested on an ambiguity in `nonconceptual content' and some false presuppositions about what is required for concept possession. Once these are cleared away, I argue that none of the arguments which have been advanced about nonconceptual content do much to threaten the natural view that (...) perception and thought are relations to the same kind of content. (shrink)

This paper examines how new evil demon problems could arise for our access to the internal world of our own minds. I start by arguing that the internalist/externalist debate in epistemology has been widely misconstrued---we need to reconfigure the debate in order to see how it can arise about our access to the internal world. I then argue for the coherence of scenarios of radical deception about our own minds, and I use them to defend a properly formulated internalist view (...) about our access to our minds. The overarching lesson is that general epistemology and the specialized epistemology of introspection need to talk---each has much to learn from each other. (shrink)

Dretske has provided very influential arguments that there is a difference between our sensory awareness of objects and our awareness of facts about these objects—that there is a difference, for example, between seeing x and seeing that x is F. This distinction between simple and epistemic seeing is a staple of the philosophy of perception. Memory is often usefully compared to perception, and in this spirit I argue for the conditional claim that if Dretske’s arguments succeed in motivating the posit (...) of simple seeing, then parallel arguments should equally motivate a posit I call simple remembering. Simple remembering would be a conscious form of memory about an object or event which is prior to and independent of any beliefs the subject may or may not form about the object or event simply remembered. (shrink)

Judgments based on episodic memory are often thought to be immune to errors of misidentification (IEM). Yet there is a certain category of episodic memories, viz. observer memories, that seems to threaten IEM. In the resulting debate, some say that observer memories are a threat to the IEM enjoyed by episodic memory (Michaelian, 2021); others say that they pose no such threat (Fernández, 2021; Lin, 2020). In this paper, we argue for a middle way. First, we frame the debate, claiming (...) that the existing literature lacks a satisfying definition both of observer memories and of the precise issue of errors of identification in such memories. Then, we contribute to the debate by challenging an anti-separatist view about the relation between phenomenal and intentional features of observer memories that looms behind this debate. On this view, if the rememberer's self is a phenomenal feature of the memory, by implication it is also built into the intentional content. We reject this view and offer a moderate separatist account. Distinguishing between empirically-grounded species of observer memories, we say that the phenomenal self sometimes is, and sometimes is not built into the intentional content of the memory, and this results in different implications for IEM. (shrink)

Algunos defensores del conceptualismo perceptual intentan bloquear el argumento noconceptualista de la riqueza de contenido afirmando que no hay percepción consciente sin atención. Para justificar esta afirmación los conceptualistas normalmente apelan a experimentos psicológicos, tales como la ceguera al cambio y la ceguera inatencional. En este artículo argumentaré que esta estrategia es insuficiente. Además sostendré, en base a recientes consideraciones teóricas y empíricas, que hay buenas razones para pensar que probablemente hay una forma de conciencia fenoménica visual más allá de (...) los límites de la atención que no es accesible cognitivamente y menos aún estructurada conceptualmente. Some supporters of perceptual conceptualism attempt to block the non-conceptualist argument from richness claiming that there is no conscious perception without attention. In order to justify this assertion conceptualists normally appeal to psychological experiments, such as change blindness and inattentional blindness. In this paper I will argue that this strategy is insufficient. In addition, I will point out, on the basis of recent theoretical and empirical considerations, that there are good reasons to think that probably there is a form of perceptual phenomenal consciousness beyond the limits of attention that is not cognitively accessible, not to mention conceptually structured. (shrink)

Among the exciting prospects raised by advocates of predictive processing [PP] is the offer of a systematic description of our neural activity suitable for drawing explanatory bridges to the structure of conscious experience. Yet the gulf to cross seems wide. For, as critics of PP have argued, our visual experience certainly doesn’t seem probabilistic.While Clark proposes a means to make PP compatible with the experience of a determinate world, I argue that we should not rush to do so. Two notions (...) of determinacy are conflated in the claim that perception is determinate: ‘univocality’ and ‘full detail’. The former, as Clark argues, is only to be expected in any PP agent that models its world for the purpose of acting on it. But as Husserl argued, and as perceptual psychology has borne out, we significantly overestimate the degree of detail with which we perceive a univocal world.This second form of indeterminacy is due not to the probabilistic nature of PP’s model, but rather to its hierarchical structure, with increasingly coarse-grained representations as we move further from the sensory periphery. A PP system may, or may not, deliver a univocal hypothesis at each of these levels. An action-oriented PP system would only be expected to do so only at the level needed for successful action guidance. A naïve reporter’s overestimation of the degree of determinate detail in their visual experience can thereby be accounted for with a more gradual version of the ‘refrigerator light’ effect: we experience determinate details just to the degree that they’re needed – immediately as they’re needed. (shrink)

It is popular to hold that emotions are evaluative. On the standard account, the evaluative character of emotion is understood in epistemic terms: emotions apprehend or make us aware of value properties. As this account is commonly elaborated, emotions are experiences with evaluative intentional content. In this paper, I am concerned with a recent alternative proposal on how emotions afford awareness of value. This proposal does not ascribe evaluative content to emotions, but instead conceives of them as evaluative at the (...) level of intentional mode or attitude. I first argue that this proposal fails to make emotions intelligible as value apprehensions. There are reasons to suppose that emotions do not apprehend value to begin with, but are related to values in a different, non-epistemic sense. I then go on to show that the notion of an evaluative intentional mode can still help elucidate the evaluative character of emotion. I argue that there is a plausible non-epistemic understanding of the view that emotions are evaluative modes. On this account, emotions are not ways of apprehending values, but ways of acknowledging values. (shrink)

In the philosophy and psychology of perception there exists a long-standing debate about the detachability of the visual from the conceptual contents of perception. The article analyses the implications of this dilemma for the attribution of aesthetic properties independent of the classification of aesthetic objects and the possibility of aesthetic formalism.

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 1, Page 307-325, March 2022.

Arguments for attributing non-conceptual content to experience have predominantly been motivated by aspects of the visual perception of empirical properties. In this article, I pursue a different strategy, arguing that a specific class of affective-evaluative experiences have non-conceptual content. The examples drawn on are affective-evaluative experiences of first exposure, in which the subject has a felt valenced intentional attitude towards evaluative properties of the object of their experience, but lacks any powers of conceptual discrimination regarding those evaluative properties. I also (...) show that by accepting this thesis we can explain relevant features of evaluative understanding. (shrink)

A common objection to sense-datum theories of perception is that they cannot give an adequate account of the fact that introspection indicates that our sensory experiences are directed on, or are about, the mind-independent entities in the world around us, that our sense experience is transparent to the world. In this paper I point out that the main force of this claim is to point out an explanatory challenge to sense-datum theories.

What is knowledge of one's own current, consciously entertained intentional states a form of inner awareness? If so, what form? In this paper I explore the prospects for a quasi-observational account of a certain class of cases where subjects appear to have self-knowledge, namely, the so-called cogito-like cases. In section one I provide a rationale for the claim that we need an epistemology of self-knowledge, and specifically, an epistemology of the cogito-like cases. In section two I argue that contentful properties (...) in such cases have two features in common with observational properties of objects. In section three, I develop a quasi-observational account of self-knowledge for the cogito-like cases by considering various accounts of the nature of observational properties and by applying them to these cases. I conclude by addressing some important objections to the account. (shrink)

What is knowledge of one's own current, consciously entertained intentional states a form of inner awareness? If so, what form? In this paper I explore the prospects for a quasi-observational account of a certain class of cases where subjects appear to have self-knowledge, namely, the so-called cogito-like cases. In section one I provide a rationale for the claim that we need an epistemology of self-knowledge, and specifically, an epistemology of the cogito-like cases. In section two I argue that contentful properties (...) in such cases have two features in common with observational properties of objects. In section three, I develop a quasi-observational account of self-knowledge for the cogito-like cases by considering various accounts of the nature of observational properties (specifically, secondary qualities) and by applying them to these cases. I conclude by addressing some important objections to the account. (shrink)

In this essay, I specify types of representational content that can be attributed to Kant’s account of representation. The more specific aim is to examine which of these types of content can be regarded as possible without the application of concepts. In order to answer the question, I proceed as follows. First, I show how intuition (in Kant’s sense) can be seen as providing indexical content independently of empirical concepts. Second, I show in what sense the generation of spatial content (...) can be regarded as non-categorial. A key distinction is that a perceptual examination of an object can be understood as thoroughly sensible and particular, whereas a conceptual determination always grasps the object via its generalisable features. Third, I propose that the faculties of sensibility and understanding are not only separable in principle, but that their contributions remain in a certain sense separate in actual cognition as well. This is to say that a conceptual determination of an object does not entail that the object ceases to be non-conceptually available to the perceiver, which further suggests the autonomy of sensibility and its perceptual content. Finally, I raise difficulties in attributing non-conceptual representational content to Kant’s judgment-centered stance on representation and experience, only to emphasise how these difficulties easily lead to a misappreciation of Kant’s fundamental distinction between sensibility and understanding and their unique cognitive contributions. (shrink)

A number of authors have argued recently that the content of perceptual experience can, and even must, be characterized in conceptual terms. Their claim, more precisely, is that every perceptual experience is such that, of necessity, its content is constituted entirely by concepts possessed by the subject having the experience. This is a surprising result. For it seems reasonable to think that a subject’s experiences could be richer and more fine-grained than his conceptual repertoire; that a subject might be able, (...) for example, to discriminate in experience more shades of colors than he has color concepts. The key move in their argument, therefore, is to articulate the conceptual content of experience using demonstrative, instead of general, concepts. For instance, these authors argue that the content of my perceptual experience of a particular shade of green is properly characterized in terms of the concept expressed by the linguistic utterance “that shade”. Even if I don’t possess a general concept for the shade I’m seeing—a concept of the kind typically expressed using color names like ‘chartreuse’ or ‘lime’—nevertheless, these authors argue, the content of the experience can still be characterized conceptually using a demonstrative concept that I do possess. (shrink)

A number of authors have argued recently that the content of perceptual experience can, and even must, be characterized in conceptual terms. Their claim, more precisely, is that every perceptual experience is such that, of necessity, its content is constituted entirely by concepts possessed by the subject having the experience. This is a surprising result. For it seems reasonable to think that a subject’s experiences could be richer and more fine-grained than his conceptual repertoire; that a subject might be able, (...) for example, to discriminate in experience more shades of colors than he has color concepts. The key move in their argument, therefore, is to articulate the conceptual content of experience using demonstrative, instead of general, concepts. For instance, these authors argue that the content of my perceptual experience of a particular shade of green is properly characterized in terms of the concept expressed by the linguistic utterance “that shade”. Even if I don’t possess a general concept for the shade I’m seeing—a concept of the kind typically expressed using color names like ‘chartreuse’ or ‘lime’—nevertheless, these authors argue, the content of the experience can still be characterized conceptually using a demonstrative concept that I do possess. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the question of whether mature human experience is thoroughly conceptual, or whether it involves non-conceptual elements or layers. It has two central goals. The first goal is methodological. It aims to establish that that question is, to a large extent, an empirical question. The question cannot be answered by appealing to purely a priori and transcendental considerations. The second goal is to argue, inter alia by relying on empirical findings, that the view known as ‘state-conceptualism’ (...) is false. We will argue that our experiences do involve non-conceptual elements. That is, a subject may enjoy an experience with a particular phenomenal aspect, without possessing the concept needed for the specification of the content of that aspect, and moreover, without being able to acquire that concept upon having that experience. (shrink)

The view that the content of experience is conceptual is often felt to conflict with the empiricist intuition that experience precedes thought, rather than vice versa. This concern is explicitly articulated by Ayers as an objection both to McDowell and Davidson, and to the conceptualist view more generally. The paper aims to defuse the objection in its general form by presenting a version of conceptualism which is compatible with empiricism. It proposes an account of observational concepts on which possession of (...) such a concept involves more than the ability for perceptual discrimination, but less than the capacity to employ the concept in inferences: it consists in the capacity to perceptually discriminate objects with the awareness that one is discriminating as one ought. This understanding of concept-possession allows us make sense of experiences' having conceptual content without supposing that the subject must grasp the relevant concepts prior to having those experiences. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to clarify the notion of mnemonic content. Memories have content. However, it is not clear whether memories are about past events in the world, past states of our own minds, or some combination of those two elements. I suggest that any proposal about mnemonic content should help us understand why events are presented to us in memory as being in the past. I discuss three proposals about mnemonic content and, eventually, I put forward a (...) positive view. According to this view, when a subject seems to remember a certain event, that event is presented to her as making true a perceptual experience that caused the very memory experience that she is having. (shrink)

In this article, I make a distinction between two versions of non-epistemicism about seeing, and bring explicitly into view and argue against a particular version defended by Dretske. More specifically, I distinguish non-epistemic seeing as non-conceptual seeing, where concept possession is assumed to be cognitively demanding, from non-epistemic seeing as seeing without noticing, where noticing is assumed to be relatively cognitively undemanding. After showing that Dretske argues for the possibility of non-epistemic seeing in both senses of the term, I target (...) his thesis that a given subject sees all the objects that are visually differentiated in her visual field, where visual differentiation does not require that she notice those objects. I argue that the notion of a visual field deployed in the formulation of the thesis cannot be phenomenal and therefore that seeing without noticing amounts to mere visual confrontation. I further argue that since the epistemicist does not deny the existence of seeing without noticing in the sense of mere visual confrontation, there is a clear sense in which Dretske's non-epistemicism turns out to be trivial. (shrink)

Active externalism (also known as the extended mind hypothesis) says that we use objects and situations in the world as external memory stores that we consult as needs dictate. This gives us economies of storage: We do not need to remember that Bill has blue eyes and wavy hair if we can acquire this information by looking at Bill. I argue for a corollary to this position, which I call ‘internalism.’ Internalism says we can acquire knowledge on a need‐to‐know basis (...) by consulting portable, inner analogues of the world. This, however, leads to a dilemma. If the knowledge was stored in memory, it is difficult to see how we could have acquired it by consulting inner analogues, for it would seem that we knew it already. Moreover, if it was stored in memory, we lose the economies of storage that provide much of the rationale for external memory stores and hence for their inner analogues. If, on the other hand, the knowledge was not stored in memory, it is difficult to see how we could have acquired it by consulting inner analogues, for it was not there to be acquired. I propose a solution to this problem that turns on the concept of nonconceptual content, and I relate the solution to Stephen Kosslyn's (1994) architecture of perception and visual mental imagery. Viewed in a broader context, the solution shows that the world leaks into the mind, as well as mind leaking into the world. (shrink)

This review provides an overview of Eva Schmidt's impressively thorough and detailed book on the Conceptualist/Nonconceptualist debate in the philosophy of perception, and briefly sketches two objections to Schmidt. First, I suggest that a certain dilemma for the Conceptualist Schmidt raises in the context of her discussion of the fineness of grain argument is surmountable. Second, I question whether Schmidt's response to the epistemological motivation for Conceptualism is sound.

Though it enjoys widespread support, the claim that perceptual experiences possess nonconceptual content has been vigorously disputed in the recent literature by those who argue that the content of perceptual experience must be conceptual content. Nonconceptualism and conceptualism are often assumed to be well-defined theoretical approaches that each constitute unitary claims about the contents of experience. In this paper I try to show that this implicit assumption is mistaken, and what consequences this has for the debate about perceptual experience. I (...) distinguish between two different ways that nonconceptualist (and conceptualist) proposals about perceptual content can be understood: as claims about the constituents that compose perceptual contents or as claims about whether a subject. (shrink)

In his paper “Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science,” Andy Clark seminally proposed that the brain's job is to predict whatever information is coming “next” on the basis of prior inputs and experiences. Perception fundamentally subserves survival and self-preservation in biological agents, such as humans. Survival however crucially depends on rapid and accurate information processing of what is happening in the here and now. Hence, the term “next” in Clark's seminal formulation must include not (...) only the temporal dimension (i.e., what is perceivednow) but also the spatial dimension (i.e., what is perceivedhereor next-to-my-body). In this paper, we propose to focus on perceptual experiences that happen “next,” i.e., close-to-my-body. This is because perceptual processing of proximal sensory inputs has a key impact on the organism's survival. Specifically, we focus on tactile experiences mediated by the skin and what we will call the “extended skin” or “second skin,” that is, immediate objects/materials that envelop closely to our skin, namely, clothes. We propose that the skin and tactile experiences are not a mere border separating the self and world. Rather, they simultaneously and inherently distinguishandconnect the bodily self to its environment. Hence, these proximal and pervasive tactile experiences can be viewed as a “transparent bridge” intrinsically relating and facilitating exchanges between the self and the physical and social world. We conclude with potential implications of this observation for the case of Depersonalization Disorder, a condition that makes people feel estranged and detached from their self, body, and the world. (shrink)

Conceptualists have it that the representational content of perceptual experience is determined by the concepts a subject applies in having such an experience. Conceptualists like Bill Brewer [1999] and John McDowell [1994] have laid particular emphasis on demonstrative concepts in trying to account for the fact that subjects can perceive and discriminate very many specific shades of colour in experience. Against this, it has been objected that such demonstrative concepts have incoherent conditions of extension and/or of individuation, due to the (...) fact that chromatic indiscriminability is non-transitive. In this paper, I consider three different versions of this objection and show why each fails. (shrink)

Conceptualist accounts of the representational content of perceptual experiences have it that a subject _S_ can experience no object, property, relation, etc., unless _S_ "i# possesses and "ii# exercises concepts for such object, property, or relation. Perceptual experiences, on such a view, represent the world in a way that is conceptual.

Philosophical Explorations, Volume 17, Issue 1, Page 35-48, March 2014.

I argue that strong representationalism, the view that for a perceptual experience to have a certain phenomenal character just is for it to have a certain representational content (perhaps represented in the right sort of way), encounters two problems: the dual looks problem and the duplication problem. The dual looks problem is this: strong representationalism predicts that how things phenomenally look to the subject reflects the content of the experience. But some objects phenomenally look to both have and not have (...) certain properties, for example, my bracelet may phenomenally look to be circular-shaped and oval-shaped (and hence non-circularshaped). So, if strong representationalism is true, then the content of my experience ought to represent my bracelet as being both circular-shaped and non-circular-shaped. Yet, intuitively, the content of my experience does not represent my bracelet as being both circular-shaped and non-circular-shaped. The duplication problem is this. On a standard conception of content, spatio-temporally distinct experiences and experiences had by distinct subjects may differ in content despite the fact that they are phenomenally indistinguishable. But this undermines the thesis that phenomenal character determines content. I argue that the two problems can be solved by applying a version of an idea from David Chalmers, which is to recognize the existence of genuinely centered properties in the content of perceptual experience. (shrink)

Stanley and Williamson have defended the intellectualist thesis that knowing-how is a subspecies of knowing-that by appeal to the syntax and semantics of ascriptions of knowing-how. Critics have objected that this way of defending intellectualism places undue weight on linguistic considerations and fails to give sufficient attention to empirical considerations from the scientific study of the mind. In this paper, I examine and reject Stanley's recent attempt to answer the critics.

It is now 25 years since Gareth Evans introduced the distinction between conceptual and nonconceptual content in The Varieties of Reference. This is a fitting time to take stock of what has become a complex and extended debate both within philosophy and at the interface between philosophy and psychology. Unfortunately, the debate has become increasingly murky as it has become increasingly ramified. Much of the contemporary discussion does not do full justice to the powerful theoretical tool originally proposed by Evans (...) and subsequently refined by theorists in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s – most effectively, I think, by Christopher Peacocke (particularly in his 1992). Even worse, significant parts of the discussion are somewhat confused. This paper makes a start on clarifying what I think ought to be the central issues in debates about nonconceptual content. I begin in §1 by pointing out how narrowly focused contemporary discussion is relative to Evans’s original discussion. We are not making as much use as we should of nonconceptual content as a tool for understanding subpersonal information processing and the complexities of its status relative to perception and thought at the personal level. In §2 I turn to what is the central focus of contemporary discussion, namely, the content of perception and identify a “master argument” for nonconceptualism based on the relation between conceptual capacities and capacities for perceptual discrimination. The aim of §3 is to clarify the relation between the claim that perception has nonconceptual content and some superficially similar claims discussed by philosophers of perception. Finally, in §4 I explain why the attention recently focused on what is sometimes called the state version of the nonconceptualist thesis seems to me to be misdirected. (shrink)

Autobiographical memories typically give rise either to memory reports (“I remember going swimming”) or to first person past-tense judgements (“I went swimming”). This article focuses on first person past-tense judgements that are (epistemically) based on autobiographical memories. Some of these judgements have the IEM property of being immune to error through misidentification. This article offers an account of when and why first person past-tense judgements have the IEM property.

In a recent paper, Fredérique de Vignemont has argued that there is a positive quale of bodily ownership . She thinks that tactile and other forms of somatosensory phenomenology incorporate a distinctive feeling of myness and takes issue with my defense in Bermúdez of a deflationary approach to bodily ownership. That paper proposed an argument deriving from Elizabeth Anscombe’s various discussions of what she terms knowledge without observation . De Vignemont is not convinced and appeals to the Rubber Hand Illusion (...) to undercut my appeal to Anscombe. Section 1 of this article restates the case against the putative quale of ownership. Section 2 explains why de Vignemonts’ objections miss the mark. Section 3 discusses in more detail how to draw a principled distinction between bodily awareness and ordinary perceptual awareness. (shrink)

According to the increasingly popular perceptual/representational accounts of pain (and other bodily sensations such as itches, tickles, orgasms, etc.), feeling pain in a body region is perceiving a non-mental property or some objective condition of that region, typically equated with some sort of (actual or potential) tissue damage. In what follows I argue that given a natural understanding of what sensory perception requires and how it is integrated with (dedicated) conceptual systems, these accounts are mistaken. I will also examine the (...) relationship between perceptual views and two (weak and strong) forms of representationalism about experience. I will argue that pains pose very serious problems for strong representationalism as well. (shrink)

Russell’s theory of acquaintance construes perceptual awareness as at once constitutively independent of conceptual thought and yet a source of propositional knowledge. Wilfrid Sellars, John McDowell, and other conceptualists object that this is a ‘myth’: perception can be a source of knowledge only if conceptual capacities are already in play therein. Proponents of a relational view of experience, including John Campbell, meanwhile voice sympathy for Russell’s position on this point. This paper seeks to spell out, and defend, a claim that (...) offers the prospects for an attractive, unacknowledged element of common ground in this debate. The claim is that conceptual capacities, at least in a certain minimal sense implicit in McDowell’s recent work, must be operative in perceptual experience, if it is to rationalize judgement. The claim will be supported on the basis of two premises, each of which can be defended drawing, inter alia, on considerations stressed by Campbell. First, that experience rationalizes judgement only if it is attentive. Second, that attention qualifies as a conceptual capacity, in the noted, minimal sense. The conjunction of the two premises might be dubbed ‘attentional conceptualism’. (shrink)

This is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on the contents of perception.