Off-campus access
Using PhilPapers from home?
Click here to configure this browser for off-campus access.
- Jack Lyons, Perception and Basic Beliefs: Zombies, Modules, and the Problem of the External World.This book manuscript offers solutions to two persistent and I believe closely related problems in epistemology. The first problem is that of drawing a principled distinction between perception and inference: what is the difference between seeing that something is the case and merely believing it on the basis of what we do see? The second problem is that of specifying which beliefs are epistemologically basic (i.e., directly, or noninferentially, justified) and which are not. I argue that perceptual beliefs about external objects are epistemologically basic and that what makes a belief a perceptual belief, or a basic belief, is not a matter of the subject’s contemporaneous nondoxastic experiences, nor the content of the belief in question, nor the subject’s auxiliary beliefs; what determines whether a belief is basic or perceptual is the nature of the cognitive system, or “module”, that is causally responsible for the belief. The class of modules whose outputs are perceptual beliefs is a subset of the class of modules whose outputs are basic beliefs. Thus, even zombies, who in the philosophical literature lack conscious experiences altogether, can have basic, justified, perceptual beliefs. The theories of perceptual and basic beliefs developed in the monograph are embedded in a larger reliabilist epistemology. The resulting theory of basic beliefs actually bolsters reliabilism against a famous class of objections usually thought to argue for a kind of internalism (BonJour’s clairvoyance objection and the like). I develop a detailed reliabilist theory, one that draws an explicit distinction between basic and nonbasic beliefs, using the general framework of my theory of basic beliefs to sketch a reliabilist theory of inferential justification. Here is a pdf version of the manuscript, for anyone who is interested. It is a large file, and it hasn’t been updated or revised since August, 2005. The table of contents should at least steer you toward whatever parts you might care to read. Comments are welcome.No categories
Discussion of Jack Lyons, Perception and basic beliefs: Zombies, modules, and the problem of the external world
Nothing in this forum yet.
Similar books and articles
A particular belief of a person is basic just in case it is epistemically justified and it owes its justification to something other than her other justified beliefs or their interrelations; a person’s belief is nonbasic just in case it is epistemically justified but not basic. Foundationalists agree that if one has a nonbasic belief, then—at rock bottom—it owes its justification to at least one basic belief. There are justified beliefs (if any) because and only because there are basic beliefs. (...)
In my reading list
| Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography
| Export citation | Other links: blackwell-synergy.com | Scholar | More..
| | Other links: blackwell-synergy.com | Scholar | More.. Many hold that perception is a source of epistemically basic (direct) belief: for justification, perceptual beliefs do not need positive inferential support from other justified beliefs, especially from beliefs about one’s current sensory episodes. Perceptual beliefs can, however, be defeated or undermined by other things one believes, and so to be justified in the end there must be no undefeated undermining grounds. Similarly for memory and introspection.1..
No categories
The question I am interested in is this. What exactly is the role of conscious experience in the acquisition of knowledge on the basis of perception? The problem here, as I see it, is to solve simultaneously for the nature of this experience, and its role in acquiring and sustaining the relevant beliefs, in such a away as to vindicate what I regard as an undeniable datum, that perception is a basic source of knowledge about the mind- independent world, in (...)
I argue that our justification for beliefs about the external physical world need not be constituted by any justified beliefs about perceptual experiences. In this way our justification for beliefs about the physical world may be nondoxastic and this differentiates my proposal from traditional foundationalist theories such as those defended by Laurence BonJour, Richard Fumerton, and Timothy McGrew. On the other hand, it differs from certain non-traditional foundationalist theories such as that defended by James Pryor according to which perceptual experience (...)
How things look (or sound, taste, smell, etc.) plays two important roles in the epistemology of perception.1 First, our perceptual beliefs are episte- mically justified, at least in part, in virtue of how things look. Second, whether a given belief is a perceptual belief, as opposed to, say, an infer- ential belief, is also at least partly a matter of how things look. Together, these yield an epistemically significant sense of looks. A standard view is that how things look, in (...)
In my reading list
| Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: blackwell-synergy.com | Scholar | More..
| | Other links: blackwell-synergy.com | Scholar | More.. Recent philosophical discussions of self-knowledge have focused on basic cases: our knowledge of our own thoughts, beliefs, sensations, experiences, preferences, and intentions. Empiricists argue that we acquire this sort of self-knowledge through inner perception; rationalists assign basic self-knowledge an even more secure source in reason and conceptual understanding. I try to split the difference. Although our knowledge of our own beliefs and thoughts is conceptually insured, our knowledge of our experiences is relevantly like our perceptual knowledge of the external world.
In my reading list
| Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: blackwell-synergy.com interscience.wiley.com | Scholar | More..
| | Other links: blackwell-synergy.com interscience.wiley.com | Scholar | More.. What is the role of conscious perceptual experience in the acquisition of empirical knowledge? My central claim is that a proper account of the way in which perceptual experiences contribute to our understanding of the most basic beliefs about particular things in the mind-independent world around us reveals how such experiences provide peculiarly fundamental reasons for such beliefs. There are, I claim, epistemic requirements upon the very possibility of empirical belief. The crucial epistemological role of experiences lies in their essential (...)
I took it that the definitions Swinburne quotes imply that all of a person's basic beliefs are (privately) rational; Swinburne demurs. It still seems to me that these definitions have this consequence. Let me briefly explain why. According to Swinburne, a person's evidence consists of his basic beliefs, weighted by his confidence in them. So presumably we are to think of S's evidence as the set of the beliefs he takes in the basic way, together with a sort of index (...)
The author argues that coherence views of justification, in spite of their crucial insight into the interpenetration of our beliefs, neglect a key constraint on justification: they are unable to accommodate the epistemic significance of experience. Epistemic justification is not just a function of our beliefs and their interrelations. Both, beliefs and experiences, are relevant to the justification of an empirical belief. Experience is not itself a form of belief or disposition to believe; it cannot be analyzed in doxastic terms. (...)
Intuitively, it seems that some belief-forming practices have the following three properties: 1. They are rational practices, and the beliefs that we form by means of these practices are themselves rational or justified beliefs. 2. Even if in most cases these practices reliably lead to correct beliefs (i.e., beliefs in true propositions), they are not infallible: it is possible for beliefs that are formed by means of these practices to be incorrect (i.e., to be beliefs in false propositions). 3. The (...)
In my reading list
| Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: users.ox.ac.uk | Scholar | More..
| | Other links: users.ox.ac.uk | Scholar | More.. 
