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It Seems Like There Aren’t Any Seemings

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Abstract

I argue that the two primary motivations in the literature for positing seemings as sui generis mental states are insufficient to motivate this view. Because of this, epistemological views which attempt to put seemings to work don’t go far enough. It would be better to do the same work by appealing to what makes seeming talk true rather than simply appealing to seeming talk.

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Notes

  1. See, e.g., Huemer (2001). Conee (2004) also offers a version of evidentialism which makes heavy usage of seemings, and Tucker (2011) makes usage of seemings in religious epistemology.

  2. This view is defended by Cullison (2010), Huemer (2007), and Bealer (1999). It is compatible with (Tolhurst 1998) and seems to be sanctioned by Bergman (forthcoming).

  3. The same line of argument is endorsed by Bergman (forthcoming), and Bealer (1999) and Sosa (1996) make similar defenses.

  4. This proposed identification is at least suggested in (Sosa 1996).

  5. The story here about why memorial experiences are different from non-memorial experiences might be a Humean one according to which the liveliness or faintness of the impression does the distinguishing work. See (Hume 2000).

  6. This is so for at least some seemings skeptics. For instance, Earl Conee and Richard Feldman (2008) report that they are skeptical of seemings as sui generis propositional attitudes while in the very same paper defending the centrality of experiences for their evidentialist views. Citing their work in this context is all the more important because Cullison takes Feldman to be one of his key opponents (see Cullison (2010: n.17)).

  7. Tolhurst (1998) also advocates at least some token identities between experiences and seemings. For more on the distinction between token and type attitudes, see Wetzel (2006). Intuitively, the difference is that types are general kinds of things and tokens are their instances. Thus, belief is a type of mental state of which individual instances of belief are instances. A type-identification of experiences and seemings would thus identify these types of things; a token-identification would suggest that some tokens of experiences are tokens of seemings, but need not be committed to saying that the types are identical.

  8. Exactly what we do experience is the subject of the “problem of perception.” See (Crane 2011).

  9. For a defense of this view, see (Siegel 2011).

  10. This line of argument may lead one to question whether even the token identities between seemings and experiences suggested by Huemer are appropriate. My own reading here is that the phrase “perceptual experiences” was a poor choice. Instead, Huemer should have identified some token perceptions with some token seemings, where perception is understood—as it commonly is [see, e.g., (Pitt 2008)]—as some sort of hybrid experience cum judgment state. Reading Huemer in this way is both charitable to him (as we have seen in the text, reading him as identifying token seemings with token experiences alone is problematic) and fits nicely with the criticism to be developed in the text. My suggestion is that seeming talk is ambiguous. One way in which it can be ambiguous is an ambiguity between the experiential component of perception and the judgmental component of perception. One can see how this would apply in the bent stick example discussed later in the text.

  11. The contradiction test derives from (Zwicky and Sadock 1975). Sennet (2011) defends the test as one of the most accurate predictors of ambiguity.

  12. This line of argument can be found in both Huemer (2007) and Cullison (2010).

  13. Huemer discusses a perceptual example. I cite the stick’s seeming bent as my answer to the question about why I am inclined to believe that the stick is bent. However, as we saw earlier, this sort of example can be handled by appealing to experiences. It is better to pick an example where there plausibly are no experiences to appeal to. Cullison’s moral example is more apropos.

  14. By saying that it may be non-vacuously true, I mean to indicate that it may be true and not just because its antecedent is false.

  15. For further discussion of how this sort of move might work, see (van Inwagen 1990) and (Cameron 2010).

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Correspondence to T. Ryan Byerly.

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Byerly, T.R. It Seems Like There Aren’t Any Seemings. Philosophia 40, 771–782 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-012-9363-8

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