A content theory of art would identify an artwork with the meaningful or representational content of some concrete artistic vehicle, such as the intentional, expressive, stylistic, and subject matter-related content embodied in, or resulting from, acts of intentional artistic expression by artists. Perhaps surprisingly, the resultant view that an artwork is nothing but content seems to have been without theoretical defenders until very recently, leaving a significant theoretical gap in the literature. I present some basic (...) arguments in defence of such a view, including the following. Content views of linguistic communication are ubiquitous, so why should they not be applicable in artistic cases as well? Also, propositional accounts of language involve two kinds of content (the proposition expressed by a sentence, plus the worldly state of affairs it represents), both of which kinds can be used in explaining artworks. In addition, the differing modal properties of artworks and concrete artefacts can be used to show that artworks could not be, or include, such physical artefacts. (shrink)

In this paper, we consider Noël Carroll’s Content Theory (CT) (2015) and argue that a key problem with CT is that it can be interpreted in two distinct ways: as a descriptive theory of aesthetic experience and as a normative prescriptive theory. Although CT is presented as a descriptive theory of experience, much of what Carroll says implies that CT can also be understood as a theory about how one ought to look at artworks. (...) We argue that when understood as a descriptive theory, CT fails to qualify as a meaningful theory of aesthetic experience. We then interpret the theory prescriptively. Ultimately, this second interpretation is also found lacking: if the aim of the theory is to instruct one on how to view art, it is no longer an attempt to characterize the experience of art. We conclude by arguing that the main flaw in CT is its approach: we cannot meaningfully characterize an experience by enumerating the objects that supposedly cause said experience, and any theory that takes such an approach is likely to be unsuccessful. (shrink)

Linnebo and Pettigrew present some objections to category theory as an autonomous foundation. They do a commendable job making clear several distinct senses of ‘autonomous’ as it occurs in the phrase ‘autonomous foundation’. Unfortunately, their paper seems to treat the ‘categorist’ perspective rather unfairly. Several infelicities of this sort were addressed by McLarty. In this note I address yet another apparent infelicity.

The representational content or subject matter of a picture is normally distinguished from various non-representational components of meaning involved in artworks, such as expressive, stylistic or intentional factors. However, I show how such non subject matter components may themselves be analyzed in content terms, if two different categories of representation are recognized--aspect indication for stylistic etc. factors, and normal representation for subject matter content. On the account given, the relevant kinds of content are hierarchically structured, with (...) relatively unconceptualized lower level aspectual contents encoding or symbolizing higher level conceptualized representational subject matter. Such an account is strongly supported by the latest findings of cognitive science regarding levels of conceptualization. The paper also demonstrates how the account given is compatible with the actual pictorial competence of normal viewers of visual artworks. (shrink)

Informational theories of semantic content have been recently gaining prominence in the debate on the notion of mental representation. In this paper we examine new-wave informational theories which have a special focus on cognitive science. In particular, we argue that these theories face four important difficulties: they do not fully solve the problem of error, fall prey to the wrong distality attribution problem, have serious difficulties accounting for ambiguous and redundant representations and fail to deliver a metasemantic theory (...) of representation. Furthermore, we argue that these difficulties derive from their exclusive reliance on the notion of information, so we suggest that pure informational accounts should be complemented with functional approaches. (shrink)

There are two leading theories about the ontology of dreams. One holds that dreams involve hallucinations and beliefs. The other holds that dreaming involves sensory and propositional imagining. I highlight two features of dreams which are more easily explained by the imagination theory. One is that certain things seem to be true in our dreams, even though they are not represented sensorily; this is easily explained if dreams involve propositional imagining. The other is that dream narratives can be temporally (...) segmented, involving events which take place across long spans of time; this makes sense if dreams involve sensory imagining, for we often sensorily imagine narratives during wakefulness in the same way. The two considerations are unified by the fact that both highlight forms of content determination characteristic of imagining. (shrink)

Perception is riddled with cases of reliable misperception. These are cases in which a perceptual state is tokened inaccurately any time it is tokened under normal conditions. On the face of it, this fact causes trouble for theories that provide an analysis of perceptual content in non-semantic, non-intentional, and non-phenomenal terms, such as those found in Millikan (1984), Fodor (1990), Neander (2017), and Schellenberg (2018). I show how such theories can be extended so that they cover such cases without (...) giving up their core commitments. (shrink)

Radical enactivism, an increasingly influential approach to cognition in general, has recently been applied to memory in particular, with Hutto and Peeters New directions in the philosophy of memory, Routledge, New York, 2018) providing the first systematic discussion of the implications of the approach for mainstream philosophical theories of memory. Hutto and Peeters argue that radical enactivism, which entails a conception of memory traces as contentless, is fundamentally at odds with current causal and postcausal theories, which remain committed to a (...) conception of traces as contentful: on their view, if radical enactivism is right, then the relevant theories are wrong. Partisans of the theories in question might respond to Hutto and Peeters’ argument in two ways. First, they might challenge radical enactivism itself. Second, they might challenge the conditional claim that, if radical enactivism is right, then their theories are wrong. In this paper, we develop the latter response, arguing that, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, radical enactivism in fact aligns neatly with an emerging tendency in the philosophy of memory: radical enactivists and causal and postcausal theorists of memory have begun to converge, for distinct but compatible reasons, on a contentless conception of memory traces. (shrink)

This thesis is about experiential content: what it is; what kind of account can be given of it. I am concerned with identifying and attacking one main view - I call it the inferentialist proposal. This account is central to the philosophy of mind, epistemology and philosophy of science and perception. I claim, however, that it needs to be recast into something far more subtle and enriched, and I attempt to provide a better alternative in these pages. The inferentialist (...) proposal holds that experiential content is necessarily under¬pinned by sophisticated cognitive influences. My alternative, the continuum theory, holds that these influences are relevant to experience only at certain levels of organisation and that at other levels there are contents which such features do not capture at all. Central to my account is that there are degrees to which cognitive influences affect experiential content; indeed, for the most part, experience is an amalgam of both inferential and non-inferential features. I claim that the inferentialist proposal is fundamentally flawed and deserves replacement, and I argue that my alternative fills the hollow that remains. The thesis is divided into four sections. In Part I, Chapter 1, I introduce two traditionally rival views of experiential content. In Chapter 2, I develop my continuum alternative. Chapter 3 assesses the relationship between experience and language, while Chapter 4 explores the relationship between beliefs and experience. The overall argument is that it has been a mistake to understand experience simply in inferential or non-inferential terms. In Part II, I examine the structure of mental content. Chapter 5 is concerned with the kinds of experiences which escape the inferentialist analysis. Chapter 6 considers Kant’s metaphysic of experience counterpointed to Lorenz’s reading of his work in the light of evolutionary biology. Chapter 7 treats animal experience in relation to the continuum view I am developing, while Chapter 8 reviews Fodor’s contribution to perceptual psychology. It is argued that the view of experiential content being developed is both consistent with empirical data on informationally local perceptual sub-systems, but also accords well with evolutionary theory and a naturalist interpretation of Kant’s taxonomy. Part III deals with inferentialism in the philosophy of science. In Chapter 9, I assess the theory dependence of observation thesis as it is advanced by Paul Feyerabend. I bring out of his account a subtle confusion concerning the importance of inference in the context of scientific inquiry. Part IV deals with the issue of experience in the philosophy of mind. In Chapter 10, I look at Wilfred Sellars’s attack on sense data theories. Chapter 11 confronts Paul Churchland’s treatment of ‘folk psychology’ while Chapter 12 isolates the issue of experiential qualia and the position of property dualism. I offer a critical review of Thomas Nagel’s work in this chapter and claim that his position can be read in a way which is consistent with the continuum account I am developing. I conclude the thesis in the usual fashion with a summary of the central claims. (shrink)

In this paper, I analyze a type of externalist enactivism defended by Riccardo Manzotti. Such radical versions of enactivism are gaining more attention, especially in cognitive science and cognitive robotics. They are radical in that their notion of representation is purely referential, and content is conflated with reference. Manzotti follows in the footsteps of early causal theories of reference that had long been shown to be inadequate. It is commonly known that radical versions of externalism may lead to difficulties (...) with the notion of representation, especially if they cannot help themselves with the notion of syntax. I argue that a type of externalism present in Manzotti’s enactivism may well lead to anti-representationalism. (shrink)

Externalism is the view that the intentional content of a mental state supervenes on its relations to objects in the extramental world. Nativism is the view that some of the innate states of the mind/brain have intentional content. I consider both “causal” and “nomic” versions of externalism, and argue that both are incompatible with nativism. I consider likely candidates for a compatibilist position – a nativism of “narrow” representational states, and a nativism of the contentless formal “vehicles” of (...) representational states. I argue that “narrow nativism” is either too implausible to appeal to the nativist – because it entails that innate representational states are lost as the mind becomes more experienced, or too costly to appeal to the externalist – because a reasonable version of it requires the analytic-synthetic distinction. Finally, I argue that “syntactic nativism” is indistinguishable from classical anti-nativist empiricism, given the latter’s broad tolerance for innate implementation of psychological principles and mechanisms. (shrink)

This paper is about two requirements on wish reports whose interaction motivates a novel semantics for these ascriptions. The first requirement concerns the ambiguities that arise when determiner phrases, such as definite descriptions, interact with ‘wish’. More specifically, several theorists have recently argued that attitude ascriptions featuring counterfactual attitude verbs license interpretations on which the determiner phrase is interpreted relative to the subject’s beliefs. The second requirement involves the fact that desire reports in general require decision-theoretic notions for their analysis. (...) The current study is motivated by the fact that no existing account captures both of these aspects of wishing. I develop a semantics for wish reports that makes available belief-relative readings but also allows decision-theoretic notions to play a role in shaping the truth conditions of these ascriptions. The general idea is that we can analyze wishing in terms of a two-dimensional notion of expected utility. (shrink)

This paper addresses Prinz's naturalistic theory of conceptual content, which he has defended in several works (Prinz, 2000; 2002; 2006). More precisely, I present in detail and critically assess his account of referential content, which he distinguishes from nominal or cognitive content. The paper argues that Prinz's theory faces four important difficulties, which might have significant consequences for his overall empiricist project.

This book argues that misinformation poses a multi-faceted threat to knowledge, while arguing that some forms of content moderation risk exacerbating these threats. It proposes alternative forms of content moderation that aim to address this complexity while enhancing human epistemic agency. The proliferation of fake news, false conspiracy theories, and other forms of misinformation on the internet and especially social media is widely recognized as a threat to individual knowledge and, consequently, to collective deliberation and democracy itself. This (...) book argues that misinformation presents a three-pronged threat to knowledge. While researchers often focus on the role of misinformation in causing false beliefs, this deceptive potential of misinformation exists alongside the potential to suppress trust and to distort the perception of evidence. Recognizing the multi-faceted nature of this threat is essential to the development of effective measures to mitigate the harms associated with misinformation. The book weaves together work in analytic epistemology with emerging empirical work in other disciplines to offer novel insights into the threats posed by misinformation. Additionally, it breaks new ground by systematically assessing different forms of content moderation from the perspective of epistemology. Misinformation, Content Moderation, and Epistemology will appeal to philosophers working in applied and social epistemology, as well as scholars and advanced students in disciplines such as communication studies, political science, and social psychology who are researching misinformation. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to lay out the algebraic approach to propositions and then to show how it can be implemented in new solutions to Frege's puzzle and a variety of related puzzles about content.

Several philosophers think there are important analogies between emotions and perceptual states. Furthermore, considerations about the rational assessibility of emotions have led philosophers—in some cases, the very same philosophers—to think that the content of emotions must be propositional content. If one finds it plausible that perceptual states have propositional contents, then there is no obvious tension between these views. However, this view of perception has recently been attacked by philosophers who hold that the content of perception is (...) object-like. I shall argue for a view about the content of emotions and perceptual states which will enable us to hold both that emotional content is analogous to perceptual content and that both emotions and perceptual states can have propositional contents. This will involve arguing for a pluralist view of perceptual content, on which perceptual states can have both contents which are proposition-like and contents which are object-like. I shall also address two significant objections to the claim that emotions can have proposition-like contents. Meeting one of these objections will involve taking on a further commitment: the pluralist account of perceptual content will have to be one on which the contents of perception can be non-conceptual. (shrink)

The disjunction problem and the distality problem each presents a challenge that any theory of mental content must address. Here we consider their bearing on purely probabilistic causal theories. In addition to considering these problems separately, we consider a third challenge—that a theory must solve both. We call this “the hard problem.” We consider 8 basic ppc theories along with 240 hybrids of them, and show that some can handle the disjunction problem and some can handle the (...) distality problem, but none can handle the hard problem. This is our main result. We then discuss three possible responses to that result, and argue that though the first two fail, the third has some promise. (shrink)

Skyrms, building on the work of Dretske, has recently developed a novel information-theoretic account of propositional content in simple signalling systems. Information-theoretic accounts of content traditionally struggle to accommodate the possibility of misrepresentation, and I show that Skyrms’s account is no exception. I proceed to argue, however, that a modified version of Skyrms’s account can overcome this problem. On my proposed account, the propositional content of a signal is determined not by the information that it actually carries, (...) but by the information that it would carry at the nearest separating equilibrium of the underlying evolutionary dynamics. I show that this amended account yields reasonable ascriptions of false propositional content in a well-known formal model of the evolution of communication , and close with a discussion of the serious but perhaps not insuperable difficulties we face in applying the account to examples of signalling in the real world. (shrink)

Here I propose an interpretation of the ancient Stoic psychological theory on which (i) the concepts that an adult human possesses affect the content of the perceptual impressions (φαντασίαι αἰσθητικαί) she forms, and (ii) the content of such impressions is exhausted by an ‘assertible’ (ἀξίωμα) of suitable complexity. What leads the Stoics to accept (i) and (ii), I argue, is their theory of assent and belief formation, which requires that the perceptual impression communicate information suitable to (...) serve as the content of belief. In arguing for (i), I reject a rival interpretation on which conceptualization occurs subsequently to the formation of a perceptual impression. In arguing for (ii), I deny that perceptual impressions have two kinds of content: one formulated in an assertible, the other sensory, featuring independently of this assertible. I explore the implications of (i) and (ii) for the Stoic theory of emotions, expertise, and rationality, and argue that they shed new light on the workings of impression, assent, and belief. (shrink)

As humans, we use the power of thinking to make scientific discoveries, develop technologies, manage social interactions, and transmit knowledge to the next generations. With the ability to think, we can trace back and discover the origin of the universe, the natural world, and ourselves. The content of this book, Mindsponge Theory, is part of that discovery process. -/- Product Details -/- Publisher ‏ : ‎ Walter de Gruyter (December 6, 2022) Publication date ‏ : ‎ December 6, (...) 2022 Language ‏ : ‎ English Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 214 pages ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 8367405145 ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-8367405140 Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.3 x 0.71 x 9.29 inches -/- . (shrink)

Both common sense and dominant traditions in art criticism and philosophical aesthetics have it that aesthetic features or properties are perceived. However, there is a cast of reasons to be sceptical of the thesis. This paper defends the thesis—that aesthetic properties are sometimes represented in perceptual experience—against one of those sceptical opponents. That opponent maintains that perception represents only low-level properties, and since all theorists agree that aesthetic properties are not low-level properties, perception does not represent aesthetic properties. I offer (...) a novel argument—what I call the argument from seeing-as—against that sceptic which moves from consideration of ambiguous figures to consideration of visual art. It concludes that aesthetic properties are sometimes perceived and delivers a general lesson for philosophy of perception. Contrary to extant theories of rich perceptual content, aesthetic properties are far better candidates for high-level perceptual contents than standardly theorized rich contents like natural kinds. (shrink)

I argue that the familiar picture of the rise of analytic philosophy through the early work of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell is incomplete and to some degree erroneous. Archival evidence suggests that a considerable influence on Moore, especially evident in his 1899 paper ‘The nature of judgment,’ comes from the literature in nineteenth-century empirical psychology rather than nineteenth-century neo-Hegelianism, as is widely believed. I argue that the conceptual influences of Moore’s paper are more likely to have had their (...) source in the work of two of Moore’s teachers, G. F. Stout and James Ward. What may be called an anti-psychologism about psychology characterizes the work of these and other psychologists of the period. I argue that the anti-psychologism that is the main aim of Moore’s early theory of judgment is an adaptation of this notion, which is significantly dissimilar from the notion defended by Bradley, traditionally thought to have been a key influence on Moore.Keywords: G. E. Moore; Bertrand Russell; Propositions; Anti-psychologism; Early analytic philosophy; G. F. Stout. (shrink)

In this paper, I introduce a new theory of assertoric content. By ‘theory’, I mean both an extensionally correct definition and an elucidation of the mechanisms underlying assertoric content. In agreement with some existing work on the topic, I contend that assertoric content spans several content categories and is possibly constituted by an utterance’s standing content and explicature. I also offer a detailed explanation of how and why assertoric content can be determined (...) by an utterance’s particularized conversational implicature. I call my view the first-fill theory. This theory integrates recent developments in the literature related to the lying/misleading distinction. Additionally, my view accounts for intuitive judgments regarding the assertoric content of utterances that involve slips of the tongue. Finally, I also elucidate the apparent complexity of assertoric content by drawing parallels between the interpretative modes underlying it and those used in legal interpretation. (shrink)

It is traditionally thought that metaphorical utterances constitute a special— nonliteral—kind of departure from lexical constraints on meaning. Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson have been forcefully arguing against this: according to them, relevance theory’s comprehension/interpretation procedure for metaphorical utterances does not require details specifi c to metaphor (or nonliteral discourse); instead, the same type of comprehension procedure as that in place for literal utterances covers metaphors as well. One of Sperber and Wilson’s central reasons for holding this is that (...) metaphorical utterances occupy one end of a continuum that includes literal, loose and hyperbolic utterances with no sharp boundaries in between them. Call this the continuum argument about interpreting metaphors. My aim is to show that this continuum argument doesn’t work. For if it were to work, it would have an unwanted consequence: it could be converted into a continuum argument about interpreting linguistic errors, including slips of the tongue, of which malaprops are a special case. In particular, based on the premise that the literal–loose–metaphorical continuum extends to malaprops also, we could conclude that the relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure for malaprops does not require details specifi c to linguistic errors, that is, details beyond those already in place for interpreting literal utterances. Given that we have good reason to reject this conclusion, we also have good reason to rethink the conclusion of the continuum argument about interpreting metaphors and consider what additional (metaphor-specifi c) details—about the role of constraints due to what is lexically encoded by the words used—might be added to relevance-theoretic comprehension procedures. (shrink)

The usual visual experiences possess a perspectival phenomenology as they seem to present objects from a certain perspective. Nevertheless, it is not obvious how to characterise experiential content determining such phenomenology. In particular, while there are many works investigating perspectival properties of experienced objects, a question regarding how subject is represented in visual perspectival experiences attracted less attention. In order to address this problem, I consider four popular phenomenal intuitions regarding perspectival experiences and argue that the major theories of (...) perspectival experiences do not account for all of them. Relying on these observations, I show how a theory which accommodates all these intuitions can be developed by (a) recognising that visual perspectival experiences are, in fact, multimodal visuo-bodily experiences and (b) distinguishing between egocentric and structural contents. (shrink)

In the contemporary discussions concerning unconscious perception it is not uncommon to postulate that content and phenomenal character are ‘orthogonal’, i.e., there is no type of content which is essentially conscious, but instead, every representational content can be either conscious or not. Furthermore, this is not merely treated as a thesis justified by theoretical investigations, but as supported by empirical considerations concerning the actual functioning of the human cognition. In this paper, I address unconscious color perception and (...) argue for a negative thesis—that the main experimental paradigms used in studying unconscious color perception do not provide support for the position that conscious and unconscious color representations have the same type of content. More specifically, I claim that there is no significant support for the claim that unconscious vision categorically represents surface colors. (shrink)

This chapter begins with an empirical analysis of attitudes towards the law, which inspires a philosophical re-examination of the moral status of the rule of law. The chapter analyses survey data from the US about law-related attitudes and legal compliance. Consistently with prior studies, it finds that people’s ascriptions of legitimacy to the legal system are predicted strongly by their perceptions of the procedural justice and lawfulness of police and court officials’ action. Two factors emerge as significant predictors of people’s (...) compliance with the law: (i) their belief that they have a (content-independent, moral) duty to obey the law (which is one element of legitimacy, as defined in the chapter); and (ii) their moral assessment of the content of specific legal requirements (referred to in the chapter as ‘perceived moral content of laws’). The chapter also observes an interactive relationship between these two factors. The authors then identify a parallel (similarly interactive) modality in the way that form and content mutually affect the value of the rule of law. They argue that Lon Fuller’s precepts of legality possess an expressive moral quality, but that the extent to which their expressive effect materialises is sensitive to the moral quality of the law’s content. (shrink)

In her landmark book, Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories (Millikan1984),1 Ruth Garrett Millikan utilizes the idea of a biological function to solve philosophical problems associated with the phenomena of language, thought, and meaning. Language and thought are activities of biological organisms, according to Millikan, and we should treat them as such when trying to answer related philosophical questions. Of special interest is Millikan’s treatment of intentionality. Here Millikan employs the notion of a biological function to explain what it is (...) for one thing in nature, a bee dance (43), for example, to be about another, in this case, the location of a nectar source. My concern in this paper is to understand whether Millikan’s account of intentionality adequately explains how humans achieve reference, in language or thought, to individuals and groups in their environment. In bringing her theory of intentional content to bear on human activities, Millikan focuses largely on natural language. Thus, in what follows, I begin by laying out the biology-based principles that underlie Millikan’s theory of content, then proceed with an explanation of how the theory is to apply to natural language. As it appears, Millikan’s account of how content is determined for natural language terms and sentences rests on the determinacy of intentional content at the psychological level. This leads me to take a careful look at what Millikan says about the content of mental representations, in hopes of finding a sufficient basis there for the application of Millikan’s theory of content to natural language. Ultimately, I conclude that Millikan’s theory faces a problem of vacuity. If we approach the theory as a theory of intentional content, intended to explain the nature of reference, the theory is lacking in an extremely important respect: Millikan explains how it could be one of the biological functions of a mental or natural language term to refer, without telling us precisely what in the natural order constitutes the reference relation.. (shrink)

What is the content of a mental state? This question poses the problem of intentionality: to explain how mental states can be about other things, where being about them is understood as representing them. A framework that integrates predictive coding and signaling systems theories of cognitive processing offers a new perspective on intentionality. On this view, at least some mental states are evaluations, which differ in function, operation, and normativity from representations. A complete naturalistic theory of intentionality must (...) account for both types of intentional state. (shrink)

The present paper was written as a contribution to ongoing methodological debates within the NCC project. We focus on the neural correlates of conscious perceptual episodes. Our claim is that the NCC notion, as applied to conscious perceptual episodes, needs to be reconceptualized. It mixes together the processing related to the perceived contents and the neural substrate of consciousness proper, i.e. mechanisms making the perceptual contents conscious. We thus propose that the perceptual NCC be divided into two constitutive subnotions. The (...) main theoretical idea that emerges as a consequence of this reconceptualization is that the neural correlate of a perceptual episode is formed in the neural interaction between content-processing and consciousness-conferring mechanisms. The paper elaborates this distinction, marshals some initial arguments in its favour, and tests it against some of the most debated theories of consciousness. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to introduce the work of Leopold Blaustein — philosopher and psychologist, who studied under Kazimierz Twardowski in Lvov and under Husserl in Freiburg im Breisgau. In his short academic career Blaustein developed an original philosophy that drew upon both phenomenology and Twardowski’s analytical approach. One of his main publications concerns Husserl’s early theory of intentional act and object, introduced in Logische Untersuchungen. In the first part of the article I briefly present Blaustein’s biography (...) and some general features of his philosophy. The second part provides an overview of Blaustein’s dissertation concerning Husserl’s early phenomenology. In the third and final part I summarize Blaustein’s research, including the critical remarks of Roman Ingarden. (shrink)

This paper presents arguments from empirical research and from philosophical considerations to the effect that phenomenality and content are two distinct and independent features of mental representations, which are both relational. Thus, it is argued, classical arguments that infer phenomenality from content have to be rejected. Likewise, theories that try to explain the phenomenal character of experiences by appeal to specific types of content cannot succeed. Instead, a dynamic view of consciousness has to be adopted that seeks (...) to explain consciousness by certain ways of processing representations. Therefore, only empirical methods that are able to investigate the dynamics of the mind can be used for the “quest for consciousness” proper. Moreover, the central intuitions about consciousness are best explained when phenomenality and content are clearly distinguished. (shrink)

Some have claimed that people with very different beliefs literally see the world differently. Thus Thomas Kuhn: ‘what a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual—conceptual experience has taught him to see’ (Kuhn 1970, p. ll3). This view — call it ‘Perceptual Relativism’ — entails that a scientist and a child may look at a cathode ray tube and, in a sense, the first will see it while the second won’t. The (...) claim is not, of course, that the child’s experience is ‘empty’; but that, unlike the scientist, it does not see the tube as a cathode ray tube. One way of supporting this claim is to say that one cannot see something as an F unless one has the concept F. Since the child plainly lacks the concept of a cathode ray tube, it cannot see it as a cathode ray tube. Although Perceptual Relativism is hard to believe, this supporting suggestion is not so implausible. After all, when we see (and more generally, perceive) the world, the world is presented to us in a particular way; so how can we see it as being that way unless we have some idea or conception of the way it is presented? We need not be committed to a representative theory of perception to think that perceptions in some sense represent the world. We can express this by saying that perceptions have content. Now it is a commonplace that the contents of beliefs and the other propositional attitudes involve concepts. The belief that this thing is a cathode ray tube involves, in some sense, the concept cathode ray tube. So the line of thought behind Perceptual Relativism may be expressed thus: seeing an F as an F is a state with content. (shrink)

Call the idea that states of perceptual awareness have intentional content, and in virtue of that aim at or represent ways the world might be, the ‘Content View.’ I argue that though Kant is widely interpreted as endorsing the Content View there are significant problems for any such interpretation. I further argue that given the problems associated with attributing the Content View to Kant, interpreters should instead consider him as endorsing a form of acquaintance theory. (...) Though perceptual acquaintance is controversial in itself and in attribution to Kant, it promises to make sense of central claims within his critical philosophy. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophy and theoretical psychology are dominated by an acceptance of content-externalism: the view that the contents of one's mental states are constitutively, as opposed to causally, dependent on facts about the external world. In the present work, it is shown that content-externalism involves a failure to distinguish between semantics and pre-semantics---between, on the one hand, the literal meanings of expressions and, on the other hand, the information that one must exploit in order to ascertain their literal meanings. (...) It is further shown that, given the falsity of content-externalism, the falsity of the Computational Theory of Mind (CTM) follows. It is also shown that CTM involves a misunderstanding of terms such as "computation," "syntax," "algorithm," and "formal truth." Novel analyses of the concepts expressed by these terms are put forth. These analyses yield clear, intuition-friendly, and extensionally correct answers to the questions "what are propositions?, "what is it for a proposition to be true?", and "what are the logical and psychological differences between conceptual (propositional) and non-conceptual (non-propositional) content?" Naively taking literal meaning to be in lockstep with cognitive content, Burge, Salmon, Falvey, and other semantic externalists have wrongly taken Kripke's correct semantic views to justify drastic and otherwise contraindicated revisions of commonsense. (Salmon: What is non-existent exists; at a given time, one can rationally accept a proposition and its negation. Burge: Somebody who is having a thought may be psychologically indistinguishable from somebody who is thinking nothing. Falvey: somebody who rightly believes himself to be thinking about water is psychologically indistinguishable from somebody who wrongly thinks himself to be doing so and who, indeed, isn't thinking about anything.) Given a few truisms concerning the differences between thought-borne and sentence-borne information, the data is easily modeled without conceding any legitimacy to any one of these rationality-dismantling atrocities. (It thus turns out, ironically, that no one has done more to undermine Kripke's correct semantic points than Kripke's own followers!). (shrink)

In this article I offer an explicating interpretation of the procedure of content recarving as described by Frege in §64 of the Foundations of Arithmetic. I argue that the procedure of content recarving may be interpreted as an operation that while restricting the subject matter of a sentence, performs a generalization on what the sentence says about its subject matter. The characterization of the recarving operation is given in the setting of Yablo’s theory of subject matter and (...) it is based on the relation of determination between properties. The main advantage of the proposal is its generality, for it is applicable not just to the case of abstraction principles. (shrink)

This chapter begins with an empirical analysis of attitudes towards the law, which, in turn, inspires a philosophical re-examination of the moral status of the rule of law. In Section 2, we empirically analyse relevant survey data from the US. Although the survey, and the completion of our study, preceded the recent anti-police brutality protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd, the relevance of our observations extends to this recent development and its likely reverberations. Consistently with prior studies, we (...) find that people’s ascriptions of legitimacy to the legal system are predicted strongly by their perceptions of the procedural justice and lawfulness of police and court officials’ action. Two factors emerge as significant predictors of people’s compliance with the law: (i) their belief that they have a (content-independent, moral) duty to obey the law (which is one element of legitimacy, as defined here); and (ii) their moral assessment of the content of specific legal requirements (‘perceived moral content of laws’). We also observe an interactive relationship between these two factors. At higher levels of perceived moral content of laws, felt duty to obey is a better predictor of compliance. And, similarly, perceived moral content of laws is a better predictor of compliance at higher levels of felt duty to obey. This suggests that the moral content incorporated in specific laws interacts with the normative force people ascribe to legal authorities by virtue of other qualities, specifically here procedural justice and lawfulness. In Section 3, the focus shifts to a philosophical analysis, whereby we identify a parallel (similarly interactive) modality in the way that form and content mutually affect the value of the rule of law. We advocate a distinctive alternative to two rival approaches in jurisprudential discourse, the first of which claims that Lon Fuller’s eight precepts of legality embody moral qualities not contingent on the law’s content, while the second denies any independent moral value in these eight precepts, viewing them as entirely subservient to the law’s substantive goals. In contrast, on the view put forward here, Fuller’s principles possess (inter alia) an expressive moral quality, but their expressive effect does not materialise in isolation from other, contextual factors. In particular, the extent to which it materialises is partly sensitive to the moral quality of the law’s content. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to scrutinize active externalism and its repercussions for externalism about mental content. I start from the claim that active externalism is a version of content externalism that follows from the extended cognition thesis as a thesis about cognitive vehicles. Various features of active content externalism are explored by comparison with the known forms of passive externalism – in particular with respect to the multiple realizability of the relevant external content-determining components (...) and with respect to mental causation. A crucial result is that social externalism is already a version of active externalism. I conclude with a first sketch of a general account of meaning inspired by extended cognition: a use theory supplemented by a functional-role account. (shrink)

Michael Tye proposed a way of understanding the content of hallucinatory experiences. Somewhat independently, Mark Johnston provided us with elements to think about the content of hallucination. In this paper, their views are compared and evaluated. Both their theories present intricate combinations of conjunctivist and disjunctivist strategies to account for perceptual content. An alternative view, which develops a radically disjunctivist account, is considered and rejected. Finally, the paper raises some metaphysical difficulties that seem to threaten any conjunctivist (...) theory and to lead the debate to a dilemma: strong disjunctivists cannot explain the subjective indistinguishability between veridical and hallucinatory experiences, whereas conjunctivists cannot explain what veridical and hallucinatory experiences have in common. This dilemma is left here as an open challenge. (shrink)

On the dominant interpretation, Ockham is an externalist about mental content. This reading is founded principally on his theory of intuitive cognition. Intuitive cognition plays a foundational role in Ockham’s account of concept formation and judgment, and Ockham insists that the content of intuitive states is determined by the causal relations such states bear to their objects. The aim of this paper is to challenge the externalist interpretation by situating Ockham’s account of intuitive cognition vis-à-vis his broader (...) account of efficient causation. While there can be no doubt that intuitive states are causally individuated, I argue that, given Ockham’s broader theory of efficient causation (on which causation turns out to be an internal relation), this very fact entails that the content of such states is determined by factors internal (rather than external) to the states themselves. (shrink)

Inferentialism is the view that representational content is explained by linguistic or mental states interacting according to inferential rules. Mendelovici's and Bourget's swapping argument against inferentialism shows that rules of inference do not sufficiently constrain content. This paper argues that their argument can be further strengthened so that its conclusion yields that the content and inferential roles are strictly independent. It is then argued that this conclusion is untenable and that the argument, rather than undermining inferentialism, corrodes (...) the model-theoretic foundations of standard philosophical semantics. The paper concludes with some hints towards an alternative semantic paradigm inspired by intuitionistic type-theory that is immune to the swapping argument. (shrink)

The paper argues for the view advocated by Yolton that Locke's ideas are best viewed as intentional contents. Drawing on Smith and McIntyre's distincition between object- and content-theories of intentionality I seek it show that it belongs to the second category. The argument relies mainly on the analysis of Locke's discussion of meaning, the reality and adequacy of ideas and real essence.

The thesis that follows proffers a solution to the mind-matter problem, the problem as to how mind and matter relate. The proposed solution herein is a variant of panpsychism – the theory that all (pan) has minds (psyche) – that we name pansentient monism. By defining the suffix 'psyche' of panpsychism, i.e. by analysing what 'mind' is (Chapter 1), we thereby initiate the effacement of the distinction between mind and matter, and thus advance a monism. We thereafter critically examine (...) the prevalent view, antithetical to a pansentient monism, that mind is not identical to matter but emergent therefrom (Chapter 2). This anti-emergentist critique acts also as a fortification of the Genetic Argument for panpsychism: if mind is not emergent (nor distinct) from matter, mind must always have existed with matter. But what is 'matter'? Chapter 3 investigates what we understand by 'matter', or 'the physical', and exposes it as a highly deficient concept and percept that in concreto points to its identity with that denoted by 'mind'. This also acts as a fortification of the Abstraction Argument for panpsychism, employing a new taxonomy of physicalism and a new taxonomy of the varieties of abstraction. Thus do we reach a monism that is a parsimonious psycho-physical identity theory. But here we face what can be called The Identity Problem for Panpsychism: if our panpsychism is a psycho-physical identity theory, how can it respond to the powerful objections that beset the identity theory of the twentieth century? In Chapter 4 it will be argued that, like emergentism, this psycho-neural identity theory presupposed a deficient concept of 'matter', down to which mind was reduced away, let alone identified. But to identify down phenomena to what is actually an abstraction is to commit failure of explanation. When the theory is amended accordingly, we move from a psycho-neural identity theory to a genuine psycho-physical identity theory that as such can overcome the aforementioned identity problem. Furthermore, as Chapter 5 clarifies, our pansentient monism has, in addition to parsimony, the explanatory power to resolve the problem of mental causation that afflicts both the reductive physicalism of psycho-neural identity theory and the non-reductive physicalism of emergentism, by genuinely identifying physical and mental causation. Jaegwon Kim considers the place of consciousness in a physical world and the nature of mental causation to be the two key components of the mind-matter problem. Through the critical analysis of our prosaic understanding of mind and matter in this thesis, which incorporates the thought of both classical and contemporary thinkers through a novel fusion, it is hoped that both components are addressed and redressed. That is to say that I present this pansentient monism as a plausible, parsimonious, explanatory, and thus, I think, powerful position towards this ever-perplexing mind-matter mystery. -/- [This thesis was passed in January 2019 with viva examination from Galen Strawson and Joel Krueger. (shrink)

According to “actionism” (Noë 2010), perception constitutively depends on implicit knowledge of the way sensory stimulations vary as a consequence of the perceiver’s self-movement. My aim in this contribution is to develop an alternative conception of the role of action in perception present in the work of Gareth Evans using resources provided by Ruth Millikan’s biosemantic theory of mental representation.

It seems plausible that visual experiences of darkness have perceptual phenomenal content that clearly differentiates them from absences of visual experiences. I argue, relying on psychological results concerning auditory attention, that the analogous claim is true about auditory experiences of silence. More specifically, I propose that experiences of silence present empty spatial directions like ‘right’ or ‘left’, and so have egocentric spatial content. Furthermore, I claim that such content is genuinely auditory and phenomenal in the sense that (...) one can, in principle, recognize that one is experiencing silence. This position is far from obvious, as the majority of theories concerning silence perception do not ascribe perceptual phenomenal content to experiences of silence. (shrink)