What philosophical issue or issues does Molyneux’s question raise? I concentrate on two. First, are there any properties represented in both touch and vision? Second, for any such common perceptible, is it represented in the same way in each, so that the two senses support a single concept of that property? I show that there is space for a second issue here, describe its precise relations to Molyneux’s question, and argue for its philosophical significance. I close by arguing that Gareth (...) Evans conflated the two issues, and thereby provide further grounds for distinguishing them. (shrink)

Seattle rain smelled different from New Orleans rain…. New Orleans rain smelled of sulfur and hibiscus, trumpet metal, thunder, and sweat. Seattle rain, the widespread rain of the Great Northwest, smelled of green ice and sumi ink, of geology and silence and minnow breath.— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug PerfumeMuch of the philosophical literature on perception has focused on vision. This is not surprising, given that vision holds for us a certain prestige. Our visual experience is incredibly rich, offering up a mosaic (...) of apparent three-dimensional objects. For this reason, it is commonplace to suppose that visual experience is world-directed, with the view taking its most popular form in the representational, or content, view. World-directed views contrast with what we might call subjectivist views — views according to which experiences are raw feels or mere sensations. (shrink)

Many philosophical thought experiments and arguments involve unusual cases. We present empirical reasons to doubt the reliability of intuitive judgments and conclusions about such cases. Inferences and intuitions prompted by verbal case descriptions are influenced by routine comprehension processes which invoke stereotypes. We build on psycholinguistic findings to determine conditions under which the stereotype associated with the most salient sense of a word predictably supports inappropriate inferences from descriptions of unusual (stereotype-divergent) cases. We conduct an experiment that combines plausibility ratings (...) with pupillometry to document this “salience bias.” We find that under certain conditions, competent speakers automatically make stereotypical inferences they know to be inappropriate. (shrink)

Many take the possibility of hallucinations to imply that a relationalist account, according to which perceptual experiences are constituted by direct relations to ordinary mind-independent objects, is false. The common reaction among relationalists is to adopt a disjunctivist view that denies that hallucinations have the same nature as perceptual experiences. This paper proposes a non-disjunctivist response to the argument from hallucination by arguing that the alleged empirical and a priori evidence in support of the possibility of hallucinations is inconclusive. A (...) corollary upshot of the article is that whether hallucinations are possible or not is still an open empirical question. (shrink)

Objects are central in visual, auditory, and tactual perception. But what counts as a perceptual object? I address this question via a structural unity schema, which specifies how a collection of parts must be arranged to compose an object for perception. On the theory I propose, perceptual objects are composed of parts that participate in causally sustained regularities. I argue that this theory falls out of a compelling account of the function of object perception, and illustrate its applications to multisensory (...) perception. I also argue that the account avoids problems faced by standard views of visual and auditory objects. (shrink)

The problem of the nature of color is typically put in terms of the following question about the intentional content of visual experiences: what’s the nature of the property we attribute to physical objects in virtue of our visual experiences of color? This problem has proven to be tenacious largely because it’s not clear what the constraints are for an answer. With no clarity about constraints, the proposed solutions range widely, the most common dividing into subjectivist views which hold that (...) attributed colors are mental properties or mental events} and a variety of realist views, which hold that colors are properties of physical objects. These realist views, in turn, divide into views that hold that attributed colors are dispositions of physical objects to produce color experiences (dispositionalism),° nondispositional relations between objects and perceivers (the relational view)," physical properties of physical objects (physicalism),‘ or sui generis properties of physical objects (primitivism and impressionism).‘ I’ll examine a proposed constraint which Mark Johnston (1992) calls Revelation. According to Revelation, the appearance of color in our ordinary visual experience provides us with unqualified access to the nature of color. While every proposal about the nature of color must take a stand on how the.. (shrink)

Externalist representationalism is touted as a superior rival to naïve realism, and yet a careful analysis of the externalist representationalist's analysis of our ordinary perceptual experiences shows the view to be far closer to naïve realism than we might have expected. One of the central advertised benefits of representationalist views in general is that they are compatible with the idea that ordinary, illusory and hallucinatory perceptual experiences are of the same fundamental kind. Naïve realists are forced to deny the ‘common (...) fundamental kind claim’ and adopt disjunctivism. However, I argue that externalist representationalism is also a version of disjunctivism. Consequently, one of the main rivals to naïve realism turns out not to be a rival at all. (shrink)

For Reid perception, broadly speaking, was a complex of two very different mental states. Calling such views dual component theory, A. D. Smith questions whether any such theory, and whether Reid's version in particular, is a viable theory of perception. The aim of this paper is to defend Reidian Dual Component Theory from Smith's critique. Answering Smith's critique reveals the depth and resilience of Reid's approach to perception, highlighting specifically the continued interest of his thought about the relationship between sensation (...) and perception, the nature of illusion, the immediacy of perception, and the content of perceptual belief. (shrink)

Levinas is usually discussed as a philosopher wrestling with the nature of our experience of others, ethical obligation, and the divine. Unlike other phenomenologists, such as Husserl and Heidegger, he is not often mentioned in discussions about issues in philosophy of mind. His work in that area, especially on perception, is underappreciated. He gives an account of the nature of perceptual experience that is remarkable both in how it departs from that of others in the phenomenological tradition and for how (...) it fits in among presently available views about the nature of perceptual experience, namely, as a form of naïve realism. (shrink)

Two popular theses central to recent theorizing about consciousness are the transitivity principle and the transparency of experience. According to the former, conscious mental states are mental states we are aware of in some way. According to the latter, there is some awareness-relation that we seemingly cannot bear to our experiences. I argue that, within certain reasonable constraints, there is no precisification of these theses that renders them compatible.

According to ‘direct social perception’ (DSP) accounts of social cognition, perception may be ‘smart’ enough on its own to inform us about other people’s emotions. Some DSP advocates suggest that ‘smart’ social perception should be conceived along ‘enactive’ lines. In this paper, I suggest that DSP needs social perception to have representational content. This seems in tension with the main versions of enactivism, which deny that perception is representational. I thus present the following challenge to ‘enactive’ versions of DSP: either (...) they show how perception can have the requisite smartness without representational content, which I doubt that they can, or they embrace the orthodox idea that perceptual experiences have representational contents. I also suggest that DSP defenders, whether or not they want to be enactivists, can cheerfully accept the latter idea. (shrink)