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Some experiments in perceptual psychology measure perceivers’ phenomenal experiences of objects versus their cognitive assessments of object properties. Analyzing such experiments, this article responds to Pizlo’s claim that much work on shape constancy before 1985 confused problems of shape ambiguity with problems of shape constancy. Pizlo fails to grasp the logic of experimental designs directed toward phenomenal aspects of shape constancy. In the domain of size perception, Granrud’s studies of size constancy in children and adults distinguish phenomenal from cognitive factors. |
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This paper is a response to Keith Lehrer's ‘Reid on Common Sense and Morals.’ I start by defending the general claim that it is appropriate to call Reid a moral realist. I continue by discussing three aspects of Reid's account of moral ideas. First, our first moral conceptions are non-propositional mental states that are essential ingredients of moral perception. Our first moral conceptions are not gross, indistinct and egocentric but are uninformed mental states that might be about others. Second, moral (...) |
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Molyneux’s question, whether the newly sighted might immediately recognize tactilely familiar shapes by sight alone, has produced an array of answers over three centuries of debate and discussion. I propose the first pluralist response: many different answers, both yes and no, are individually sufficient as an answer to the question as a whole. I argue that this is possible if we take the question to be cluster concept of sub-problems. This response opposes traditional answers that isolate specific perceptual features as (...) |
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The dominant view among philosophers of perception is that color experiences, like color judgments, are essentially representational: as part of their very nature color experiences possess representational contents which are either accurate or inaccurate. My starting point in assessing this view is Sydney Shoemaker’s familiar account of color perception. After providing a sympathetic reconstruction of his account, I show how plausible assumptions at the heart of Shoemaker’s theory make trouble for his claim that color experiences represent the colors of things. (...) |
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Philosophy was at the core of the eighteenth century movement known as the Scottish Enlightenment. The movement included major figures, such as Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid and Adam Ferguson, and also many others who produced notable works, such as Gershom Carmichael, George Turnbull, George Campbell, James Beattie, Alexander Gerard, Henry Home (Lord Kames) and Dugald Stewart. I discuss some of the leading ideas of these thinkers, though paying less attention than I otherwise would to Hume, Smith (...) |
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For the most part, philosophical discussion of the senses has been concerned with what distinguishes them from one another, following Grice’s treatment of this issue in his ‘Remarks on the senses’. But this is one of two questions which Grice raises in this influential paper. The other, the question of what distinguishes senses from faculties that are not senses, is the question I address in this thesis. Though there are good reasons to think that the awareness we have of our (...) |
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The incorporation of post-event testimonial information into an agent’s memory representation of the event via constructive memory processes gives rise to the misinformation effect, in which the incorporation of inaccurate testimonial information results in the formation of a false memory belief. While psychological research has focussed primarily on the incorporation of inaccurate information, the incorporation of accurate information raises a particularly interesting epistemological question: do the resulting memory beliefs qualify as knowledge? It is intuitively plausible that they do not, for (...) |
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Over the past few decades, as philosophers of mind have begun to rethink the sharp divide that was traditionally drawn between the phenomenal character of an experience (what it’s like to have that experience) and its intentional content (what it represents), representationalist theories of consciousness have become increasingly popular. On this view, phenomenal character is reduced to intentional content. This article explores a key motivation for this theory, namely, considerations of experiential transparency. Experience is said to be transparent in that (...) |
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The present paper argues for the relevance of Immanuel Kant and the German Enlightenment to contemporary social epistemology. Rather than distancing themselves from the alleged ‘individualism’ of Enlightenment philosophers, social epistemologists would be well-advised to look at the substantive discussion of social-epistemological questions in the works of Kant and other Enlightenment figures. After a brief rebuttal of the received view of the Enlightenment as an intrinsically individualist enterprise, this paper charts the historical trajectory of philosophical discussions of testimony as a (...) |
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Research in the psychology of deception detection implies that Fricker, in making her case for reductionism in the epistemology of testimony, overestimates both the epistemic demerits of the antireductionist policy of trusting speakers blindly and the epistemic merits of the reductionist policy of monitoring speakers for trustworthiness: folk psychological prejudices to the contrary notwithstanding, it turns out that monitoring is on a par (in terms both of the reliability of the process and of the sensitivity of the beliefs that it (...) |
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John Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities of objects has meet resistance. In this paper I bypass the traditional critiques of the distinction and instead concentrate on two specific counterexamples to the distinction: Killer yellow and the puzzle of multiple dispositions. One can accommodate these puzzles, I argue, by adopting Thomas Reid’s version of the primary/secondary quality distinction, where the distinction is founded upon conceptual grounds. The primary/secondary quality distinction is epistemic rather than metaphysical. A consequence of Reid’s primary/ (...) |
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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 (...) |
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Philosophers of mind have distinguished (and sometimes conflated) various qualities. This article tries to sort things out. |
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Intuitions about the transparency of experience have recently begun to play a key role in the debate about qualia. Specifically, such intuitions have been used by representationalists to support their view that the phenomenal character of our experience can be wholly explained in terms of its intentional content.[i] But what exactly does it mean to say that experience is transparent? In my view, recent discussions of transparency leave matters considerably murkier than one would like. As I will suggest, there is (...) |
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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 (...) |
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The notion of a "mental representation" is, arguably, in the first instance a theoretical construct of cognitive science. As such, it is a basic concept of the Computational Theory of Mind, according to which cognitive states and processes are constituted by the occurrence, transformation and storage (in the mind/brain) of information-bearing structures (representations) of one kind or another. |
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Traditionally, perceptual experiences—for example, the experience of seeing a cat—were thought to have two quite distinct components. When one sees a cat, one’s experience is “about” the cat: this is the representational or intentional component of the experience. One’s experience also has phenomenal character: this is the sensational component of the experience. Although the intentional and sensational components at least typically go together, in principle they might come apart: the intentional component could be present without the sensational component or vice (...) |
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I reconstruct J. H. Lambert’s views on how practical grounds relate to epistemic features, such as certainty. I argue, first, that Lambert’s account of moral certainty does not involve any distinctively practical influence on theoretical belief. However, it does present an interesting form of fallibilism about justification as well as a denial of a tight link between knowledge and action. Second, I argue that for Lambert, the persistence principle that underwrites induction is supported by practical reasons to believe; this indicates (...) |
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This book offers a defence of Wrightean epistemic entitlement, one of the most prominent approaches to hinge epistemology. It also systematically explores the connections between virtue epistemology and hinge epistemology. -/- According to hinge epistemology, any human belief set is built within and upon a framework of pre-evidential propositions – hinges – that cannot be justified. Epistemic entitlement argues that we are entitled to trust our hinges. But there remains a problem. Entitlement is inherently unconstrained and arbitrary: We can be (...) |
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There is, of course, The Given: what is given in experience. The ‘Myth Of The Given’ is just a wrong answer to the question ‘What is given?’ This paper offers a brief sketch of three possible right answers. It examines an early account by Charles Augustus Strong of why The Myth is a myth. It maintains that a natural and naturalistic version of empiricism is compatible with the fact that the Myth is a myth. It gives proper place to enactivist (...) |
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A contemporary debate concerning the epistemology of testimony is portrayed by its protagonists as having its origins in the eighteenth century and the respective views of David Hume and Thomas Reid. Hume is characterized as a reductionist and Reid as an anti-reductionist. This terminology has been widely adopted and the reductive approach has become synonymous with Hume. In Sect. 1 I spell out the reductionist interpretation of Hume in which the justification possessed by testimonially-acquired beliefs is reducible to the epistemic (...) |
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There occurred in the twentieth century the most remarkable episode in the history of human thought. A number of thinkers denied the existence of something we know with certainty to exist: consciousness, conscious experience. Others held back from the Denial, as we may call it, but claimed that it might be true --a claim no less remarkable than the Denial. This paper documents some aspects of this episode, with particular reference to two things. First, the development of two views which (...) |
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Among contemporary epistemologists of testimony, David Hume is standardly regarded as a ‘global reductionist’, where global reductionism requires the hearer to have sufficient first-hand knowledge of the facts in order to individually ascertain the reliability of the testimony in question. In the present paper, I argue that, by construing Hume’s reductionism in too individualistic a fashion, the received view of Hume on testimony is inaccurate at best, and misleading at worst. Overall, Hume is much more willing to regard testimonial acceptance (...) |
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In the section of the Treatise titled ‘Of the immateriality of the soul’, Hume adduces an argument to show that nothing can be ‘locally conjoined’ with all of a person’s perceptions. The argument is seldom discussed, and deserves attention, mainly because it can be transformed into an argument against the very existence of a soul. In this paper, I present and closely examine both arguments, Hume’s argument and the one against the existence of the soul. Both, I conclude, are fallacious. (...) |
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I distinguish between two claims of transparency of experiences. One claim is weaker and supported by phenomenological evidence. This I call the transparency datum. Introspection of standard perceptual experiences as well as bodily sensations is consistent with, indeed supported by, the transparency datum. I formulate a stronger transparency thesis that is entailed by representationalism about experiential phenomenology. I point out some empirical consequences of strong transparency in the context of representationalism. I argue that pain experiences, as well as some other (...) |
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Cognition is not, and could not possibly be, entirely representational in character. There is also a phenomenal form of cognitive expression that registers the intrinsic properties of mental states themselves. Arguments against the reality of this intrinsic phenomenal dimension to mental experience have focused either on its supposed impossibility, or secondly, the non-appearance of any such qualities to introspection. This paper argues to the contrary, that the registration of cognitive state properties does take place independently of representational content; and necessarily (...) |
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Much attention has recently been paid to the idea, which I label ‘External World Acquaintance’ (EWA), that the phenomenal character of perceptual experience is partially constituted by external features. One motivation for EWA which has received relatively little discussion is its alleged ability to help deal with the ‘Explanatory Gap’ (e.g. Fish 2008, 2009, Langsam 2011, Allen 2016). I provide a reformulation of this general line of thought, which makes clearer how and when EWA could help to explain the specific (...) |
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This paper develops a descriptive and normative account of how people respond to testimony. It postulates a default pathway in which people more or less automatically respond to a claim by accepting it, as long as the claim made is consistent with their beliefs and the source is credible. Otherwise, people enter a reflective pathway in which they evaluate the claim based on its explanatory coherence with everything else they believe. Computer simulations show how explanatory coherence can be maximized in (...) |
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I consider the geometrical structure of the apparent visual field. Although the optics of vision is well understood, the nature of visual awareness remains largely in the dark. A famous attempt at a formal description of the apparent visual field was by Helmholtz, in the late nineteenth century. It purportedly explains the phenomenon of the subjective curvatures often reported when viewing objectively straight lines of great extent. I consider the general problem, and suggest an alternative formal account. On phenomenological grounds (...) |
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Nagel’s challenge is to devise an objective phenomenological vocabulary that can describe the objective structural similarities between aural and visual perception. My contention is that Charles Sanders Peirce’s little studied and less understood phenomenological vocabulary makes a significant contribution to meeting this challenge. I employ Peirce’s phenomenology to identify the structural isomorphism between seeing a scarlet red and hearing a trumpet’s blare. I begin by distinguishing between the vividness of an experience and the intensity of a quality. I proceed to (...) |
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The standard interpretation of Hume on testimony takes him to be a reductionist; justification of beliefs from testimony ultimately depends on one's own first-person experience. Yet Hume's main discussions of testimony in the Treatise and first Enquiry suggest a social account. Hume appeals to shared experience and develops norms of belief from testimony that are not reductionist. It is argued that the reductionist interpretation rests on an overly narrow view of Hume's theory of ideas. By attending to such mechanisms of (...) |
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Among contemporary epistemologists of testimony, David Hume is standardly regarded as a "global reductionist", where global reductionism requires the hearer to have sufficient first-hand knowledge of the facts in order to individually ascertain the reliability of the testimony in question. In the present paper, I argue that, by construing Hume's reductionism in too individualistic a fashion, the received view of Hume on testimony is inaccurate at best, and misleading at worst. Hume's overall position is more amenable to testimonial acceptance than (...) |
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Enthymemes are traditionally defined as arguments in which some elements are left unstated. It is an empirical fact that enthymemes are both enormously frequent and appropriately understood in everyday argumentation. Why is it so? We outline an answer that dispenses with the so called "principle of charity", which is the standard notion underlying most works on enthymemes. In contrast, we suggest that a different force drives enthymematic argumentation—namely, parsimony, i.e. the tendency to optimize resource consumption, in light of the agent's (...) |
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In recent philosophy of mind, a series of challenging ideas have appeared about the relation between the body and the sense of touch. In certain respects, these ideas have a striking affinity with Husserl’s theory of the constitution of the body. Nevertheless, these two approaches lead to very different understandings of the role of the body in perception. Either the body is characterized as a perceptual “organ,” or the body is said to function as a “template.” Despite its focus on (...) |
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It is occasionally claimed that the important work of philosophers, physicists, and mathematicians in the nineteenth and in the early twentieth centuries made Kant’s critical philosophy of geometry look somewhat unattractive. Indeed, from the wider perspective of the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries, the replacement of Newtonian physics with Einstein’s theories of relativity, and the rise of quantificational logic, Kant’s philosophy seems “quaint at best and silly at worst”.1 While there is no doubt that Kant’s transcendental project involves his own conceptions (...) |
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The basic alternatives seem to be either a Humean reductionist view that any particular assertion needs backing with inductive evidence for its reliability before it can retionally be believed, or a Reidian criterial view that testimony is intrinscially, though defeasibly, credible, in the absence of evidence against its reliability.Some recent arguments from the constraints on interpreting any linguistic performances as assertions with propositional content have some force against the reductionist view. We thus have reason to accept the criterial view, at (...) |
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Special issue. With contributions by Luc Bovens and Stephan Hartmann, David Glass, Keith Lehrer, Erik Olsson, Tomoji Shogenji, Mark Siebel, and Paul Thagard. |
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Externalist analyses of justification typically include some sort of reliability requirement. But the fact that the beliefs of a demon victim can be justified despite their being formed in completely unreliable ways suggests that reliability isn’t required for justification. In this paper, I propose an analysis of justification in terms of proper function that enables us to hang on to the externalism without the reliability requirement. As an added bonus, the proposed analysis of justification yields an account of the elusive (...) |
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This paper outlines a multidimensional conception of Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) that differs from the 'orthodox' conception in terms of the content of its commitment to the reality of the self. Unlike the orthodox conception it recognizes that selves are fuzzy entities. By appreciating the possibility that selves are fuzzy entities, it is possible to rebut a form of fictionalism about the self which appeals to clinical data from MPD. Realism about self can be preserved in the face of multiple (...) |
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This paper presents what we call with Plantin an argumentative cell as an unit which is inspired by Toulmin’s layout of arguments, in order to analyse two major effects of pseudo-objectivity in argumentation. Four problems of Toulmin's layout will be tackled: Data are only described as facts, the definition of Backing is blurred, but it may be linked with sources of information and extended to Data, the dialectical component of the Rebuttal needs to be extended to concessions, and dealing with (...) |
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What entitles you to rely on information received from others? What entitles you to rely on information retrieved from your own memory? Intuitively, you are entitled simply to trust yourself, while you should monitor others for signs of untrustworthiness. This article makes a case for inverting the intuitive view, arguing that metacognitive monitoring of oneself is fundamental to the reliability of memory, while monitoring of others does not play a significant role in ensuring the reliability of testimony. |
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Ideas play at least two roles in Locke's theory of the understanding. They are constituents of ‘propositions,’ and some of them ‘represent’ the qualities and sorts of surrounding bodies. I argue that each role involves a distinct kind of intentional directedness. The same idea will in general be an ‘idea of’ two different objects, in different senses of the expression. Identifying Locke's scheme of twofold ‘ofness’ reveals a common structure to his accounts of simple ideas and complex ideas of substances. (...) |
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Let us focus on what I take it is the paradigm case of testimony—the intentional transfer of a belief from one agent to another, whether in the usual way via a verbal assertion made by the one agent to the other, or by some other means, such as through a note.1 So, for example, John says to Mary that the house is on fire (or, if you like, ‘texts’ her this message on her phone), and Mary, upon hearing this, forms (...) |
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I suggest two main ways of interpreting Reid's analysis of the perception of the quality of hardness: Reid endorses two distinct concepts of hardness. The distinction between the two lies in a profoundly different relation between the sensation of hardness and the concept of hardness in each of them. The first concept, which I term as a “sensation-laden concept”, is “the quality that arises in us the sensation of hardness.” The second concept, which I call a “non-sensational concept”, is “the (...) |
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