Abstract
Declan Smithies’ The Epistemic Role of Consciousness (2019) is a defense of “Phenomenal Mentalism” according to which, necessarily, which propositions X has epistemic justification to believe at any given time is determined solely by X’s phenomenally individuated mental states at that time. Smithies offers two kinds of arguments for Phenomenal Mentalism: the ones that appeal to particular cases such as blindsight (the “arguments from below”) and the ones that appeal to general epistemic principles such as the JJ principle (the “arguments from above”). My focus is on the former. More precisely, I focus on a particular argument from below in Chapter 3, which I call “Argument from Blindsight”. According to this argument, the cases of blindsight show that consciousness is necessary for perceptual justification. In response, I raise two worries about Argument from Blindsight: first, it is difficult to find a plausible interpretation of “full rationality” according to which the premises are true (Section 2) and, second, the argument oscillates between empirical and stipulative discussions of blindsight in a potentially problematic manner (Section 3).
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Notes
Berger (2020) raises two objections to AFB. First, Premise 2 is rejected because blindsighted subjects are less than fully rational. After all, humans in general are not fully rational; there is no reason to think that blindsighted subjects are any better. Second, Premise 3 is rejected because norms of rationality apply to the states of the same kind. Even if unconscious visual information provides a source of noninferential justification for belief, blindsighted people are fully rational insofar as they proportion their unconscious beliefs to their unconscious visual information. Berger’s first objection is related to one of my objections (the one about “full rationality”), but the latter is more serious than the former.
But a non-Bayesian conception of rationality (such as the ecological conception) can yield a different interpretation of the bias. See also van der Leer & McKay 2014 for a different interpretation of the bias.
It is not obvious, however, that blindsight is a purely perceptual deficit; for instance, blindsight might involve a metacognitive failure in the prefrontal cortex (Ko & Lau 2012). In order to avoid this empirical issue, Smithies might introduce another stipulation that blindsight is a purely perceptual deficit. In this case, Premise 2 is stipulative rather than empirical.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Tony Cheng, Takuya Niikawa, and an anonymous referee for their comments on the manuscript. This paper is partly based on my blog post “Actual Blindsighters and Stipulated Blindsighters” at The Brains Blog (April 26, 2021). I thank Declan Smithies for the helpful online conversation on the blog post.
Funding
This work is supported by JSPS KAKENHI (20H00001 and 21H00464).
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Miyazono, K. On Smithies’ Argument from Blindsight. AJPH 1, 9 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44204-022-00012-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s44204-022-00012-8