This article challenges the orthodox position that some smells are pleasantly fragrant and some tactile sensations are painful. It proposes that the affective components of our experiences are a kind of illusion. Under this alternative picture, experiences that seem to have positive or negative affect never actually do. Rather, the affective component is hyper-illusory, a second-order misrepresentation of the way things actually seem to us. While perceptual hyperillusions have elicited scepticism in other contexts, affective hyperillusions can withstand common critiques. Focusing (...) on the paradigmatic affective experience — pain — the article situates the hyperillusory account within the existing scientific and philosophical literature. Several theoretical advantages of positing a hyper-illusory structure to affective experiences emerge from the discussion. (shrink)

To appear in the Cambridge Handbook to Cognitive Science, eds. Ramsey and Frankish.

Sense-perception—the awareness or apprehension of things by sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste—has long been a preoccupation of philosophers. One pervasive and traditional problem, sometimes called “the problem of perception”, is created by the phenomena of perceptual illusion and hallucination: if these kinds of error are possible, how can perception be what it intuitively seems to be, a direct and immediate access to reality? The present entry is about how these possibilities of error challenge the intelligibility of the phenomenon of (...) perception, and how the major theories of perception in the last century are best understood as responses to this challenge. (shrink)

This paper is an essay in counterfactual epistemology. What if experience have high-level contents, to the effect that something is a lemon or that someone is sad? I survey the consequences for epistemology of such a scenario, and conclude that many of the striking consequences could be reached even if our experiences don't have high-level contents.

A survey of arguments for and against the view that colors are physical properties.

Disjunctivism about sensory experience is frequently put forward in defence of a particular conception of perception and perceptual experience known as naïve realism. In this paper, I present an argument against naïve realism that proceeds through a rejection of disjunctivism. If the naïve realist must also be a disjunctivist about the phenomenal nature of experience, then naïve realism should be abandoned.

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

In this paper I try to defend McDowell’s empiricism from a certain objection made by Davidson, Stroud and Glüer. The objection states that experiences cannot be reasons because they are—as McDowell conceives them—inert. I argue that, even though there is something correct in the objection, that is not sufficient for rejecting the epistemological character that McDowell attributes to experiences. My strategy consists basically in showing that experiences involve a constitutive attitude of acceptance of their contents.

The paper argues -- against the standard view in metaphysics -- that the existence of ordinary objects like tomatoes is (near-enough) established by the fact that such things are apparently encountered in perception.

I defend both conceptualists and nonconceptualists against an attack which has been leveled at them by critics such as Byrne (Perception and conceptual content In: Steup M, Sosa E (eds) Contemporary debates in epistemology. Blackwell, Malden, pp 231-250, 2005), Speaks (Philos Rev 114:359–398, 2005), and Crowther (Erkenntnis 65:5–276, 2006). They distinguish a ‘state’ reading and a ‘content’ reading of ‘(non)conceptual’ and argue that many arguments on either side support only the respective state views, not the respective content views. To prepare (...) the ground for my defense, I argue for an understanding of the state view in terms of concept exercise rather than concept possession and provide an overview of versions of conceptualism and nonconceptualism of different strengths. I then argue that conceptualists and nonconceptualists tacitly accept a so-called ‘state-to-content’ principle, show that existing defenses of this principle fail, and provide a new defense of it. It draws on the sources of the nonconceptualism debate, viz. the need to do justice both to the phenomenology of experience and to its epistemological role and to account for the existence of perceptual content and thought content. I argue that epistemological considerations together with considerations from the subject’s perspective support the claim that conceptual thought has conceptual and propositional content, whereas nonconceptual experience has nonconceptual and non-propositional content. (shrink)

I first argue that the skeptic needs an internalist conception of justification for her argument for skepticism. I then argue that the skeptic also needs to show that we do not have perceptual access to the world if her skepticism is to be a real threat to human knowledge of the world. This, I conclude, puts the skeptic in a dilemma, for internalist conceptions of justification presuppose that we have perceptual access to the world.

Regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with Stacie Friend’s claim that fiction is a genre, her notion of genre can be fruitfully applied to a paradigmatic genre such as science fiction. This article deploys Friend’s notion of genre in order to improve the influential characterization of science fiction proposed by Darko Suvin and to defend it from a criticism recently raised by Simon Evnine. According to Suvin, a work of science fiction must concern “a fictional ‘novum’ validated by cognitive (...) logic.” While Suvin conceives of his characterization as a necessary and sufficient condition for membership in the genre, I propose to cast the notions of “fictional novum” and “cognitive validation” as standard features of the genre, which works of science fiction should have but might lack. I argue that this amended version of Suvin’s characterization can better account for two basic properties of science fiction as a genre, namely its historicity and its relevance to appreciation. Lastly, I show that the amended version can shed some light on the affinity between works of science fiction and philosophical thought experiments. (shrink)

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 (...) considerations. It is ) broadly in line with the Sellarsian view as refined by John McDowell. It meets an important constraint: acknowledging the reality of something that seems at first to lend support to The Myth—i.e. the fact that we can engage in ‘non-inferential self-attribution of … sensations’ —without in any way succumbing to the Myth. (shrink)

THIS PAPER ARGUES FOR THE CLAIM THAT ALTHOUGH COLOUR WORDS LIKE 'RED' ARE, ESSENTIALLY, 'PHENOMENAL-QUALITY' WORDS—I.E., WORDS FOR PROPERTIES WHOSE WHOLE AND ESSENTIAL NATURE CAN BE AND IS FULLY REVEALED IN SENSORY EXPERIENCE, GIVEN ONLY THE QUALITATIVE CHARACTER THAT THAT EXPERIENCE HAS—STILL 'RED' CANNOT BE SUPPOSED TO BE A WORD THAT PICKS OUT OR DENOTES ANY PARTICULAR PHENOMENAL QUALITY. THE ARGUMENT RESTS ESSENTIALLY ON THE SUPPOSITION, OFTEN DISCUSSED UNDER THE HEADING OF THE 'COLOR-SPECTRUM INVERSION ARGUMENT', THAT TWO PEOPLE COULD POSSIBLY (...) AGREE IN ALL THEIR COLOUR-JUDGEMENTS WHILE DIFFERING IN THEIR COLOUR EXPERIENCE. (shrink)

This is a reply to Casey O'Callaghan and Jonathan Westphal’s comments on Seeing Dark Things: The Philosophy of Shadows. Both attempt to soften the blow to intuition that comes from the most controversial thesis of the book: we see the backs of back-lit objects. Each characterizes the viewing of silhouettes as a kind of marginal seeing that only discloses shapes, sizes and location. In response, photographs are presented to show that silhouettes are typically three-dimensional and they often have internal structure. (...) Consider the silhouette of a bird fluttering inside a cage; we see more than the outline of the cage. Orbiting this main point are subsidiary points about the distinction between shade and shadows, the nature of occlusion, the color black, and peculiarities of absent absences. (shrink)

According to direct perception approaches we directly see others’ emotions, and by seeing emotions we immediately ascribe them to others. Direct perception is explicitly presented as an alternative account of mindreading, but it also contains an implicit thesis about the extent of the reach of perception. In this paper emotion perception is defended: siding with the direct perception approach I claim that we can simply see emotions and not just low level features of the facial and bodily displays, but contra (...) the direct perception approach I argue that seeing emotions is not sufficient for recognizing emotions as mental states in order to ascribe them to others. (shrink)

I argue that perceptual consciousness is constituted by a mental activity. The mental activity in question is the activity of employing perceptual capacities, such as discriminatory, selective capacities. This is a radical view, but I hope to make it plausible. In arguing for this mental activist view, I reject orthodox views on which perceptual consciousness is analyzed in terms of peculiar entities, such as, phenomenal properties, external mind-independent properties, propositions, sense-data, qualia, or intentional objects.

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

Central to Wilfrid Sellars ' philosophical system is his belief that science's current ontology is inadequate as it fails to provide for an acceptable account of perceptual experience. Unfortunately, this remains the most puzzling plank in his philosophy. Sellars himself argues for this position via his wellknown example of a pink ice cube and its homogeneous colour. This homogeneity, says Sellars, bars the acceptance of science's present ontology of achromatic particles, and requires the introduction of items which are truly coloured. (...) Only with such a revised and expanded ontology, with all that entails, can science adequately meet its explanatory demands. I aim here to remedy at least some of the confusions and misunderstandings this position has engendered. But I mean to take a different route from Sellars. In short, given the problems with Sellars ' views on homogeneity, I will argue for the Sellarsian conclusion as to the inadequacy of present scientific ontologies, yet without reliance on the puzzling doctrine of homogeneity. I begin then with a detailed examination of Sellars official position, indicate the trouble spots, and begin an alternative route. As I conceive things, however, the position I will sketch is still thoroughly Sellarsian, for it proceeds from premises Sellars himself has endorsed. (shrink)

Commonsense epistemology regards perceptual experience as a distinctive source of knowledge of the world around us, unavailable in ‘blindsight’. This is often interpreted in terms of the idea that perceptual experience, through its representational content, provides us with justifying reasons for beliefs about the world around us. I argue that this analysis distorts the explanatory link between perceptual experience and knowledge, as we ordinarily conceive it. I propose an alternative analysis, on which representational content plays no explanatory role: we make (...) perceptual knowledge intelligible by appeal to experienced objects and features. I also present an account of how the commonsense scheme, thus interpreted, is to be defended: not by tracing the role of experience to its contribution in meeting some general condition on propositional knowledge (such as justification), but by subverting the assumption that it has to be possible to make the role of experience intelligible in terms of some such contribution. (shrink)

Many philosophers believe that there is a causal condition on perception, and that this condition is a conceptual truth about perception. A highly influential argument for this claim is based on intuitive responses to Gricean-style thought experiments. Do the folk share the intuitions of philosophers? Roberts et al. (2016) presented participants with two kinds of cases: Blocker cases (similar to Grice’s case involving a mirror and a pillar) and Non-Blocker cases (similar to Grice’s case involving a clock and brain stimulation). (...) They found that a substantial minority agreed that seeing occurs in the Non-Blocker cases, and that in the Blocker cases significantly less agreed that seeing occurs. They thus hypothesized that folk intuitions better align with a no blocker condition than with a causal condition. This paper continues this line of enquiry with two new experiments. The paper investigates the generality and robustness of Roberts et al.’s findings by expanding the sense modalities tested from only vision to audition and olfaction as well. The paper also uses Gricean-style thought experiments as a case study for investigating the “reflection defense” against the negative project in experimental philosophy. Our results replicate and extend Roberts et al.’s study and support their hypothesis that folk intuitions better align with a no blocker condition. They also provide an empirical reason to doubt the reflection defense. (shrink)

Many philosophers believe that there is a causal condition on perception, and that this condition is a conceptual truth about perception. A highly influential argument for this claim is based on intuitive responses to Gricean style thought experiments. Do the folk share the intuitions of philosophers? Roberts et al. (2016) presented participants with two kinds of cases: Blocker cases (similar to Grice’s case involving a mirror and a pillar) and Non-Blocker cases (similar to Grice’s case involving a clock and brain (...) stimulation). They found that a substantial minority agreed that seeing occurs in the Non-Blocker cases, and that in the Blocker cases significantly less agreed that seeing occurs. They thus hypothesized that folk intuitions better align with a no blocker condition than with a causal condition. This paper continues this line of enquiry with two new experiments. The paper investigates the generality and robustness of Roberts et al.’s findings by expanding the sense modalities tested from only vision to audition and olfaction as well. The paper also uses Gricean style thought experiments as a case study for investigating the “reflection defense” against the negative project in experimental philosophy. Our results replicate and extend Roberts et al.’s study and support their hypothesis that folk intuitions better align with a no blocker condition. They also provide an empirical reason to doubt the reflection defense. (shrink)

It is widely held by philosophers not only that there is a causal condition on perception but also that the causal condition is a conceptual truth about perception. One influential line of argument for this claim is based on intuitive responses to a style of thought experiment popularized by Grice. Given the significance of these thought experiments to the literature, it is important to see whether the folk in fact respond to these cases in the way that philosophers assume they (...) should. We test folk intuitions regarding the causal theory of perception by asking our participants to what extent they agree that they would ‘see’ an object in various Gricean scenarios. We find that the intuitions of the folk do not strongly support the causal condition; they at most strongly support a ‘no blocker’ condition. We argue that this is problematic for the claim that the causal condition is a conceptual truth. (shrink)

A. W. Price; VII*—Varieties of Objectivity and Values, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 83, Issue 1, 1 June 1983, Pages 103–120, https://doi.org/.

This paper is about the nature of conscious sensory properties. My initial thesis is that these properties should not be equated with representational properties. I argue that any such representationalist view is in danger of implying that conscious sensory properties are constituted by relations to propositions or other abstract objects outside space and time; and I add that, even if this implication can be avoided, the broadness of representational properties in any case renders them unsuitable to constitute conscious properties. In (...) place of the representational account, I then defend an equation of conscious sensory properties with intrinsic non‐relational properties of subjects, and I show how this view deals naturally with all the difficulties facing representationalism. I conclude by defending this non‐relational account of conscious experience against arguments from the ‘transparency’ and the ‘intrinsic intentionality’ of experience. (shrink)

Object perception deploys a suite of perceptual capacities that constrains attention, guides reidentification, subserves recognition, and anchors demonstrative thought. Objects for perception—perceptual objects—are the targets of such capacities. Characterizing perceptual objects for multisensory perception faces two puzzles. First is the diversity of objects across sensory modalities. Second is the unity of multisensory perceptual objects. This paper resolves the puzzles. Objects for perception are structured mereologically complex individuals. Perceptual objects are items that bear perceptible features and have perceptible parts arranged to (...) form a unified whole. This circumscribes the targets of object perception where neutral talk concerning intentional objects and objects of perception cannot. Nonetheless, it is more permissive than identifying perceptual objects with material bodies, which excludes too much and leans too heavily on vision. The account thus is tailored to capture the role of objects in perception beyond vision: tactual, auditory, and olfactory objects are individuals with differing structures. Its flexibility also enables the account to accommodate shared objects for multisensory perception: multisensory perceptual objects are mereologically complex individuals with hybrid structure. For instance, one can bimodally perceive a common whole with parts accessible to one but not both modalities. Each sense provides a partial perspective on a complex whole that is perceptible through the coordinated use of multiple senses. Understanding perceptual objects as structured mereologically complex individuals thus provides a theoretically useful notion of an object for multisensory perception that resolves the puzzles of diversity and of unity. (shrink)

Suppose that you are looking at a vase of flowers on the table in front of you. You can visually attend to the vase and to the flowers, noticing their different features: their colour, their shape and the way they are arranged. In attending to the vase, the flowers and their features, you are attending to mind-independent objects and features. Suppose, now, that you introspectively reflect on the visual experience you have when looking at the vase of flowers. In doing (...) so, you might notice various features of your experience, for example that individual petals on the flowers are difficult to distinguish. Although in introspection your interest is in the character of your experience, your attention is still to the objects of your experience – to the mind-independent vase and the flowers. Since attending to your experience involves attending to the mind-independent objects and features of your experience, your experience seems introspectively to involve those mind-independent objects and features. 2In general, then, when we introspect a visual experiential episode, it seems that we are related to some mind-independent object or feature that is present and is a part, or a constituent, of the experience. We can call this property – the property of having some mind-independent object or feature as a constituent – the naïve realist property of experiences. It is widely accepted that visual experiences seem to have the NR property; 3 naïve realism is the view that some experiences – the veridical ones – actually do have it: " veridical experiential episodes have mind-independent objects and features as constituents."On a plausible conception of phenomenal character, the phenomenal character of a perceptual experience just is those properties of the experience that explain the way it introspectively seems. Naïve realism is then the view that veridical …. (shrink)

There are two very different ways of thinking about perception. According to the first one, perception is representational: it represents the world as being a certain way. According to the second, perception is a genuine relation between the perceiver and a token object. These two views are thought to be incompatible. My aim is to work out the least problematic version of the representational view of perception that preserves the most important considerations in favor of the relational view. According to (...) this version of representationalism, the properties represented in perception are tropes—abstract particulars that are logically incapable of being present in two distinct individuals at the same time. I call this view ‘trope representationalism’. (shrink)

When we see an object, we also represent those parts of it that are not visible. The question is how we represent them: this is the problem of amodal perception. I will consider three possible accounts: (a) we see them, (b) we have non-perceptual beliefs about them and (c) we have immediate perceptual access to them, and point out that all of these views face both empirical and conceptual objections. I suggest and defend a fourth account, according to which we (...) represent the occluded parts of perceived objects by means of mental imagery. This conclusion could be thought of as a (weak) version of the Strawsonian dictum, according to which “imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself”. (shrink)

Standard interpretations of Kant’s transcendental idealism take it as a commitment to the view that the objects of cognition are structured or made by conditions imposed by the mind, and therefore to what Van Cleve calls “honest-to-God idealism”. Against this view, many more recent investigations of Kant’s theory of representation and cognitive significance have been able to show that Kant is committed to a certain form of Mental Content Externalism, and therefore to the realist view that the objects involved in (...) experience and empirical knowledge are mind-independent particulars. Some of these recent interpreters have taken this result to demonstrate an internal incompatibility between Kant‘s transcendental idealism and his own model of cognitive content and the environmental conditions of empirical knowledge. Against this suggestion, this article argues that, while Kant’s theory of content is indeed best construed as externalist, an adequately adjusted form of transcendental idealism is not only compatible with this externalism, but in fact supports it. More generally, the article develops the position that mental content externalism cannot force the adoption of metaphysical realism. (shrink)

Disjunctivists maintain that perceptual experiences and hallucinatory experiences are distinct kinds of event with different metaphysical natures. Moreover, given their view about the nature of perceptual cases, disjunctivists must deny that the perceptual kind of experience can occur during hallucination. However, it is widely held that disjunctivists must grant the converse claim, to the effect that the hallucinatory kind of experience occurs even during perception. This paper challenges that thought. As we will see, the argument for thinking that the hallucinatory (...) kind of experience is present even in cases of perception depends on prior acceptance of a ‘non-demanding’ conception of hallucination, on which all it takes to produce an hallucinatory experience is to induce in the subject the right kind of neurological condition. On the view developed here, by contrast, there are substantive causal conditions, going beyond the mere occurrence of the right kind of neurological state, that must be met if an experience of the hallucinatory kind is to occur. By drawing on this view, I argue, disjunctivists can deny that the kind of experience involved in hallucination ever occurs during perception. This then allows disjunctivists to avoid certain important problems they would otherwise face. It also leaves them with considerably more freedom when it comes to theorising about the nature of hallucinatory experience. (shrink)

There is a traditional conception of sensory experience on which the experiences one has looking at, say, a cat could be had by someone merely hallucinating a cat. Disjunctivists take issue with this conception on the grounds that it does not enable us to understand how perceptual knowledge is possible. In particular, they think, it does not explain how it can be that experiences gained in perception enable us to be in ‘cognitive contact’ with objects and facts. I develop this (...) chal- lenge to the traditional conception and then show that it is possible to accommo- date an adequate account of cognitive contact in keeping with the traditional conception. One upshot of the discussion is that experiences do not bear the explanatory burden placed upon them by disjunctivists. (shrink)

A perceptual experience of a given object seems to make the object itself present to the perceiver’s mind. Many philosophers have claimed that naïve realism (the view that to perceive is to stand in a primitive relation of acquaintance to the world) provides a better account of this phenomenological directness of perceptual experience than does the content view (the view that to perceive is to represent the world to be a certain way). But the naïve realist account of this phenomenology (...) has a conspicuous shortcoming: it explains the phenomenological directness of veridical perceptual experiences but not of hallucinations. Conversely, I maintain that a particular variety of the content view provides a unified account of the phenomenological directness of both veridical and hallucinatory experiences. If so, then contrary to what is often assumed, the phenomenological facts concerning perceptual experience are explained better by the content view than by naïve realism, and consequently, we have a compelling reason to prefer the content view to naïve realism. (shrink)

When you have a perceptual experience of a given physical object that object seems to be immediately present to you in a way it never does when you consciously think about or imagine it. Many philosophers have claimed that naïve realism (the view that to perceive is to stand in a primitive relation of acquaintance to the world) can provide a satisfying account of this phenomenological directness of perceptual experience while the content view (the view that to perceive is to (...) represent the world to be a certain way) cannot. I argue that this claim is false. Specifically, I maintain that the only acceptable naïve realist account of the relevant phenomenology is circular and that the content view can provide a similar account. In addition, I maintain that a certain specific variety of the content view provides a non-circular and thus more satisfactory account of this phenomenology. If so, then contrary to what is commonly assumed there are powerful phenomenological grounds for preferring the content view to naïve realism. (shrink)

© Millar 2018This bold, provocative, and highly original book is in three Parts. Part I outlines a problem, sketches a solution, and defends a claim that is crucial to the solution—that ‘perceptual experiences and the processes by which they arise can be rational or irrational’. This claim is The Rationality of Perception. In Part II Siegel argues that the power of experiences to justify beliefs can be downgraded or upgraded by psychological precursors. Part III applies, and further develops, the theoretical (...) framework that has been outlined in the previous parts. The topics addressed there include fearful and wishful seeing, and selection effects as they bear on the character of experiences. The last chapter concerns the appraisal of culturally appropriated racial attitudes that can influence beliefs and, on Siegel’s view, visual experiences as well. The discussion throughout takes readers well off the beaten track and is to... (shrink)

Do we directly perceive physical objects? What is the significance of the qualification ‘directly’ here? Austin famously denied that there was a unique interpretation by which we could make sense of the traditional debate in the philosophy of perception. I look here at Thompson Clarke’s discussion of G. E. Moore and surface perception to answer Austin’s scepticism.

In his Dewey Lectures,1 Hilary Putnam argues that contemporary philosophy cannot solve nor see its way past the traditional problem of how language or thought hooks on to.

Inspired by the writings of J. M. Hinton (1967a, 1967b, 1973), but ushered into the mainstream by Paul Snowdon (1980–1, 1990–1), John McDowell (1982, 1986), and M. G. F. Martin (2002, 2004, 2006), disjunctivism is currently discussed, advocated, and opposed in the philosophy of perception, the theory of knowledge, the theory of practical reason, and the philosophy of action. But what is disjunctivism?

Naïve realism, the view that perceptual experiences are irreducible relations between subjects and external objects, has intuitive appeal, but this intuitive appeal is sometimes thought to be undermined by the possibility of certain kinds of hallucinations. In this paper, I present the intuitive case for naïve realism, and explain why this intuitive case is not undermined by the possibility of such hallucinations. Specifically, I present the intuitive case for naïve realism as arguing that the only way to make sense of (...) the phenomenal character associated with perceptual experiences is by means of a naïve realist ontology. I then explain why this intuitive argument is not undermined by the possibility of hallucinatory experiences that possess the phenomenal character associated with perceptual experiences but, being hallucinations, do not have the ontological nature specified by naïve realism. (shrink)

Perception is a central means by which we come to represent and be aware of particulars in the world. I argue that an adequate account of perception must distinguish between what one perceives and what one's perceptual experience is of or about. Through capacities for visual completion, one can be visually aware of particular parts of a scene that one nevertheless does not see. Seeing corresponds to a basic, but not exhaustive, way in which one can be visually aware of (...) an item. I discuss how the relation between seeing and visual awareness should be explicated within a representational account of the mind. Visual awareness of an item involves a primitive kind of reference: one is visually aware of an item when one's visual perceptual state succeeds in referring to that particular item and functions to represent it accurately. Seeing, by contrast, requires more than successful visual reference. Seeing depends additionally on meta-semantic facts about how visual reference happens to be fixed. The notions of seeing and of visual reference are both indispensable to an account of perception, but they are to be characterized at different levels of representational explanation. (shrink)

According to Brandom, perceptual knowledge is the product of two distinguishable capacities: the capacity to reliably discriminate behaviorally between different sorts of stimuli, and the capacity to take up a position in the game of giving and asking for reasons. However, in focusing exclusively on the entitlements and commitments of observation reports, rather than on perception itself, Brandom passes over a conception of perceptual experience as a sort of contentful mental state. In this article, I argue that this is a (...) blind spot, which makes Brandom’s account of perceptual knowledge unable to properly accommodate the phenomenon of seeing aspects. (shrink)

The main focus of acquaintance theorists has been the nature and mechanism of perceptual acquaintance with particulars. Generally, one’s view of perceptual acquaintance with general features has taken its bearings from one’s view of perceptual acquaintance with particulars. This has led to the glossing over of significant differences in the mechanisms of perceptual acquaintance with particulars and with general features. The difference in mechanisms suggests a difference in the sort of epistemic state at play in the two kinds of cases. (...) While the existence of such a difference might initially seem to spell trouble for acquaintance theorists, it can be made palatable by being traced back to the distinct basic functions concepts of particulars and of general features serve in thought. (shrink)

I shall be mainly concerned with the question ‘What is personal propositional knowledge?’. This question is obviously quite narrowly focused, in three respects. In the first place, there is impersonal as well as personal knowledge. Second, a distinction is often drawn between propositional knowledge and practical knowledge. And third, as well as asking what knowledge is, it is also possible to ask whether and how knowledge of various kinds can be acquired: causal knowledge, a priori knowledge, moral knowledge, and so (...) on. I shall dwell briefly on each of these three points. First, there is the distinction between personal and impersonal knowledge – in other words, between the psychological concept of knowledge and the social one.1 We use the concept of knowledge to describe the cognitive condition of individuals; but we also use it to describe the progress of scientific and historical research. So for example we can speak or enquire about the state of knowledge in a particular field of biology or history. And if we do so, we are evidently not concerned with what anyone in particular knows about, say, the genetics of fruit flies or the career of Charlemagne, but rather with what the scientific or academic community knows. Needless to say, there is a close connection between personal and impersonal knowledge. But ‘It is known that p’ does not simply mean ‘Someone or other. (shrink)

I describe and discuss one particular dimension of disagreement in the philosophical literature on episodic memory. One way of putting the disagreement is in terms of the question as to whether or not there is a difference in kind between remembering seeing x and remembering what x looks like. I argue against accounts of episodic memory that either deny that there is a clear difference between these two forms of remembering, or downplay the difference by in effect suggesting that the (...) former contains an additional ingredient not present in the latter, but otherwise treating them as the same thing. I also show that a recent ‘minimalist’ approach to episodic memory (Clayton & Russell in Neuropsychologia 47 (11): 2,330–2,340, 2009; Russell & Hanna in Mind & Language 27 (1): 29–54, 2012) fails to give a satisfactory explanatory account of the difference between the two types of remembering. I finish by sketching an alternative approach to episodic memory, which turns on the idea that episodic recollection recruits a specific form of causal reasoning that provides for a concrete sense in which remembered events are remembered as belonging to the past. (shrink)

I interpret the anti-idealist manoeuverings of the second half of Moore's 'The refutation of idealism', material as widely cited for its discussion of 'transparency' and 'diaphanousness' as it is deeply obscure. The centerpiece of these manoeuverings is a phenomenological argument for a relational view of perceptual phenomenal character, on which, roughly, 'that which makes the sensation of blue a mental fact' is a non-intentional relation of conscious awareness, a view close to the opposite of the most characteristic contemporary view going (...) under the transparency rubric. The discussion of transparency and diaphanousness is a sidelight, its principal purpose to shore up the main line of argumentation against criticism; in those passages all Moore argues is that the relation of conscious awareness is not transparent, while acknowledging that it can seem to be. (shrink)

Celem artykułu jest wyróżnienie dwóch, funkcjonujących w języku potocznym sensów wyrażenia „widzieć” – obiektywnego i subiektywnego bez jednoczesnego przypisywania obserwatorom przekonań. Celem jest zatem ekstensjonalna eksplikacja. Pozwala to na opisywanie percepcji wzrokowej bez przesądzania o wyższych zdolnościach kognitywnych podmiotu percepcji. Wprowadzenie przekonań obserwatora pozwala następnie na wyrażenie większej ilości rozróżnień występujących w literaturze poświęconej filozoficznym zagadnieniom percepcji zmysłowej.

In the section ‘Unity and Objectivity’ of The Bounds of Sense, P. F. Strawson argues for the thesis that unity of consciousness requires experience of an objective world. My aim in this essay is to evaluate this claim. In the first and second parts of the essay, I explicate Strawson's thesis, reconstruct his argument, and identify the point at which the argument fails. Strawson's discussion nevertheless raises an important question: are there ways in which we must think of our experiences (...) if we are to self-ascribe them? In the third part of the essay, I use Kant's remarks concerning the passivity of experience to suggest one answer to this question: in self-ascribing experiences, we must be capable of thinking of them as passive to their objects. This can be used to provide an alternative route from unity to objectivity. (shrink)