This chapter contains sections titled: Abstract Relativistic Content The Argument from Primitive Colors The Argument from the Inverted Spectrum The Argument from Dual Looks The Argument from Duplication Conclusion References.

This thesis mounts an attack against accounts of perceptual justification that attempt to analyze it in terms of evidential justifiers, and has defended the view that perceptual justification should rather be analyzed in terms of non-evidential justification. What matters most to perceptual justification is not a specific sort of evidence, be it experiential evidence or factive evidence, what matters is that the perceptual process from sensory input to belief output is reliable. I argue for this conclusion in the (...) following way. Chapter 1: The Arguments from HallucinationChapter 1 presents a skeptical argument from hallucination that starts from a premise about the alleged introspective indistinguishability of perception and hallucination, and concludes that perceptual knowledge is impossible. Underlying this argument are certain assumptions about the nature of perceptual justification, and different responses to the argument portray different views of perceptual justification. Evidentialism and dogmatism both reject the premise that appearances do not provide evidence sufficient for perceptual knowledge, although they disagree about the precise nature of the appearances. Epistemological disjunctivism rejects the premise that introspectively indistinguishable experiences provide the same evidence, while upholding the idea that some sort of evidence, namely factive evidence, is necessary for perceptual justification and knowledge. Process reliabilism rejects the premise that evidence is necessary for perceptual knowledge on the grounds that even perceptual justification can be obtained without evidence, as long as the cognitive process producing the belief is reliable.Chapter 2: EvidentialismChapter 2 starts by introducing some motivations for experientialist views of perceptual justification, such as evidentialism and dogmatism, which hold that conscious experiences evidentially justify perceptual beliefs. These motivations have to do with their ability to accommodate the New Evil Demon Intuition that demon-deceived subjects have justified perceptual beliefs and the Blindsight Intuition that blindsighters do not have justified perceptual beliefs. However, experientialist views are also faced with a Sellarsian dilemma: either experience is construed as non-propositional, but then the proposed evidential relation is unclear, or experience is construed as propositional, but then it is ad hoc to hold that they can evidentially justify without being justified themselves.Chapter 2 continues with a discussion of evidentialism, which grasps the first horn of this dilemma. I argue that evidentialism cannot adequately explain why a non-propositional experience constitutes evidence for this rather than that belief, and also does not provide any account of how to determine which belief fits an evidence-set which partly consists out of non-propositional experiences. Although a reliabilist version of evidentialism can provide a better account of these matters, it suffers from counter-intuitive predictions about justification and a conception of evidence that is so liberal that it could even include blindsighters and clairvoyants as having such evidence.Chapter 3: DogmatismChapter 3 focuses on variants of dogmatism, a theory of perceptual justification that grasps the second horn of the Sellarsian dilemma by holding that a perceptual experience with the content that p is sufficient for immediate prima facie justification of the belief that p. I first argue that dogmatism should identify perceptual experiences with high-level conscious states to accommodate the problem of novice vs. expert identification and the problem of the speckled hen. I then argue that this version of dogmatism still fails to meet a certain explanatory challenge which I dub the `Distinctiveness Problem'. Dogmatism should explain what is so distinctive about perceptual experience that enables it, in contrast with desire and imagination, to evidentially justify the belief that p without, in contrast with belief, being justified itself.Phenomenalist answers to this problem fail because they either do not provide a distinctive property of perceptual experience, or else provide a property that is reducible to or possibly caused by beliefs. In both cases, dogmatism would have the result that intuitively unjustifying experiences, such as imaginations, nevertheless become capable of justifying beliefs. Moreover, phenomenalists still need some explanation of why phenomenology is epistemically relevant at all.A new variant of the problem of the speckled hen is an intuitive illustration of this point against dogmatists. If a perceptual experience that p is not reliably connected to the fact that p or the belief that p, then beliefs based on this experience simply will not be intuitively justified. One possible response to this problem incorporates reliability into the content of experience in the sense that an experience cannot have the content that p if it is not reliably connected to both the fact that p and the belief that p. However, this will lose the motivation from the New Evil Demon Scenario, and will make large concessions towards reliabilism.Chapter 4: Epistemological DisjunctivismGiven these problems for experientialist views of perceptual justification, chapter 4 focuses on a different evidential account of justification: epistemological disjunctivism. According to the Justified True Belief version of Epistemological Disjunctivism, the fact that I see that p is the factive and reflectively accessible evidence in virtue of which I know that p. I argue that JTBED faces formidable problems: first, it cannot adequately deal with the basis problem, second, it cannot accommodate the New Evil Demon Intuition, third,it faces the problem of hyper-intellectualization, and fourth, it has no good account of reflective access.Knowledge First Epistemological Disjunctivism, in contrast, holds that seeing that p just is a way of knowing that p. The fact that I see that p constitutes my justification for believing that p, even though it is not necessary for my knowledge that p. Although this view solves most of the above problems, I argue that KFED still faces a challenge of its own: its notion of justification is so strong that justification entails knowledge but is not itself entailed by it. This means that it too faces a hyper-intellectualization objection because it cannot accommodate animal justification, and that it too will struggle to accommodate the New Evil Demon Intuition.Nevertheless, there is something to the epistemological disjunctivist idea that higher-order capabilities are important to perceptual justification. Specifically, higher-order capabilities provide one with a way of accommodating the Blindsight Intuition without appealing to the notion of experiential evidence: blindsighters are epistemically worse off than normal human perceivers because they lack higher-order beliefs about how they are gaining their information. If one holds that these higher-order beliefs provide a special sort of justification for perceptual beliefs, then blindsighters lack this type of justification. Chapter 5: Process ReliabilismAfter displaying the problems of several evidential accounts of perceptual justification, chapter 5 introduces a non-evidential account: process reliabilism. The classic version of this view holds that the reliability of a belief-forming process is necessary and sufficient for the prima facie justification of a specific set of beliefs, namely, those that arise out of belief-independent processes. Two classic major problems for this view consist of counterexamples to both the necessity and sufficiency of reliability for justification. Although the Generality Problem raises some difficulties for reliabilism, they do not appear to be insurmountable.The second part of chapter 5 focuses on a variety of process reliabilism, inferentialist reliabilism, that is explicitly aimed at responding to clairvoyance cases. According to inferentialist reliabilism, one should distinguish between basic and non-basic beliefs, where basic beliefs are those that result out of the non-inferential operation of an inferentially opaque cognitive system that developed in a natural way. Reliability is only sufficient for the justification of basic beliefs, while non-basic beliefs also require conditional reliability and justification of the beliefs on which they are based.This distinction between basic and non-basic beliefs is meant to answer the challenge arising out of clairvoyance cases because these are all supposedly cases in which the resulting beliefs arenon-basic. However, I argue that the beliefs in these cases come out as non-basic primarily because of the etiological constraint on cognitive systems, a constraint that is unfortunately undermotivated. It seems that beliefs can be justified even if they are produced by a cognitive system that developed by accident, or by a system that was artificially designed to produce those beliefs. So even though the inferentialist reliabilist might have a point in distinguishing between basic and non-basic beliefs, it is still in need of a different response to clairvoyance cases. Chapter 6: Rejoinders for ReliabilismChapter 6 improves on the inferentialist reliabilist account of justification by presenting a different way of dealing with the clairvoyance cases and New Evil Demon Scenario. I start from the empirically plausible idea that we know that we are perceiving when we are perceiving, not because of the use of experiential evidence, but rather, because of an unconscious source-monitoring mechanism. I then argue that the existence of such a source-monitoring mechanism could be used to explain why clairvoyance cases actually have to do with defeat rather than absence of prima facie justification: beliefs that pop up in our head should be recognized as stemming from untrustworthy sources, and so we acquire defeating higher-order beliefs about the first-order beliefs. I also argue that this defeat should be able to occur even if the higher-order beliefs are themselves unjustified. This defeater-account of clairvoyance is preferable to several externalist alternatives. Making reliability relative to a specific world seems rather ad hoc, and further requirements on justification, such as evidence-based belief, cognitively integrated belief, or properly produced belief, all appear unnecessary and are susceptible to adapted versions of the clairvoyance case.I further argue for an alternative inferentialist reliablist response to the New Evil Demon Intuition which treats it as mistaken rather than correct. The New Evil Demon Intuition might arise because of a mistaken view of actual perceptual justification as having to do with experiential evidence. This mistaken view could be explained by the fact that experience is actually reliably connected to belief and is often cited in response to a knowledge-challenge. If this is a correct analysis of the New Evil Demon Intuition, then there is an element of question-begging involved when this scenario is still pressed against inferentialist reliabilists who do not adhere to the experientialist assumption it presupposes.With the inferentialist reliabilist account in hand,we are able to see that many of the premises of the epistemological argument from hallucination are problematic. Evidence does not appear to be required for perceptual knowledge, as perceptual justification does not even require such evidence. Moreover, if we accept a reliabilist model of introspection, then we are often able to know on the basis of introspection that we are perceiving rather than hallucinating. Once one gets clear about the alternatives, it becomes apparent that the argument thrives on internalist assumptions about justification and knowledge that one need not accept. (shrink)

The Academics offered an argument from twins or perceptually indiscernible objects and an argument from dreams or madness in support of the indiscernibility thesis: that every true perceptual impression is such that some false impression just like it is possible. I claim that these arguments, unlike modern sceptical arguments, are supposed to establish mere counterfactual rather than epistemic possibilities. They purport to show that for any true perceptual impression j, there are a number of alternative (...) causal histories j might have had which would not have resulted in any change in the way in which j represents its object. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for the cognitive impenetrability of perception by undermining the argument from reentrant pathways. To do that I will adduce psychological and neuropsychological evidence showing that (a) early vision processing is not affected by our knowledge about specific objects and events, and (b) that the role of the descending pathways is to enable the early-vision processing modules to participate in higher-level visual or cognitive functions. My thesis is that a part of observation, (...) which I will call perception, is bottom-up and theory neutral. As such, perception could play the role of common ground on which a naturalized epistemology can be built and relativism avoided. (shrink)

In the 1980s, a number of philosophers argued that perception is analog. In the ensuing years, these arguments were forcefully criticized, leaving the thesis in doubt. This paper draws on Weber’s Law, a well-entrenched finding from psychophysics, to advance a new argument that perception is analog. This new argument is an adaptation of an argument that cognitive scientists have leveraged in support of the contention that primitive numerical representations are analog. But the (...) class='Hi'>argument here is extended to the representation of non-numerical magnitudes, such as luminance and distance, and shown to apply to perception and not just cognition. The relevant sense of ‘analog’ is also clarified, and two powerful objections are addressed. Finally, the question whether perception’s analog vehicles are located in conscious experience is explored and related to a well-known controversy within psychophysics. (shrink)

One cannot have the concept of a red object without having the concept of an extended object. But the word "red" doesn't contain the word "extended." In general, our concepts are interconnected in ways in which the corresponding words are not interconnected. This is not an accidental fact about the English language or about any other language: it is inherent in what a language is that the cognitive abilities corresponding to a person's abilities to use words cannot possibly be reflected (...) in semantic relations holding among those words. This fact in its turn is a consequence of the fact that expressions are, whereas concepts are not, digital structures, for which reason the ways in which cognitive abilities interact cannot possibly bear any significant resemblance to the ways in which expressions interact. Consequently, there is no truth to the contention that our thought-processes are identical with, or bear any resemblance to, the digital computations that mediate computer-activity. (shrink)

0. Relativistic Content In standard semantics, propositional content, whether it be the content of utterances or mental states, has a truth-value relative only to a possible world. For example, the content of my utterance of ‘Jim is sitting now’ is true just in case Jim is sitting at the time of utterance in the actual world, and the content of my belief that Alice will give a talk tomorrow is true just in case Alice (...) will give a talk on the day following the occurrence of my belief state in the actual world. Let us call propositional content which has a truth-value relative only to a possible world ‘non-relativistic content’. Non-relativistic content can be treated as either structured or unstructured. On the unstructured-content view, non-relativistic content is a set of possible worlds and bears the truth-value true just in case the actual world is a member of that set. For example, the content of my utterance of ‘Jim is working now’ at time t is the set of worlds in which Jim is working at t, and this content is true just in case the actual world is among those worlds. On the structured-content view, non-relativistic content is a set or conglomeration of properties and/or objects, where properties are features which objects possess regardless of who considers or observes them and regardless of when they are being considered or observed. Such properties are said to be (or represent) functions from possible worlds to extensions. Relative to a possible world they determine a set of objects instantiating the property. For example, relative to the actual world the property of being human determines the set of actual humans. Not all content is non-relativistic. Let us say that propositional content is relativistic just in case it possesses a truth-value only relative to a centered world. A centered world is a possible world in which an individual and a time are marked, where the marked individual.. (shrink)

The efforts to prove God's existence in the history of thought have been one of the fundamental problems of philosophy and theology, and even the most important one. The evidences put furword to prove the existence of God constitute the center of philosophy of religion’s problems not only philosophy of religion, but also the disciplines such as theology-kalam and Islamic philosophy are also seriously concerned. When we look at the history of philosophy, it is clear that almost all philosophers are (...) interested in the evidence in favour of and against the existence of God. Especially in recent times, religious experience has often been regarded as evidence of the existence of God. Studies in the field of religious and mystical experience have put forward many arguments concerning the use of religious experience as evidence. However, this study has been limited to experience of sense and pure consciousness claims rather than examining all of these arguments. In this study firstly, the analogy between experience of sense and religious experience will be deal with, and then claims that conciousness can be emptied by a number of methods which are defended by mystics. In addition, it will be tried to defend the opinion that the mystical experiences which are the common point of the two approaches are valid. The main emphasis of the article will be that these arguments can be used as evidence for the existence of God.Summary: Religious experience - which has not been considered as one of the classical evidences regarding the existence of God before being popular by recent studies – is started to be called one of the arguments. The most important reason for not arguing religious experience among the evidences of God’s existence is that it is a personal experience and therefore contains subjective perspectives. However, many researchers, who refuse to accept the criticism raised against religious experience with restricting to subjectivity, emphasized the importance of religious experience by highlighting the objective aspects of such experiences. This emphasis was not only on its significance, but also on the fact that it had a cognitive feature and thus it could provide evidence for the existence of God. The argument of religious experience is generally defined as an effort for demonstrating to existence of God with reference to several feelings such as spiritual experiences of human in face of creator and sacred Being, encounter with God, uniting, and annihilating selfness in Him. The emergence of such efforts, especially after the XVIIIth century, indicates that the history of the evidence does not go back much earlier. However, even if notas evidence, it is possible to extend the traces of religious and mystical experience to the history of religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism. Considering a great amount of the previous literature focused on religious experience in the West, It is easily seen that such research is still new. The main purpose in addressing such a controversial issue is to make the argument on the religious experience more current and to show whether the religious experience would be able to use as evidence for the existence of God.First title of this study comprises many different claims such as Walter T. Stace’s The Argument from Unanimity Richard Swinburne’s The Principle of Credulity, William P. Alston’s Perceiving God, John Hick’s Experience-as. However, instead of briefly giving out very different claims, the study chooses to focus on two arguments which are less discussed and can be given in more detail. The first is the argument based on the analogy between the religious experience and the sense experience. The fundamental point of this argument is sense experience. With reference to the similarities between the sense experience and the religious experience, it can be argued that religious experience is also cognitive and may function as an evidence for the existence of God. In other words, being perceptual and noetic, namely cognitive, of sense experience is addressed as a similar side of religious experience. Whether it is imaginary or real, eventually, it is necessary for an experience to have an object and being experience of something. Therefore, the religious experience includes the perception of a Transcendent Being that is beyond and in excess of the individual who experiences. Perception of the sense experience will definitely be different from the perception of religious experience. Researchers who think that the five sense organs do not run the perception of Sacred Beings, identified broader and various meanings for the perception. Thereby, in this approach, where the semantic field of perception is expanded, it was contended that human beings were able to perceive the transcendent, eternal, and unlimited God, and this can be explained in the epistemological sense. In order to use religious experiences as an evidence for the existence of God, it is necessary to determine whether such experiences are caused by God rather than something else. This raises the issue of the validity of religious experience. The researchers in this area have propounded various criteria to identify whether religious experience is existed or not. Experiences, which do not meet the criteria, are not considered existed even if they claim to be religious experience.The second is the argument that discusses whether it is possible to suggest an evidence for the existence of God by utilizing pure consciousness events. In general, this argument claims that the consciousness gets clear, and thus, mystic or Sufi experiences the Divine One with pure consciousness by discharging consciousness from all sensual contents and removing it from secular desire and wishes. The argument, which claims the experience of Divine One is direct, therefore uninterpretable, and experienced by pure consciousness, believes clearing the consciousness of mystics from sensual qualities such as seeing, hearing, and tasting. It is stated that it is possible for mystics to empty their sensory images and get rid of them, and thus, their desires and wishes could be lost. Especially, the thinkers who are connected with the philosophy of perennialism and defend this approach, thought that people, who have distinct religion, culture, and beliefs in different parts of the world and in various time periods, had the same experience and considered such experiences were universal by suggesting that this similarity could be called as common essence.Even though the claim which offers that the events of pure consciousness are the same everywhere have been criticized in many respects, the advocates of this approach have argued that the experience has the common essence, but the interpretation is different. This relationship, which was tried to be established between experience and commentary, caused a lot of work for both the thinkers who put forward the claims of pure consciousness and the researchers who opposed it. However, examining the relationship between experience and interpretation requires serious studies in socio-psychological, cultural and religious fields. Therefore, in order not to exceed the limits of the article, the relationship between experience and interpretation is briefly mentioned.While discussing two arguments, the main claims of the arguments were addressed, and the criticisms directed to this argument were not discussed as much as possible. However, some fundamental criticisms have been mentioned shortly for a better understanding of the discussion. Since such western-oriented claims mostly were deployed in a western context, the study excluded the comparison of the claims across different cultures. (shrink)

This paper examines Milner and Goodale’s hypothesis about the two visual streams and raises the questions of whether properties in egocentric space (commonly associated with the vision-for-action, or "dorsal," stream) can be part of the phenomenal content of perceptual experience, or only properties in allocentric space (commonly associated with the vision-for-perception, or "ventral," stream) can play this role, and how (if at all) properties in egocentric space differ from properties in allocentric space. These questions are reminiscent of (...) issues raised by Christopher Peacocke's "equal-sized trees" case: if you are looking at equal-sized trees on the side of a road, the trees will phenomenally look to you to be equally tall. But it is also true that a tree will take up more of the space in your visual field the closer it is to you. So, the equal-sized trees will also phenomenally look to you to have different heights. Your (visual) perceptual experience is not illusory. That is, the trees veridically look to you to have the same height, and they also veridically look to you to have different heights. Call the sort of issue raised here the "problem of dual looks." I provide a solution to the problem of dual looks that helps shed light on whether properties in egocentric space can be part of the phenomenal content of perceptual experience, and how (if at all) properties in egocentric space differ from properties in allocentric space. (shrink)

Extensive literatures exist on the epistemology of testimony, memory, and perception, but for the most part these literatures do not systematically consider the extent of the analogies between the three epistemic sources. A number of the same problems reappear in all three literatures, however. Dealing simultaneously with all three sources and making a careful accounting of the analogies and disanalogies between them should therefore avoid unnecessary duplication of effort. Other than limits on the scope of which memorially- and (...) testimonially-based beliefs should be included in the Parity Thesis, I argue that most of the disanalogies that different philosophers have proffered between the sources do not mark distinctions among the universes of possible testimonially-, memorially-, and perceptually-based beliefs regarding the explanation of those beliefs' epistemic status. I first criticize the suggestion that perception is a generative epistemic source, while testimony and memory are not; I propose and defend counterexamples in which testimony and memory produce new beliefs. Next, I criticize a variety of distinctions that have been drawn between testimony and perception, taken chiefly from the reductionist-antireductionist literature on testimony. I criticize the suggestion that the conceptualization of content and the transparency of experience affect the epistemologies of testimony and perception in different ways. Regarding memory and testimony, I advocate modeling testimony on the legal relationship of a principal and an agent, arguing that law's apparatus used to analyze such situations suggests that using others' epistemic services in testimony will supply the same epistemic benefits and burdens as if we had performed those epistemic tasks personally and then relied only on memory. I apply this analysis to the transmission of defeaters in testimony. I argue that memory does feature the epistemic equivalent of a perceptual image and that both perceptually- and memorially-based beliefs can concern either the past or the present. Finally, I construct a set of six transformations that turn individual possible instances of perceptually-, memorially-, or testimonially-based beliefs into individual possible instances of the other two types of beliefs without changing the structure of those beliefs' epistemologies. (shrink)

In this paper, I claim that since there is a cognitively impenetrable stage of visual perception, namely early vision, and cognitive penetrability and theory-ladenness are coextensive, the CI of early vision entails that early vision content is theory neutral. This theory-neutral part undermines relativism. In this paper, I consider two objections against the thesis. The one adduces evidence from cases of rapid perceptual learning to undermine my thesis that early vision is CI. The other emphasizes (...) that the early perceptual system, in order to solve various underdetermination problems, relies on certain principles, which may be taken to constitute a sort of a theory about the world that affect early vision, rendering it theory-laden. Both objections purport to show that early vision is CP and theory-laden. Against this thesis, I argue that the evidence on which the two objections are based does not show that early vision is CP and is fully compatible with the view that early vision is CI. (shrink)

The debate about direct perception encompasses different topics, one of which concerns the richness of the contents of perceptual experiences. Can we directly perceive only low-level properties, like edges, colors etc., or can we perceive high-level properties and entities as well? The aim of the paper is to defend the claim that the content of our perceptual experience can include emotions and also person impressions. Using these examples, an argument is developed to defend a liberal-content view (...) for core examples of social cognition. This view is developed and contrasted with accounts which claim that in the case of registering another person’s emotion while seeing them, we have to describe the relevant content not as the content of a perceptual experience, but of a perceptual belief. The paper defends the view that perceptual experiences can have a rich content yet remain separable from beliefs formed on the basis of the experience. How liberal and enriched the content of a perceptual experience is will depend upon the expertise a person has developed in the field. This is supported by the argument that perceptual experiences can be systematically enriched by perceiving affordances of objects, by pattern recognition or by top-down processes, as analyzed by processes of cognitive penetration or predictive coding. (shrink)

The aim of this dissertation is to defend the view that vision is a noninferential way of acquiring knowledge about what takes place in one's immediate vicinity. This direct approach to vision is opposed to the widely-held Cartesian idea that in perception items of consciousness function as epistemic intermediaries. ;In Chapter One I argue that the content of experience is the same as the content of the judgments we would make on the basis of experience, were we (...) to take experience at face value. The representational content of experience, like that of judgment, is fully conceptual. In Chapter Two I examine and criticize the view that experience has, in addition to representational content, irreducibly subjective, nonconceptual, phenomenal content. ;The upshot of these discussions is that experience is an epistemic notion. To have an experience is not just passively to have sensations; it requires the exercise of understanding. The relation between experience and reality is not causal, but normative: to have an experience is to take things to be some way or other, and how things are gives us reasons for taking them to be that way. In Chapter Three I argue that the Causal Theory of Perception misdescribes the place of causation in an account of perception and that it relies on an unsatisfactory conception of experience. In this connection I evaluate the so-called Argument from Illusion. ;In the remainder of the dissertation I take up a different set of issues. First, I defend the reality of appearances by arguing that how something looks--in particular, what color it is--is a fully mind-independent, higher-order property of the thing. Second, I consider the view that contemporary cognitive theories of vision, which explain vision in terms of inference, computation and construction, pose a threat to direct realism. Against this I argue that computational theories provide abstract characterizations of subpersonal processes which causally enable vision. In particular, they describe these blind causal processes as if they involved inference and construction. But the subpersonal processes subserving vision, while causally important, are themselves epistemically irrelevant. (shrink)

Sensations can occur in the absence of perception and yet be experienced ‘as if’ seen, heard, tasted, or otherwise perceived. Two concepts used to investigate types of these sensory-like mental phenomena (SLMP) are mental imagery and hallucinations. Mental imagery is used as a concept for investigating those SLMP that merely resemble perception in some way. Meanwhile, the concept of hallucinations is used to investigate those SLMP that are, in some sense, compellingly like perception. This may be a (...) difference of degree. Attempts to reliably differentiate between instances of each type of SLMP remain unresolved. Despite this, the concepts of mental imagery and hallucinations are each routinely used independently of the other. These uses are especially interesting in those published accounts of experiments where equivalent findings about the neuroanatomical correlates of SLMP are reported in support of diverging knowledge-claims about the role of SLMP in neurocognitive processes. This practice presents a puzzle. To examine one aspect of this puzzle, I compare the uses of these two scientific concepts in three ways: examining their roles in differentiating between types of SLMP; exploring how their respective historical developments intersect; and analysing their contributions in neuroimaging experiments. In presenting this series of comparative analyses, I will draw on three themes from historical, philosophical, and social studies of scientific practices: interest in material contributions to knowledge; accounts of how concepts are used in experiments; and explorations of the historical conditions within which current practices emerge. Building on this literature, my comparative analyses supports five related claims. My first claim is that the concepts of mental imagery and hallucinations are each used as independent tools in neuroimaging experiments. My second claim is that, as experimental tools, the concepts of mental imagery and hallucinations are each used for investigating discrete epistemic goals. My third claim is that there are implicit interdependent associations that structure the uses of these two concepts as tools for independently investigating these discrete epistemic goals in neuroimaging experiments. This third claim rests on my analyses of both past and present uses of each concept. Firstly, as seen in their intersecting histories, there are disciplined performances of using the concepts of mental imagery and hallucinations that carry-along shared associations about the mediating role of SLMP in thought. Secondly, these interdependent ‘mediator-view’ associations continue to structure the independent uses of each concept as a tool for investigating SLMP in pursuit of specific goals. Taking this further, my fourth claim is that recognising the structured uses of the concepts of mental imagery and hallucinations can help to account for how equivalent SLMP-neuro-correlates are generated in support of diverging knowledge-claims. Finally, my fifth claim is that the structured uses of these concepts as tools can contribute to experiments in ways analogous to, yet not equivalent with, the active contributions of material instruments. Bringing these claims together, I argue that the concepts of mental imagery and hallucinations operate as structured tools that can actively contribute to the knowledge generated by neuroimaging experiments. In presenting this argument I seek to demonstrate that examining the structured uses of concepts as tools can complement existing approaches to studying how the heterogeneous dynamics of experimental practices can come to contribute to scientific knowledge in unintended ways. (shrink)

This article explores rival interpretations of Badiou’s strategy behind the claim ‘mathematics is ontology’, from his construction of an alternative history of being to that of Heidegger to his exposure of the radical contingency of the ‘decisions on being’ carried out by transformative practices in the four conditions of philosophy: art, politics, love and science. The goal of this exploration is to open up the possibility of another strategy that responds to Badiou’s initial intuition – that being is multiple (...) – by embracing the writing of multiple ontologies in the sphere of action. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume 29, Number 1, April 2003, pp. 29-41 Hume's Argument for the Temporal Priority of Causes TODD RYAN In a section entitled "Of Probability; and of the idea of cause and effect," Hume embarks on a search for the conceptual components of our idea of causation. Rejecting the possibility of analyzing the idea in terms of the qualities of objects, Hume claims to discover two (...) constituent relations. First, a cause and effect must be contiguous in space and time because "nothing can operate in a time or place, which is ever so little remov'd from those of its existence" (T 1.3.2.6; SBN 75).x Second, a cause must be temporally prior to its effect. Although experience is said to confirm this latter requirement "in most instances," Hume goes on to present an argument purporting to demonstrate that the temporal priority of a cause is an essential feature of every instance of causation.2 Despite the extensive treatment that his analysis of causation has occasioned, Hume's argument for the temporal priority of causes has received comparatively little attention. In this paper I hope to remedy this neglect by providing a more accurate explication of the argument than has previously been offered. Hume does not argue directly for the claim that a cause must be temporally prior to its effect. Rather he offers an alleged reductio ad absurdum of the opposing view that "'tis not absolutely necessary a cause shou'd precede its effect; but that any object or action, in the very first moment of its existence, may exert its productive quality, and give rise to another object or action, perfectly co-temporary with itself (T 1.3.2.7; SBN 76)." This careful summary Todd Ryan is Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Trinity College, Hartford, CT 06106-3100, USA. e-mail: [email protected] 30 Todd Ryan of the opposing view provides a clear statement of what Hume takes to be at issue, namely whether it is "absolutely necessary" that a cause be temporally prior to its effect. From this it can readily be inferred precisely what would count as a refutation of his own view. Specifically, if it could be shown that some objects can produce their effect perfectly contemporaneously with themselves, then his position would have to be abandoned.3 It is against this latter possibility that Hume directs his argument. He writes: 'Tis an establish'd maxim both in natural and moral philosophy, that an object, which exists for any time in its full perfection without producing another, is not its sole cause; but is assisted by some other principle, which pushes it from its state of inactivity, and makes it exert that energy, of which it was secretly possest. Now if any cause may be perfectly co-temporary with its effect, 'tis certain, according to this maxim, that they must all of them be so; since any one of them, which retards its operation for a single moment, exerts not itself at that very individual time, in which it might have operated; and therefore is no proper cause. The consequence of this wou'd be no less than the destruction of that succession of causes, which we observe in the world; and indeed, the utter annihilation of time. For if one cause were co-temporary with its effect, and this effect with its effect, and so on, 'tis plain there wou'd be no such thing as succession, and all objects must be co-existent (T 1.3.2.7; SBN 76). The general structure of the argument is reasonably clear. According to the "establish'd maxim" (hereafter EM) any object that does not produce an effect as soon as possible is not the "sole cause" of that effect. Assuming then that causes might occur simultaneously with their effects, it follows that every proper cause must be contemporaneous with its effect. But if every effect occurs simultaneously with its cause, then we arrive at the absurd conclusion that there can be no causal (or indeed temporal) succession in the world. Therefore, the original assumption that a cause may be perfectly co-temporary with its effect must be... (shrink)

Why should we believe that perceptions justify beliefs? One argument starts with the premise that sentences of the form “a looks F” may be used to justify conclusions of the form “a is F”. I will argue that this argument for the claim that perceptions justify beliefs founders on the following dilemma: Either “a looks F” does not report the content of a perception or, if it does, then it does not justify the conclusion “a is (...) F”. (shrink)

In recent literature, panpsychism has been defended by appeal to two main arguments: first, an argument from philosophy of mind, according to which panpsychism is the only view which successfully integrates consciousness into the physical world (Strawson 2006; Chalmers 2013); second, an argument from categorical properties, according to which panpsychism offers the only positive account of the categorical or intrinsic nature of physical reality (Seager 2006; Adams 2007; Alter and Nagasawa 2012). Historically, however, panpsychism has also (...) been defended by appeal to a third argument based on considerations about the nature and observability of causation. This argument has not been much discussed in recent times. Here is a concise version from William James: "… the concrete perceptual flux, taken just as it comes, offers in our own activity-situations perfectly comprehensible instances of causal agency … If we took these experiences as the type of what actual causation is, we should have to ascribe to cases of causation outside of our life, to physical cases also, an inwardly experiential nature. In other words, we should have to espouse a so-called “pan-psychic” philosophy" (James 1911: 218). James here suggests that we have direct experience of causation in our own agency. He thereby directly contradicts David Hume, who famously denied that we have any experience of causation. James goes on to claim that if this experience is representative of causation in general, it follows that all causation is mental, and that panpsychism is true. This kind of argument for panpsychism can be called the argument from (experience of) causation. This chapter offers, first, a history of this argument and arguments closely related to it, and second, an analysis of the argument – is it valid, are its premises in any way defensible, and how does it relate to the other, more popular arguments for panpsychism from philosophy of mind and categorical properties? (shrink)

According to the phenomenological argument for disjunctivism, the reasons why we should prefer the disjunctive theory over its rivals is that (1) the disjunctive theory conforms the most to our pretheoretical or natural convictions about perception (what Michael Martin calls naïve realism), and (2) we should commit ourselves to naïve realism because it conforms the most to the phenomenology of the perceptual experience of objects. In this paper, I try to explain why is the phenomenal argument exceptionally (...) strong argument for disjunctivism and at the same time against sense-datum and intentional theories. Furthermore, I try to show that the disjunctivist’s explanation of hallucination (which is allegedly the weak point of the theory) is as plausible as its rivals’. (shrink)

Evidentialism is the thesis that all reasons to believe p are evidence for p. Pragmatists hold that pragmatic considerations – incentives for believing – can also be reasons to believe. Nishi Shah, Thomas Kelly and others have argued for evidentialism on the grounds that incentives for belief fail a ‘reasoning constraint’ on reasons: roughly, reasons must be considerations we can reason from, but we cannot reason from incentives to belief. In the first half of the paper, I (...) show that this argument fails: the claim that we cannot reason from incentives is either false or does not combine with the reasoning constraint to support evidentialism. However, the failure of this argument suggests an alternative route to evidentialism. Roughly, reasons must be premises of good reasoning, but it is not good reasoning to reason from incentives to belief. The second half of the paper develops and defends this argument for evidentialism. (shrink)

The questions whether the content of perception is nonconceptual and, if so, whether it can serve as the justificatory basis for perceptual beliefs have been at the epicentre of wide-ranging debates in recent philosophy of mind and epistemology. The present dissertation will set out to answer these matters. It will be argued that the content of perception is not necessarily conceptual, i.e. a specific understanding of nonconceptual content will be laid out and defended. Starting (...) class='Hi'>from the presentation and criticism of conceptualism, it will be concluded that the arguments brought forth against nonconceptualism can successfully be met. A specific version of nonconceptualism will be developed on this basis and will serve as the necessary framework for the remainder of the discussion. Flowing from these arguments, this specific version of nonconceptualism will be taken to task by clarifying, analysing and specifying its epistemological commitments and options. Several problem sets will have to be introduced and evaluated, such as the divide between externalists and internalists, the phenomena surrounding epistemic defeaters and examinations pertaining to reasoning, specifically whether experiences could be the output states of inferential processes. These reflections will not only provide a more in-depth investigation of some of the most pressing epistemological questions surrounding nonconceptual content, but will also allow for a seamless transition into the problem of which specific epistemological theory best bears out the epistemological role of nonconceptual content. Specifically, disjunctivism, capacity approaches and phenomenal conservatism will be assessed as to their capacity to vindicate nonconceptual content. Phenomenal conservatism will be identified as the theory that best integrates nonconceptualism. While phenomenal conservatism will thus be defended, the closing sections of the present dissertation will mainly focus on questions surrounding rationality. Indeed, if perception and/ or perceptual experiences could be classified as rational, or more accurately put, if arguments pertaining to the evaluability of a perceptual experience’s aetiology are tenable, it can reasonably be asked whether phenomenal conservatism can satisfactorily meet this challenge. Ultimately, it will be concluded that there is room for a specific notion of nonconceptual content as the justificatory basis for basic perceptual beliefs. (shrink)

My dissertation addresses the question "do desires provide reasons?" I present two independent lines of argument in support of the conclusion that they do not. The first line of argument emerges from the way I circumscribe the concept of a desire. Complications aside, I conceive of a desire as a member of a family of attitudes that have imperative content, understood as content that displays doability-conditions rather than truth-conditions. Moreover, I hold that an attitude may (...) provide reasons only if it has truth-evaluable content. Insofar as desires lack truth-evaluable content, I hold that the content of a desire has the wrong kind of logical structure to provide reasons. My second line of argument claims that even if a desire did have truth-evaluable content, it would not follow that desires provide reasons. This is because a desire has no more rational significance than a guess or coin-flip. My argument relies on what I call the non-substitutability principle, the thesis that (all things being equal) one cannot substitute something that lacks rational significance, relative to some attitude, A, for something that has rational significance, relative to A, and leave the rational standing of A unchanged. For example, one cannot substitute the guess that P (i.e., something that lacks rational significance relative to the belief that P) for the perception that P (i.e., something that is rationally significant relative to the belief that P) without altering the rational standing of the belief. I argue that when the non-substitutability principle is applied to a desire that gives rise to an intention, it turns out that one can always substitute a guess or coin-flip (i.e., something that lacks rational significance relative to the intention) for the desire, without altering the rational standing of the intention. I take this to show that desires are not rationally significant relative to the intentions to which they give. (shrink)

Visual Associative agnosia is a rare perceptual impairment generally resulting from lesions in the infero temporal cortex. Patients suffering from associative agnosia are able to make accurate copies of line drawings, but they are unable to visually recognize objects - including those represented in line drawings - as belonging to familiar high-level kinds. The Rich Content View claims that visual experience can represent high-level kind properties. The phenomenon of associative agnosia appears to present us with a strong (...) case for the Rich Content View. There are reasons for thinking that the experiences of an agnosic patient differ from those of a healthy subject. Given that there is a phenomenal contrast between the experiences of an associative agnosic and those of a healthy perceiver, one may argue that this contrast is due to differences in abilities to represent high-level kinds. I claim that there is indeed a phenomenal contrast between the visual experiences of an agnosic and those of a healthy perceiver. However, the explanation of this contrast that best fits the empirical data is compatible with the view that visual experience does not represent high-level kinds. (shrink)

Relativism offers a nifty way of accommodating most of our intuitions about epistemic modals, predicates of personal taste, color expressions, future contingents, and conditionals. But in spite of its manifest merits relativism is squarely at odds with epistemic value monism: the view that truth is the highest epistemic goal. I will call the argument from relativism to epistemic value pluralism the trivial argument for epistemic value pluralism. After formulating the argument, I will look at three possible (...) ways to refute it. I will then argue that two of these are unsuccessful, and defend the third, which involves denying that there are any genuinely relative truths. (shrink)

An important argument for the belief-desire thesis is based on the idea that an agent can be motivated to act only if her mental states include one which aims at changing the world, that is, one with a “world-to-mind”, or “telic”, direction of fit. Some cognitivists accept this claim, but argue that some beliefs, notably moral ones, have not only a “mind-to-world”, or “thetic”, direction of fit, but also a telic one. The paper first argues that this cognitivist (...) reply is deficient, for only the “dominant” direction of fit of an attitude is responsible for its character and function. Further, it seems that the dominant direction of fit of an attitude is determined by its psychological mode, and so all beliefs seem to have a dominant thetic direction of fit, and to be motivationally inert. The main part of this paper, however, is devoted to explaining how it is that attitudes, like moral attitudes, can truly have two directions of fit in a way which enables them to be both cognitive and motivational. Reflection on the nature of beliefs suggests that the claim that the dominant direction of fit of an attitude is determined by its psychological mode should be qualified. The reasons beliefs provide draw their authority for the agent – their demanding nature – from the objects represented by these beliefs, and so, it is the beliefs’ content which determine their dominant direction of fit, as far as their role in practical reasoning is concerned. Thus, in the sense relevant to practical reasoning a belief with a normative content does have a dominant telic direction of fit. At the same time, in the sense relevant to its satisfaction conditions a moral belief has a dominant thetic direction of fit, which underlies its classification as a cognitive attitude. Cognitivists, then, can have it both ways. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a new argument for the perceptual rationality thesis: the claim that perceptual experiences themselves can be rational or irrational. In her book The Rationality of Perception, Susanna Siegel has offered several intertwined arguments for this same thesis, and, as you will see, one of Siegel’s arguments is what inspires my own. However, I will suggest that the new argument is significantly better-supported than Siegel’s original argument.

Many so-called “cognitivist” theories of the emotions account for the meaningfulness of emotions in terms of beliefs or judgments that are associated or identified with these emotions. In recent years, a number of analytic philosophers have argued against these theories by pointing out that the objects of emotions are sometimes meaningfully experienced before one can take a reflective stance toward them. Peter Goldie defends this point of view in his book The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration. Goldie argues that emotions are (...) meaningful in a way that is different from the meaningfulness of beliefs. He describes this meaningfulness in terms of “feeling towards,” which he identifies as a unique type of intentionality characteristic of emotions. The independence of feeling-towards from acts like believing is most clearly brought out by cases in which there is not enough time to form a belief but in which a person experiencing feelings towards an object responds emotionally in a way that is meaningful to them. Employing a similar type of argument, the phenomenologist Max Scheler argues that certain types of acts of feeling are phenomenologically prior to presentative acts of perception, representation, or imagination. Scheler supports his claim about the phenomenological priority of such acts of feeling by referring to cases in which the presented contents of an object are hidden or obscured but where the object of feeling, value, remains adequately given. I endeavor to show how Scheler draws support for his position from these cases and the great significance of his interpretation of these cases for his philosophical outlook as a whole. I close by considering some questions about his interpretation and use of these cases. (shrink)

Ordinary people tend to be realists regarding perceptual experience, that is, they take perceiving the environment as a direct, unmediated, straightforward access to a mindindependent reality. Not so for (ordinary) philosophers. The empiricist influence on the philosophy of perception, in analytic philosophy at least, made the problem of perception synonymous with the view that realism is untenable. Admitting the problem (and trying to offer a view on it) is tantamount to rejecting ordinary people’s implicit realist assumptions as naive. (...) So what exactly is the problem? We can approach it via one of the central arguments against realism – the argument from hallucination. The argument is intended as a proof that in ordinary, veridical cases of perception, perceivers do not have an unmediated perceptual access to the world. There are many versions of it; I propose the following1: 1. Hallucinations that are subjectively indistinguishable from veridical perceptions are possible. 2. If two subjective states are indistinguishable, then they have a common nature. 3. The contents of hallucinations are mental images, not concrete external objects. 4. Therefore, the contents of veridical perceptions are mental images rather than concrete external objects. The key move is, I believe, from the fact that hallucinations that are subjectively indistinguishable from cases of veridical perception are possible to an alleged common element, factor, or nature, in the form of a mental state, in the two cases – that is, premise 2. Disjunctivism, at its core, can be taken as simply denying this move, and arguing that all that follows from the premise stating the possibility of hallucinations that are subjectively indistinguishable from cases veridical perception is that there is a broader category, that of “experience as of...”, which encompasses both cases.. (shrink)

A number of philosophers endorse, without argument, the view that there’s something it’s like consciously to think that p, which is distinct from what it’s like consciously to think that q. This thesis, if true, would have important consequences for philosophy of mind and cognitive science. In this paper I offer an argument for it, and attempt to induce examples of it in the reader. The argument claims it would be impossible introspectively to distinguish conscious (...) thoughts with respect to their content if there weren’t something it’s like to think them. This argument is defended against several objections. Then I use what I call “minimal pair” experiences—sentences read without and with understanding—to induce in the reader an experience of the kind I claim exists. Further objections are considered and rebutted. (shrink)

The current technoscientific progress has led to a sectorization in the philosophy of science. Today the philosophy of science isn't is informal interested in studying old problems about the general characteristics of scientific practice. The interest of the philosopher of science is the study of concepts, problems and riddles of particular disciplines. Then, within this progress of philosophy of science, neuroscientific research stands out, because it invades issues traditionally addressed by the humanities, such as the nature of consciousness, action, knowledge, (...) normativity, etc. As a result, the new area of interdisciplinary study of neuroscience and philosophy arises: neurophilosophy. This emerging area applies neuroscientific concepts to traditional philosophical questions, limiting their responses to neuroscientific revelations about nervous systems. Neurophilosophy research focuses on problems related to the indirect nature of mind and brain, computational or representative analysis of brain process, relationships between psychological and neuroscientific research, adequate adaptations of physical and philosophical concepts in neuroscience and the place of cognitive functions. Now, the temporal representation of conscious experience and the types of the neural architecture to represent objects in time have aroused scientific interest. Under these interests, we focus on the studies on the temporary triadic structure of phenomenological consciousness in Dan Lloyd and Rick Grush. From Grush’s studies, the importance of Kantian ideas for cognitive neuroscience emerges, due to the active way in which Kant conceived space and time as forms of intuition, within which the mind interprets its experience. Under this perspective, the theoretical arguments of Dennett-Kinsbourne and Eagleman-Sejnowski represent winks in the direction of Kant-Husserl within the neuroscientific goal while considering that the contents provided by the mind included space, objects and perception of causal relationships. Then, theories of cognitive neuroscience are beginning to suggest that these elements are also, as Kant argued, interpretative elaborations provided by mind / brain, and not only content received from outside. In other words, current cognitive neuroscientific theories try to pass from its Humean phase to a Kantian phase. So, the challenge has been to explain that these elements are provided by the mind and the world itself, and how they have the content they have come from. These are lacking in current studies. Filling this gap helps to involve the analysis of the scientist’s experience in his theoretical attitude. In this sense, an investigation under the Kantian-Husserlian approach that involves pure intuitions a priori with the experience of the scientific and neuroscientific concepts represents a ground-breaking. At present, a neurophilosophical study about this does not exist. In this sense, one feasible proposal for research would be based on the application of neuroscientific results of Moser-Britt to philosophical problems of foundational notions in relativistic physics: space, time, space-time, field, etc., under the Kantian-Husserlian approach, which allows to demonstrate the multidisciplinary link between neurophilosophy and physics. This represents a ground-breaking area in current interests in scientific research, with a positive impact in the field of neuroscience, and contributing to the study of abstraction emphasizing the importance of Kant’s Copernican turn and Husserl’s phenomenological ideas in the construction of physical theories. -/- . (shrink)

In this article I argue for the thesis that Alexander's main argument, in Ethical Problems I, is an attempt to block the implication drawn by the Stoics and other ancient philosophers from the double potential of use exhibited by human life, a life that can be either well or badly lived. Alexander wants to resist the thought that this double potential of use allows the Stoics to infer that human life, in itself, or by its own nature, (...) is neither good nor bad. Furthermore, I shall argue that Alexander's main argument establishes that human life, despite exhibiting a double potential of use, is by its own nature or intrinsically good. Finally, given that this is not a conclusion that the Stoics are likely to accept, I shall also contend that the argument should be regarded as conducted for the most part in foro interno, as a way of persuading the Peripatetics themselves of the falsity of the Indifference Implication, precisely because of the risk that such an implication be derived from their own theoretical framework. (shrink)

Metaethical relativism is the view that whether a moral claim is true depends on the standards endorsed by an individual or society. This view is attractive because it allows one to hold that moral claims can be true or false in an ordinary correspondence sense, without being committed to the view that moral claims state objective facts. But what could it mean to say that a whether a moral claim is true depends on an individual or society’s standards? How could (...) a single claim be true or false in an ordinary sense, and yet be true for some people while false for others? This thesis defends a certain answer to this question: metaethical truth relativism. Metaethical relativists have historically endorsed a different view: content relativism, which is the view that the semantic contents of moral claims vary across contexts of use. However, semanticists working outside metaethics have recently shown that an alternative exists, namely truth relativism: the view that the truth values of moral contents vary across contexts. Metaethicists have been slow to investigate the significance of this discovery. This is surprising, because truth relativism appears to avoid some of the most influential objections to content relativist views. Thus, this development in semantics appears to offer an exciting new direction for research on relativism in metaethics. The scope of this thesis is not narrowly semantic, however. Questions in moral semantics often interconnect with questions in substantive metaethics, and the question of whether ethical thought and talk is semantically relativistic is no exception. Therefore, while the core of the this thesis focuses on moral semantics, it also contains a fair amount of substantive metaethical material, located primarily in the first and final chapters. The plan of the thesis is as follows. Chapters 1 & 2 begin with a discussion of the most historically influential argument for metaethical relativism: the argument from disagreement. Chapter 1 discusses an epistemic version of this argument, but concludes that this version provides only limited evidence for relativism. However, chapter 2 introduces a different version of the argument, with a more semantic focus, and begins to make the case that this argument provides evidence not only for metaethical relativism broadly construed, but for truth relativism in particular. The broad strokes of this argument are that there can be moral disagreements which are faultless and furthermore that only truth relativism can vindicate the sense that these are genuine disagreements, rather than mere differences of opinion. Chapter 2 presents empirical evidence for the claim that putative moral disagreements can be faultless. Chapters 3 and 4 then take a deep dive into the topic of disagreement. Chapter 3 develops a positive account of disagreement which is available only to truth relativists. And chapter 4 advances detailed arguments against contextualist accounts of disagreement. Chapters 3 and 4 together thus defend in detail the claim that truth relativism can, while content relativism cannot, account for the sense that there is genuine disagreement in the relevant cases. Chapters 2 through 4, therefore, form a single long argument for truth relativism. They show that there is a compelling argument for relativism broadly construed, and that deep analysis of the issues surrounding this argument favour truth relativism over content relativism. Chapter 5 zooms back out to the broader metaethical landscape, discussing two remaining objections to relativism. The first objection is that relativism has objectionably subjectivistic implications, and the second is that moral standards cannot helpfully be understood as determined by societies. In the course of responding to these objections, natural opportunities to flesh out the substantive metaethical commitments of the theory will arise. And this will set us up to conclude with a brief comparison of truth relativism with some of the other main options in the space of substantive metaethical theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 537 tion of his three dialogues, and of course there are several references to Hume's intern= parable Dialogues. The bibliographic essay is useful with respect to general works and period pieces but unfortunately does little to help those who are seeking further help in understanding an individual writer. Professor France's work is an invaluable guide nevertheless for those who realize that authors, even philosophers, do not (...) write in a cultural vacuum. NICHOLASCAPALDI Queens College, CUNY Die Auseinandersetzung yon ldealismus und Realismus in Fichtes Wissenscha/tslehre. By Ingeborg Schfissler. (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1972. Pp. 182. DM 24.50) For Fichte scholars this closely argued and well organized study of the foundations of Fichte's Wissenscha/tslehre is simply a must. American philosophers generally, however, will not become Fichte enthusiasts after reading this book. But this is not the fault of the authoress, but of Fichte. The key question which Dr. SchiJssler raises is, What role does realism play in Fichte's transcendental idealism? With this question in mind she examines Fichte's "foundation of the entire theory of science" of 1794-1795 and related matters, and the "theory of science" of 1804, together with the lecture of 1813. As Fichte originally saw the task of philosophy it was to explain theoretical, i.e., scientific, consciousness in terms of its own foundation. In 1804, however, the task was conceived as presentation of absolute truth; and in 1813, Fichte tried to understand the theory of science as a theory of appearances. Dr. Schfissler's thesis is that all three approaches are necessary; that, in fact, the changes in Fichte's conception of what a theory of science is or ought to be are grounded in the nature of transcendental philosophy itself. The book is not something one reads for relaxation; its sustained and detailed arguments militate against that. But it is a highly illuminating study, and well worth the effort of careful analysis. W. H. WE~mSTBR Florida State University The Manifold in Perception. Theories of Art.from Kant to Hildebrand. By Michael Pedro. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972. Oxford-Warburg Studies) This is a survey of theories of art of Kant, Schiller, Herbart, Hildebrand, Schopenhauer and Fiedler. One may question the value of a re-statement of this sort, over simply another reading of the works of the authors themselves. Pedro's answer may be found in the Preface and again in a more extended statement in the conclusion. "German aesthetic theory from Kant through to the end of the nineteenth century seemed to contain valuable critical ideas quite absent from contemporary philosophical writing." Pedro's attempt has been to "re-locate notions in current use, like 'aesthetic detachment', within the sustained systematic discourse of which they were once part. This seemed a way both of uncovering a number of assumptions which have been constraining writing on art for some time, and of clarifying a number of crucial insights of earlier theorists." The author's account is almost entirely expository, its negative critical questions being limited almost exclusively to Herbart. Yet even here, when the author indicates that Herbart's theory of mind "exhibits certain very basic logical difficulties," he adds that 538 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY "they are difficulties which have a particular importance in the discussion of art.... " Podro's clarification is largely made through the asking of questions which the authors themselves did not ask and then suggesting answers to these questions in the light of what the authors did say. The two chapters on Schiller form the core of the book. Schiller's theory of art and aesthetic education of man is placed as central to Podro's account of an aesthetic tradition beginning with Kant and ending with Fiedler. The "tradition" detailed in Podro's book is described as having two underlying assumptions. The first was that any account of art must indicate distinctive or at least characteristic uses of our perception, uses which if not exclusive to art are at least necessary to it, and which are seen in art in a particularly striking way. The second assumption was that art involves our attitudes, in the sense of our serious purposes as... (shrink)

David Bloor has advocated a bold hypothesis about the form any sociology of science should take in setting out the four central tenets of his ?strong programme? (SP). The first section of this paper discusses how three of these tenets are best formulated and how they relate to one another. The second section discusses how reasons can be causes of belief and how such reasons raise a serious difficulty for SP. The third section discusses how SP is committed to a (...) form of relativism about truth. The fourth section discusses how one might deal with the problem of SP applying both to itself and to other sociological theories. In addition there is, throughout, a discussion of how rules of inference, methodologies, and philosophical doctrines either apply to SP or are exempt from applying. It is argued that SP must be a severely limited doctrine impotent to make evaluative claims about the worth of any theory, including itself. (shrink)

Many people, failing to understand the theories of such ethical relativists as William Graham Sumner, Ruth Benedict and Edward Westermarck, have thought that various findings of the social sciences establish these theories. They regard the problem of ethical relativism, or the problem of determining whether or not any of these theories is sound, as a scientific problem. And they often think of ethical relativism as a scientific theory which explains these findings. In particular, it is widely thought that anthropologists have (...) amassed overwhelming evidence to prove that the moral beliefs of peoples of different cultures conflict or are diverse in such a way that this diversity of morals raises the problem of ethical relativism. And many have thought and continue to think that ethical relativism is demonstrated by this evidence and is a scientific hypothesis which accounts for the diversity of morals. The argument from the diversity of morals is the most popular argument for ethical relativism based on the data of the social sciences. (shrink)

One crucial premise in the argument from illusion is the Phenomenal Principle. It states that if there sensibly appears to be something that possesses a sensible quality, then there is something of which the subject is aware that has that sensible quality. The principle thus enables the inference from a mere appearance to an existence (usually a mental one). In the argument from appearance, a similar move is taken by some philosophers—they infer a content (...) from a mere appearance. There are two kinds of defences for the Phenomenal Principle in the literature, namely, the epistemological one (e.g. H.H. Price) and the semantic one (e.g. Frank Jackson). I argue that neither consolidates the Phenomenal Principle. I particularly demonstrate that the appearance verb in premise 1 of the argument from illusion is not used in the phenomenal sense as it is used in the Phenomenal Principle, which renders the argument essentially invalid. To avoid invalidity, the proponents either give up the phenomenal use, which makes the argument unable to serve its original purpose, i.e. inferring an unusual existence, or they insist on the phenomenal use in all premises of the argument, which will trivialise the argument. I also demonstrate that a similar objection applies to the argument from appearance. (shrink)

In the contemporary discussions concerning unconscious perception it is not uncommon to postulate that content and phenomenal character are ‘orthogonal’, i.e., there is no type of content which is essentially conscious, but instead, every representational content can be either conscious or not. Furthermore, this is not merely treated as a thesis justified by theoretical investigations, but as supported by empirical considerations concerning the actual functioning of the human cognition. In this paper, I address unconscious color (...) perception and argue for a negative thesis—that the main experimental paradigms used in studying unconscious color perception do not provide support for the position that conscious and unconscious color representations have the same type of content. More specifically, I claim that there is no significant support for the claim that unconscious vision categorically represents surface colors. (shrink)

American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and American College of Medical Genetics (ACMG) recently provided two recommendations about predictive genetic testing of children. The Clinical Sequencing Exploratory Research Consortium's Pediatrics Working Group compared these recommendations, focusing on operational and ethical issues specific to decision making for children. Content analysis of the statements addresses two issues: (1) how these recommendations characterize and analyze locus of decision making, as well as the risks and benefits of testing, and (2) whether the guidelines conflict (...) or come to different but compatible conclusions because they consider different testing scenarios. These statements differ in ethically significant ways. AAP/ACMG analyzes risks and benefits using best interests of the child and recommends that, absent ameliorative interventions available during childhood, clinicians should generally decline to order testing. Parents authorize focused tests. ACMG analyzes risks and benefits using the interests of the child and other family members and recommends that sequencing results be examined for additional variants that can lead to ameliorative interventions, regardless of age, which laboratories should report to clinicians who should contextualize the results. Parents must accept additional analysis. The ethical arguments in these statements appear to be in tension with each other. (shrink)

I elaborate on Pylyshyn's definition of the cognitive impenetrability (CI) of early vision, and draw on the role of concepts in perceptual processing, which links the problem of the CI or cognitive penetrability (CP) of early vision with the problem of the nonconceptual content (NCC) of perception. I explain, first, the sense in which the content of early vision is CI and I argue that if some content is CI, it is conceptually encapsulated, that is, it (...) is NCC. Then, I examine the definitions of NCC and argue that they lead to the view that the NCC of perception is retrieved in a stage of visual processing that is CI. Thus, the CI of a state and content is a sufficient and necessary condition for the state and its content to be purely NCC, the CI?≡?NCC thesis. Since early vision is CI, the purely NCC of perception is formed in early vision. I defend the CI?≡?NCC thesis by arguing against objections raised against both the sufficient and the necessary part of the thesis. (shrink)

Our thought and talk are situated. They do not take place in a vacuum but always in a context, and they always concern an external situation relative to which they are to be evaluated. Since that is so, François Recanati argues, our linguistic and mental representations alike must be assigned two layers of content: the explicit content, or lekton, is relative and perspectival, while the complete content, which is absolute, involves contextual factors in addition to what is (...) explicitly represented. Far from reducing to the context-independent meaning of the sentence-type or, in the psychological realm, to the 'narrow' content of mental representations, the lekton is a level intermediate between context-invariant meaning and full propositional content. Recognition of that intermediate level is the key to a proper understanding of context-dependence in language and thought. Going beyond the usual discussions of indexicality and unarticulated constituents in the philosophy of language, Recanati turns to the philosophy of mind for decisive arguments in favour of his approach. He shows, first, that the lekton is the notion of content we need if we are to properly understand the relations between perception, memory, and the imagination, and second, that the psychological 'mode' is what determines the situation the lekton is relative to. In this framework he provides a detailed account of de se thought and the first person point of view. In the last part of the book, Recanati discusses the special freedom we have, in discourse and thought, to shift the situation of evaluation. He traces that freedom to a special mode - the anaphoric mode - which enables us to go beyond the egocentric stage of pre-human thought. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Appropriate Indecorum Rhetoric and Aesthetics in the Political Theory of Jacques RancièreEthan StonemanJacques Rancière is one of France's leading intellectuals and a recent addition to the who's who of Continental philosophy. Since his time as a student at the Ecole normale supérieure, Rancière has generated a body of work that is at once wide-ranging, interdisciplinary, and consistent. His arguments for a postfoundational and postliberal democratic understanding of politics (...) have influenced, echoed, or demanded critical response from such other Continental luminaries as Slavoj Žižek (1999, 2004) and Alain Badiou (2005). Much of this cachet is no doubt due to Rancière's central thesis regarding the sources, uses, and ends of politics. According to this argument, politics does not derive from putative a priori truths about knowledge, human nature, or social interaction; it is not a function of particular forms of government, and it neither establishes nor ensures socioeconomic order. Rather, for Rancière politics is a dissensual activity consisting solely in the demonstration of equality. But rather than designating something to be attained, preserved, or balanced against competing factors, Rancière's equality names an assumption that political subjects must presuppose on their own account and exhibit through their own actions. Insofar as a given social arrangement is hierarchical, the egalitarian presupposition will be necessarily agonistic and symbolically disruptive of that order. [End Page 129] In a word, Rancière champions a politics from the ground up, one that defends without patronizing the down-and-out, the disenfranchised, the unseen, and the unheard.During the last quarter of the twentieth century, while Rancière was formulating his theory of politics, American rhetoricians began to assert the continued relevance of decorum to the analysis of contemporary social phenomena (see, e.g., Fantham 1984; Leff 1987, 1990; Rosteck and Leff 1990; Hariman 1992, 1995; Smith 1992; Deem 1995). These efforts were concurrent with other attempts to foreground the aesthetic capacity of rhetoric to create, sustain, and transform perception via the symbolic manipulation of appearances (see, e.g., Farrell 1993; Whitson and Poulakos 1993; Vitanza 1997; Greene 1998). It is surprising, however, that these efforts to revitalize decorum and aesthetics have largely fail to reference recent Continental theories of aesthetics, many of which have tacit but unexplored bearing on decorum and rhetoric in general. Equally surprising is the tendency, within rhetorical studies, to discuss aesthetics without so much as broaching the subject of decorum. One exception to this trend is Robert Hariman (1992, 1995), who makes a convincing case for the conceptual intimacy between decorum and aesthetics. The classical theory of decorum, he argues, "blended significant aspects of rhetorical practice, social awareness, and political structure into an aesthetic sensibility that directed the selection of diction appropriate to one's subject or situation" (1992, 152). According to this account, decorum in the classical era engendered an aesthetic orientation toward one's sociopolitical environment and the rhetorical practices therein.I contend that Rancière's political theory makes significant strides toward bridging the gap between decorum, aesthetics, and politics while at the same time focusing attention on the role of equality and the empowering potential of indecorum. Although rhetoricians have tended not to address the inventional possibilities of indecorum per se, there has been a recurring effort among those writing on decorum to explicate the conditions of rhetorical performances of confrontation, nonadjustment, and resistance—performances that would eschew a logic of influence and assent for a tactics of opposition and disturbance. This trend has been accompanied by periodic attempts to account for rhetoric's potential to interrupt dominant modes of discourse and rationality and to identify its countervailing forces and formal constraints (Scott and Smith 1969; Windt 1972; Campbell 1973; Phillips 1996; Doxtader 2000). It is my contention that Rancière's political vocabulary can extend this line of inquiry by [End Page 130] expanding the possibility for indecorum to subvert the symbolic structures of oppression and domination while avoiding the pitfalls of adaptation and co-optation, that is, the reconstitution of decorum via dialectical syntheses of competing codes of conduct. Specifically, rhetoricians may interpret Rancière's political theory as answering Melissa Deem's... (shrink)

Over the last decade, attention has crawled from out of the shadows into the philosophical limelight with several important books and widely read articles. Carolyn Dicey Jennings has been a key player in the attention revolution, actively publishing in the area and promoting awareness. This book was much anticipated by insiders and does not disappoint. It is in no way redundant with respect to other recent monographs, covering both a different range of material and developing novel positions throughout. The (...) book might have been called The Attending Self, since Jennings defines attention as mental prioritization controlled by the self. This invocation of the self is among her central innovations, and may prove to be the main source of controversy. I will highlight points of contention here, but want to emphasize at the outset that the book is essential reading for anyone interested in attention. Jennings also contributes to a range of other debates, which will help a broader audience appreciate the importance this topic.After a brief introduction, Jennings provides “a philosophical landscape” of attention (chap. 2), tracing the concept through history. This is an invaluable achievement that will be welcomed by both newcomers and veterans. Jennings exhibits enormous breadth, covering areas that contemporary philosophers of mind tend to neglect: medieval philosophy, Buddhist thought, and phenomenology, to name a few. We also get perspectives on attention from core figures in the Western canon, such as Descartes, Locke, and Kant, as well as thinkers who gave the topic a more political inflection: Mary Wollstonecraft and W. E. B. DuBois. Jennings surveys contemporary literature as well, locating recent work in these older lineages. Some authors get more treatment later in the book (e.g., William James and Wayne Wu). Overall, Jennings provides the best overview of this history I have seen. She proves that attention is not a new topic, but one with deep roots and one that can inform current debates; Jennings draws on these roots throughout. I would love to see a companion piece surveying scientific theories, including “gain control” and “biased competition,” which get little airtime in the book. Some recent philosophical theories are under-explored as well, including Chris Mole’s concept of cognitive unison (Jennings discusses other aspects of his view), Carlos Montemayor and Harry Haladjian’s exploration of attention’s diversity (we get a touch of this), and my own proposal that attention is a gateway to working memory (not mentioned here). That said, no extant survey is more complete.Chapter 3 begins with the empirical claim that attention is regulated by slow brainwaves, and then takes up two issues. The first is mental causation. Endorsing moderate emergentism, Jennings argues that slow brain waves are causally efficacious even though they are not reducible to lower-level processes. (The metaphysics and neuroscience are presented accessibly, aided by three appendixes.) Second, Jennings argues that these slow brain waves indicate that attention is controlled by the self. As someone who was never moved by the mental causation problem—I don’t think overdetermination threatens efficacy—I would have welcomed more development of this second issue. For one thing, in linking attention to subjective control, Jennings eschews the idea that there can be purely “bottom-up” attention driven by stimulus features alone. This goes against the orthodoxy in attention science, and makes it hard for her to accommodate phenomena such as “pop-out,” or the commonsense idea that attention can be “captured” by a sudden flash or loud sound. For another thing, I wanted to hear more on why Jennings relates slow brain waves to the self. Does this include the slow waves that occur during deep sleep? Is there even such a thing as the self? Is there one self or many? How do slow brain waves reflect our interests, projects, values, self-conceptions, autobiographical narratives, or social identities? Does the social self invoked by Wollstonecraft and DuBois gain a foothold here? The whole chapter campaigns against metaphysical reductionism, but arrives at a perspective on the self that will strike some readers as highly reductive.In the fourth chapter, Jennings sheds further light on her conjecture that attention involves the self by advancing the thesis that attention endows sensory information with meaning. On the face of it, this may sound implausible. Object recognition, reading, and many other meaning-involving processes can take place outside of attention and outside of consciousness. But Jennings has a richer notion of “meaning” in mind. She develops the idea of “subject unity,” which is imposition of structure on perception that reflects the interests of the perceiving subject. This, she claims, is what brings perception into the space of reasons. Along the way, she has interesting observations about binding, feature integration, and demonstrative reference. The material is highly original, and Jennings’s postulation of interest-based perceptual organization is compelling. At the same time, one might wonder whether interests are really relegated to the ambit of attentional control. Consider the cocktail party effect, wherein one’s own name captures attention. This implies a preattentive filter that reflects our interests. Emotionally charged words, facial expressions, and dangerous objects also work this way, and social biases can operate preattentively as well. If these reflect our interests, then meaning may arise outside attention.Jennings’s fifth chapter explores the relationship between attention and consciousness. Some authors have argued that attention is necessary and sufficient for consciousness. Jennings focuses primarily on the necessity claim. She does not systematically review the empirical literature here, but she addresses some of the key findings, and effectively rebuts studies that allege to find consciousness outside attention. She does not rest her case there, however. Instead, she identifies a new class of examples that purport to establish the possibility of consciousness without attention. Her central example she calls “conscious entrainment,” which is what we experience when engaged in habitual or skilled activities. Other possible examples touched on in the chapter include hypervigilance in individuals with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), passive movie watching, dreaming, and “attentional neglect.” These states all involve intense focus, Jennings admits, but not attention. To some readers this may sound contradictory. Isn’t focus a kind of attention? Don’t these states of absorption involve stimulus selection and enhancement of relevant features, suppression of distractors, and other hallmarks of attention? Jennings says none of this is tantamount to attention. Recall that she thinks attention is controlled by the self. In these cases, we are invited to imagine that the self takes a passive role: control is either ceded to the world (movie watching) or to previously mastered routines (skills and habits). Thus, Jennings’s claim that there is no attention in these cases hangs on her contentious thesis that attention requires a controlling self. One might also push back by arguing that, in some of Jennings’s allegedly selfless examples, the self remains involved. Skilled activities and hypervigilance, for example, can reflect personal interests.Skills and hypervigilance get more airtime in chapter 6. There, Jennings turns to questions of responsibility—a neglected topic in attention research. The chapter begins with a manslaughter trial in which the teenage plaintiff was given a light sentence because the judge evidently believed that the teen’s ADHD compromised his ability to control his actions. The example may be a bit triggering for people who have a personal relationship with this diagnosis, but, putting that aside, Jennings uses it to introduce the important concept of attention-based control. With reduced control, Jennings argues, comes reduced responsibility. I am inclined to see ADHD as involving dysregulation of attention (difficulty disengaging and dividing attention, for example) rather than diminished attention, but that can still be characterized as an issue with control of attention; therefore ADHD still illustrates Jennings’s point that there is a link between responsibility and control of attention. This, it turns out, is only half of her story. Having argued for this link, one might expect Jennings to follow Wayne Wu, who contends that attention is necessary for action, and hence for responsibility. She does not. Instead, she says argues that responsibility can also arise in cases of “strategic automaticity.” This brings us back to skills. When skills are deployed, action is governed by learned pairings between stimuli and responses. The choice to exercise a skill requires attention, so attention is needed for being a responsible agent, but once a skill kicks in, attention is no longer required, and one can be held responsible for actions performed skillfully—thus attention is not required for responsibility tout court. Jennings addresses an opposing view (defended by Wu, Ellen Fridland, and Barbara Montero), according to which skills involve “automatic attention” rather than no attention. Jennings worries that this move will collapse the distinction between attention and other kinds of selection and filtering that occur throughout the nervous system, including the retina. She says that the attentional interpretation of skilled action is at odds with the lack of top-down reweighing of sensory inputs, regulated by lateral frontal cortex. These objections to automatic attention warrant response. My own view is that attention involves broadcasting to working memory, so retinal filtering is ruled out. Jennings’s insistence on top-down reweighing will not move those who believe attention can be purely bottom-up. For all that, I side with Jennings in wanting to allow for responsibility without attentional control. I think we can be responsible for implicit biases, for example. I also think attentional control is insufficient for responsibility, as when we act under duress.Jennings offers fresh perspective on the nature of attention, and its role in meaningful perception, consciousness, action, and responsibility. Each chapter can be read separately, but they hang together well, and each reflects her thesis that attention is essentially linked to the self. Though I am skeptical of that strong claim, we would do well to follow Jennings in regarding attention as interest-laden interface between mind and world. I look forward to a sequel in which attention is related to richer conceptions of identity, and where the political consequences of this link are actively explored. Meanwhile, one can hardly fault Jennings for covering too little. She tackles a remarkable range of topics, from metaphysics to ethics. Her arguments throughout demand response, repay careful study, and propel the field forward. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Thales of Miletus: The Beginnings of Western Science and PhilosophyKevin RobbPatricia F. O’Grady. Thales of Miletus: The Beginnings of Western Science and Philosophy. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2002. Pp xxii + 310. Paper, $84.95.This book has a consistent thesis: Thales of Miletus was the first Western scientist and philosopher not just for what he began, but for what he himself said (or, as O'Grady believes, wrote). On (...) this view, Thales made significant contributions to metaphysics ("He asked the question: 'What is real?' no less than Plato and Aristotle did," 249), cosmology (on the earth and earthquakes, 87 ff.), astronomy (notably the eclipse, 126 ff.), mathematics (Proclus attributes Euclidean theorems to Thales, 191 ff.), psychology (on psyche) and theology (on "full of the gods," 108 ff.). O'Grady's thesis is that we know enough about Thales' thoughts in these areas (each a treacherous minefield of scholarly dispute, as O'Grady admits) that, after a clarified understanding of "Scientificity and Rationality" (her awkward title for Chapter 11), we can confidently conclude that philosophy and science were well begun by Thales. "I believe I have drawn a clear and detailed picture of a brilliant, veracious, and courageously speculative Greek. I see him as a questioner of almost everything, an investigator of nature...Thales is not the mere shadowy figure of Guthrie's perception. He is a man of substance, a man of distinction and of lasting importance" (251).O'Grady had early noted that W. K. C. Guthrie considered Thales a shadowy figure historically, made all the more so, Guthrie believed, because the legend kept expanding. For example, a sixth-century Thales as the seeker after the material archê, and so the first important physikos, is unknown before fourth-century Aristotle's Metaphysics Alpha, and by the time Euclidean theorems are attributed to Thales the tendency to foist imposing discoveries on famous persons was prevalent.This raises the major issue concerning O'Grady's exhaustively researched book. To what extent can the doxographic sources (the "A" sections of Diels's 1903Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker), be used to interpret the Presocratics, especially if the original wording from a thinker perished (any "B" section quotations). It is clear that in the fourth century nothing in writing from Thales survived for the Lyceum to read and catalogue although its scholars clearly sought it; the repeated legetai ("it is said") of Aristotle in Metaphysics Alpha and elsewhere is decisive. It is his standard way of indicating that no written work on the matter survives to be consulted, but stories or oral accounts do.O'Grady's thesis requires that the "A" section material be exploited fully, especially to present Thales as a philosopher (29-70). Many historians will be unwilling to take the entire journey with her. Some (Harold Cherniss) would balk at the first step. The demand for confirming ipsissima verba (or "B" quotations) to reconstruct the thought of any Presocratic with real confidence (as once proposed by G. S. Kirk) threatens to exclude Thales from histories of philosophy, an unsatisfactory result. Even so, Harold Cherniss proposed that drastic solution in 1935 in his magisterial Aristotle's Criticism of Presocratric Philosophy. Presocratic philosophy, he argued, should begin with Anaximander (375).The heart of Cherniss's numbingly exhaustive argument (400 + pages) was that Aristotle's purpose in surveying his predecessors's views was never historical, but dialectical. His intent was to argue for a fourfold causality (on the grounds only four archai had been turned up by all his predecessors, starting with Thales' material cause), and to fit those predecessors's views into a theory of natural causality as he had finally formulated it in his sophisticated, [End Page 107] largely technical vocabulary. Aristotle's "historical" notices on which all later accounts must depend were, thus, never history; the problem and the solution, along with their language, were Aristotle's alone. If Theophrastus paraphrased what he found in Aristotle (McDiarmid), and if the post-Aristotelian doxographic notices were largely dependent on Theophrastus (so already Diels in 1879, in Doxographi Graeci), then any attempt to extract a philosophical Thales from the later doxographic sources (or Aristotle) is methodologically doomed from... (shrink)

I will use three simple arguments to refute the thesis that I appear to directly perceive a mind-independent material object. The theses I will use are similar to the time-gap argument and the argument from the relativity of perception. The visual object of imagination and the object of experience are in the same place. They also share common qualities such as the content, subjectivity, change in virtue of conditions of observers, and the like. This (...) leads to the conclusion that both a tree-image and a tree-experience are distinct from a material tree. Perception of an object is caused by human nature, the senses and consciousness, and mind may prevent the direct perception of the external world. The strongest objection against that consequence is that there is no extra entity called sense-datum or appearance between a subject-in-itself and a real external thing-in-itself. That is, we see books, not book-images. The possible reply would be that a person sees no mental pictures except that which they see via pictures. (shrink)

John Rawls’s thesis that a certain package of basic liberties should be given lexical priority is of great interest for legal and political philosophy, but it has received relatively little defense from Rawls or his supporters. In this paper, I examine three arguments for the thesis: the first is based on the two ‘moral powers’; the second, on the social bases of self-respect; and the third, on a Kantian notion of autonomy. I argue none of these accounts (...) successfully establishes 1) the distinct claim of lexical priority, 2) for the complete package of basic liberties, on the basis of reasons that are appropriately public. In turn, I propose an alternative argument, in support of those two claims, based on the social or ‘relational’ conception of equality. (shrink)

In this contribution, I explore the treatment that Plato devotes to Protagoras’ relativism in the first section of the Theaetetus (151 E 1–186 E 12) where, among other things, the definition that knowledge is perception is put under scrutiny. What I aim to do is to understand the subtlety of Plato’s argument about Protagorean relativism and, at the same time, to assess its philosophical significance by revealing the inextric¬ability of ontological and epistemological aspects on which it is built (...) (for this latter aspect, I refer to contemporary discussions of relativism, mainly to Margolis’ robust relativism). I then turn to Aristotle’s treatment of Protagoras’ relativism in Metaphysics Γ, sections 5 and 6, in order to show that Plato and Aristotle surprisingly share the same view as regards the philosophical content of Protagoras’ relativism (in doing so, I take position against the standard opinion among scholars that Plato and Aristotle understand Protagoras’ relativism in different, even incompatible, ways). What I ultimately aim to demonstrate is that Protagoras’ relativism, as understood by both Plato and Aristotle, is a coherent, even attractive, philosophical position. (shrink)

Both common sense and dominant traditions in art criticism and philosophical aesthetics have it that aesthetic features or properties are perceived. However, there is a cast of reasons to be sceptical of the thesis. This paper defends the thesis—that aesthetic properties are sometimes represented in perceptual experience—against one of those sceptical opponents. That opponent maintains that perception represents only low-level properties, and since all theorists agree that aesthetic properties are not low-level properties, perception does not represent (...) aesthetic properties. I offer a novel argument—what I call the argument from seeing-as—against that sceptic which moves from consideration of ambiguous figures to consideration of visual art. It concludes that aesthetic properties are sometimes perceived and delivers a general lesson for philosophy of perception. Contrary to extant theories of rich perceptual content, aesthetic properties are far better candidates for high-level perceptual contents than standardly theorized rich contents like natural kinds. (shrink)

Clare Batty has recently argued that the content of human olfactory experience is 'a very weak kind of abstract, or existentially quantified content', and so that 'there is no way things smell'. Her arguments are based on two claims. Firstly, that there is no intuitive distinction between olfactory hallucination and olfactory illusion. Secondly, that olfaction 'does not present smell at particular locations', and 'seems disengaged from any particular object'. The present article shows both of these claims to (...) be false. It shows that naïve subjects find it quite natural to draw a distinction between olfactory hallucination and olfactory illusion. And it argues that the phenomenology of normal olfactory experience is of particular objects as having smells. Two confusions are responsible for Batty thinking otherwise: (1) Batty's examples are cases of extreme pungency, and she mistakes a peculiarity of intense perceptions for a property of olfaction more generally; (2) Batty focuses on very short time slices and so confuses limitations on the information carried by a single sniff for a limitation on the logical form of all olfactory content. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to present and analyze arguments provided for the Psychological Principle of Non-Contradiction which states that one cannot have, or cannot be described as having, contradictory beliefs. By differentiating two possible interpretations of PNC, descriptive and normative, and examining arguments provided for each of them separately I point out the flaws in reasoning in these arguments and difficulties with aligning PNC with the empirical data provided by research done in cognitive and clinical psychology. I claim (...) that PNC cannot be derived from any metaphysical stance regarding the mental phenomena and that having contradictory beliefs should be regarded as possible. Furthermore, I argue that interpreting a subject as having contradictory beliefs, and therefore abandoning PNC, can be more effective in explaining the phenomena of contradictory beliefs and irrational behaviour than solutions consistent with the PNC. (shrink)