In this paper, I develop and defend a new adverbial theory of perception. I first present a semantics for direct-object perceptual reports that treats their object positions as supplying adverbial modifiers, and I show how this semantics definitively solves the many-property problem for adverbialism. My solution is distinctive in that it articulates adverbialism from within a well-established formal semantic framework and ties adverbialism to a plausible semantics for perceptual reports in English. I then go on to present adverbialism as a (...) theory of the metaphysics of perception. The metaphysics I develop treats adverbial perception as a directed activity: it is an activity with success conditions. When perception is successful, the agent bears a relation to a concrete particular, but perception need not be successful; this allows perception to be fundamentally non-relational. The result is a novel formulation of adverbialism that eliminates the need for representational contents, but also treats successful and unsuccessful perceptual events as having a fundamental common factor. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

This paper reconstructs and defends a Sellarsian approach to “sensation” that allows us to avoid mythological conceptions of it. Part I reconstructs and isolates Sellars’s argument for “sensation,” situating his adverbial interpretation of the notion within his broader theory of perception. Part II positions Sellars’s views vis-à-vis current conversations on adverbalism. In particular, it focuses on the Many Property Problem, which is traditionally considered the main obstacle to adverbialism. After reconstructing Sellars’s response to this problem, I demonstrate that his position (...) is compatible with some current strategies to solving it and can be developed along similar lines. Finally, part III addresses how a Sellarsian adverbial approach productively accounts for the phenomenal properties of experience often understood to fall under the notion of “sensation”. The paper therefore shows how isolating Sellars’s argument can yield a non-problematic conception of sensation. Indeed, the argument on which I focus offers a form of direct realism compatible with recent forms of “new adverbialism”. Although my view remains Sellarsian, to defend it I maintain that some Sellarsian claims about sensation should be resisted as not logically entailed by his argument. (shrink)

This paper explores Sellars’ and Hegel’s treatment of ‘sensation’ – a notion that plays a central role in the reflections of both authors but which has garnered little scholarly attention. To disentangle the issues surrounding the notion and elaborate its role, function, and fate in their thought, I begin with a methodological question: what kind of philosophical argument leads Sellars and Hegel to introduce the concept of ‘sensation’ into their systems? Distinguishing between their two argumentative approaches, I maintain that Hegel (...) offers what I broadly label a ‘transcendental’ argument for ‘sensation,’ which he presents in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit and in the corresponding Lectures, whereas Sellars introduces the notion of sensation for what I term empirically ‘explanatory’ reasons. Next, I closely analyze Hegel’s and Sellars’ theories of sensation to produce a textually supported and conceptually coherent reading of their views on the notion. To clarify my methodological distinction and its stakes in Hegel’s and Sellars’ I will reference Lewis’ notion of the given. (shrink)

Introspective as well as empirical evidence indicates that emotions shape our thinking in numerous ways. Yet, this modificatory aspect of emotions has received relatively little interest in the philosophy of emotion. I give a detailed account of this aspect. Drawing both on the work of William James and adverbialist conceptions of perception, I sketch a theory of emotions that takes these aspects into consideration and suggest that we should understand emotions as manners of thinking.

Although adverbialism is not given much attention in current discussions of phenomenal states, it remains of interest to philosophers who reject the representationalist view of such states, in suggesting an alternative to a problematic ‘act-property’ conception. We discuss adverbialism and the formalization Tye once offered for it, and criticize the semantics he proposed for this formalization. Our central claim is that Tye’s ontological purposes could have been met by a more minimal view, which we dub “attributeism”. We then show that (...) there is no incompatibility between the ontology of attributeism and the postulation of pictorial representations in the brain. (shrink)

According to color subjectivism, colors are mental properties, processes, or events of visual experiences of color. I first lay out an argument for subjectivism founded on claims from visual science and show that it also relies on a philosophical assumption. I then argue that subjectivism is untenable because this view cannot provide a plausible account of color perception. I describe three versions of subjectivism, each of which combines subjectivism with a theory of perception, namely sense datum theory, adverbialism, and the (...) virtual color proposal, and argue that each version faces serious objections. Considering these three theories of perception to be exhaustive of those available to the subjectivist, I conclude that subjectivism is untenable and that the scientifically motivated argument for this view is unsound. I then offer the diagnosis that the philosophical assumption on which this argument relies is mistaken. (shrink)

My main aim is to clarify what we mean by ‘look’ sentences such as (1) below – ones that we use to talk about visual experience: -/- (1) The ball looked red to Sue -/- This is to help better understand a part of natural language that has so far resisted treatment, and also to help better understand the nature of visual experience. -/- By appealing to general linguistic principles I argue for the following account. First, we use (1) to (...) talk about an event. Second, we use the verb ‘look’ to specify the kind of event about which we are talking – it is a looking event. Third, we use the subject ‘the ball’ to specify a stimulus of the event – something that looks some way in the event. Fourth, we use the adjunct ‘to Sue’ to specify an experiencer of the event – someone to whom things look some way in the event. Finally, we use the complement ‘red’ to specify a way of the event – a way in which the event occurs (I take ways of occurring to be properties of events). Which way do we use ‘red’ in (1) to specify? I argue: the maximally specific way w such that the following is generically true: looking events whose stimulus is red occur in way w (it is important that this is understood generically: this is what does much of the work in explaining our use of (1) and other ‘look’ sentences). Putting this together, what we mean by (1) is: there was a looking event whose stimulus was the ball, whose experiencer was Sue, and which occurred in the maximally specific way that looking events occur when their stimulus is red. -/- This account of how we use ‘red’ in (1) is one of the most interesting aspects of my thesis. It extends to an account of how we use ‘proud’ in ‘John walks proud’, ‘as if he is American’ in ‘John talks as if he is American’, ‘like a duck’ in ‘John sounds like a duck’, and so on. In each case we use the expression in question to specify a way: the maximally specific way proud people walk, the maximally specific way American people talk, and so on. So the study of ‘look’ sentences has much to tell us about the functioning of many other English language constructions, and suggests that ways have a significant role to play in the semantics of natural language – a fact that has not yet been sufficiently recognised by linguists or philosophers of language. -/- My thesis also has implications for the philosophy of perception. One of the central questions about perception is: What is the nature of visual experience? What is it, for example, for a ball to look red to Sue? My thesis offers an answer: What it is for the ball to look red to Sue is for whatever it is that we mean by ‘The ball looks red to Sue’ to be the case, and what we mean by ‘The ball looks red to Sue’ is that there is a looking event whose stimulus is the ball, whose experiencer is Sue, and which is occurring in a certain way. It thus delivers an adverbial account of visual experience, one that has the resources to better deal with problems that are traditionally thought to be decisive against adverbial accounts. (shrink)

Adverbialism is the view that to have a conscious perceptual experience is to be consciously experiencing in a certain way, and that this way is not to be understood in relational or representational terms. We might compare what it is for a conscious being to be experiencing in a certain way with what it is for a string to be vibrating in a certain way. This paper makes a new case for adverbialism by appealing to the fact that we can (...) pick out ways of experiencing by treating them as information-bearing signals. In both presenting and defending the view, it will be crucial that information is not the same as representational content, but can still concern objects and the properties of those objects. The resulting information-theoretic adverbialism can answer or deflect the most influential objections to adverbialism. (shrink)

This chapter considers how Liberal Naturalism interacts with the main problems and theories in the philosophy of perception. After briefly summarising the traditional philosophical problems of perception and outlining the standard philosophical theories of perceptual experience, it discusses whether a Liberal Naturalist outlook should incline one towards or away from any of these standard theories. Particular attention is paid to the work of John McDowell and Hilary Putnam, two of the most prominent Liberal Naturalists, whose work was also very influential (...) in the philosophy of perception. There is also a section focusing on colour, an especially important topic not only for debates about perceptual experience but also for debates concerning how our ‘manifest image’ of the natural world relates to our best theories in the physical sciences. (shrink)

In the philosophy of perception, representationalism is the view that all phenomenological differences among mental states are representational differences, in other words, differences in content. In this paper I defend an alternative view which I call external sortalism, inspired by traditional adverbialism, and according to which experiences are not essentially representational. The central idea is that the external world serves as a model for sorting, conceptualizing, and reasoning surrogatively about perceptual experience. On external sortalism, contents are construed as a kind (...) of gloss on experiences themselves. We can retain what is attractive about representationalism, namely, that perceptual experiences can be evaluated for accuracy, without problematic commitment to the idea that they bear a substantive, representational relation to external objects and properties and that this relation determines the phenomenal character of experience. (shrink)

The debate between relationalism and representationalism in the philosophy of perception seems to have come to a standstill where opponents radically disagree on methodological principles or fundamental assumptions. According to Fish (this volume) this is because, not unlike Kuhnian scientific paradigms, the debate displays some elements of incommensurability. This diagnosis makes advancing the debate impossible. I argue that what is hindering progress is not a clash of research programmes, but a series of misunderstandings that can be avoided by disentangling the (...) different questions each theory is invested in and by making explicit the hidden assumptions at play in the debate. One such central assumption is what I call the Superficiality Constraint. This is the idea that the phenomenal character of experience is superficial with respect to introspection. I argue that we can make progress in the debate by assessing to what extent and at what cost relationalism can accommodate this constraint. (shrink)

The debate between relationalism and representationalism in the philosophy of perception seems to have come to a standstill where opponents radically disagree on methodological principles or fundamental assumptions. According to Fish (this volume) this is because, not unlike Kuhnian scientific paradigms, the debate displays some elements of incommensurability. This diagnosis makes advancing the debate impossible. I argue that what is hindering progress is not a clash of research programmes, but a series of misunderstandings that can be avoided by disentangling the (...) different questions each theory is invested in and by making explicit the hidden assumptions at play in the debate. One such central assumption is what I call the Superficiality Constraint. This is the idea that the phenomenal character of experience is superficial with respect to introspection. I argue that we can make progress in the debate by assessing to what extent and at what cost relationalism can accommodate this constraint. (shrink)

Overview of Wilfrid Sellars's philosophy.

There are two ways of reading Newman’s objection to Russell’s structuralism. One assumes that according to Russell, our knowledge of a theory about the external world is captured by an existential generalization on all non-logical symbols of the theory. Under this reading, our knowledge amounts to a cardinality claim. Another reading assumes that our knowledge singles out a structure in Russell’s (and Newman’s) sense: a model theoretic structure that is determined up to isomorphism. Under this reading, our knowledge is far (...) from trivial, for it amounts to knowledge of the structure of the relations between objects, but not their identity. Newman’s objection is then but an expression of structural realism. Since therefore the content of theories is described by classes of structures closed under isomorphism, the most natural description of a theory in structural realism is syntactic. (shrink)