Science has uncovered many mistakes that had been hidden for centuries among implicit everyday assumptions. When we make explicit what lies implicit within language, there is no guarantee that we will arrive at truth about the world. Many therefore assume that only science delivers truth. Recent debates on this issue often refer to Wilfred Sellars’s arguments against the pre-conceptual given but conclude that his additional insistence on the exclusivity of the scientific image of the world is unfounded. In this paper (...) I resort to Robert Brandom’s development of these arguments to show that saying a word, understanding a concept and engaging in some practices go together. Both laws of nature and social norms regulate these practices and determine the identity conditions of objects. I argue therefore that the conceptual scheme indeed reflects the nature of things because it results from our successful engagement with the world during the long sweep of evolutionary time. (shrink)

John Cook Wilson (1849–1915) was Wykeham Professor of Logic at New College, Oxford and the founder of ‘Oxford Realism’, a philosophical movement that flourished at Oxford during the first decades of the 20th century. Although trained as a classicist and a mathematician, his most important contribution was to the theory of knowledge, where he argued that knowledge is factive and not definable in terms of belief, and he criticized ‘hybrid’ and ‘externalist’ accounts. He also argued for direct realism in perception, (...) criticizing both empiricism and idealism, and argued for a moderate nominalist view of universals as being in rebus and only ‘apprehended’ by their particulars. His influence helped swaying Oxford away from idealism and, through figures such as H. A. Prichard, Gilbert Ryle, or J. L. Austin, his ideas were also to some extent at the origin of ‘moral intuitionism’ and ‘ordinary language philosophy’ which defined much of Oxford philosophy until the second half of the twentieth-century. Nevertheless, his name and legacy were all but forgotten for generations after World War II. Still, his views on knowledge are with us today, being in part at work in the writings of philosophers as diverse as John McDowell, Charles Travis, and Timothy Williamson. (shrink)

What determines the meaning of a context-sensitive expression in a context? It is standardly assumed that, for a given expression type, there will be a unitary answer to this question; most of the literature on the subject involves arguments designed to show that one particular metasemantic proposal is superior to a specific set of alternatives. The task of the present essay will be to explore whether this is a warranted assumption, or whether the quest for the one true metasemantics might (...) be a Quixotic one. We argue that there are good reasons—much better than are commonly appreciated—for thinking the latter, but that there nevertheless remains significant scope for metasemantic theorizing. We conclude by outlining our preferred option, metasemantic pluralism. (shrink)

Mysterianism has become a popular stance in philosophy of consciousness and other philosophical subdisciplines. The aim of this paper is to show that mysterianism is not justified, mainly because its inclination to epistemic defeatism and the misunderstanding of the division of epistemic labour. In the first part, I will present the history of mysterianism in the 19th and 20th century philosophy. Then, in the second part, I will point out how epistemic defeatism is founded in the unwarranted philosophical futurology. The (...) third part will deal with the division of labour in society, language and knowledge. Because of the division of epistemic labour, the understanding is distributed among numerous agents without possibility of individual comprehension. Finally, I will coin the term “ignorance illusion” that plays the central role in the mysterians’ worldview. (shrink)

Les théories descriptives ont tenté d'éliminer certaines contradictions logiques si les noms étaient considérés comme des descriptions définitives. Kripke a rejeté la validité de ces théories descriptives en faisant valoir qu'aucune description unique de l'identité n'était nécessaire, les descriptions d'identification peuvent être utilisées même si la référence n'a pas été correctement identifiée, et une description (par opposition à un nom) ne peut pas fonctionner comme un indicateur rigide. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.22215.85920.

Teoriile descriptiviste au încercat să elimine anumite contradicții logice dacă numele erau considerate descrieri definite. Kripke a respins valabilitatea acestor teoriile descriptiviste argumentând că nu este nevoie de o descriere unică a identității, se pot utiliza descrieri identificatoare chiar dacă referința nu a fost identificată corect, și o descriere (spre deosebire de un nume) nu poate funcționa ca indicator rigid. Ulterior, teoriile descriptiviste au extins această idee a descrierii definite la un set de descrieri sau o medie ponderată a acestor (...) descrieri. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.25776.00009. (shrink)

Our interpretive resources enable us to make sense of, navigate, and communicate about our shared world. These resources not only carve the world up into categories, but also guide how we, individually and collectively, are oriented towards it. In this thesis, I examine how these resources, and the dispositions they guide, may be harmful. A vital kind of interpretive resources are frames, which equip us with unified perspectives on the world. Perspectives are suites of open-ended interpretive (inquisitive, attentional, inferential, evaluative, (...) and affective) dispositions. Frames thereby guide how we interpret, respond to, and navigate the world. I show that these perspectives are epistemically powerful and indispensable. I argue that flawed perspectives, and the distorting frames that produce them, are deeply pernicious and I examine their relationship to oppression. (shrink)

This paper exposes a common mistake concerning the division of linguistic labor. I characterize the mistake as an overgeneralization from natural kind terms; this misleads philosophers about which terms are subject to the division of linguistic labor, what linguistic labor is, how linguistic labor is divided, and how the extensions of non-natural kind terms subject to the division of linguistic labor are determined. I illustrate these points by considering Sally Haslanger’s account of the division of linguistic labor for social kind (...) terms and raising an objection to it. Then, I draw on Tyler Burge’s work to characterize a conception of the division of linguistic labor that avoids the mistaken overgeneralization and grounds 1–4 above in social norms and practices. (shrink)

Conceptual engineering is to be explained by appeal to the externalist distinction between concepts and conceptions. If concepts are determined by non-conceptual relations to objective properties rather than by associated conceptions (whether individual or communal), then topic preservation through semantic change will be possible. The requisite level of objectivity is guaranteed by the possibility of collective error and does not depend on a stronger level of objectivity, such as mind-independence or independence from linguistic or social practice more generally. This means (...) that the requisite level of objectivity is exhibited not only by natural kinds, but also by a wide range of philosophical kinds, social kinds and artefactual kinds. The alternative externalist accounts of conceptual engineering offered by Herman Cappelen and Derek Ball fall back into a kind of descriptivism which is antithetical to externalism and fails to recognise this basic level of objectivity. (shrink)

I argue for a theory of the optimal function of the speech act of referring, called the edenic theory. First, the act of singular reference is defined directly in terms of Gricean communicative intentions. Second, I propose a doxastic constraint on the optimal performance of such acts, stating, roughly, that the speaker must not have any relevant false beliefs about the identity or distinctness of the intended object. In uttering a singular term on an occasion, on this theory, one represents (...) oneself as not having any confused beliefs about the object to which one intends to refer. This paves the way for an intentionalist theory of reference that circumvents well-known problems, which have not been adequately addressed before in the literature. (shrink)

Content externalism implies first, that there is a distinction between concepts and conceptions, and second, that there is a distinction between thoughts and states of mind. In this paper, I argue for a novel theory of self-knowledge: the partial-representation theory of self-knowledge, according to which the self-ascription of a thought is authoritative when it is based on a con-scious, occurrent thought in virtue of which it partially represents an underlying state of mind.

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)

A number of philosophers have recently suggested that the role of intuitions in the epistemology of armchair philosophy has been exaggerated. This suggestion is rehearsed and endorsed. What bearing does the rejection of the centrality of intuition in armchair philosophy have on experimentalist critiques of the latter? I distinguish two very different kinds of experimentalist critique: one critique requires the centrality of intuition; the other does not.

Abstract Timothy Williamson has recently proposed to undermine modal skepticism by appealing to the reducibility of modal to counterfactual logic ( Reducibility ). Central to Williamson’s strategy is the claim that use of the same non-deductive mode of inference ( counterfactual development , or CD ) whereby we typically arrive at knowledge of counterfactuals suffices for arriving at knowledge of metaphysical necessity via Reducibility. Granting Reducibility, I ask whether the use of CD plays any essential role in a Reducibility-based reply (...) to two kinds of modal skepticism. I argue that its use is entirely dispensable, and that Reducibility makes available replies to modal skeptics which show certain propositions to be metaphysically necessary by deductive arguments from premises the modal skeptic accepts can be known. Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-19 DOI 10.1007/s11098-011-9784-4 Authors Juhani Yli-Vakkuri, Wolfson College, Oxford University, Oxford, OX2 6UD UK Journal Philosophical Studies Online ISSN 1573-0883 Print ISSN 0031-8116. (shrink)

In this paper I argue first, that a contrastive account of self-knowledge and the propositional attitudes entails an anti-individualist account of propositional attitude concepts, second, that the final account provides a solution to the McKinsey paradox, and third, that the account has the resources to explain why certain anti-skeptical arguments fail.

Noam Chomsky influenced the Linguistics and Psychology development decisively in the twentieth century, and was one of the cognitive science founders. In philosophy, his influence was important too, but the most of his observations about natural language semantics never was accepted by mainstream philosophy of language. The externalism of the leading persons in that philosophical current was just incompatible with the internalist approach proposed at the outset by Chomsky to language study. In this article, I highlight the points in which (...) the externalist philosophy of language and the Chomskyan internalism get attrition in a more impressive way by making explicit the arguments that Chomsky presents to defend your position and to attack the externalist view. (shrink)

This third paper locates the synthetic neurorobotics research reviewed in the second paper in terms of themes introduced in the first paper. It begins with biological non-reductionism as understood by Searle. It emphasizes the role of synthetic neurorobotics studies in accessing the dynamic structure essential to consciousness with a focus on system criticality and self, develops a distinction between simulated and formal consciousness based on this emphasis, reviews Tani and colleagues' work in light of this distinction, and ends by forecasting (...) the increasing importance of synthetic neurorobotics studies for cognitive science and philosophy of mind going forward, finally in regards to most- and myth-consciousness. (shrink)

‘Free action’ is subject to the causal theory of reference and thus that The essential nature of free actions can be discovered only by empirical investigation, not by conceptual analysis. Heller ’s proposal, if true, would have significant philosophical implications. Consider the enduring issue we will call the Compatibility Issue : whether the thesis of determinism is logically compatible with the claim that.

What is the scope of a semantic theory consistent with the theoretical assumptions adopted by the generative program? In this paper I will show that the linguistic theory generically known as generative grammar is an extremely coherent Scientific Research Program and within this descriptive framework it’s possible to characterize the main features of an I-semantics. First, will be presented the hardcore of the generative program, its heuristics and Chomsky’s criticism towards formal semantics. Second, I will compare two approaches: the denotational (...) approach by Larson and Segal and the intensional approach by Paul Pietroski. I argue in favor of Pietroski’s approach, because it is more coherent with the core assumptions of the generative program. The main argument is that syntax, in the context of the generative program is explanatory and, in this very context, semantics is not. Therefore, in order to account for the explanatory role of syntax in the generative program it is necessary to review certain foundational assumptions commonly accepted in formal semantics. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that, contrary to the constructive empiricist’s position, observability is not an adequate criterion as a guide to ontological commitment in science. My argument has two parts. First, I argue that the constructive empiricist’s choice of observability as a criterion for ontological commitment is based on the assumption that belief in the existence of unobservable entities is unreasonable because belief in the existence of an entity can only be vindicated by its observation. Second, I argue that (...) the kind of ontological commitment that is under consideration when accepting a scientific theory is commitment to what I call theoretical kinds and that observation can vindicate commitment to kinds only in exceptional cases. (shrink)

Can psychology explain the qualitative content of experience? A persistent philosophical objection to that discipline is that it cannot. Qualitative states or 'qualia' are argued to have characteristics which cannot be explained in terms of their relationships to other psychological states, stimuli, and behavior. Since psychology is confined to descriptions of such relationships, it seems that psychology cannot explain qualia. A paradigm case of qualia is provided by simultaneous color contrast effects, in which a neutral grey patch is made to (...) look reddish by being enclosed in a green surround. If the qualia based objections are sound, psychology ought not to be able to explain simultaneous color contrast; but psychology at least seems to be able quite successfully to explain those effects. This paper analyzes the logic of psychological explanations of simultaneous color contrast effects, and the import of various qualia based objections to those explanations. I argue that the qualia objections do not demonstrate any explanatory inadequacy in existing psychological explanations of 'looks'. Psychology succeeds in explaining at least some qualia. In a more positive vein, I argue that once the structure of such explanations is sufficiently understood, a place can be found for qualia within the emerging scientific account of color perception. The resulting account can deal with many of the traditional perplexities over qualia. (shrink)

Emergentism is an important and yet underexplored component of John Dewey’s metaphysical program, and concerns the ways in which existences relate, operate, and grow in coordination with a more inclusive environment. Through an emergent account, Dewey addresses continuities among the generic traits of nature, inanimate substance, biological life, and experiential “fields” such as mind and consciousness. The notion of a field is especially important for depicting the ways in which existences serially interact in accordance with some particular purpose or set (...) of functions. Apart from an emergent scheme that contextualizes the interactive contexts of experience, phenomena such as “mind” and “consciousness” remain enigmatic occurrences. Moreover, cognition, and with it instances of “knowing,” remain susceptible to merely “subjective” characterizations that reinforce a misleading dualism between mind and nature. In addition to its role in addressing naturalistic continuities, Dewey’s emergentism suggests a non-reductive philosophical methodology that directly challenges contemporary varieties of realism and materialism. (shrink)

This paper attempts to revisit how ‘acquaintance’ could bring about belief and how belief becomes knowledge in our language system due to the credential undertaking of truth, justification, evidence, and causal or conceptual preservation. My quest in this paper is to interrogate belief and the cessation of belief (I call this the ‘death of belief’) from the perspective of the doxastic approach of externalism and internalism in the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. I will attempt to make sense (...) of the nominal appeal (an approach that conserves the process of continuing belief through evidence and conceptualization) to both of these ideas in a sophisticated manner. The linguistic form of using words seems allied to the context sensitivity of the speakers involved in social practices. A tripartite structure pivots the model of linguistic belief, where minds are causally entrenched in a world that stimulates conceptual or internal states, representing how objectivity works. The entanglements of concepts with pictures hinge on conceptual prerequisites to impact the world. (shrink)

In this paper, I will analyze certain aspects of imaginative content, namely the content of the representational mental state called “imagining.” I will show that fully accounting for imaginative content requires acknowledging that, in addition to imagining, an imaginative project—the overall mental activity we engage in when we imagine—includes another infrastructural component in terms of which content should be explained. I will then show that the phenomenon of imaginative immersion can partly be explained in terms of the proposed infrastructure of (...) imaginative projects. (shrink)

This essay reviews Theatre, Communication, Critical Realism (2010) by Tobin Nellhaus. It begins by outlining the objective of the book and proceeds to evaluate its central argument. The objective is to develop a theory of theatre founded on the premises of critical realism and thereby theoretically situate theatrical performance in its socio-cultural matrix. The argument is that critical realism is effective for developing a comprehensive account of theatrical performance because it has the capacity to reveal truths about the structure of (...) social reality (that correspond to those articulated by critical realism). In the second part of the review, employing the methods of conceptual analysis, I propose that Nellhaus’s thesis of ‘ontological doubling’ (which claims that performance doubles human agency) is undermined by certain epistemological presuppositions regarding the ontology of fictional characters. (shrink)

The ‘Mind-Upload’ hypothesis, a radical version of the Brain-in-a-Vat thought experiment, asserts that a whole mind can safely be transferred from a brain to a digital device, after being exactly encoded into substrate independent informational patterns. Prima facie, MU seems the philosophical archenemy of the Embodied Mind theory, which understands embodiment as a necessary and constitutive condition for the existence of a mind and its functions. In truth, whether and why MU and EM are ultimately incompatible is unobvious. This paper, (...) which aims to answer both questions, will not simply confirm that MU and EM actually are incompatible. It will also show the true reason of their incompatibility: while EM implies that a mind’s individual identity is contingent upon the details of its physical constituents, MU presupposes that minds can be relocated from one material vessel to another. A systematic comparison between these conflicting assumptions reveals that the real shortcoming of MU is not the one usually discussed by the philosophical literature: it has nothing to do with MU’s functionalist or computationalist prerequisites, and is only secondarily related to the artificial implementability of consciousness; the real problem is that MU presupposes that minds could still be individuated and numerically identified while being reduced to immaterial formal patterns. EM seems committed to refute this assumption, but does it have sufficient resources to succeed? (shrink)

It is well known that experts’ opinion and testimony take on a decisive weight in judicial fact-finding, raising issues and perplexities that have long been under scholarly scrutiny. In this paper I argue that expert’s opinions have a much wider impact on legal decision-making. In particular, they may generate a problem that I will call ‘the opacity of law’. A legal text, such as a statute or regulation, becomes opaque if a legal authority is not able to grasp its full (...) linguistic content but is nevertheless in a position to use it, thanks to an expert’ opinion, in legal decision-making. When this occurs, not only do experts contribute to fact-finding but also to determining the content of the law. In the paper I analyse the linguistic and cognitive sources of this phenomenon, its characteristics and troublesome consequences, and the different kinds of opacity that may affect legal decision-making. (shrink)

It is well known that experts’ opinion and testimony take on a decisive weight in judicial fact-finding, raising issues and perplexities that have long been under scholarly scrutiny. In this paper I argue that expert’s opinions have a much wider impact on legal decision-making. In particular, they may generate a problem that I will call ‘the opacity of law’. A legal text, such as a statute or regulation, becomes opaque if a legal authority is not able to grasp its full (...) linguistic content but is nevertheless in a position to use it, thanks to an expert’ opinion, in legal decision-making. When this occurs, not only do experts contribute to fact-finding but also to determining the content of the law. In the paper I analyse the linguistic and cognitive sources of this phenomenon, its characteristics and troublesome consequences, and the different kinds of opacity that may affect legal decision-making. (shrink)

In a series of papers, Jesper Kallestrup and Duncan Pritchard argue that the thesis that knowledge is a cognitive success because of cognitive ability (robust virtue epistemology) is incompatible with the idea that whether or not an agent’s true belief amounts to knowledge can significantly depend upon factors beyond her cognitive agency (epistemic dependence). In particular, certain purely modal facts seem to preclude knowledge, while the contribution of other agents’ cognitive abilities seems to enable it. Kallestrup and Pritchard’s arguments are (...) targeted against views that hold that all it takes to manifest one’s cognitive agency is to properly exercise one’s belief-forming abilities. I offer an account of the notion of cognitive ability according to which our epistemic resources are not exhausted by abilities to produce true beliefs as outputs, but also include dispositions to stop belief-formation when actual or modal circumstances are not suitable for it (precautionary cognitive abilities). Knowledge, I argue, can be accordingly conceived as a cognitive success that is also due to the latter. The resulting version of robust virtue epistemology helps explain how purely modal facts as well as other agents’ cognitive abilities may have a bearing on the manifestation of one’s cognitive agency, which shows in turn that robust virtue epistemology and epistemic dependence are not incompatible after all. (shrink)

Scientific writings and policy documents define the terms nanomaterial and nanoparticle in various ways. This variation is considered problematic because the absence of a shared definition is understood as potentially hindering nanomaterial knowledge production and regulation. Another view is that the existence of a shared definition may itself cause problems, as rigid definitions arguably exclude important aspects of the studied phenomena. The aim of this paper is to inform this state of disagreement by providing analytical concepts for a systematic understanding (...) of how, and even whether, nanomaterial and nanoparticle could and should be defined. To do this, we review definitions of nanomaterial and nanoparticle presented in research articles and policy documents. Definitions were identified by first conducting a Scopus search and then tracing cited definitions back to their sources. In total, 36 definitions were identified. Theories of definition from philosophy and linguistics provide analytical guidance for structuring and categorizing the identified definitions, and the main analytical dimensions of the definitions are then identified and discussed. Finally, we propose a framework for understanding the process of defining nanomaterial and nanoparticle. This framework considers both the generality needed for a shared understanding and the level of precision required for different purposes. (shrink)

The canonical arguments against the description theory of names are usually taken to have established that the reference of a name as used on a given occasion is not semantically determined by the qualitative descriptions that the speaker may have in mind. The deepest moral of these arguments, on the received view, would be that the speaker’s narrow mental states play no semantic role in fixing reference. My central aim in this paper is to challenge this common understanding by highlighting (...) that the same argumentative schemas can be adapted to undermine a related non-description theory, according to which the reference of a name as used on a given occasion would semantically depend on broad mental states of the speaker. Once this is realised, it becomes evident that the falsity of the description theory is not the deepest lesson of the canonical arguments, but only a consequence of the deepest lesson. The most fundamental moral is that the speaker’s mental states, whether narrow or broad, do not always determine linguistic reference. (shrink)

We talk as if there are natural kinds and in particular we quantify over them. We can count the number of elements discovered by Sir Humphrey Davy, or the number of kinds of particle in the standard model. Consequently, it looks at first sight at least, that natural kinds are entities of a sort. In the light of this we may ask certain questions: is the apparent existence of natural kinds real or an illusion? And if real, what sort of (...) entity are natural kinds? Are they sui generis? Or can they be identified with or reduced to some other kind of entity? In this essay I shall look at possible reasons for asserting that either kinds are no sort of entity, or, if they are entities, their existence is equivalent to some fact not involving kinds. Richard Boyd seems to take the view that the apparent existence of natural kinds is an illusion. (shrink)

Attempting to compare scientific theories requires a philosophical model of meaning. Yet different scientific theories have at times—particularly in early chemistry—pre-supposed disparate theories of meaning. When two theories of meaning are incommensurable, we must say that the scientific theories that rely upon them are meta-incommensurable. Meta- incommensurability is a more profound sceptical threat to science since, unlike first-order incommensurability, it implies complete incomparability.

The paper makes two points. First, any theory of knowledge must explain the difference between cases of knowledge from falsehood and Gettier cases where the subject relies on reasoning from falsehood. Second, the closeness-to-the-truth approach to explaining the difference between knowledge-yielding and knowledge-suppressing falsehoods does not hold up to scrutiny.

The Physical Intentionality Thesis claims that dispositions share the marks of psychological intentionality; therefore, intentionality is not exclusively a mental phenomenon. Beyond the standard five marks, Alexander Bird introduces two additional marks of intentionality that he argues dispositions do not satisfy: first, thoughts are extrinsic; second, the direction of causation is that objects cause thoughts, not vice versa. In response, this paper identifies two relevant conceptions of extrinsicness, arguing that dispositions show deep parallels to thoughts on both conceptions. Then, it (...) shows that Bird’s discussion of direction of causation overlooks complexities of dispositionality and intentionality that problematize apparent differences between thoughts and dispositions. The paper ends with a discussion of why we find these parallels between thoughts and dispositions. (shrink)

The paper is an addition to the intensionalist approach to decision theory, with emphasis on game theoretic modelling. Extensionality in games is an a priori requirement that players exhibit the same behavior in all algebraically equivalent games on pain of irrationality. Intensionalism denies that it is always irrational to play differently in differently represented but algebraically equivalent versions of a game. I offer a framework to integrate game non-extensionality with the more familiar idea of linguistic non-extensionality from philosophy of language, (...) followed by applications of it based on toy examples of well-known game models. I argue that the notion of what I call “Intensional Nash Equilibrium” is, in effect, very useful in understanding human decision-making. (shrink)

The present paper is a continuation of a previous one by the same title, the content of which faced the issue concerning the relations of coreference and qualification in compliance with the Navya-Nyāya theoretical framework, although prompted by the Advaita-Vedānta enquiry regarding non-difference. In a complementary manner, by means of a formal analysis of equivalence, equality, and identity, this section closes the loop by assessing the extent to which non-difference, the main issue here, cannot be reduced to any of the (...) former. The following sections of this study will focus on the assessment of the eventual possibility of causation and transformation in non-difference. (shrink)

In this paper I explored three well-known cases that seem to cast doubt on the notion that a speaker is always at the place of the utterance when the utterance occurs. I gave a few examples produced in Second Life environment, which cannot be handled correctly by evaluating the expression at issue with respect to the traditional view, i.e., the kaplanian framework—where the agent and the utterer will always be identical, and the referent of “I” will always be the utterer. (...) The same happens to “here” and “now”; in each case the character of the indexical is a function from a contextual parameter to the referent of the expression. An example of logical truth peculiar to indexicals is the sentence “I am here now”, since, according to that view, no utterance can take place in a context whose agent is not in its location in its time. Finally I concluded by claiming that particular kinds of utterances produced in virtual environments (VE) break with the logical truth status of “I am here now”. (shrink)

In the present paper, the notion that brains in vats with perceptual experiences of the same type as ours could perceptually represent other entities than shapes is challenged. Whereas it is often held that perceptual experiences with the same phenomenal character as ours could represent computational properties, I argue that this is not the case for shapes. My argument is in brief that the phenomenal character of a normal visual experience exemplifies shapes – phenomenal shapes – which functions as the (...) vehicle for our perceptual representation of shapes. Due to the unique mereological structure of shapes, phenomenal shapes are unable to reliably track any property but shapes. In so far as reliable tracking is a necessary condition for perceptual representation, phenomenal shapes can consequently and contrary to received wisdom only represent shapes. (shrink)

This paper presents a framework for analysing perceptual Twin Earth thought experiments. Visual content normally has an analogue character, and it is argued in this paper that this sets certain constraints on the extent to which Twin Earth thought experiments can be successful. The argumentation in the paper is developed by using examples from visual spatial content. It is argued that visual spatial content can only be “twin-earthed” in a very limited way. Whereas the metrics of space can be twin-earthed, (...) visual experience has a structure that means that it can only be the vehicle for representing entities with geometrical structures. (shrink)