This paper argues that, given a certain apparently inevitable thesis about content, we could not know our own minds. The thesis is that the content of a thought is determined by its relational properties.

The notion of representation in neuroscience has largely been predicated on localizing the components of computational processes that explain cognitive function. On this view, which I call “algorithmic homuncularism,” individual, spatially and temporally distinct parts of the brain serve as vehicles for distinct contents, and the causal relationships between them implement the transformations specified by an algorithm. This view has a widespread influence in philosophy and cognitive neuroscience, and has recently been ably articulated and defended by Shea. Still, I am (...) skeptical about algorithmic homuncularism, and I argue against it by focusing on recent methods for complex data analysis in systems neuroscience. I claim that analyses such as principle components analysis and linear discriminant analysis prevent individuating vehicles as algorithmic homuncularism recommends. Rather, each individual part contributes to a global state space, trajectories of which vary with important task parameters. I argue that, while homuncularism is false, this view still supports a kind of “vehicle realism,” and I apply this view to debates about the explanatory role of representation. (shrink)

In this paper I propose three steps to overcome the force-content dichotomy and dispel the Frege point. First, we should ascribe content to force indicators. Through basic assertoric and directive force indicators such as intonation, word order and mood, a subject presents its position of theoretical or practical knowledge of a state of affairs as a fact, as something that is the case, or as a goal, as something to do. Force indicators do not operate on truth- or satisfaction evaluable (...) entities as on the traditional view, but complete and unify them. Second, higher-level acts such as interrogative, logical and fictional acts create higher-level unities that may suspend commitment to the assertions and directions they operate on. But they do not cancel their force, but transfer the meaning of force indicators into the new unities they create. For example, in the context of asking a theoretical or practical question, the assertoric or directive force indicator now presents the kind of knowledge the subject is seeking. Third, the Frege point conflates different varieties of force. We neither need Frege’s assertion sign, nor Hare’s neustic, nor Hanks’s cancellation sign, but only ordinary force indicators and interrogative, logical and fictional markers. Propositions are not forceless contents to which a subject commits by forceful acts, but forceful acts put forward by higher-level acts which may suspend commitment to them. (shrink)

Most of those who hold that emotions involve appraisals also accept that the content of emotions is nonconceptual. The main motivation for nonconceptulism regarding emotions is that it accounts for the difference between emotions and evaluative judgements. This paper argues that if one assumes a broadly Fregean account of concepts, there are good reasons to accept that emotions have nonconceptual contents. All the main arguments for nonconceptualism regarding sensory perception easily transpose to the case of emotions. The paper ends by (...) responding to two important objections: firstly, that nonconceptualism rules out the possibility that emotions justify evaluative judgements and secondly, that nonconceptualism cannot account for the fact that some emotions have conceptually articulated cognitive bases. (shrink)

In 'Aboutness' (MIT Press 2014), Yablo argues for the importance of the notions of partial content and of partial truth. This paper argues that those notions are involved in a much greater range of entities than acknowledged by Yablo. The paper also argues that some of those entities involve a notion of partial satisfaction as well as partial existence (and partial validity).

The aim of this paper is to argue that the phenomenal similarity between perceiving and visualizing can be explained by the similarity between the structure of the content of these two different mental states. And this puts important constraints on how we should think about perceptual content and the content of mental imagery.

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)

Recently, the thesis that experience is fundamentally a matter of representing the world as being a certain way has been questioned by austere relationalists. I defend this thesis by developing a view of perceptual content that avoids their objections. I will argue that on a relational understanding of perceptual content, the fundamental insights of austere relationalism do not compete with perceptual experience being representational. As it will show that most objections to the thesis that experience has content apply only to (...) accounts of perceptual content on which perceptual relations to the world play no explanatory role. With austere relationalists, I will argue that perceptual experience is fundamentally relational. But against austere relationalists, I will argue that it is fundamentally both relational and representational. (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)

I argue that assertoric content functions as a means for us to track the responsibilities undertaken by communicators, and that distinctively assertoric commitments are distinguished by being generated directly in virtue of the words the speaker uses. This raises two questions: (a) Why are speakers responsible for the content thus generated? (b) Why is it important for us to distinguish between commitments in terms of their manner of generation? I answer the first question by developing a novel responsibility based metasemantics. (...) I answer the second by reference to the conflicting pressures governing the resources we have available for appraising speech. (shrink)

In Mind and World, John McDowell argues against the view that perceptual representation is non-conceptual. The central worry is that this view cannot offer any reasonable account of how perception bears rationally upon belief. I argue that this worry, though sensible, can be met, if we are clear that perceptual representation is, though non-conceptual, still in some sense 'assertoric': Perception, like belief, represents things as being thus and so.

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)

Content disjunctivism is the view that veridical experience involves contents and objects that differ from those of corresponding hallucinations. On one formulation of this view, we are aware of ordinary material things in our surroundings when we experience veridically, and we are aware of mere appearances when we hallucinate. This paper proposes a way of developing this view and offers some considerations in support. Central to the proposed regimentation will be a distinction between different notions of appearance. We distinguish between (...) the notion of something merely appearing to have a property and the notion of mere appearances, which are types of objects that we can refer to and be aware of. Mere appearances are not sense data or Meinongian non-existent objects but existing objects that do not have the properties that they appear to have. These notions of appearance will be elucidated, in particular by characterizing how they are involved in hallucination and illusion. I argue that the resulting view is supported by how our mental life seems to us when we experience our environment. (shrink)

Building on Christopher Peacocke’s account of analog perceptual contentand my own account of analog perceptual vehicles, I defend three claims: that theperception of magnitudes often has analog contents; that the perception of magni-tudes often has analog vehicles; and that the first claim is true in virtue of the second—that is, the analog vehicles help to ground the analog contents.

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)

Bystander information is information about others’ attitudes towards a text (i.e. about whether they agree or disagree with it). Social media platforms force bystander information upon us when we read posts thereon. What effect does this have on how we respond to what we read? The dominant view in the literature is that it changes our minds (the so-called “bandwagon effect”). Simplifying a little: if we see that most people agree (disagree) with what a post says, we are more likely (...) to agree (disagree) with what it says. This paper argues that we should take seriously a competitor view and care about the difference between it and the dominant view. The competitor view proposes that bystander information changes what a text seems to us to say: although bystander information may lead us to change what attitude we express toward a post, that’s not because we’ve changed our attitude toward any fixed content (i.e. fixed thing that the post says). This paper argues that, if this competitor view is correct, then social media is likely to be an especially hazardous place for the practice of sharing content. (shrink)

Philosophical considerations regarding experiential spatial content have focused on exteroceptive sensations presenting external entities, and not on interoceptive experiences that present states of our own body. A notable example is studies on interoceptive touch, in which it is argued that interoceptive tactile experiences have rich spatial content such that tactile sensations are experienced as located in a spatial field. This paper investigates whether a similarly rich spatial content can be attributed to experiences of acute, cutaneous pain. It is argued that (...) such experiences of pain do not have field-like content, as they do not present distance relations between painful sensations. (shrink)

The standing tradition in theorizing about meaning, since at least Frege, identifies meaning with propositions, which are, or determine, the truth-conditions of a sentence in a context. But a recent trend has advocated a departure from this tradition: in particular, it has been argued that modal claims do not express standard propositional contents. This non-propositionalism has received different implementations in expressivist semantics and certain kinds of dynamic semantics. They maintain that the key aspect of interpretation of modal claims is the (...) characteristic dynamic effect they have on the context. I argue that pessimism about truth-conditions arises from an overly simplistic picture of content, context and their interaction. While I agree with the critics that an important aspect of modal meaning is the dynamic effect modals have on the context, I argue that they have mischaracterized the nature and the complexity of this effect. A more nuanced account of the interaction between modals and context shows that far from being incompatible with propositional meaning, the dynamic aspect of meaning is precisely what allows us to predict the correct propositional content of an utterance. (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)

Content-externalism is the view that a subject’s relations to a context can play a role in individuating the content of her mental states. According to social content-externalists, relations to a socio-linguistic context can play a fundamental individuating role. Åsa Wikforss has suggested that ‘social externalism depends on the assumption that individuals have an incomplete grasp of their own concepts’ (Wikforss 2004, p. 287). In this paper, I show that this isn’t so. I develop and defend an argument for social content-externalism (...) which does not depend on this assumption. The argument is animated by strands of thought in the later work of Wittgenstein. In addition to demonstrating that social externalists are not necessarily committed to thinking that a subject can have thoughts involving concepts which she incompletely understands, this argument is important insofar as it: (1) supports a form of content-externalism with extended scope; (2) avoids the controversy surrounding the claim that subjects can think with concepts which they incompletely understand; and (3) situates Wittgenstein’s later work with respect to contemporary debates about content-externalism. (shrink)

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)

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)

Phishing attacks remain one of the most prevalent cybersecurity threats, affecting individuals and organizations globally. The rapid evolution of phishing techniques necessitates more sophisticated detection and classification methods. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to phishing content classification using a Genetic Ranking Optimization Algorithm (GROA), combined with dynamic weighting, to improve the accuracy and ranking of phishing versus legitimate content. Our method leverages features such as URL structure, email content analysis, and user behavior patterns to enhance the detection (...) system's decision-making process. (shrink)

There is a great deal of terminological confusion in discussions of holism. While some well-known authors, such as Davidson and Quine, have used “holism” in various of their writings,2 it is not clear that they have held views attributed to them under that label, views that are said to have wildly counterintuitive results.3 In Davidson’s case, it is not clear that he is describing the same doctrine in each of his uses of “holism” or “holistic.” Critics of holism show a (...) similar license. My aim in this paper, therefore, cannot be to provide and to examine a characterization of content holism that matches every use that has been made of the term. I aim rather to give a precise form to a holistic doctrine at one end of a spectrum of views that ranges from localism or atomism about content to holism about content. This view has the wild consequences often attributed to holism. While it is dubious that anyone has ever seriously held the view I characterize,4 some view like it seems to be what critics often have in mind when arguing against content holism. It is therefore worthwhile to make it precise, to distinguish it from other, related views, and to examine its internal coherence. Thus, in this paper, I will, first, clarify the doctrine, or a doctrine, of content holism, and, second, argue that content holism (so characterized) is not just false (which may be readily granted) but self-contradictory. To begin, we must distinguish between meaning holism and content holism. Let us reserve the term “meaning holism” for doctrines which are about the conditions for the possibility of linguistic expressions having meanings. Meaning holism is therefore a doctrine in the domain of the philosophy of language. “Content holism,” in contrast, we will treat as a doctrine in the philosophy of mind, about the conditions for the possibility of a thought5 having a content. By “a content” we mean, intuitively, what.. (shrink)

Nicholas Shea offers Varitel Semantics as a naturalistic account of mental content. I argue that the account secures determinate content only by appeal to pragmatic considerations, and so it fails to respect naturalism. But that is fine, because representational content is not, strictly speaking, necessary for explanation in cognitive science. Even in Shea’s own account, content serves only a variety of heuristic functions.

For deductive reasoning to be justified, it must be guaranteed to preserve truth from premises to conclusion; and for it to be useful to us, it must be capable of informing us of something. How can we capture this notion of information content, whilst respecting the fact that the content of the premises, if true, already secures the truth of the conclusion? This is the problem I address here. I begin by considering and rejecting several accounts of informational content. I (...) then develop an account on which informational contents are indeterminate in their membership. This allows there to be cases in which it is indeterminate whether a given deduction is informative. Nevertheless, on the picture I present, there are determinate cases of informative (and determinate cases of uninformative) inferences. I argue that the model I offer is the best way for an account of content to respect the meaning of the logical constants and the inference rules associated with them without collapsing into a classical picture of content, unable to account for informative deductive inferences. (shrink)

Inferentialism is the view that representational content is explained by lingual or mental states interacting according to inferential rules. Mendelovici and Bourget have argued against inferentialism that rules of inference do not sufficiently constrain content. This paper argues that their argument can be further strengthened such that its conclusion yields that content and inferential roles are strictly independent. It will then be 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. (shrink)

We discuss at some length evidence from the cognitive science suggesting that the representations of objects based on spatiotemporal information and featural information retrieved bottomup from a visual scene precede representations of objects that include conceptual information. We argue that a distinction can be drawn between representations with conceptual and nonconceptual content. The distinction is based on perceptual mechanisms that retrieve information in conceptually unmediated ways. The representational contents of the states induced by these mechanisms that are available to a (...) type of awareness called phenomenal awareness constitute the phenomenal content of experience. The phenomenal content of perception contains the existence of objects as separate things that persist in time and time, spatiotemporal information, and information regarding relative spatial relations, motion, surface properties, shape, size, orientation, color, and their functional properties. (shrink)

The senses present their content in the form of images, three-dimensional arrays of located sense features. Peacocke’s “scenario content” is one attempt to capture image content; here, a richer notion is presented, sensory images include located objects and features predicated of them. It is argued that our grasp of the meaning of these images implies that they have propositional content. Two problems concerning image content are explored. The first is that even on an enriched conception, image content has certain expressive (...) limitations. In particular, it cannot express absolute location and time (as opposed to spatiotemporal relations) or logical complexity. Yet, perceptual experience does seem to express certain absolute locations—namely, here and now. How can it do so? Secondly, image content cannot exhaust the significance of perceptual states. This is proved by noting that perception, memory, and anticipation can have the same image content. Yet they have different significance. These problems show that some of the significance of sensory states comes from outside the image. (shrink)

According to Sparse views of perceptual content, the phenomenal character of perceptual experience is exhausted by the experiential presentation of ‘low-level’ properties such as (in the case of vision) shapes, colors, and textures Whereas, according to Rich views of perceptual content, the phenomenal character of perceptual experience can also sometimes involve experiencing ‘high-level’ properties such as natural kinds, artefactual kinds, causal relations, linguistic meanings, and moral properties. An important dialectical tool in the debate between Rich and Sparse theorists is the (...) so-called ‘method of phenomenal contrast’. I explore how this method of phenomenal contrast interacts with the sort of content-externalism made familiar by Putnam. I show that the possibility of Twin Earth style cases places important restrictions on the range of properties that the method of phenomenal contrast could plausibly apply to. Moreover, these restrictions would apply to some paradigmatically low-level properties as well as to some of the frequently advanced high-level properties. I also draw some general lessons about the different ways one might conceive of the relation between phenomenal character and representational content. (shrink)

There has been extensive discussion of testimonial epistemic injustice, the phenomenon whereby a speaker’s testimony is rejected due to prejudice regarding who they are. But people also have their testimony rejected or preempted due to prejudice regarding what they communicate. Here, the injustice is content focused. We describe several cases of content focused injustice, and we theoretically interrogate those cases by building up a general framework through which to understand them as a genuine form of epistemic injustice that stands in (...) intertwined relationships to other forms of epistemic injustice. (shrink)

Perception is our key to the world. It plays at least three different roles in our lives. It justifies beliefs and provides us with knowledge of our environment. It brings about conscious mental states. It converts informational input, such as light and sound waves, into representations of invariant features in our environment. Corresponding to these three roles, there are at least three fundamental questions that have motivated the study of perception. How does perception justify beliefs and yield knowledge of our (...) environment? How does perception bring about conscious mental states? How does a perceptual system accomplish the feat of converting varying informational input into mental representations of invariant features in our environment? -/- This book presents a unified account of the phenomenological and epistemological role of perception that is informed by empirical research. So it develops an account of perception that provides an answer to the first two questions, while being sensitive to scientific accounts that address the third question. The key idea is that perception is constituted by employing perceptual capacities - for example the capacity to discriminate instances of red from instances of blue. Perceptual content, consciousness, and evidence are each analyzed in terms of this basic property of perception. Employing perceptual capacities constitutes phenomenal character as well as perceptual content. The primacy of employing perceptual capacities in perception over their derivative employment in hallucination and illusion grounds the epistemic force of perceptual experience. In this way, the book provides a unified account of perceptual content, consciousness, and evidence. (shrink)

Avicenna has placed the discussion of bliss and happiness as the main axis of the eighth Namat of ishārāt wa-al-tanbīhāt, and he has dedicated the first two chapters of this Namat to the issue of the originality of pleasure and intellectual happiness and its strength compared to other pleasures. In the first chapter, Avicenna has addressed the anteriority of internal pleasure over external pleasure by expressing an "Wahm" and "Tanbih", and he has rejected the views of those who make pleasure (...) exclusive to external issues. On the other hand, he also mentioned the second chapter as a sequel to the first chapter and in that he refuted the promise of those who reckon that happiness is exclusive in sensual matters. In this way, Avicenna's purpose in these two chapters is to prove the pleasure and intellectual happiness and its superiority over other pleasures. As a matter of fact, Avicenna has made this discussion the basis for other discussions of this Namat, and this study will aim to analyze the content of these two chapters. (shrink)

This paper argues that to account for group speech acts, we should adopt a representationalist account of mode / force. Individual and collective subjects do not only represent what they e.g. assert or order. By asserting or ordering they also indicate their theoretical or practical positions towards what they assert or order. The ‘Frege point’ cannot establish the received dichotomy of force and propositional content. On the contrary, only the representationalist account allows a satisfactory response to it. It also allows (...) us to give a more satisfactory analysis of the speech act of inviting a joint commitment and to answer two important questions Bernhard Schmid has raised about group speech acts, namely whether there are 1st person plural forms of Moore’s paradox and of 1st person authority. (shrink)

It is argued that if, with Dummett, we see assertion as an act governed by conditions of correctness which makes a claim to the effect that these conditions are met, then the conditions of correctness that determine its content must have the impersonal character of a requirement of truth, rather than the speaker-relative character of a requirement of justification or assertibility. For otherwise it would be impossible for different speakers to use the same words to make an assertion with the (...) same content. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider the use of mathematical results in philosophical arguments arriving at conclusions with non-mathematical content, with the view that in general such usage requires additional justification. As a cautionary example, I examine Kreisel’s arguments that the Continuum Hypothesis is determined by the axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory, and interpret Weston’s 1976 reply as showing that Kreisel fails to provide sufficient justification for the use of his main technical result. If we take the perspective that mathematical results (...) are used in the context of a modelling of something not necessarily mathematical, then the situation is clarified somewhat, and the procedure for arriving at justification for the use of such results becomes clear. I give an example of a particularly strong form this justification might take, using the idea of formalism independence due to Gödel and Kennedy. (shrink)

This paper pursues two lines of inquiry. First, drawing on evidence from clinical literature on borderline states of consciousness, I propose a new categorical framework for liminal states of consciousness associated with certain forms of meditative attainment; second, I argue for dissociating phenomenal character from phenomenal content in accounting for the etiology of nonconceptual states of awareness. My central argument is that while the idea of nonconceptual awareness remains problematic for Buddhist philosophy of mind, our linguistic and categorizing practices cannot (...) be adequately explained without considering the ways in which the first-person phenomenology grounds a more basic level of cognitive and affective sensing. (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)

A central idea in Ruth Millikan’s biosemantics is that a representation’s content is restricted to conditions required for the normal success of actions that it has as its function to guide. This paper raises and responds to a problem for this idea. The problem is that the success requirement seems to block us from saying that epistemic modal judgments represent our epistemic circumstances. For the normal success of actions guided by these judgments seems to depend on what is actually the (...) case, not on whether or to what extent various possibilities were supported by our evidence. In response, I argue, first, that actions guided by epistemic modal judgments have as their function to implement strategies for handling epistemic circumstances, second, that the successful performance of this function requires that aspects of these circumstances obtain, and, third, that biosemantics can thus understand epistemic modal judgments as representing these aspects. The recognition of such strategic contents introduces complications; I further argue that these are benign. (shrink)

This book offers a refreshing mix of science, personal stories, and reflections on the nature of thought. I really liked how the author uses simple yet deep anecdotes like the clever paradox of the sage and the king to explore complex ideas in an approachable way. The writing flows smoothly, and the content feels like little nuggets of wisdom that make you pause and think.

According to the Self-Location Thesis, certain types of visual experiences have self-locating and so first-person, spatial contents. Such self-locating contents are typically specified in relational egocentric terms. So understood, visual experiences provide support for the claim that there is a kind of self-consciousness found in experiential states. This paper critically examines the Self-Location Thesis with respect to dynamic-reflexive visual experiences, which involve the movement of an object toward the location of the perceiving subject. The main aim of this paper is (...) to offer an alternative interpretation of these cases which resists attributing them self-locating content, arguing for a replacement of the de se component with a non-conceptual equivalent of the indexical ‘here’. In its final section, the paper also considers an extension of the h-replacement account to cases of visual kinesthesis. (shrink)

This article presents a semantic analysis of indirect speech reports. The analysis aims to explain a combination of two phenomena. First, there are true utterances of sentences of the form α said that φ which are used to report an utterance u of a sentence wherein φ's content is not u's content. This implies that in uttering a single sentence, one can say several things. Second, when the complements of these reports (and indeed, these reports themselves) are placed in conjunctions, (...) the conjunctions are typically infelicitous. I argue that this combination of phenomena can be explained if speech reports report (perhaps contingent) parts of the contents of the sentences reported. (shrink)

What are contents? The answer provided by the possible worlds approach is that contents are sets of possible worlds. This approach incurs serious problems and to solve them Jago suggests, in The Impossible, to get rid of the ‘possible’ bit and allowing some impossible worlds to be part of the game. In this note, I briefly consider the metaphysics behind Jago’s account and then focus on whether Jago is right in thinking that his worlds and his worlds only can do (...) the explanatory work he posits them for. (shrink)

In some important papers, and especially in his 'The Problem of the Essential Indexical', John Perry has argued that we should draw a clear distinction between two aspects of belief: its causal role in action, on the one hand, and its semantic content (the proposition that is believed), on the other. According to Perry, beliefs with the same semantic content (with the same truth conditions) may have a very different causal influence on the subject¿s action. In this paper, we show (...) that Perry's arguments in favor of this thesis are not sound and defend, against him, the common sense intuition according to which what leads us to act as we do is what we believe (the semantic content of our belief), or, in other words, that there is no schism between the semantic content and the causal role of our beliefs. (shrink)

This paper presents information about the moisture content and temperature level of brick walls in Tirana, Albania. The buildings whose walls have been studied were built in two different eras, throughout the twentieth century, and in more recent times. Given that during the second half of the twentieth century, Albania has been isolated from most of Europe and the West, and consequently the new architectural ideologies of the time, have not had the proper implementation there, the paper focuses on the (...) characteristic types of bricks used in Albania, the functions for which they are used, and their effectiveness in achieving comfort (thermal, moisture content control) during the two time periods mentioned above. Depending on the functions bricks perform in the walls studied in this paper, the walls are separated into two main groups: Walls in which bricks have structural role (red silicate brick walls, white silicate brick walls) and walls in which bricks do not have structural role (concrete block walls, holed brick walls). For all the types of bricks mentioned above, indoor moisture content and temperature measurements have been performed in all four cardinal directions. For the walls in which the bricks have a structural function, moisture measurements have been performed in all the facades of the buildings, because moisture in the bricks of these types of buildings, being a very important factor, directly affects the structural performance of the elements. The aim of the paper is to show the differences in moisture and temperature levels of the walls of these buildings, depending on the engineering and architectural techniques used during the building process, the use of insulation, and the masonry composition. (shrink)

In the first section of this paper, after briefly arguing for the assumption that experiential content is propositional, I’ll distinguish three interpretations of the claim that experience has content (the Mild, Medium, and Spicy Content Views). In the second section, I’ll flesh out Naïve Realism in greater detail, and I’ll reconstruct what I take to be the main argument for its incompatibility with the Content Views. The third section will be devoted to evaluation of existing arguments for the Mild Content (...) View (the arguments from accuracy and appearing), and the development of what I take to be a stronger argument (the argument from belief generation). In the final section, I’ll identify a flaw in the argument for the incompatibility of Naïve Realism with the Content Views, which opens the door to a reconciliation. (shrink)

An observation of Hume’s has received a lot of attention over the last decade and a half: Although we can standardly imagine the most implausible scenarios, we encounter resistance when imagining propositions at odds with established moral (or perhaps more generally evaluative) convictions. The literature is ripe with ‘solutions’ to this so-called ‘Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance’. Few, however, question the plausibility of the empirical assumption at the heart of the puzzle. In this paper, we explore empirically whether the difficulty we (...) witness in imagining certain propositions is indeed due to claim type (evaluative v. non-evaluative) or whether it is much rather driven by mundane features of content. Our findings suggest that claim type plays but a marginal role, and that there might hence not be much of a ‘puzzle’ to be solved. (shrink)

In their monograph Narrow Content, Yli-Vakkuri and Hawthorne argue that all versions of internalism about mental content are either false or "pointless" (roughly, of no interest). We overview Yli-Vakkuri and Hawthorne's main line of argument and suggest that, while largely correct, it does not touch the core internalist claim that mental states have internally determined contents. Instead of engaging with this claim, Yli-Vakkuri and Hawthorne attack a variety of stronger or weaker claims. The stronger claims fall prey to the Mirror (...) Man argument and other considerations. The weaker claims fall prey to the charge of pointlessness. But the core internalist view is left untouched. (shrink)