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Exactness, inexactness, and the non-transitivity of perceptual indiscriminability

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Abstract

I defend, to a certain extent, the traditional view that perceptual indiscriminability is non-transitive. The argument proceeds by considering important recent work by Benj Hellie: Hellie argues that colour perception represents ‘inexactly’, and that this results in violations of the transitivity of colour indiscriminability. I show that Hellie’s argument remains inconclusive, since he does not demonstrate conclusively that colour perception really does represent inexactly. My own argument for the non-transitivity of perceptual indiscriminability uses inexactness instead as one horn of a dilemma: the key idea is that there is a class of perceptual experiences which might plausibly be supposed either to represent inexactly or to represent exactly—but which demonstrate the non-transitivity of perceptual indiscriminability either way.

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Correspondence to Charles Pelling.

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Pelling, C. Exactness, inexactness, and the non-transitivity of perceptual indiscriminability. Synthese 164, 289–312 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-007-9227-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-007-9227-0

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