Online research in philosophy

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Perky's famous experiments have been taken to show that at the limit perceiving and imagining (more precisely, seeing and visualising into seen space) do not differ phenomenologically. One way to block this result is to argue that the task Perky set her subjects raised the threshold for perception, so that they were not perceiving the stimuli she showed them. I argue that even if this strategy fails, Perky's cases cannot prove the conclusion folk have wanted to draw. She showed her (...) subjects, not the objects they went on to visualise, but crude pictures of such things. What they confused with visualising into seen space was thus, not perceptual consciousness of stimuli, but pictorial consciousness. Once we're clear about the nature of the latter, we can see that Perky's results reveal nothing very surprising at all. -/- This is a longer version of a paper to appear in 'Analysis' (July 2012). (shrink)

Bringsjord (1985) argues that the definition of possible worlds as maximal possible sets of propositions is incoherent. Menzel (1986a) notes that Bringsjord’s argument depends on the Powerset axiom and that the axiom can be reasonably denied. Grim (1986) counters that W can be proved to be incoherent without Powerset. Grim was right. However, the argument he provided is deeply flawed. The purpose of this note is to detail the problems with Grim’s argument and to present a sound alternative argument for (...) his conclusion — basically the argument Russell gave to establish a well-known paradox in The Principles of Mathematics. (shrink)

This book advocates dispositional essentialism, the view that natural properties have dispositional essences.1 So, for example, the essence of the property of being negatively charged is to be disposed to attract positively charged objects. From this fact it follows that it is a law that all negatively charged objects will attract positively 10 charged objects; and indeed that this law is metaphysically necessary. Since the identity of the property of being negatively charged is determined by its being related in a (...) certain way to the property of being positively charged, in any world in which these properties exist they must be related so that all negatively charged objects attract positively charged objects. 15 Bird opposes his dispositional essentialism to the view that properties are categorical in nature, with their identities grounded in quiddities that are not exhausted by their relations to other properties. The main exponents of this view are D.M. Armstrong and David Lewis. They take the laws of nature to be contingent though they entertain very different views about their nature: Armstrong is a necessitarian 20 about laws, taking them to be relations of nomic necessitation between universals, while Lewis is a Humean about laws who takes them to be a special kind of regularity. The book is a sustained defence of the dispositional essentialist conception of properties and laws against the competing conceptions espoused by Armstrong and Lewis. One rough way to characterize the difference between these conceptions is to say that 25 the categoricalist sees properties as passive and inert with the laws of nature being fixed independently of the nature of properties whereas, in contrast, the dispositional essentialist sees properties as active potencies from which the laws of nature automatically spring. A slightly more tendentious way to express the difference is to say, as Bird does, that the categoricalist views embrace the Humean doctrine that there are no 30 necessary connexions in nature, while the dispositional essentialist view, on the other hand, repudiates this doctrine.. (shrink)

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