It is common for an object to present different colour appearances to different perceivers, even when the perceivers and viewing conditions are normal. For example, a Munsell chip might look unique green to you and yellowish green to me in normal viewing conditions. In such cases, there are three possibilities. Ecumenism: both experiences are veridical. Nihilism: both experiences are non-veridical. Inegalitarianism: one experience is veridical and the other is non-veridical. Perhaps the most important objection to inegalitarianism is the ignorance objection, (...) according to which inegalitarianism should be rejected because it is committed to the existence of unknowable colour facts. The goal of this paper is to show that ecumenists are also committed to unknowable colour facts. More specifically, I argue that, with the exception of colour eliminativism, all major philosophical theories of colour are committed to unknowable colour facts. (shrink)

My paper has three parts. First I will outline the act/object theory of perceptual experience and its commitments to (a) a relational view of experience and (b) a view of phenomenal character according to which it is constituted by the character of the objects of experience. I present the traditional adverbial response to this, in which experience is not to be understood as a relation to some object, but as a way of sensing. In the second part I argue that (...) acceptance of (a) is independent of acceptance of (b). I then present a modified adverbialism that presents experience as relational in nature but whose character is nevertheless to be explained in terms of the way in which one senses an object. Finally, I will offer an explanation of how a naïve realist about experience can adopt this modified adverbialism and in so doing accommodate the possibility of perceptual error. (shrink)

Drawing on the findings of neuroscience, this text proposes and defends the hypothesis that the various modalities of sensation share a generic form that the author, Austen Clark, calls feature-placing.

What are intuitions? According to doxastic views, they are doxastic attitudes or dispositions, such as judgments or inclinations to make judgments. According to perceptualist views, they are—like perceptual experiences—pre-doxastic experiences that—unlike perceptual experiences—represent abstract matters as being a certain way. In this paper I argue against doxasticism and in favor of perceptualism. I describe two features that militate against doxasticist views of perception itself: perception is belief-independent and perception is presentational. Then I argue that intuitions also have both features. The (...) upshot is that intuitions are importantly similar to perceptual experiences, and so should not be identified with doxastic attitudes or dispositions. I consider a popular argument from the introspective absence of sui generis intuition experiences in favor of doxasticism. I develop a conception of intuition experiences that helps to defuse this argument. (shrink)

Sensorimotor expectations concern how visual experience covaries with bodily movement. Sensorimotor theorists argue from such expectations to the conclusion that the phenomenology of vision is constitutively embodied: objects within the visual field are experienced as 3-D because sensorimotor expectations partially constitute our experience of such objects. Critics argue that there are two ways to block the above inference: to explain how we visually experience objects as 3-D, one may appeal to such non-bodily factors as expectations about movements of objects, not (...) the perceiver, or to the role of mental imagery in visual experience. But instead of using sensorimotor expectations to explain how objects are experienced within the visual field, we can instead use them to explain our experience of the visual field itself and, in particular, our experience of its limits; that is, our ever-present visual sense of there being more to see, beyond what’s currently within the visual field. Crucially, this inference from sensorimotor expectations to the constitutive embodiment of visual phenomenology is not threatened by the above two challenges. I thus present here a sensorimotor theory of the phenomenology of the visual field, that is, our experience of our visual fields as such. (shrink)

I argue for a version of the causal analysis of seeing which I call the 'potential information' analysis. I proceed initially by considering some standard causal analyses, those of Tye and Jackson. I show that these analyses are too weak, for they allow cases of hallucination to count as seeing. I argue that what is central to seeing is that our visual experiences provide a means of gaining true beliefs about objects. This, however, does not mean that we must actually (...) gain true beliefs about objects in any particular case. Rather, what must be the case is that a perceiver of our sort could gain true beliefs about objects on the basis of experiences like ours. I defend this analysis against various objections, making important qualifications to it as I do so. (shrink)

The target article is an attempt to make some progress on the problem of color realism. Are objects colored? And what is the nature of the color properties? We defend the view that physical objects (for instance, tomatoes, radishes, and rubies) are colored, and that colors are physical properties, specifically types of reflectance. This is probably a minority opinion, at least among color scientists. Textbooks frequently claim that physical objects are not colored, and that the colors are "subjective" or "in (...) the mind." The article has two other purposes: first, to introduce an interdisciplinary audience to some distinctively philosophical tools that are useful in tackling the problem of color realism and, second, to clarify the various positions and central arguments in the debate. (shrink)

Bodily pain strikes many philosophers as deeply paradoxical. The issue is that pains seem to bear both physical characteristics, such as a location in the body, and mental characteristics, such being mind-dependent. In this paper I clarify and address this alleged paradox of pain. I begin by showing how a further assumption, Objectivism, the thesis that what one feels in one’s body when one is in pain is something mind-independent, is necessary for the generation of the paradox. Consequently, the paradox (...) can be avoided if one rejects this idea. However, doing so raises its own difficulties, for it is not obvious how anything can possess all of the features we typically associate with bodily pain. To address this puzzle and finally put the paradox of pain to rest, I develop the Embodied View, a novel metaphysical account on which pains are constitutively mind-dependent features of parts of a subject’s body. (shrink)

Intuition is sometimes derided as an abstruse or esoteric phenomenon akin to crystal-ball gazing. Such derision appears to be fuelled primarily by the suggestion, evidently endorsed by traditional rationalists such as Plato and Descartes, that intuition is a kind of direct, immediate apprehension akin to perception. This paper suggests that although the perceptual analogy has often been dismissed as encouraging a theoretically useless metaphor, a quasi-perceptualist view of intuition may enable rationalists to begin to meet the challenge of supplying a (...) theoretically satisfying treatment of their favoured epistemic source. It is argued, first, that intuitions and perceptual experiences are at a certain level of abstraction the same type of mental state, presentations, which are distinct from beliefs, hunches, inclinations, attractions, and seemings. The notion of a presentation is given a positive explication, which identifies its characteristic features, accounts for several of its substantive psychological roles, and systematically locates it in a threefold division among types of contentful states. Subsequently, it is argued that presentations, intuitive no less than sensory, are by their nature poised to play a distinctive epistemic role. Specifically, in the case of intuition, we encounter an intellectual state that is so structured as to provide justification without requiring justification in turn—something which may, thus, be thought of as ‘given’. (shrink)

Conceptualism is the thesis that, for any perceptual experience E, (i) E has a Fregean proposition as its content and (ii) a subject of E must possess a concept for each item represented by E. We advance a framework within which conceptualism may be defended against its most serious objections (e.g., Richard Heck's argument from nonveridical experience). The framework is of independent interest for the philosophy of mind and epistemology given its implications for debates regarding transparency, relationalism and representationalism, demonstrative (...) thought, phenomenal character, and the speckled hen objection to modest foundationalism. (shrink)

Taking perceptual experience to consist in a relation of acquaintance with the sensible qualities, I argue that the state of being acquainted with a sensible quality is intrinsically a form of knowledge, and not merely a means to more familiar kinds of knowledge, such as propositional or dispositional knowledge. We should accept the epistemic claim for its explanatory power and theoretical usefulness. That acquaintance is knowledge best explains the intuitive epistemic appeal of ‘Edenic’ counterfactuals involving unmediated perceptual contact with reality (...) (cf. Chalmers, in: Gendler, Hawthorne (eds) Perceptual experience, Oxford University Press, 2006). It explains the elusiveness of knowledge gained through new acquaintances. It coheres with the knowledge-like functional role of acquaintance in the special context of evaluative beliefs and evaluative reasoning, where the objects of acquaintance serve as evidence and inferential basis. And, finally, taking acquaintance to be knowledge is theoretically fruitful: it helps vindicate claims about the relationship between knowledge and concern for others we already find intuitive or outright accept. After developing a novel case for the epistemic claim, I respond to two familiar objections against it: namely, (1) that there are no pre-propositional, pre-conceptual cases of perceptual experience that remain epistemically relevant (Sellars in Empiricism and the philosophy of mind, Routledge, 1968, McDowell, in: Lindgard (ed) John McDowell: Experience, norm, and nature, Blackwell, 2008); and (2) that the category of knowledge appears gerrymandered once we add ‘object’ knowledge to the epistemological mix (Farkas, in: Knowles, Raleigh (eds), Acquaintance: new essays, Oxford University Press, 2019). (shrink)

This is a paper about The Causal Self-Referential Theory of Perception. According to The Causal Self-Referential Theory as developed by above all John Searle and David Woodruff Smith, perceptual content is satisfied by an object only if the object in question has caused the perceptual experience. I argue initially that Searle's account cannot explain the distinction between hallucination and illusion since it requires that the state of affairs that is presented in the perceptual experience must exist in order for the (...) perception to be veridical. Smith's account is interestingly different in that the descriptive content, i.e. the content that presents the perceptual object as having certain properties, does not determine the object of the experience. His account consequently does not require that the state of affairs that is presented in perception exists in order for the perception to have an object. Smith argues instead that perceptual reference is determined by a specific kind of demonstrative content. In this paper it is argued that Smith's account of demonstrative content is too indeterminate and in certain circumstances prescribes the wrong object. It is subsequently argued that the theory of demonstrative content can be modified so as to avoid these consequences. This modification involves deriving the conditions of satisfaction of seeing an object from the conditions of satisfaction of seeing the shape of the object, where the shape of the object is conceived of as a particularized property, what is also called a ‘trope’. (shrink)

According to naïve realist (or primitivist) theories of colour, colours are sui generis mind-independent properties. The question that I consider in this paper is the relationship of naïve realism to what Mark Johnston calls Revelation, the thesis that the essential nature of colour is fully revealed in a standard visual experience. In the first part of the paper, I argue that if naïve realism is true, then Revelation is false. In the second part of the paper, I defend naïve realism (...) against a number of objections. (shrink)

Inter-species variation in colour perception poses a serious problem for the view that colours are mind-independent properties. Given that colour perception varies so drastically across species, which species perceives colours as they really are? In this paper, I argue that all do. Specifically, I argue that members of different species perceive properties that are determinates of different, mutually compatible, determinables. This is an instance of a general selectionist strategy for dealing with cases of perceptual variation. According to selectionist views, objects (...) simultaneously instantiate a plurality of colours, all of them genuinely mind-independent, and subjects select from amongst this plurality which colours they perceive. I contrast selectionist views with relationalist views that deny the mind-independence of colour, and consider some general objections to this strategy. (shrink)

This paper presents an ‘over-representational’ account of blurred visual experiences. The basic idea is that blurred experiences provide too much, inconsistent, information about objects’ spatial boundaries, by representing them as simultaneously located at multiple locations. This account attempts to avoid problems with alternative accounts of blurred experience, according to which blur is a property of a visual field, a way of perceiving, a form of mis-representation, and a form of under-representation.

Property dualism is enjoying a slight resurgence in popularity, these days; substance dualism, not so much. But it is not as easy as one might think to be a property dualist and a substance materialist. The reasons for being a property dualist support the idea that some phenomenal properties (or qualia) are as fundamental as the most basic physical properties; but what material objects could be the bearers of the qualia? If even some qualia require an adverbial construal (if they (...) are modifications of the thing that is conscious because of them, not properties of something else to which the subject of consciousness is related), then the property dualist can be driven to speculative forms of materialism none of which, at this point, looks more likely to be true than the more modest versions of emergent dualism defended by contemporary substance dualists. (shrink)

To adopt a first-person perspective on consciousness is typically understood as a matter of inwardly engaging one's awareness in such a way as to make one's conscious states and their properties into objects of awareness. When awareness is thus inwardly engaged, experience functions as both act and object of awareness. As objects of awareness, an experience-token and its various properties are items of which a subject is aware. As an act of awareness, an experience-token is that in virtue of which (...) items - in this case, other experience-tokens and their properties - can appear, to a subject, as objects of awareness. The precise nature of the relation between experience functioning as act and as object is a matter of dispute. However, two broad possibilities can be distinguished: (1) as acts of awareness, experiences reveal other experiences to subjects by way of a form of direct, unmediated, acquaintance, (2) as acts of awareness experiences reveal other experiences to subjects by way of modes of presentation of those experiences. I shall argue against (1). Possibility (2), I shall argue, entails a form of representationalism about experiences: experiences are defined by their representational role. However, (2) also yields a crucial but largely neglected consequence of representationalism: necessarily, in any given experience, there is an aspect of this experience that must be understood in terms of its representational role but cannot be understood in terms of its representational content. I shall call this the ineliminable intentional core of the experience. The ineliminable intentional core of the experience is, necessarily, not an object of inwardly engaged awareness. This entails a significant revision in the way we think about the concept of the first-person perspective, and of what it is to study consciousness from the inside. (shrink)

The main aims in this article are to discuss and criticize the core thesis of a position that has become known as phenomenal conservatism. According to this thesis, its seeming to one that p provides enough justification for a belief in p to be prima facie justified. This thesis captures the special kind of epistemic import that seemings are claimed to have. To get clearer on this thesis, the article embeds it, first, in a probabilistic framework in which updating on (...) new evidence happens by Bayesian conditionalization, and second, a framework in which updating happens by Jeffrey conditionalization. The article spells out problems for both views, and then generalizes some of these to nonprobabilistic frameworks. The main theme of the discussion is that the epistemic import of a seeming should depend on its content in a plethora of ways that phenomenal conservatism is insensitive to. (shrink)

The aim in this paper is to focus on one of the proposals about successful perception that has led its adherents to advance some kind of disjunctive account of experience. The proposal is that we should understand the conscious sensory experience involved in successful perception in relational terms. I first try to clarify what the commitments of the view are, and where disagreements with competing views may lie. I then suggest that there are considerations relating to the conscious character of (...) our perception of events that speak in its favour. (shrink)

This paper expands on the discussion in the first section of 'Beyond phenomenal naivete'. Let Phenomenal Naivete be understood as the doctrine that some phenomenal characters of veridical experiences are factive properties concerning the external world. Here I present in detail a phenomenological case for Phenomenal Naivete and an argument from hallucination against it. I believe that these arguments show the concept of phenomenal character to be defective, overdetermined by its metaphysical and epistemological commitments together with the world. This does (...) not establish a gappish eliminativism, but a gluttish pluralism, on which there are many imperfect deservers of the name 'phenomenal character'. Different projects in the philosophy of mind -- phenomenology, philosophy of conscious, metaphysics and epistemology of perception -- are concerned with different deservers of the name. (shrink)

When I take a sip from the coffee in my cup, I can taste that it is sweet. When I hold the cup with my hands, I can feel that it is hot. Why does the experience of feeling that the cup is hot give me justification for believing that the cup is hot?And why does the experience of tasting that the coffee is sweet give me justification for believing that the coffee is sweet?In general terms: Why is it that (...) a sense experience that P is a source of justification—a reason—for believing that P? Call this the Question. I will discuss various answers to the Question, and defend the one I myself favor. (shrink)

Many people have recently argued that we need to distinguish between experiences and seemings and that this has consequences for views about how perception provides evidence. In this article I spell out my take on these issues by doing three things. First, I distinguish between mere sensations like seeing pitch black all around you and perceptual experiences like seeing a red apple. Both have sensory phenomenology in presenting us with sensory qualities like colors, being analog in Dretske's sense, and being (...) fine-grained. However, only the latter have furthermore a perceptual phenomenology characterized by objectification and related dualities of perspectivality/completion and variation/constancy. Second, I elaborate on the reasons for thinking that both mere sensations and perceptual experiences need to be distinguished from accompanying seemings that passively assign things into conceptual categories and thereby tell you something about them. For example, when you look at a red apple and have the relevant recognitional abilities it will also normally seem to you that this is an apple. Finally, I argue that the best version of the popular dogmatist view about evidence is one which claims that it's neither experiences nor seemings by themselves, but rather the right sorts of composites of experiences and seemings that provide evidence. (shrink)

This chapter considers how Liberal Naturalism interacts with the main problems and theories in the philosophy of perception. After briefly summarising the traditional philosophical problems of perception and outlining the standard philosophical theories of perceptual experience, it discusses whether a Liberal Naturalist outlook should incline one towards or away from any of these standard theories. Particular attention is paid to the work of John McDowell and Hilary Putnam, two of the most prominent Liberal Naturalists, whose work was also very influential (...) in the philosophy of perception. There is also a section focusing on colour, an especially important topic not only for debates about perceptual experience but also for debates concerning how our ‘manifest image’ of the natural world relates to our best theories in the physical sciences. (shrink)

A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic had been responsible for introducing the Vienna Circle’s ideas, developed within a Germanophone framework, to an Anglophone readership. Inevitably, this migration from one context to another resulted in the alteration of some of the concepts being transmitted. Such alterations have served to facilitate a number of false impressions of Logical Empiricism from which recent scholarship still tries to recover. In this paper, I will attempt to point to the ways in which LTL has (...) helped to foster the various mistaken stereotypes about Logical Empiricism which were combined into the received view. I will begin by examining Ayer’s all too brief presentation of an Anglocentric lineage for his ideas. This lineage, as we shall see, simply omits the major 19th century Germanophone influences on the rise of analytic philosophy. The Germanophone ideas he presents are selectively introduced into an Anglophone context, and directed towards various concerns that arose within that context. I will focus on the differences between Carnap’s version of the overcoming of metaphysics, and Ayer’s reconfiguration into what he calls the elimination of metaphysics. Having discussed the above, I will very briefly outline the consequences that Ayer’s radicalisation of the Vienna Circle’s doctrines had on the subsequent Anglophone reception of Logical Empiricism. (shrink)

I argue that we can achieve certainty about some empirical propositions. When someone is having a migraine and attending to it, she can be certain that she is in pain. I show that examples intended to undermine claims of certainty or to raise doubts about the reliability of introspection do not touch such cases. Traditional foundationalists have held that epistemically certain beliefs can serve as the basis for all one’s other justified beliefs. This is not so, because those beliefs that (...) are certain are spread too thinly to serve as broad justificatory foundations. Certainty has a different role. The best explanation for the existence of epistemically certain empirical beliefs is experientialism, the view that nondoxastic sensory experiences can justify beliefs. Experientialism then offers a framework for showing how the stream of sensory experiences can provide an adequate basis for the justification of our ordinary beliefs about the external world. (shrink)

This paper shows that Husserl is not guilty of Sellars’ myth of the sensory given. I firstly show that Husserl’s account of ‘sensations’ or ‘sense data’ seems to possess some of the attributes Sellars’ myth critiques. In response I show that, just as Sellars thinks that our ‘conceptual capacities’ afford us an awareness of a logical perceptual space that has a propositional structure, Husserl thinks that ‘acts of apprehension’ structure sensations to afford us perception that is similarly propositionally structured. Not (...) only this, but there is much affinity and shared motivation between Husserl and Sellars accounts of the sensory stratum. Reflection on phenomenological considerations prevents Sellars from denying phenomenal non-conceptual content, whilst Husserlian ‘sense data’ are technical designations; dependant parts of perceptual experience grasped in abstraction, necessary for providing a reflective/philosophical account of empirical knowledge. I show that both Husserl and Sellars assert that the proper description of phenomenal content affords it the function of presenting properties of spatial objects during perception, and reiterate the well-known fact that Husserl thinks that perception is of ‘conceptually’ apprehended spatiotemporal objects. (shrink)

Disjunctivists (Hinton 1973, Snowdon 1990, Martin 2002, 2006) often motivate their approach to perceptual experience by appealing in part to the claim that in cases of veridical perception, the subject is directly in contact with the perceived object. When I perceive a table, for example, there is no table-like sense-impression that stands as an intermediary between the table and me. Nor am I related to the table as I am to a deer when I see its footprint in the snow. (...) I do not experience the table by experiencing some- thing else over and above the table and its facing surface. I see the facing surface of the table directly. (shrink)

Phenomenal character is determined by representational content, which both hallucinatory and veridical experiences can share. But in the case of veridical experience, unlike hallucination, the external objects of experience literally have the properties one is aware of in experience. The representationalist can accept the common factor assumption without having to introduce sensory intermediaries between the mind and the world, thus securing a form of direct realism.

Various reflections on the nature of consciousness, partly inspired by Alastair Hannay's views on the subject, are presented. In particular, its reality as a distinct non-physical existence is defended against such alternatives as have dominated philosophy for many years. The main difficulty in such a defense concerns the contingency it seems to imply as to the relations between consciousness and its expression in behaviour. But it only implies such contingency if some version of the Humean principle that there cannot be (...) necessary connections between distinct existences is assumed. It is more promising to see this relation as the falsification of this Humean principle and thus avoid what seems the main recommendation of behaviourism, functionalism etc. Some final reflections on the nature of the physical suggest that something like consciousness may be the noumenal essence of the physical in general. (shrink)

Current orthodoxy in the philosophy of perception views indirect realism as misguided, wrongheaded or simply outdated. The reasons for its pariah status are variegated. Although it is surely not unreasonable to speculate that philosophical fashion is one factor that contributes to this situation, there are also solid philosophical arguments which put pressure on the indirect realist position. In this paper, I will discuss one such main objection and show how the indirect realist can face it. The upshot will be a (...) defence of a new structural account of indirect realism which is immune to a number of objections that have been traditionally levelled at such theories of perceptual consciousness. (shrink)

Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 115, Issue 3pt3, Page 277-306, December 2015.

In The Problem of Perception, A.D. Smith’s central aim is to defend the view that we can directly perceive ordinary objects, such as cups, keys and the like.1 The book is organized around the two arguments that Smith considers to be serious threats to the possibility of direct perception: the argument from illusion, and the argument from hallucination. The argument from illusion threatens this possibility because it concludes that indirect realism is true. Indirect realism is the view that we perceive (...) mind-independent ordinary objects, but can only do so indirectly, by perceiving mind-dependent objects: objects whose existence depends on being perceived or thought about. The argument from hallucination draws a similar conclusion: if we perceive mindindependent ordinary objects at all, then our perception of them is indirect in the same way. In responding to these arguments, Smith develops an account of percep- tual consciousness. Perceptual consciousness is a kind of experience, distinct from what Smith calls ‘mere sensory experiences’, or equivalently, ‘mere sensation’. Perceptual consciousness is experience that is properly percep- tual, in which one has the phenomenology of perceiving things in the external world (including one’s body) that exist independently of one’s mind. Perceptual consciousness on its own does not suffice for actually being in perceptual contact with mind-independent reality, although it suffices for it to seem as if one i s . It follows that perceptual consciousness does not suffice for direct perception of ordinary objects, or for direct realism. Nevertheless, Smith holds that the correct account of perceptual consciousness is a crucial element in blocking the arguments from illusion and hallucination, and therefore in supporting the possibility of direct perception. This is an extraordinarily engaging book. Within a single, unified narrative, one encounters the views of many philosophers—Husserl, Fine, Broad, Sextus Empiricus, Loar, Schopenhauer, Meinong, Burge, Dilthey, Russell, Dennett, Sartre, O’Shaughnessy, Evans, Berkeley, Craig, Brentano and many.... (shrink)

I develop a view of perception that does justice to Price's intuition that all sensory experience acquaints us with sensible qualities like colour and shape. Contrary to the received opinion, I argue that we can respect this intuition while insisting that ordinary perception puts us in direct contact with the mind-independent world. In other words, Price's intuition is compatible with naïve realism. Both hallucinations and ordinary perceptions acquaint us with instances of the same kinds of sensible qualities. While the instances (...) in hallucination are mind-dependent, those in veridical perception are not. The latter are ontologically over-determined —they have their existence guaranteed both in virtue of having a material bearer and in virtue of being perceived by a mind. Such over-determined instances are mind-independent—they can continue to exist unperceived, because, in addition to the minds that perceive them, their existence is guaranteed by the material objects that are their bearers. (shrink)

I argue that any account of perceptual experience should satisfy the following two desiderata. First, it should account for the particularity of perceptual experience, that is, it should account for the mind-independent object of an experience making a difference to individuating the experience. Second, it should explain the possibility that perceptual relations to distinct environments could yield subjectively indistinguishable experiences. Relational views of perceptual experience can easily satisfy the first but not the second desideratum. Representational views can easily satisfy the (...) second but not the first desideratum. I argue that to satisfy both desiderata perceptual experience is best conceived of as fundamentally both relational and representational. I develop a view of perceptual experience that synthesizes the virtues of relationalism and representationalism, by arguing that perceptual content is constituted by potentially gappy de re modes of presentation. (shrink)

Recently, the thesis that experience is fundamentally a matter of representing the world as being a certain way has been questioned by austere relationalists. I defend this thesis by developing a view of perceptual content that avoids their objections. I will argue that on a relational understanding of perceptual content, the fundamental insights of austere relationalism do not compete with perceptual experience being representational. As it will show that most objections to the thesis that experience has content apply only to (...) accounts of perceptual content on which perceptual relations to the world play no explanatory role. With austere relationalists, I will argue that perceptual experience is fundamentally relational. But against austere relationalists, I will argue that it is fundamentally both relational and representational. (shrink)

I develop a view of the common factor between subjectively indistinguishable perceptions and hallucinations that avoids analyzing experiences as involving awareness relations to abstract entities, sense-data, or any other peculiar entities. The main thesis is that hallucinating subjects employ concepts (or analogous nonconceptual structures), namely the very same concepts that in a subjectively indistinguishable perception are employed as a consequence of being related to external, mind-independent objects or property-instances. These concepts and nonconceptual structures are identified with modes of presentation types. (...) Since a hallucinating subject is not related to any such objects or property-instances, the concepts she employs remain empty. I argue that the phenomenology of hallucinations and perceptions can be identified with employing concepts and analogous nonconceptual structures. By doing so, I defend an ontologically minimalist view of the phenomenology of experience that (1) vindicates Aristotelianism about types and (2) amounts to a naturalized view of the phenomenology of experience. (shrink)

Does a penny viewed at an angle in some sense look elliptical, as though projected on a two-dimensional surface? Many philosophers have said such things, from Malebranche (1674/1997) and Hume (1739/1978), through early 20th-century sense-data theorists, to Tye (2000) and Noë (2004). I confess that it doesn't seem this way to me, though I'm somewhat baffled by the phenomenology and pessimistic about our ability to resolve the dispute. I raise geometrical complaints against the view and conjecture that views of this (...) sort draw some of their appeal from over-analogizing visual experience to painting or photography. Theorists writing in contexts where vision is typically analogized to less-projective media--wax signet impressions in ancient Greece, stereoscopy in introspective psychology circa 1900--are substantially less likely to attribute such projective distortions to visual appearances. (shrink)

The force of sceptical inquiries into out knowledge of other people is a paradigm of the force that philosophical views can have. Sceptical views arise out of philosophical inquiries that are identical in all major respects with inquiries that we employ in ordinary cases. These inquiries employ perfectly mundane methods of making and assessing claims to know. This paper tries to show that these inquiries are conducted in cases that lack certain contextual ingredients found in ordinary cases. The paper concludes (...) that these ordinary methods of inquiry, when employed in these limited cases, put us in a position in which we actually cannot know. Thus our ability to know will be a function of the added contextual elements that are found in ordinary cases. A second conclusion is that we come literally to observe bodily behaviour in the course of the sceptical inquiry; while in ordinary cases we observe pain-behaviour. (shrink)

Gilbert Harman (1990) seeks to defend psychophysical functionalism by articulating a representationalist view of the qualities of experience. The negative side of the present paper argues that the resources of this representationalist view are insufficient to ground the evident distinction between perception and (mere) thought. This failure makes the view unable to support the uses to which Harman wishes to put it. Several rescuing moves by other representationalists are considered, but none is found successful. Part of the difficulty in Harman's (...) (...) work is that he does not adequately specify the view he rejects. The positive aim of the present paper is to provide a robust intrinsic quality account of experience that offers advantages in comparison with Harman's view, and that plainly does not fall to any of the arguments he advances. (shrink)

The 18th-century Scottish ‘common sense’ philosopher Thomas Reid argued that perception can be distinguished on several dimensions from other categories of experience, such as sensation, illusion, hallucination, mental images, and what he called ‘fancy.’ We extend his approach to eleven mental categories, and discuss how these distinctions, often ignored in the empirical literature, bear on current research. We also score each category on five properties (ones abstracted from Reid) to form a 5 × 11 matrix, and thus can generate statistical (...) measures of their mutual dependencies, a procedure that may have general interest as illustrating what we can call ‘computational philosophy.’. (shrink)