How must experience of time be structured in time? In particular, does the following principle, which I will call inheritance, hold: for any temporal property apparently presented in perceptual experience, experience itself has that same temporal property. For instance, if I hear Paul McCartney singing ‘Hey Jude’, must my auditory experience of the ‘Hey’ itself precede my auditory experience of the ‘Jude’, or can the temporal order of these experiences come apart from the order the words are experienced as having? (...) A number of recent authors (Phillips Experience and Time, ‘The Temporal Structure of Experience’, Soteriou ‘Perceiving Events’, Hoerl ‘“A Succession of Feelings, in and of Itself, is Not a Feeling of Succession”’, Rashbrook) claim, to paraphrase Martin (399), that inheritance best characterises how our temporal experience seems to initial reflective intuition. For this reason, Phillips takes the principle to form part of our naïve view of temporal experience. An opposing group of theorists object that inheritance is subject to empirical counter-example. This article surveys such challenges. Section 2 considers Grush's case against inheritance based on postdiction. Section 3 examines Watzl's anti-inheritance argument based on silencing effects. Finally, Section 4 explores a number of alleged counter-examples proposed by Lee (‘Temporal Experience and the Temporal Structure of Experience’). Section 1 provides essential background to the debate. (shrink)

Bering's argument that human beings are endowed with a cognitive system dedicated to forming illusory representations of psychological immortality relies on the claim that children's beliefs in the afterlife are not the result of religious teaching. We suggest four reasons why this claim is unsatisfactory.

The research guided by the correspondence metaphor is lauded for its emphasis on functional analysis, but the term “correspondence” itself needs clarification. Of the two terms in the relationship, only one is well defined. It is suggested that behavior at acquisition needs to be analyzed and that molecular principles from the learning laboratory might be useful in doing so.

Many current neurophysiological, psychophysical, and psychological approaches to vision rest on the idea that when we see, the brain produces an internal representation of the world. The activation of this internal representation is assumed to give rise to the experience of seeing. The problem with this kind of approach is that it leaves unexplained how the existence of such a detailed internal representation might produce visual consciousness. An alternative proposal is made here. We propose that seeing is a way of (...) acting. It is a particular way of exploring the environment. Activity in internal representations does not generate the experience of seeing. The out- side world serves as its own, external, representation. The experience of seeing occurs when the organism masters what we call the gov- erning laws of sensorimotor contingency. The advantage of this approach is that it provides a natural and principled way of accounting for visual consciousness, and for the differences in the perceived quality of sensory experience in the different sensory modalities. Sev- eral lines of empirical evidence are brought forward in support of the theory, in particular: evidence from experiments in sensorimotor adaptation, visual “filling in,” visual stability despite eye movements, change blindness, sensory substitution, and color perception. (shrink)

Questions of identity over time are often hard to answer. A long tradition has it that such questions are somehow soft: they have no unique, determinate answer, and disagreements about them are merely verbal. I argue that this claim is not the truism it is taken to be. Depending on how it is understood, it turns out either to be false or to presuppose a highly contentious metaphysical claim.

That grass is green, that pigs don’t fly, and that you are now awake are all hard facts. But there is often said to be something soft about matters of identity over time. Is today’s village church the very church that was first built here, despite centuries of repairs and alterations? How many parts of my bicycle do I need to replace before I get a numerically different bike? If a club disbands and years later some of the original members (...) start a similar club with the same name, have we got two clubs, or one club with a discontinuous history? It is tempting to say that there are no hard answers to these questions laid up in heaven. There is no determinate fact of the matter. Those who disagree about such things are arguing about words, not facts. We are free to say what we like. (shrink)

According to a bodily view of pain, pains are objects which are located in body parts. This bodily view is supported by the locative locutions for pain in English, such as that “I have a pain in my back.” Recently, Liu and Klein (Analysis, 80(2), 262–272, 2020) carry out a cross-linguistic analysis, and they claim that (1) Mandarin has no locative locutions for pain and (2) the absence of locative locutions for pain puts the bodily view at risk. This paper (...) rejects both claims. Regarding the philosophical claim, I argue that a language without locative locutions for pain only poses a limited challenge to the bodily view. Regarding the empirical claim, I identify the possible factors which might have misled Liu and Klein about the locative locutions for pain in Mandarin, and argue that Mandarin has a wide range of locative locutions for pain by conducting a corpus analysis. I conclude that compared to English, Mandarin lends no less, if not more, support to the bodily view of pain. (shrink)

According to Newton and Clarke, Leibniz’s relationalism cannot make sense of distance quantities. Although the core of Newton and Clarke’s “argument from quantity” is clear enough, its details remain unclear because we do not know what its key term “quantity” means. This key term is still unsettled because, unlike Leibniz, who loudly voices his view of quantity in both his correspondence with Clarke and in his philosophical essays on quantity, Newton and Clarke are frustratingly terse when it comes to defining (...) quantity. Nevertheless, I think that it would be hasty to conclude that there is no way to expand our understanding of the term “quantity” as it appears in their argument. Although Newton and Clarke do not pursue a theory of quantity, their colleagues do, and the theory of quantity developed by their peers promises to deliver a historically rich perspective on Newton and Clarke’s argument from quantity. In this article, I aim to provide some historical context for Newton and Clarke’s argument from quantity by examining two criteria for quantity that were popular among their peers—what I call the “divisibility” and “precise increase and diminution” conditions. (shrink)

How are we to understand philosophical claims about sense perception being direct versus indirect? There are multiple relevant notions of perceptual directness, so I argue. Perception of external objects may be direct on some notions, while indirect on others. My interest is with the sense in which ideas count as perceptual mediators in the philosophy of Descartes and Locke. This paper has two broader aims. The first is to clarify four main notions of perceptual directness. The second is to support (...) my contention that in the texts characterizing ideas as immediate objects of perception, Descartes and Locke are invoking the notion of directness I call 'objectual'. This notion is modeled on the way a picture mediates perception of the pictured object. The upshot of my account is that – with respect to the objectual notion of directness – Descartes and Locke each hold an indirect theory of perception. (shrink)

Koriat & Goldsmith propose that the correspondence metaphor captures the essence of everyday memory research. We suggest that correspondence is often not at issue because objective assessments of everyday events are frequently lacking. In these cases, other questions arise, such as how individuals evaluate the validity of memories and the significance they attach to those evaluations.

Investigations of metacognition – and also the application of the storehouse and correspondence metaphors – seem as appropriate for laboratory research as for naturalistic research. In terms of measurement, the only quantitative difference between the “input-bound percent correct” and “output-bound percent correct” is the inclusion versus exclusion (respectively) of omission errors in the denominator of the percentages.

Koriat & Goldsmith are right in their claim that the “ecological” and “traditional” approaches to memory rely on different metaphors. But the underlying ecological metaphor is notcorrespondence(which in any case is not a metaphorical notion): it isaction. Remembering is a kind of doing; like most other forms of action it is purposive, personal, and particular.

It is an apparent truism about visual perception that we can see only what is visible to us. It is also frequently accepted that visual perception is dynamic: our visual experiences are extended through, and can evolve over time. I argue that taking the dynamism of visual experience seriously renders certain simplistic interpretations of the first claim, that a subject at a given time can see only what is visible to her at that time, false: we can be meaningfully said (...) to see invisible objects. This counterintuitive result in turn focuses our attention on the relationship between perception and memory. I show that it is difficult to draw a clear or simple distinction between the two. Memory and perception rely on, and blend with, one another. Together, these claims point us away from understanding visual perception as a simple reflection of the environment, and instead as closer to a process of dynamic modelling that draws together occurrent stimulation and stored information. (shrink)

InLeibniz: Perception, Apperception, and Thought, Robert McRae alleges a flat “contradiction” at the heart of Leibniz's doctrine of three grades of monads: bare entelechies characterized by perception; animal souls capable both of perception and of sensation; and rational souls, minds or spirits endowed not only with capacities for perception and sensation but also with consciousness of self or what Leibniz calls “apperception.” Apperception is a necessary condition of those distinctively human mental processes associated with understanding and with reason. Insofar as (...) it is also a sufficient condition of rationality, it is not ascribable to animals. But apperception is a necessary condition of sensation or feeling as well; and animals are capable of sensation, according to Leibniz, who decisively rejected the Cartesian doctrine that beasts are nothing but material automata. “On the one hand,” writes McRae, “what distinguishes animals from lower forms of life is sensation or feeling, but on the other hand apperception is a necessary condition of sensation, and apperception distinguishes human beings from animals”. “We are thus left with an unresolved inconsistency in Leibniz's account of sensation, so far as sensation is attributable both to men and animals”. (shrink)

This paper presents a distinctively metaphysical version of the problem of other minds. The main source of this version of the problem lies in the principle that, when it comes to consciousness, no distinction can sensibly be drawn between appearance and reality. I will argue that, unless we want to call that principle into question, we should seriously consider the possibility of accepting the conclusion that other minds are not like our own. This option is less problematic than it might (...) seem at first if we are willing to reconceive facts of consciousness as subjective rather than objective in nature. -/- . (shrink)

Lockean views of personal identity maintain that we are essentially persons who persist diachronically by virtue of being psychologically continuous with our former selves. In this article, I present a novel objection to this variant of psychological accounts, which is based on neurophysiological characteristics of the brain. While the mental states that constitute said psychological continuity reside in the cerebral hemispheres, so that for the former to persist only the upper brain must remain intact, being conscious additionally requires that a (...) structure originating in the brainstem—the ascending reticular activating system—be functional. Hence, there can be situations in which even small brainstem lesions render individuals irreversibly comatose and thus forever preclude access to their mental states, while the neural correlates of the states themselves are retained. In these situations, Lockeans are forced to regard as fulfilled their criterion of diachronic persistence since psychological continuity, as they construe it, is not disrupted. Deeming an entity that is never again going to have any mental experiences to be a person, however, is an untenable position for a psychological account to adopt. In their current form, Lockean views of personal identity are therefore incompatible with human neurophysiology. (shrink)

Koriat & Goldsmith's thesis is provocative but has three problems: First, quantity and accuracy are not simply related, they are complementary. Second, the storehouse metaphor is not the driving force behind contemporary theories of memory and may not be viable. Third, the taxonomy is incomplete, leaving unclassified several extremely influential methods and measures, such as priming and response latency.

According to so-called “credit views of knowledge,” knowledge is an achievement of an epistemic agent, something for which an agent is creditable or responsible. One influential criticism of the credit view of knowledge holds that the credit view has difficulty making sense of knowledge acquired from testimony. As Jennifer Lackey has argued, in many ordinary cases of the acquisition of testimonial knowledge, if anyone deserves credit for the truth of the audience’s belief it is the testimonial speaker rather than the (...) audience, and so it isn’t clear that testimonial knowers are appropriately creditable for the truth of their beliefs. I argue that the credit view of knowledge can be saved from Lackey’s objection by focusing on the way in which testimonial knowledge is the result of an essentially social epistemic ability. While there is indeed a sense in which a testimonial knower is only partially epistemically responsible for her testimonial belief, this is consistent with the truth of her belief being creditable to her in another sense. The truth of her belief is most saliently explained by, and hence is fully creditable to, an essentially social epistemic ability, an ability that is only partially seated in the knowing subject. (shrink)

The philosophical investigation of perceptual illusions can generate fruitful insights in the study of subjective time consciousness. However, the way illusions are interpreted is often controversial. Recently, proponents of the so-called dynamic snapshot theory have appealed to the Waterfall Illusion, a kind of motion aftereffect, to support a particular view of temporal consciousness according to which experience is structured as a series of instantaneous snapshots with dynamic qualities. This dynamism is meant to account for familiar features of the phenomenology of (...) time, such as succession, continuity, and change. Previous theories have typically appealed to a subjective present occupying an interval of time; that is, a “specious present.” I argue, through analysis of motion aftereffect illusions and the rare condition of akinetopsia, i.e. motion-blindness, that the Waterfall Illusion fails to support the dynamic snapshot theory as intended. Furthermore, I suggest that future theories of subjective time should see temporal phenomenology as the result of non-localised processes closely tied to the mechanism underlying consciousness generally. (shrink)

Midwest Studies In Philosophy, Volume 44, Issue 1, Page 92-116, December 2019.

(2003). The World as Representation: Schopenhauer's Arguments for Transcendental Idealism. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 57-87.

This commentary deals with criteria for assigning truth values to memory contents. A parallel with perception shows how truth values can be assigned by considering subjects' beliefs about the truth state of the memory content. This topic is also relevant to the study of processes of control over retrieval.

The value of accuracy and quantity as memory measures is assessed. It is argued that (1) accuracy does not measure correspondence (monitoring) because it ignores omissions and correct rejections, (2) quantity is confounded with monitoring in recall, and (3) in recognition, if targets and foils are unequal, both measures, even together, still ignore correct rejections.

George Berkeley argues that vision is a language of God, that the immediate objects of vision are arbitrary signs for tactile objects and that there is no necessary connection between what we see and what we touch. Thomas Reid, on the other hand, aims to establish a geometrical connection between visible and tactile figures. Consequently, although Reid and Berkeley's theories of vision share important elements, Reid explicitly rejects Berkeley's idea that visible figures are merely arbitrary signs for tangible bodies. But (...) is he right in doing so? I show that many passages in Berkeley's work on vision suggest that he acknowledges a geometrical connection between visibles and tangibles. So the opposition between the arbitrariness Berkeley defends and a geometrical connection cannot be as universal as Reid thinks. This paper seeks to offer a plausible reading of Berkeley's theory of vision in this regard and an explanation of why Reid interprets Berkeley differently. (shrink)

In Justification Without Awareness, Michael Bergmann attacks Internalism and Mentalism. His attack on Internalism refutes some versions of an awareness requirement for justification but leaves another standing and well-motivated. His attack on Mentalism, while successful, leaves us with a difficult question—what non-mental features play a role in determining justification?—that his own externalist theory fails to answer correctly.

Abstract: “Consciousness” seems to be a polysemic, ambiguous, term. Because of this, theorists have sought to distinguish the different kinds of phenomena that “consciousness” denotes, leading to a proliferation of terms for different kinds of consciousness. However, some philosophers—univocalists about consciousness—argue that “consciousness” is not polysemic or ambiguous. By drawing upon the history of philosophy and psychology, and some resources from semantic theory, univocalism about consciousness is shown to be implausible. This finding is important, for if we accept the univocalist (...) account then we are less likely to subject our thought and talk about the mind to the kind of critical analysis that it needs. The exploration of the semantics of “consciousness” offered here, by way of contrast, clarifies and fine-tunes our thought and talk about consciousness and conscious mentality and explains why “consciousness” means what it does, and why it means a number of different, but related, things. (shrink)

I begin by making some brief remarks about commonsense particularism. Commonsense particularists hold that we know pretty much what we think we know and hold that some of these beliefs are more reasonable than competing skeptical principles. However, commonsense philosophers often differ about what justifies these particular beliefs. Michael Bergmann holds that that our commonsense epistemic beliefs depend for their justification on epistemic intuitions or epistemic seemings. After a brief description of his views, I raise some questions about the nature (...) and epistemic role of these epistemic seemings. (shrink)

Speaking: from Intention to Articulation Willem J. M. Levelt, 1989 (1993 paperback) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press ISBN: 0–262–12137–9(hb), 0–262–62089–8(pb)Rules for Reasoning Richard E. Nisbett (Ed.), 1993 Hillsdale, NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates ISBN: 0–8058–1256–3(hb), 0–8085–1257–1 (pb)Readings in Philosophy and Cognitive Science Alvin I. Goldman, 1993 Cambridge, MA, MIT Press ISBN: 0–262–07153–3(hb), 0–262–57100–5(pb)Language Comprehension in Ape and Child, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, Serial No. 233, Vol. 58, Nos 3–4 Sue Savage‐Rumbaugh, Jeannine Murphy, Rose A. Sevcik, Karen E. (...) Brakke, Shelly L. Williams & Duane M. Rumbaugh, with commentary by Elizabeth Bates, and a reply by the authors, 1993 Chicago: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0–226–73542–7Language, Music and Mind Diana Raffman, 1993 Cambridge, MIT Press/Bradford Books ISBN: 0–262–18150–9Psychology of Proof Lance J. Rips, 1994 Cambridge, MA, MIT Press ISBN: 0–262–18153–3Human and Machine Thinking P. Johnson‐Laird, 1993 Hillsdale, NJ, Erlbaum ISBN: 0–8058–0921‐XIntelligent Behavior in Animals and Robots David McFarland & Thomas Bosser, 1993 Cambridge, MA and London, UK: MIT Press/ Bradford Books ISBN: 0–262–13293–1The Eye and the Mind: Reflections on Perception and the Problem of Knowledge Charles Landesman, 1993 Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers ISBN: 0–7923–2586–9The Moral Self GilG. Noam & Thomas E. Wren (Eds), in cooperation with Gertud Nunner‐Winkler & Wolfgang Edelstein, 1993 Cambridge, MA: MIT Press ISBN: 0–262–14052–1The Logic of Discovery: A Theory of the Rationality of Scientific Research Scott A. Kleiner, 1993 Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers ISBN: 0–7923–2371–8Folk Psychology and the Philosophy of Mind S.M. Christenson & D.R. Turner (Eds), 1993 Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum ISBN: 0–805–80931–7. (shrink)

Intentionality is a mark of the mental, as Brentano (1874) noted. Any representation or conception of anything has the feature of intentionality, which informally put, is the feature of being about something that may or may not exist. Visual artworks are about something, whether something literal or abstract. The artwork is a mentalized physical object. Aesthetic experience of the artwork illustrates the nature of intentionality as we focus attention on the phenomenology of the sensory exemplar. This focus of attention on (...) the exemplar in aesthetic experience simultaneously exhibits what the intentional object is like and what our conception of it is like. The exemplar is Janus-faced, looking in one direction outward toward the objects conceived and in the other direction inward toward our conceiving of them. It shows us what intentionality is like and how we know it. (shrink)

The form of representation cannot be fully described, as Wittgenstein noted. This is because there is a non-linguistic component in the representation of truth that aesthetic experience shows us. It is the self-represented exemplar of conscious experience. On this basis, the author defends empiricism against the objection that all representation of experience is subject to error.

The correspondence view of memory is not a metaphor. However, correspondence is the essential feature of the archaeology metaphor, which harks back to Freud and Neisser. A modern version of this metaphor and some of its implications are briefly described. The archaeology metaphor integrates the idea of stored traces in a nonmechanistic framework.

In contrast to its aims, Koriat & Goldsmith's article vividly demonstrates(1) the complementarity of ecological and traditional approaches and (2) the difficulty of characterising the growing diversity of memory research with a single set of distinctions. Moreover, the contrast between correspondence and storehouse metaphors is important enough to stand alone without reference to an everyday/laboratory controversy, which is neither acute nor necessary.

Thomas Reid, twórca szkockiej szkoły zdrowego rozsądku, głosił tezę, że wszystkie wcześniejsze systemy filozoficzne obciążone są tym samym „grzechem pierworodnym” – przyjęciem (w różnych formach) reprezentacjonistycznej teorii spostrzeżenia zmysłowego. Nazywał ją „teorią idei”, której konsekwencją miało być oddzielenie podmiotu i przedmiotu poznania nieusuwalną „zasłoną idei”. Konstruowanie własnej filozofii poprzedził analizą historii tego zagadnienia od starożytności do czasów sobie współczesnych, usiłując wykazać zasadność swego stanowiska. Celem artykułu jest odpowiedź na pytanie o trafność poglądów Reida, wyrażonych w przyjmowanej teorii spostrzeżenia. Chodzi więc (...) przede wszystkim o pogląd charakterystyczny dla tradycji arystotelesowsko-tomistycznej, tradycyjnie interpretowany jako prezentacjonizm, oraz poglądy Kartezjusza dotyczące statusu „idei” w procesie poznawania tzw. świata zewnętrznego. Przeprowadzone analizy wskazują jednocześnie na uproszczenia w Reidowskiej interpretacji poglądów jego poprzedników na naturę spostrzeżenia oraz na cechy krytykowanych teorii, które w pewnym stopniu usprawiedliwiają tę krytykę. ------------------------- Zgłoszono: 28/10/2022. Zrecenzowano: 24/11/2022. Zaakceptowano do publikacji: 16/12/2022. (shrink)

The novel correspondence metaphor outlined by Koriat & Goldsmith offers important advantages for studying critical issues of memory-accuracy. It also fits well with the current emphasis on the reconstructive nature of memory and on the role of cognitive, metacognitive, and motivational factors in memory performance. These positive features notwithstanding, the storehouse/correspondence framework faces potential perils having to do with its implied linkage to the laboratory/real-life controversy and its proposal of studying correspondence issues in isolation from memory phenomena captured by the (...) storehouse paradigm. (shrink)