Online research in philosophy

Color relationalism is the view that colors are constituted in terms of relations to perceiving subjects. Among its explanatory virtues, relation- alism provides a satisfying treatment of cases of perceptual variation. But it can seem that relationalists lack resources for saying that a representa- tion of x’s color is erroneous. Surely, though, a theory of color that makes errors of color perception impossible cannot be correct. In this paper I’ll argue that, initial appearances notwithstanding, relationalism contains the resources to account for errors of color perception. I’ll conclude that worries about making room for error are worries the relationalist can meet.

Abstract: How exactly should the relation between a veridical perception and a corresponding hallucination be understood? I argue that the epistemic notion of ‘indiscriminability’, understood as lacking evidence for the distinctness of things, is not suitable for defining this relation. Instead, we should say that a hallucination and a veridical perception involve the same phenomenal properties. This has further consequences for attempts to give necessary and sufficient conditions for the identity of phenomenal properties in terms of indiscriminability, and for considerations about the phenomenal sorites.

In his classic paper, "Some Remarks about the Senses," H. P. Grice argues that our intuitive distinction among perceptual modalities requires that the modalities be characterized in terms of the introspectible character of experience. I first show that Grice's argument provides support for the claim that perceptual experiences have qualia, namely, mental qualitative properties of experience which are what it's like to be conscious of perceived properties such as color. I then defend intentionalism about experience, which rejects qualia, by showing that we need not appeal to differences in qualia in order to distinguish the senses. Rather, I claim that we can appeal to, among other factors, differences in the physical properties of physical objects which experience represents.

This article concerns the relation between direct realism and perceptual justification. My method will be this: presupposing a direct-realist outlook, I will develop a semantical framework for characterizing perceptual justification. I understand a ‘direct realist outlook’ to involve a cluster of methodological attitudes, such as: comfort with offering contrasting treatments of ‘good cases’ of veridical perception and ‘bad cases’ of matching hallucination; a desire to explain the so-called ‘transparency’ of perception; and an aversion to theories which would require pretheoretic opinion to be significantly in the dark about the characters of perceptual states which are rationally influential. Road map: section 1 advances a picture of the nature of rationality and rational explanation in which consciousness plays a central role and then identifies the place of perceptual justification within this picture; section 2 links the theory of rationality to the traditional concerns of formal semantic theories; section 3 advances a direct realist-friendly semantical theory of justification by veridical perception; section 4 argues that this story cannot be extended to accommodate justification by hallucination; and the final section extends the discussion to a treatment of illusion, the de re, seeing-as, and other related phenomena. If the reader is looking for a punch line, it is perhaps this: according to the direct realist, when one is taken in by hallucination, one’s picture of the world is defective—incoherent, inconsistent, unsatisfiable. For when one is taken in, the picture encoded within one’s background presuppositions about one’s condition is, according to the direct realist, inconsistent with the picture one accepts in one’s perceptual state. As a result, an explanation of the impact of such delusive..

Recently representationalists have cited a phenomenon known as the transparency of experience in arguments against the qualia theory. Representationalists take transparency to support their theory and to work against the qualia theory. In this paper I argue that representationalist assessment of the philosophical importance of transparency is incorrect. The true beneficiary of transparency is another theory, naïve realism. Transparency militates against qualia and the representationalist theory of experience. I describe the transparency phenomenon, and I use my description to argue for naïve realism and against representationalism and the qualia theory. I also examine the relationship between phenomenological study and phenomenal character, and discuss the results in connection with the argument from hallucination.

Philosophers who advocate the possibility of spectrum inversion often conclude that the qualitative content of experiential states pose a serious problem for functionalism. I argue that in order for the inversion hypothesis to support this conclusion one needs to show that it generalizes to all species of qualia. By examining features of touch, taste, and olfactory sensations, I show there is good reason to resist this generalization, in which case appeals to the possibility of spectral inversion are considerably less effective than they may initially appear.

Disjunctivism about perceptual appearances, as I conceive of it, is a theory which seeks to preserve a naïve realist conception of veridical perception in the light of the challenge from the argument from hallucination. The naïve realist claims that some sensory experiences are relations to mind-independent objects. That is to say, taking experiences to be episodes or events, the naïve realist supposes that some such episodes have as constituents mind-independent objects. In turn, the disjunctivist claims that in a case of veridical perception like this very kind of experience that you now have, the experiential episode you enjoy is of a kind which could not be occurring were you having an hallucination. The common strategy of arguments from hallucination set out to show that certain things are true of hallucinations, and hence must be true of perceptions. For example, it is argued that hallucinations must have non-physical objects of awareness, or that such states are not relations to anything at all, but are at best seeming relations to objects. In insisting that veridical perceptual experience is of a distinct kind from hallucination, the disjunctivist denies that any of these conceptions of hallucination challenges our conception of veridical perceptions as relations to mind-independent objects. More specifically, I assume that the disjunctivist advocates naïve realism because they think that this position best articulates how sensory experience seems to us to be just through reflection. If the disjunctivist is correct in this contention, then anyone who accepts the conclusion of the argument from hallucination must also accept that the nature of sensory experience is other than it seems to us to be. In turn, one may complain that any such error theory is liable to lead to sceptical consequences. A Humean scepticism about the senses launches a challenge about our knowledge of the world through questioning the conception we have of what sense experience is, and how it can provide knowledge of the world..

In The Problem of Perception, A.D. Smith’s central aim is to defend the view that we can directly perceive ordinary objects, such as cups, keys and the like.1 The book is organized around the two arguments that Smith considers to be serious threats to the possibility of direct perception: the argument from illusion, and the argument from hallucination. The argument from illusion threatens this possibility because it concludes that indirect realism is true. Indirect realism is the view that we perceive mind-independent ordinary objects, but can only do so indirectly, by perceiving mind-dependent objects: objects whose existence depends on being perceived or thought about. The argument from hallucination draws a similar conclusion: if we perceive mindindependent ordinary objects at all, then our perception of them is indirect in the same way. In responding to these arguments, Smith develops an account of percep- tual consciousness. Perceptual consciousness is a kind of experience, distinct from what Smith calls ‘mere sensory experiences’, or equivalently, ‘mere sensation’. Perceptual consciousness is experience that is properly percep- tual, in which one has the phenomenology of perceiving things in the external world (including one’s body) that exist independently of one’s mind. Perceptual consciousness on its own does not suffice for actually being in perceptual contact with mind-independent reality, although it suffices for it to seem as if one i s . It follows that perceptual consciousness does not suffice for direct perception of ordinary objects, or for direct realism. Nevertheless, Smith holds that the correct account of perceptual consciousness is a crucial element in blocking the arguments from illusion and hallucination, and therefore in supporting the possibility of direct perception. This is an extraordinarily engaging book. Within a single, unified narrative, one encounters the views of many philosophers—Husserl, Fine, Broad, Sextus Empiricus, Loar, Schopenhauer, Meinong, Burge, Dilthey, Russell, Dennett, Sartre, O’Shaughnessy, Evans, Berkeley, Craig, Brentano and many....

When an object looks red to an observer, the visual experience of the observer has two important features. The experience visually represents the object as having a property—being red. And the experience has a phenomenological character; that is, there is something that it is like to have an experience of seeing an object as red. Let qualia be the properties that give our sensory and perceptual experiences their phenomenological character. This essay takes up two related problem for a nonreductive account of qualia. Some have argued that on such an account there is no room in a physicalist ontology for qualia. Section 1 shows how qualia might fit into a physicalist ontology. The second problem begins with the observation that there is a gap in scientific accounts of color experience; there is no explanation of why the features of the brain that determine our color experiences give those experiences their phenomenological character. Building on the results of Sect. 1, Sect. 2 develops an account of color perception that bridges this gap and shows how qualia give color perception its phenomenological character. To get a grip on the issues involved the paper begins by considering some aspects of a physicalist account of color.

Perception represents colors inexactly. This inexactness results from phenomenally manifest noise, and results in apparent violations of the transitivity of perceptual indiscriminability. Whether these violations are genuine depends on what is meant by 'transitivity of perceptual indiscriminability'.