Phenomenalist dogmatist experientialism (PDE) holds the following thesis: if $S$ has a perceptual experience that $p$ , then $S$ has immediate prima facie evidential justification for the belief that $p$ in virtue of the experience’s phenomenology. The benefits of PDE are that it (a) provides an undemanding view of perceptual justification that allows most of our ordinary perceptual beliefs to be justified, and (b) accommodates two important internalist intuitions, viz. the New Evil Demon Intuition and the Blindsight Intuition. However, in (...) the face of a specific version of the Sellarsian dilemma, PDE is ad hoc. PDE needs to explain what is so distinct about perceptual experience that enables it to fulfill its evidential role without being itself in need of justification. I argue that neither an experience’s presentational phenomenology, nor its phenomenal forcefulness can be used to answer this question, and that prospects look dim for any other phenomenalist account. The subjective distinctness of perceptual experience might instead just stem from a higher-order belief that the experience is a perceptual one, but this will only serve to strengthen the case for externalism: externalism is better suited to provide an account of how we attain justified higher-order beliefs and can use this account to accommodate the Blindsight Intuition. (shrink)

An overview of the epistemology of perception, covering the nature of justification, immediate justification, the relationship between the metaphysics of perceptual experience and its rational role, the rational role of attention, and cognitive penetrability. The published version will contain a smaller bibliography, due to space constraints in the volume.

As an important view in the epistemology of perception, dogmatism proposes that for any experience, if it has a distinctive kind of phenomenal character, then it thereby provides us with immediate justification for beliefs about the external world. This paper rejects dogmatism by looking into the epistemology of imagining. In particular, this paper first appeals to some empirical studies on perceptual experiences and imaginings to show that it is possible for imaginings to have the distinctive phenomenal character dogmatists have in (...) mind. Then this paper argues that some of these imaginings fail to provide us with immediate justification for beliefs about the external world at least partly due to their inappropriate etiology. Such imaginings constitute counterexamples to dogmatism. (shrink)

Traditional philosophical discussions of knowledge have focused on the epistemic status of full beliefs. In this book, Moss argues that in addition to full beliefs, credences can constitute knowledge. For instance, your .4 credence that it is raining outside can constitute knowledge, in just the same way that your full beliefs can. In addition, you can know that it might be raining, and that if it is raining then it is probably cloudy, where this knowledge is not knowledge of propositions, (...) but of probabilistic contents. -/- The notion of probabilistic content introduced in this book plays a central role not only in epistemology, but in the philosophy of mind and language as well. Just as tradition holds that you believe and assert propositions, you can believe and assert probabilistic contents. Accepting that we can believe, assert, and know probabilistic contents has significant consequences for many philosophical debates, including debates about the relationship between full belief and credence, the semantics of epistemic modals and conditionals, the contents of perceptual experience, peer disagreement, pragmatic encroachment, perceptual dogmatism, and transformative experience. In addition, accepting probabilistic knowledge can help us discredit negative evaluations of female speech, explain why merely statistical evidence is insufficient for legal proof, and identify epistemic norms violated by acts of racial profiling. Hence the central theses of this book not only help us better understand the nature of our own mental states, but also help us better understand the nature of our responsibilities to each other. (shrink)

Sometimes appearances provide epistemic support that gets undercut later. In an earlier paper I argued that standard Bayesian update rules are at odds with this phenomenon because they are ‘rigid’. Here I generalize and bolster that argument. I first show that the update rules of Dempster–Shafer theory and ranking theory are rigid too, hence also at odds with the defeasibility of appearances. I then rebut three Bayesian attempts to solve the problem. I conclude that defeasible appearances pose a more difficult (...) and pervasive challenge for formal epistemology than is currently thought. 1 The Challenge for Bayesianism1.1 Updating and experience1.2 The problem1.3 Objections2 The Challenge for Dempster–Shafer Theory2.1 Background on Dempster–Shafer theory2.2 The problem for Dempster–Shafer theory3 The Challenge for Ranking Theory4 The Appeal to Metacognition5 The Appeal to Richer Inputs6 The Appeal to a Generic Underminer7 Conclusion. (shrink)

Conditionalization and Jeffrey Conditionalization cannot simultaneously satisfy two widely held desiderata on rules for empirical learning. The first desideratum is confirmational holism, which says that the evidential import of an experience is always sensitive to our background assumptions. The second desideratum is commutativity, which says that the order in which one acquires evidence shouldn't affect what conclusions one draws, provided the same total evidence is gathered in the end. (Jeffrey) Conditionalization cannot satisfy either of these desiderata without violating the other. (...) This is a surprising problem, and I offer a diagnosis of its source. I argue that (Jeffrey) Conditionalization is inherently anti-holistic in a way that is just exacerbated by the requirement of commutativity. The dilemma is thus a superficial manifestation of (Jeffrey) Conditionalization's fundamentally anti-holistic nature. (shrink)

I propose a new argument showing that conscious vision sometimes depends constitutively on conscious attention. I criticise traditional arguments for this constitutive connection, on the basis that they fail adequately to dissociate evidence about visual consciousness from evidence about attention. On the same basis, I criticise Ned Block's recent counterargument that conscious vision is independent of one sort of attention (‘cognitive access'). Block appears to achieve the dissociation only because he underestimates the indeterminacy of visual consciousness. I then appeal to (...) empirical work on the interaction between visual indeterminacy and attention, to argue for the constitutive connection. (shrink)

Can perceptual experiences be states of uncertainty? We might expect them to be, if the perceptual processes from which they're generated, as well as the behaviors they help produce, take account of probabilistic information. Yet it has long been presumed that perceptual experiences purport to tell us about our environment, without hedging or qualifying. Against this long-standing view, I argue that perceptual experiences may well occasionally be states of uncertainty, but that they are never probabilistically structured. I criticize a powerful (...) line of reasoning that we should expect perceptual experience to be probabilistic, given their interfaces with unconscious probabilistic information, with behavior responsive to it, and with credences. (shrink)

It has been argued recently that perception is indeterminate. But there are more than one ways of spelling out what this means. The standard line is that perceptual states attribute different probabilities to different propositions. I provide an alternative to this view, where it is not the attitude, but the content of perceptual states that is indeterminate, inasmuch as it consists of the representation of determinable properties. This view does justice to the more general claim that perception is indeterminate without (...) appealing to probability either in the attitude or in the content. (shrink)

What kind of content must visual states have if they are to offer direct (noninferential) justification for our external world beliefs? How must they present that content if the degree of justification they provide is to reflect the nuance of our changing visual experiences? This paper offers an argument for the view that visual states comprise not only a content, but a confidence relation to that content. This confidence relation lets us explain how visual states can offer noninferential perceptual justification (...) of differing degrees for external world beliefs. These confidence relations let visual states justify beliefs in a way that is sensitive to subtle differences in the character of our visual experiences, while still allowing that visual states give us direct access to the external world in virtue of their content. (shrink)

In “Perceptual Confidence,” I argue that our perceptual experiences assign degrees of confidence. In “Precision, not Confidence, Describes the Uncertainty of Perceptual Experience,” Rachel Denison disagrees. In this reply I first clarify what i mean by ‘perceptual experiences’, ‘assign’ and ‘confidence’. I then argue, contra Denison, that perception involves automatic categorization, and that there is an intrinsic difference between a blurry perception of a sharp image and a sharp perception of a blurry image. -/- .

Perceptual Confidence is the view that perceptual experiences assign degrees of confidence. After introducing, clarifying, and motivating Perceptual Confidence, I catalogue some of its more interesting consequences, such as the way it blurs the distinction between veridical and illusory experiences, a distinction that is sometimes said to carry a lot of metaphysical weight. I also explain how Perceptual Confidence fills a hole in our best scientific theories of perception and why it implies that experiences don't have objective accuracy conditions.

As I head home from work, I’m not sure whether my daughter’s new bike is green, and I’m also not sure whether I’m on drugs that distort my color perception. One thing that I am sure about is that my attitudes towards those possibilities are evidentially independent of one another, in the sense that changing my confidence in one shouldn’t affect my confidence in the other. When I get home and see the bike it looks green, so I increase my (...) confidence that it is green. But something else has changed: now an increase in my confidence that I’m on color-drugs would undermine my confidence that the bike is green. Jonathan Weisberg and Jim Pryor argue that the preceding story is problematic for standard Bayesian accounts of perceptual learning. Due to the ‘rigidity’ of Conditionalization, a negative probabilistic correlation between two propositions cannot be introduced by updating on one of them. Hence if my beliefs about my own color-sobriety start out independent of my beliefs about the color of the bike, then they must remain independent after I have my perceptual experience and update accordingly. Weisberg takes this to be a reason to reject Conditionalization. I argue that this conclusion is too pessimistic: Conditionalization is only part of the Bayesian story of perceptual learning, and the other part needn’t preserve independence. Hence Bayesian accounts of perceptual learning are perfectly consistent with potential underminers for perceptual beliefs. (shrink)

A common objection to representationalism is that a representationalist view of phenomenal character cannot accommodate the effects that shifts in covert attention have on visual phenomenology: covert attention can make items more visually prominent than they would otherwise be without altering the content of visual experience. Recent empirical work on attention casts doubt on previous attempts to advance this type of objection to representationalism and it also points the way to an alternative development of the objection.

Bayesian decision theory can be viewed as the core of psychological theory for idealized agents. To get a complete psychological theory for such agents, you have to supplement it with input and output laws. On a Bayesian theory that employs strict conditionalization, the input laws are easy to give. On a Bayesian theory that employs Jeffrey conditionalization, there appears to be a considerable problem with giving the input laws. However, Jeffrey conditionalization can be reformulated so that the problem disappears, and (...) in fact the reformulated version is more natural and easier to work with on independent grounds. (shrink)

Intentionalism is the view that the phenomenal character of an experience is wholly determined by its representational content is very attractive. Unfortunately, it is in conflict with some quite robust intuitions about the possibility of phenomenal spectrum inversion without misrepresentation. Faced with such a problem, there are the usual three options: reject intentionalism, discount the intuitions and deny that spectrum inversion without misrepresentation is possible, or find a way to reconcile the two by dissolving the apparent conflict. Sydney Shoemaker's (1994) (...) introduction of appearance properties is a particularly ingenious way of pursuing the third strategy, by maintaining that there is a representational difference between the phenomenally spectrum-inverted subjects.2 In introducing appearance properties, Shoemaker does two things: he identifies a theoretical role for some family of properties to play, and he suggests a family of properties as candidates to play that role. I'll argue that his proposed candidates do not play the role as well as we would like, suggest some new candidates, and argue that they do a better job. (shrink)

Much contemporary epistemology is informed by a kind of confirmational holism, and a consequent rejection of the assumption that all confirmation rests on experiential certainties. Another prominent theme is that belief comes in degrees, and that rationality requires apportioning one's degrees of belief reasonably. Bayesian confirmation models based on Jeffrey Conditionalization attempt to bring together these two appealing strands. I argue, however, that these models cannot account for a certain aspect of confirmation that would be accounted for in any adequate (...) holistic confirmation theory. I then survey the prospects for constructing a formal epistemology that better accommodates holistic insights. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Issues concerning the putative perception/cognition divide are not only age-old, but also resurface in contemporary discussions in various forms. In this paper, I connect a relatively new debate concerning perceptual confidence to the perception/cognition divide. The term ‘perceptual confidence’ is quite common in the empirical literature, but there is an unsettled question about it, namely: are confidence assignments perceptual or post-perceptual? John Morrison in two recent papers puts forward the claim that confidence arises already at the level of perception. (...) In this paper, I first argue that Morrison’s case is unconvincing, and then develop one picture on perceptual precision with the notion of ‘matching profile’ and ‘supervaluation’ : 481–495.), highlighting the fact that this is a vagueness account, which is similar to but importantly different from indeterminacy accounts : 156–184.). With this model in hand, there can be rich resources with which to draw a theoretical line between perception and cognition. (shrink)

Jonathan Weisberg has argued that Bayesianism’s rigid updating rules make Bayesian updating incompatible with undermining defeat. In this paper, I argue that when we attend to the higher-order beliefs we must ascribe to agents in the kinds of cases Weisberg considers, the problem he raises disappears. Once we acknowledge the importance of higher-order beliefs to the undermining story, we are led to a different understanding of how these cases arise. And on this different understanding of things, the rigid nature of (...) Bayesianism’s updating rules is no obstacle to its accommodating undermining defeat. (shrink)

The present paper investigates the first step of rational belief acquisition. It, thus, focuses on justificatory relations between perceptual experiences and perceptual beliefs, and between their contents, respectively. In particular, the paper aims at outlining how it is possible to reason from the content of perceptual experiences to the content of perceptual beliefs. The paper thereby approaches this aim by combining a formal epistemology perspective with an eye towards recent advances in philosophy of cognition. Furthermore the paper restricts its focus, (...) it concentrates on the case of color perception and perceptual beliefs about color. (shrink)

John Morrison has argued that confidences are assigned in perceptual experience. For example, when you perceive a figure in the distance, your experience might assign a 55-percent confidence to the figure’s being Isaac. Morrison’s argument leans on the phenomenon of ‘completely trusting your experience’. I argue that Morrison presupposes a problematic ‘importation model’ of this familiar phenomenon, and propose a very different way of thinking about it. While the article’s official topic is whether confidences are assigned in perceptual experience, it (...) is also about two more general issues: how we can determine which properties are assigned in perceptual experience; and how we transition from perception to belief. (shrink)

Philosophy of perception has recently become one of the most important and most central sub-fields of philosophical research. The aim of this volume is to give a representative sample of the new approaches in philosophy of perception that are responsible for this explosion of philosophical interest. Perceiving the World contains eleven original essays, written specially for this book by some of the leading contemporary philosophers of perception: Jonathan Cohen, JTr(me Dokic, Fred Dretske, Andy Egan, Benj Hellie, Sean D. Kelly, M.G.F. (...) Martin, Mohan Matthen, Adam Pautz, Jesse J. Prinz, and Susanna Siegel." "Bence Nanay is BOF Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Antwerp and Senior Research Associate at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge. He received his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2006. He has published articles in various journals on philosophy of mind, philosophy of biology, and aesthetics."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

Does metacognition--the capacity to self-evaluate one's cognitive performance--derive from a mindreading capacity, or does it rely on informational processes? Joëlle Proust draws on psychology and neuroscience to defend the second claim. She argues that metacognition need not involve metarepresentations, and is essentially related to mental agency.

Mental imagery (varieties of which are sometimes colloquially refered to as “visualizing,” “seeing in the mind's eye,” “hearing in the head,” “imagining the feel of,” etc.) is quasi-perceptual experience; it resembles perceptual experience, but occurs in the absence of the appropriate external stimuli. It is also generally understood to bear intentionality (i.e., mental images are always images of something or other), and thereby to function as a form of mental representation. Traditionally, visual mental imagery, the most discussed variety, was thought (...) to be caused by the presence of picturelike representations (mental images) in the mind, soul, or brain, but this is no longer universally accepted. (shrink)

Overview of recent work in philosophy of perception.

The success of the Bayesian approach to perception suggests probabilistic perceptual representations. But if perceptual representation is probabilistic, why doesn't normal conscious perception reflect the full probability distributions that the probabilistic point of view endorses? For example, neurons in MT/V5 that respond to the direction of motion are broadly tuned: a patch of cortex that is tuned to vertical motion also responds to horizontal motion, but when we see vertical motion, foveally, in good conditions, it does not look at all (...) horizontal. This article argues that the best Bayesian approach to this problem does not require probabilistic representation. (shrink)