Online research in philosophy

In his paper "Individualism and Descartes," William Ferraiolo puts into question the widely accepted interpretation of Descartes as an individualist about mental content. In this paper, I intend to defend this interpretation of Descartes's thinking against Ferraiolo's objections. I shall hold, firstly, that attributing to Descartes an individualist doctrine is not historically misguided. Secondly, I will try to show that Descartes's endorsement of anti-individualism would lead either to depriving sceptical hypotheses of their force or to rejecting the epistemological privilege of the first person. And, thirdly, I shall try to show that Ferraiolo's objections to the individualistic interpretation rest on two important errors: a misapprehension of the argumentative order of the Mediations and a confusion between the notions of causal and constitutive dependence of content on the external environment.

Frances Egan argues that the states of computational theories of vision are individuated individualistically and, as far as the theory is concerned, are not intentional. Her argument depends on equating the goals and explanatory strategies of computational psychology with those of its algorithmic level. However, closer inspection of computational psychology reveals that the computational level plays an essential role in explaining visual processes and that explanations at this level are nonindividualistic and intentional. In conclusion, I sketch an account of content in which content does the sort of explanatory work that Egan denies is possible.

Brian Loar has argued that the well-known arguments against individualism in the philosophy of mind are insufficient because they rely on the assumption that that-clauses uniquely capture psychological content. He tried to show that this is not the use of that-clauses in philosophical psychology. I argue that he does not succeed in his argument. That-clauses sometimes capture psychological content, if our system of mental ascription is to be workable at all. I argue further that individualism tends to be at odds with a requirement of intersubjective shareability of contents and that Loar is alternative conception of psychological content is beset with difficulties.

An important class of teleological theories cannot explain the representational content of visual states because they fail to address the relationship between the world, projected retinal stimuli, and perception. A different approach for achieving a naturalized theory of visual content is offered that rejects the traditional internalism/externalism debate in favor of what is termed “empirical externalism.” This position maintains that, while teleological considerations can underwrite a broad understanding of representation, the content of visual representation can only be determined empirically according to accumulated past experience. A corollary is that a longstanding problem concerning the indeterminacy of visual content is dissolved.

This paper examines the status of unattended visual stimuli in the light of recent work on the role of attention in visual perception. Although the question of whether attention is required for visual experience seems very interesting, this paper argues that there currently is no good reason to take a stand on the issue. Moreover, it is argued that much of the allure of that question stems from a continued attachment to the defective ‘inner picture view’ of experience and a mistaken notion that the ultimate goal of vision is to produce visual experience. The paper considers a promising general account of the content and structure of vision and presents reasons for not taking that account to be committed to any substantive claims about the experiential status of unattended visual stimuli. Also addressed are the active nature of vision and the role of vision in enabling our ecological success. These considerations highlight that visual experience is not the whole of vision and that a much more important question about unattended visual stimuli than whether they are consciously experienced is what contribution they make to how we interact with the world.

The role of content in computational accounts of cognition is a matter of some controversy. An early prominent view held that the explanatory relevance of content consists in its supervenience on the the formal properties of computational states (see, e.g., Fodor 1980). For reasons that derive from the familiar Twin Earth thought experiments, it is usually thought that if content is to supervene on formal properties, it must be narrow; that is, it must not be the sort of content that determines reference and truth-conditions. An interesting alternative to this view has recently been proposed by Egan (1995). According to Egan, the explanatory role of content is such that contents must in general be broad to be explanatorily relevant. But Egan’s view involves a non-realist interpretation of content assignments. I will argue here that this non-realism about contents is undermotivated. A realist variation on her view of the explanatory role of content, however, would survive this criticism. This realist variation, I suggest, shares with the views of other commentators on Marr’s theory (e.g., Burge 1986; Shapiro 1993; forthcoming) certain commitments concerning the supervenience base of visual contents and processes. I will argue, however, that these commitments beg important questions regarding the individuation of cognitive states and processes. I conclude, contrary to Burge and Shapiro, that Marr’s theory does not favor anti-individualism.

My purpose is to take a close look at the nature of visual content. I discuss the view that visual experiences have only existential contents, the view that visual experiences have either singular or gappy contents, and the view that visual experiences have multiple contents. I also consider a proposal about visual content inspired by Kaplan's well known theory of indexicals. I draw out some consequences of my discussion for the thesis of intentionalism with respect to the phenomenal character of visual experience.