Phenomenal particularism is the view that particular external objects are sometimes part of the phenomenal character of perceptual experience. It is a central part of naïve realist or relational views of perception. We consider a series of recent objections to phenomenal particularism and argue that naïve realism has the resources to block them. In particular, we show that these objections rest on assumptions about the nature of phenomenal character that the naïve realist will reject, and that they ignore the (...) full resources that naïve realism has to offer in explaining phenomenal character. (shrink)

A common view in the philosophy of perception holds that states of seeing objects face to face have particular contents. When you see, say, a dog face to face, your visual state represents the particular dog that is in front of you. In this paper, I argue for a related claim about states of seeing objects in conventional photographs. When you see a dog in a photograph, for example, your visual state represents the particular dog that was in front of (...) the camera when the photograph was taken, that is, the photograph's depictum. The argument in this paper proceeds in two steps. In the first step, I discuss states of seeing objects face to face. I argue that such a state represents the particular object whose surface is responsible for the optical information that the visual system uses to construct the state's attributive representational content. In the second step, I apply the result of this discussion to states of seeing objects in photographs. I argue that a state of seeing an object in a photograph has a particular content that represents the object that was in front of the camera when the photograph was taken. (shrink)

Visual experiences seem to exhibit phenomenological particularity: when you look at some object, it – that particular object – looks some way to you. But experiences exhibit generality too: when you look at a distinct but qualitatively identical object, things seem the same to you as they did in seeing the first object. Naïve realist accounts of visual experience have often been thought to have a problem with each of these observations. It has been claimed that naïve realist (...) views cannot account for the generality of visual experiences, and that the naïve realist explanation of particularity has unacceptable implications for self- knowledge: the knowledge we have of the character of our own experiences. We argue in this paper that neither claim is correct: naïve realism can explain the generality of experiences, and the naïve realist explanation of particularity raises no problems for our self-knowledge. (shrink)

The phenomenal properties of conscious mental states happen to be exclusively accessible from the first-person perspective. Consequently, some philosophers consider their existence to be incompatible with materialist metaphysics. In this paper I criticise one particular argument that is based on the idea that for something to be real it must (at least in principle) be accessible from an intersubjective perspective. I argue that the exclusively subjective access to phenomenal contents can be explained by the very particular nature of the epistemological (...) relation holding between a subject and his own mental states. Accordingly, this subjectivity does not compel us to deny the possibility that phenomenal contents are ontologically objective properties. First, I present the general form of the argument that I will discuss. Second, I show that this argument makes use of a criterion of reality that is not applicable to the case of subjective experience. Third, I discuss a plausible objection and give an argument for rejecting observation models of self-knowledge of phenomenal contents. These models fall prey to the homunculus illusion. (shrink)

Critical theories often express scepticism towards the idea that social critique should draw on general normative principles, seeing such principles as bound to dominant conceptual frameworks. However, even the models of immanent critique developed in the Frankfurt School tradition seem to privilege principles over particular moral experiences. Discussing the place that particular moral experience has in the models of Honneth, Ferrara and Adorno, the article argues that experience can play an important negative role even for a critical theory (...) that is committed to the necessity of conceptual mediation, as moral experiences can undermine our confidence in the appropriateness of our moral concepts. Building on McDowell’s account of moral perception and Brandom’s interpretation of Hegel’s theory of experience, one can reconstruct Adorno as providing a “radically negativist” approach to immanent critique that takes particular moral experience seriously. (shrink)

Few words in both everyday parlance and theoretical discourse have been as rhapsodically defended or as fervently resisted as "experience." Yet, to date, there have been no comprehensive studies of how the concept of experience has evolved over time and why so many thinkers in so many different traditions have been compelled to understand it. _Songs of Experience _is a remarkable history of Western ideas about the nature of human experience written by one of our best-known (...) intellectual historians. With its sweeping historical reach and lucid comparative analysis—qualities that have made Martin Jay's previous books so distinctive and so successful—_Songs of Experience _explores Western discourse from the sixteenth century to the present, asking why the concept of experience has been such a magnet for controversy. Resisting any single overarching narrative, Jay discovers themes and patterns that transcend individuals and particular schools of thought and illuminate the entire spectrum of intellectual history. As he explores the manifold contexts for understanding experience—epistemological, religious, aesthetic, political, and historical—Jay engages an exceptionally broad range of European and American traditions and thinkers from the American pragmatists and British Marxist humanists to the Frankfurt School and the French poststructuralists, and he delves into the thought of individual philosophers as well, including Montaigne, Bacon, Locke, Hume and Kant, Oakeshott, Collingwood, and Ankersmit. Provocative, engaging, erudite, this key work will be an essential source for anyone who joins the ongoing debate about the material, linguistic, cultural, and theoretical meaning of "experience" in modern cultures. (shrink)

According to phenomenal particularism, external particulars are sometimes part of the phenomenal character of experience. Mehta criticizes this view, and French and Gomes :451–460, 2016) have attempted to show that phenomenal particularists have the resources to respond to Mehta’s criticisms. We argue that French and Gomes have failed to appreciate the force of Mehta’s original arguments. When properly interpreted, Mehta’s arguments provide a strong case in favor of phenomenal generalism, the view that external particulars are never part of phenomenal (...) character. (shrink)

In a well-cited book chapter, ecologist Jared Diamond characterizes three main types of experiment performed in community ecology: laboratory experiment, field experiment, and natural experiment. Diamond argues that each form of experiment has strengths and weaknesses, with respect to, for example, realism or the ability to follow a causal trajectory. But does Diamond’s typology exhaust the available kinds of cause-finding practices? Some social scientists have characterized something they call “causal process tracing.” Is this a fourth type of experiment or something (...) else? I examine Diamond’s typology and causal process tracing in the context of a case study concerning the dynamics of wolf and deer populations on the Kaibab Plateau in the 1920s, a case that has been used as a canonical example of a trophic cascade by ecologists but which has also been subject to controversy. I argue that ecologists have profitably deployed causal process tracing together with other types of experiment to help settle questions of causality in this case. It remains to be seen how widespread the use of causal process tracing outside of the social sciences is (or could be), but there are some potentially promising applications, particularly with respect to questions about specific causal sequences. (shrink)

This paper articulates dignity as relational engagement in concrete care situations. Dignity is often understood as an abstract principle that represents inherent worth of all human beings. In actual care practices, this principle has to be substantiated in order to gain meaning and inform care activities. We describe three exemplary substantiations of the principle of dignity in care: as a state or characteristic of a situation; as a way to differentiate between socio-cultural positions; or as personal meaning. We continue our (...) analysis by presenting cases on dignity in care related to us in focus groups with medical professionals. Our empirical ethical lens is in this paper is to analyse, not the meaning of dignity, but the way in which it emerges in practices where it is pursued, within relationships between people, technologies, places, regulations, and the values cherished by or embedded in them. We show that professional caregivers recognize in the dignity of the person they care for their own dignity; giving up on the one implies no less than giving up on the other. This ‘mirrored experience’ of dignity expresses itself in professional’s engagement with the situation. The value of this engagement, we argue, lies not primarily in realizing the particular content of the values at stake. We point to the importance of engagement itself, even if the values engaged with cannot be realized to the full, and even if competing versions of dignity are at stake simultaneously. In this way the caregivers provide us with interesting examples of moral actorship in situations of conflicting values. (shrink)

This paper introduces cosmopsychism as a holistic alternative to atomistic panpsychism, and as a general perspective on the metaphysics of consciousness. I begin with some necessary background details concerning contemporary panpsychism and the problems it faces, and then proceed to the theory itself. The starting point of the theory is the assumption that an all pervading cosmic consciousness is the single ontological ultimate. From this assumption, a panpsychist ontology of mind with distinct holistic overtones is developed. In particular, I argue (...) that such universal consciousness serves as the ground for the emergence of individual conscious creatures. The result is a theory with significant conceptual resources which presents novel means for confronting some of the most recalcitrant problems facing contemporary panpsychism: in particular, the subject combination problem, and the problem of entailment associated with it. In so doing, cosmopsychism places itself as an viable alternative to atomi... (shrink)

In this essay I offer a partial rehabilitation of Cohen’s Kant interpretation. In particular, I will focus on the center of Cohen’s interpretation in KTE, reflected in the title itself: his interpretation of Kant’s concept of experience. “Kant hat einen neuen Begriff der Erfahrung entdeckt,”7 Cohen writes at the opening of the first edition of KTE (henceforth, KTE1), and while the exact nature of that new concept of experience is hard to pin down in the 1871 edition, he (...) states it succinctly in the second edition (henceforth KTE2): experience is Newtonian mathematical natural science.8 While this equation of experience with mathematical natural science has few contemporary defenders, I believe it is substantially correct, with one important qualification. Kant uses the term Erfahrung in a number of different senses in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (henceforth, KrV). I will argue that a central, and neglected, sense of that key technical term aligns with Cohen’s reading; what Kant sometimes refers to as ‘universal experience’ (sometimes, simply ‘experience’) is, in broad outlines, correctly interpreted by Cohen as mathematical natural science. (shrink)

This chapter analyzes aspects of the relationship between consciousness and intentionality. It focuses on the phenomenal character and the intentional content of perceptual states, canvassing various possible relations among them. It argues that there is a good case for a sort of representationalism, although this may not take the form that its advocates often suggest. By mapping out some of the landscape, the chapter tries to open up territory for different and promising forms of representationalism to be explored in the (...) future. In particular, it argues for a nonreductive, narrow, and Fregean variety of representationalism, which contrasts strongly with more widely explored varieties. It concludes with some words about the fundamental relationship between consciousness and intentionality. (shrink)

I argue that any account of perceptual experience should satisfy the following two desiderata. First, it should account for the particularity of perceptual experience, that is, it should account for the mind-independent object of an experience making a difference to individuating the experience. Second, it should explain the possibility that perceptual relations to distinct environments could yield subjectively indistinguishable experiences. Relational views of perceptual experience can easily satisfy the first but not the second desideratum. (...) Representational views can easily satisfy the second but not the first desideratum. I argue that to satisfy both desiderata perceptual experience is best conceived of as fundamentally both relational and representational. I develop a view of perceptual experience that synthesizes the virtues of relationalism and representationalism, by arguing that perceptual content is constituted by potentially gappy de re modes of presentation. (shrink)

Husserl and the Logic of Experience includes both detailed work on particular aspects of logical theory (such as an inquiry into the status of the principle of excluded middle) and also detailed investigations into the nature of the logic of temporal conceptions. Demonstrating the cultural import of Husserl's work while also showing its continuing significance for logical theory, this collection is a milestone in the study of transcendental phenomenology.

This paper focuses on the notion of experience, whose conceptual analysis seems to be often neglected or at least not sufficiently made explicit in the current discourse on Everyday Aesthetics. In our investigation this notion will be tackled, in particular, through the lens of such concepts as Erlebnis, Erfahrung, and Lebenswel t, which are drawn from the continental philosophical tradition. Purpose of the paper is to present a provisional framework aimed at clarifying that a more accurate conceptualization of (...) class='Hi'>experience allows for a better contemporary reflection on the aesthetics of everyday life. (shrink)

Some have claimed that people with very different beliefs literally see the world differently. Thus Thomas Kuhn: ‘what a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual—conceptual experience has taught him to see’ (Kuhn 1970, p. ll3). This view — call it ‘Perceptual Relativism’ — entails that a scientist and a child may look at a cathode ray tube and, in a sense, the first will see it while the second won’t. (...) The claim is not, of course, that the child’s experience is ‘empty’; but that, unlike the scientist, it does not see the tube as a cathode ray tube. One way of supporting this claim is to say that one cannot see something as an F unless one has the concept F. Since the child plainly lacks the concept of a cathode ray tube, it cannot see it as a cathode ray tube. Although Perceptual Relativism is hard to believe, this supporting suggestion is not so implausible. After all, when we see (and more generally, perceive) the world, the world is presented to us in a particular way; so how can we see it as being that way unless we have some idea or conception of the way it is presented? We need not be committed to a representative theory of perception to think that perceptions in some sense represent the world. We can express this by saying that perceptions have content. Now it is a commonplace that the contents of beliefs and the other propositional attitudes involve concepts. The belief that this thing is a cathode ray tube involves, in some sense, the concept cathode ray tube. So the line of thought behind Perceptual Relativism may be expressed thus: seeing an F as an F is a state with content. (shrink)

This paper argues that the accuracy of perceptual experiences cannot be properly characterized by using the particular notion of content without breaking one of the three plausible assumptions. On the other hand, the general notion of content is not threatened by this problem. The first assumption is that all elements of content determine the accuracy conditions of an experience. The second states that objects needed for the accuracy of experiences are physical entities that stand in a perceptual relation to (...) a subject. According to the third assumption, common experiences do not have accuracy conditions that are impossible to satisfy. The above point is demonstrated by analysing illusions of identity in which the number of objects is represented incorrectly. In the concluding parts of the paper, I investigate how an alternative account of particular content can be developed by rejecting the first assumption. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the notion of experience, whose conceptual analysis seems to be often neglected or at least not sufficiently made explicit in the current discourse on Everyday Aesthetics. In our investigation this notion will be tackled, in particular, through the lens of such concepts as _Erlebnis, Erfahrung_, and _Lebenswel_t, which are drawn from the continental philosophical tradition. Purpose of the paper is to present a provisional framework aimed at clarifying that a more accurate conceptualization of experience (...) allows for a better contemporary reflection on the aesthetics of everyday life. (shrink)

This essay explores the idea of experience and its epistemological and practical role in maintaining the health of a household among early modern English Royalists. A number of prominent royalists during the mid-seventeenth century British Civil Wars expended quite some effort in the collection of medical recipes, including Queen Henrietta Maria herself, as well as William and Margaret Cavendish, and the Talbot sisters—Elizabeth Grey and Alethea Howard. This essay looks at these Royalists and four of their collections: three published (...) (Henrietta Maria, Grey, Howard), and one manuscript (the Caven­dishes), in order to determine how they conceptualized experience and its role in medical practice. The claim that such recipe collections represent a new, anti-Aristotelian idea of experience as a specific, particular event is disputed through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of these collections. Instead, it is argued that there a number of related conceptions of experience found in these Royalist recipe collections, but the basic idea is one where experience indicates long experience or expertise, an idea that can traced back at least to humanist medicine of the Renaissance, and likely back to Galen. (shrink)

Matthew H. Bowker offers a novel analysis of "experience": the vast and influential concept that has shaped Western social theory and political practice for the past half-millennium. While it is difficult to find a branch of modern thought, science, industry, or art that has not relied in some way on the notion of "experience" in defining its assumptions or aims, no study has yet applied a politically-conscious and psychologically-sensitive critique to the construct of experience. Doing so reveals (...) that most of the qualities that have been attributed to experience over the centuries — particularly its unthinkability, its correspondence with suffering, and its occlusion of the self — are part of unlikely fantasies or ideologies. By analyzing a series of related cases, including the experiential education movement, the ascendency of trauma theory, the philosophy of the social contract, and the psychological study of social isolation, the book builds a convincing case that ideologies of experience are invoked not to keep us close to lived realities and ‘things-in-themselves,’ but, rather, to distort and destroy true knowledge of ourselves and others. In spite of enduring admiration for those who may be called champions of experience, such as Michel de Montaigne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others treated throughout the work, the ideologies of experience ultimately discourage individuals and groups from creating, resisting, and changing our experience, urging us instead to embrace trauma, failure, deprivation, and self-abandonment. (shrink)

In this major reinterpretation, Howard Caygill argues that all of Benjamin's work is characterized by its focus on a concept of experience derived from Kant but applied by Benjamin to objects as diverse as urban experience, visual art, literature and philosophy. The book analyzes the development of Benjamin's concept of experience in his early writings showing that it emerges from an engagement with visual experience, and in particular the experience of colour. By representing Benjamin as (...) primarily a thinker of the visual field, Caygill is able to bring forward previously neglected texts on inscription and the visual field and to cast many of his more familiar texts, for instance the Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction in a new light. (shrink)

As most of its readers are aware, the Critique of Pure Reason is primarily concerned not with empirical, but with a priori knowledge. For the most part, the Kant of the first Critique tends to assume that experience, and the knowledge that is based on it, is unproblematic. The problem with which he is concerned is that of how we can be capable of substantive knowledge independently of experience. At the same time, however, the notion of experience (...) plays a crucial role in the central arguments of the Critique. For, again as most readers of the Critique know, Kant aims to show how we can have synthetic a priori knowledge by showing that the categories, or pure concepts of the understanding, are conditions of the possibility of experience. This means that, whether or not Kant is concerned with the notion of experience for its own sake, his account of a priori knowledge carries with it at least some commitments regarding the character of experience. If the account of a priori knowledge is to be successful, then experience has to be the kind of thing for which the categories can, in principle, serve as conditions of possibility. More specifically, experience must involve not only the senses, but also thought or understanding, for otherwise the claim that it presupposes a certain specific set of concepts is simply unintelligible. And indeed at least some parts of the Critique, in particular the so-called subjective deduction in the first edition, and the briefer passages which correspond to it in the second edition, seem to be intended to show how this requirement is met. That is, they are concerned not so much with showing that experience is governed by the categories, as with elaborating a view of experience as involving conceptual activity überhaupt. (shrink)

In this tribute to Steven T. Katz on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, Michael Zank and Ingrid Anderson present sixteen original essays written by senior and junior scholars in comparative religion, philosophy of religion, modern Judaism, and theology after the Holocaust, fields of inquiry where Steven Katz made major contributions over the course of his distinguished scholarly career. The authors of this volume, specialists in Jewish history, especially the modern experience, and Jewish thought from the Bible to Buber, (...) offer theoretical and practical observations on the value of the particular. Contributions range from Tim Knepper's reevaluation of the ineffability discourse to the particulars of the Settlement Cookbook, examined by Nora Rubel as an American classic. (shrink)

Unlike those with type 1 blindsight, people who have type 2 blindsight have some sort of consciousness of the stimuli in their blind field. What is the nature of that consciousness? Is it visual experience? I address these questions by considering whether we can establish the existence of any structural—necessary—features of visual experience. I argue that it is very difficult to establish the existence of any such features. In particular, I investigate whether it is possible to visually, or (...) more generally perceptually, experience form or movement at a distance from our body, without experiencing colour. The traditional answer, advocated by Aristotle, and some other philosophers, up to and including the present day, is that it is not and hence colour is a structural feature of visual experience. I argue that there is no good reason to think that this is impossible, and provide evidence from four cases—sensory substitution, achomatopsia, phantom contours and amodal completion—in favour of the idea that it is possible. If it is possible then one important reason for rejecting the idea that people with type 2 blindsight do not have visual experiences is undermined. I suggest further experiments that could be done to help settle the matter. (shrink)

In the first part of the paper I try to explain why the disjunctive theory of perception can seem so counterintuitive by focusing on two of the standard arguments against the view-the argument from subjective indiscriminability and the causal argument. I suggest that by focusing on these arguments, and in particular the intuitions that lie behind them, we gain a clearer view of what the disjunctive theory is committed to and why. In light of this understanding, I then present an (...) argument for the disjunctive theory based on the claim that the content of experience is particular and not general. (shrink)

Consider two deeply appealing thoughts: first, that we experience external particulars, and second, that what it’s like to have an experience – the phenomenal character of an experience – is somehow independent of external particulars. The first thought is readily captured by phenomenal particularism, the view that external particulars are sometimes part of the phenomenal character of experience. The second thought is readily captured by phenomenal generalism, the view that external particulars are never part of phenomenal (...) character. -/- Here I show that a novel version of phenomenal generalism can capture both thoughts in a satisfying fashion. Along the way, I reveal severe problems facing phenomenal particularism and also shed light on the mental kinds under which experiences fall. (shrink)

The perennial question of the nature of natural-language understanding has received renewed attention in recent years. Two kinds of natural-language understanding, in particular, have captivated the interest of philosophers: linguistic understanding and utterance understanding. While the literature is rife with discussions of linguistic understanding and utterance understanding, the question of how the two types of understanding explanatorily depend on each other has received relatively scant attention. Exceptions include the linguistic ability/know-how views of linguistic understanding proposed by Dean Pettit and Brendan (...) Balcerak Jackson. On these views, to tacitly linguistically understand a sentence just is to possess the linguistic ability/knowledge-how needed to derive/infer what is said by different utterances of the sentence. Despite their focus on linguistic understanding, both views can straightforwardly explain utterance understanding as the output of a derivation/inference from a representation of the sentence uttered. Here, I take issue with these approaches to utterance understanding and then develop an alternative. More specifically, I distinguish two kinds of utterance understanding, experiential and doxastic, and then argue that experiences of what is said by utterances play distinct rational roles in the two kinds of utterance understanding. I conclude by addressing a recent challenge to my proposal. (shrink)

Jasna Russo argues powerfully for survivor-controlled narrative research as a counterpoint to ‘conventional narrative research,’ in which a clear dichotomy obtains between the researcher who interprets and the participant whose narrative is interpreted. Russo calls us to an ethic of engagement and a focus on dialogic relationships within the research process as a way to disrupt the potential for ‘epistemic violence’ in conventional narrative research, and toward the development of a survivor owned ‘model of madness.’ Herein I extend the discussion (...) of intersectionality that Russo opened. In particular, I ask: What theoretical resources and scholarship can we draw upon to support the kind of critical... (shrink)

This article answers the question raised by the special issue of this journal in a positive way: managerial practices do need philosophy. In particular, it argues for a more concrete claim: managerial practices have needed philosophy in the past to develop some important intellectual tools, and today they still need to be open to the continuous conceptual and methodological innovations introduced by competing philosophical research programmes, because loyalty to just one favourite philosophical paradigm can hinder the ability of managerial practices (...) to express their full potential, whereas openness to philosophical innovation can help managers keep their conceptual tools up to their tasks. The authors argue for this thesis in concreto: they discuss a specific branch of managerial practice—marketing—and illustrate that a preeminent form thereof, i.e. Experiential Marketing, has needed philosophy, and still needs it nowadays, in order to achieve its goals and overcome certain problems. They also point out that Experiential Marketing needs to renew and integrate some of its philosophical assumptions and conceptual tools in the light of innovations brought about by a recent philosophical turn. In particular, the authors argue that philosophy has provided essential conceptual tools for the articulation of the notions of experience and authenticity used in Experiential Marketing; they claim that the excessive reliance of Experiential Marketing upon a problematic and somewhat outdated ontology produces paradoxes with important repercussions upon managerial practice; and they show that those problems can be overcome by integrating and partially renewing its assumptions and conceptual tools, in the light of a fresher philosophical framework. Shortcomings and solutions are discussed with reference to a specific case study: Venice as an experientially rewarding and authentic tourist destination during the Covid19 crisis, but also as a World Heritage property whose management entails difficult choices. The fruitfulness of the paradigm revision is shown also by integrating the conceptual toolkit of Experiential Marketing with three relatively new notions, deriving from a new realist framework: independence, attrition and perception. (shrink)

Diachronic perceptual atomism is the view that the contents of experience do not involve temporal relations between non-simultaneous events, such as motion, succession, or duration, but only 'snapshots' of the world. Traditionally, atomism has not been a very popular view. Indeed, many philosophers think that it is obviously false and that the main debate about time consciousness takes place between models which reject atomistic commitments. This antiatomistic sentiment can be traced back to William James's slogan that 'a succession of (...) feelings, in and of itself, is not a feeling of succession'. In this paper I argue, first, that the arguments typically launched against atomism in the spirit of James's slogan fail; and second, that the viability of atomism depends on what the conditions for a mental event's being an experience are. In particular, I argue that if a mental event is an experience only if it fulfils certain downstream conditions, which concern the role of the event in the subject's cognitive life, then atomism fails. Otherwise, it is in fact a viable and in many ways attractive view. It follows from my discussion that, contrary to popular belief, atomism is by no means obviously false. Rather, its viability depends on one's further views about the relationship between experience and cognition. (shrink)

Philosophers of perception often claim that usual perceptual experiences not only present particulars but also phenomenally present them as particulars. Nevertheless, despite the initial plausibility of this thesis, it is not clear what exactly it means to say that particularity is phenomenally presented. The paper aims to provide a deeper analysis of the claim that perceptual experiences phenomenally present objects as particulars. In doing so, I distinguish two theses regarding phenomenally presented particularity: Generic Particularity and Specific (...) class='Hi'>Particularity. According to the first thesis, vision phenomenally presents particularity of objects, understood as a general characteristic that may be shared by many entities. The second thesis states that vision phenomenally presents particularity of objects, understood as an individual characteristic unique to each particular. I argue that, relying on knowledge concerning the functioning of perceptual mechanisms, vision does not phenomenally present generic particularity but it has certain abilities for presenting specific particularity. (shrink)

According to Schellenberg, our perceptual experiences have the epistemic force they do because they are exercises of certain sorts of capacity, namely capacities to discriminate particulars—objects, property-instances and events—in a sensory mode. She calls her account the “capacity view.” In this paper, I will raise three concerns about Schellenberg’s capacity view. The first is whether we might do better to leave capacities out of our epistemology and take content properties as the fundamental epistemically relevant features of experiences. I argue we (...) would. The second is whether Schellenberg’s appeal to factive and phenomenal evidence accommodates the intuitive verdicts about the bad case that she claims it does. I argue it does not. The third is whether Schellenberg’s account of factive evidence is adequate to capture nuances concerning the justification for singular but nondemonstrative perceptual beliefs, such as the belief that’s NN, where NN is a proper name. I argue it is not. If I am right, these points suggest a mental-state-first account of perceptual justification, rather than a capacity-first account, and one which treats the good and bad cases alike in respect of justification and complicates the relation between perceptual content and what one is justified in believing. (shrink)

The intentionalist about consciousness holds that the qualitative character of experience, “what it’s like,” is determined by the contents of a select group of special intentional states of the subject. Fred Dretske (1995), Mike Thau (2002), Michael Tye (1995) and many others have embraced intentionalism, but these philosophers have not generally appreciated that, since we are intimately familiar with the qualitative character of experience, we thereby have special access to the nature of these contents. In this paper, we (...) take advantage of this fact to show that intentionalism is incompatible with the idea that these contents are singular or general propositions, and thus that intentionalism is incompatible with one dominant trend in thinking about contents in general. In particular, there appear to be insoluble difficulties in explaining how the phenomenology of place and time can be explained by any intentionalist theory appealing to singular or general propositions. (shrink)

Sensationism, a philosophy that gained momentum in the French Enlightenment as a response to Lockean empiricism, was acclaimed by Hippolyte Taine as "the doctrine of the most lucid, methodical, and French minds to have honored France." The first major general study in English of eighteenth-century French sensationism, _The Authority of Experience_ presents the history of a complex set of ideas and explores their important ramifications for literature, education, and moral theory. The study begins by presenting the main ideas of sensationist (...) philosophers Condillac, Bonnet, and Helvétius, who held that all of our ideas come to us through the senses. The experience of the body in seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching enabled individuals, as John C. O'Neal points out, to challenge the sometimes arbitrary authority of institutions and people in positions of power. After a general introduction to sensationism, the author develops a theory of sensationist aesthetics that not only reveals the interconnections of the period's philosophy and literature but also enhances our awareness of the forces at work in the French novel. He goes on to examine the relations between sensationism and eighteenth-century French educational theory, materialism, and _idéologie_. Ultimately, O'Neal opens a discussion of the implications of sensationist thought for issues of particular concern to society today. (shrink)

The work of Anthony J. Steinbock on emotions―particularly moral emotions―and on religious experience is closely related to a methodological claim. This claim is that the concepts of “experience” and “manifestation” should be understood in a broader manner than that of classical phenomenology, particularly Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. In this paper, I examine the way in which Steinbock understands and conceptualizes the kind of givenness to which he refers with the notion of “vertical experience”. I focus on his claim (...) that vertical experiences are irreducible to the kind of experiences that can be described in terms of what he calls “provocation”, “presentation” and the “noesis-noema structure”. Even though I make a criticism of his assertion that the latter implies that they should not be understood as forms of givenness founded on the above-mentioned structure, I agree with some major implications that he draws from them. In the last part of the paper, I discuss his suggestion that the Husserlian conceptualization of emotional givenness should be revised to set forward their structure in terms of what he calls “evocation” and try to give additional reasons, drawn from Husserl himself, to support this claim. The paper comes concludes by stressing the relevance of Steinbock’s analyses concerning what he calls “idolatry”. I argue that his analyses of attitudes that negate the vertical dimension of experience have far reaching implications that go beyond the field of philosophy of religion and open new, promising paths for phenomenological research on social and moral problems. (shrink)

Locke endorses a distinction between passive reflection and voluntary attentive reflection, which he occasionally labels contemplation. Failure to recognize this distinction properly has had an effect on interpretations of Locke’s theory of reflection, and caused puzzlement about the relation between reflection and consciousness. In particular, the function of reflection as a passive internal sense that produces simple ideas of mental operations has been downplayed in favour of the view that reflection in one manner or another involves attention and/or presupposes consciousness (...) of mental operations. This has led a number of scholars to maintain, implicitly or explicitly, that Locke in fact abandons either his doctrine of sensation and reflection as the two exclusive sources of ideas or his doctrine of ideas as the only immediate objects of experience. -/- With the help of a distinction between reflection as a source of ideas and reflection as an operation about ideas I aim to show how Locke can hold to his empiricist maxim about the two sources of ideas and also endorse ideas as the only immediate objects of experience. A proper understanding of Locke’s theory of reflection requires that reflection and consciousness be delineated with respect to one another. I will show how Locke’s notion of consciousness differs from both types of reflection. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Exploring "The Vital Depths of Experience":A Reader's Response to HenningJim Garrisonbethany henning's dewey and the aesthetic unconscious is a much-needed and marvelous book. It explores the pragmatic unconscious as it reveals itself in the qualitative unity of artistic expression integrated with aesthetic appreciation and response. By illuminating the role of often unconscious impulses, feelings, desires, memories, imaginaries, habits, meanings, and more, that goes into creating or appreciating a (...) work of art, she exposes the role of the unconscious in our daily lives. In this regard, she may wish to look at Hans Joas's theory of creative action. Relying largely on Dewey, Joas argues that we should regard "creativity as an analytical dimension of all human action" (Joas 116). We transform the world in even our most mundane actions and in doing so, we may draw on the depths of our unconscious.Henning writes with sincerity, clarity, and force. Recognizing that ultimately she is striving to articulate something that is often ineffable, she is not afraid of vagueness, the indeterminate, or the incomplete, and is content to live with mysteries. Henning shows unusual vulnerability in exposing some of her own aesthetic unconscious and the ways culture has inscribed itself upon her, when she responds to art works. She does so without assuming she has plumbed the vital depths of herself much less the artists and art works she explores.I found Henning's responses to be an invitation to explore my own aesthetic unconscious, and I believe others will as well. Her book is subtitled The Vital Depths of Experience. I will strive to demonstrate that depth by summoning the courage to share some of my own aesthetic responses to her textual creation. My goal is to express some of the power in a text that dares to explore the pragmatic unconscious.In writing book reviews, I often rely on Louise Rosenblatt's reader response theory. On this occasion, Rosenblatt is especially apropos since her [End Page 90] work exemplifies the kind of transactionalism that integrates the artistic artifact with those who do the work of art in experiencing it. This emphasis becomes especially obvious in Henning's chapter 5, where she defends Dewey's qualitative "unity thesis" against such critics as Richard Shusterman, John Lysaker, and Noël Carroll. My response concentrates on this remarkable chapter.Carroll argues that works like John Cage's 4'33" and the paintings of Mark Rothko lack qualitative unity that unfolds temporally because they fail to provide closure. Henning replies that "Carroll has forgotten that the art product does not need to have any particular duration for the art work to unfold temporally" (128). As Dewey states it, "[t]he work of art is complete only as it works in the experience of others than the one who created it" (LW 10:111). Those experiencing an artistic product collaborate with the initial creator to complete the meaning. Henning goes on to say that "the encounter between perceiver and product culminate in a transaction: a dynamic exchange between the organism and environment" (128). The idea is correct, but for Dewey and Bentley, however, "exchange between" suggests interaction not transaction; a mutual or reciprocal transaction or an integration would be better descriptions.Although specifically concerned with literary works of art and the experience of reading, Rosenblatt helps illuminate any aesthetic event. In her "The Poem as Event," Rosenblatt remarks:A poem, then, must be thought of as an event in time. It is not an object or an ideal entity. It is an occurrence, a coming-together, a compenetration, of a reader and a text. The reader brings to the text his past experience; the encounter gives rise to a new experience, a poem.(126)Compenetration is a nice synonym for transaction. Rosenblatt's book on transactional reading is titled The Reader, the Text, the Poem. There, she defines "poem" as "the whole category of aesthetic transactions between readers and texts without implying the greater or less 'poeticity' of any specific genre" (12). It is an event of conjoint meaning-making where meaning is felt and acted upon as well as cognized. Dewey himself states: "A new poem is... (shrink)

This paper examines the contents of perceptual experience, and focuses in particular on the relation between the representational aspects of an experience and its phenomenal character. It is argued that the Critical Realist two-component analysis of experience, advocated by Wilfrid Sellars, is preferable to the Intentionalist view. Experiences have different kinds of representational contents: both informational and intentional. An understanding of the essential navigational role of perception provides a principled way of explaining the nature of such representational (...) contents. Experiences also have a distinct phenomenal content, or character, which is not determined by representational content. (shrink)

A standing challenge for the science of mind is to account for the datum that every mind faces in the most immediate – that is, unmediated – fashion: its phenomenal experience. The complementary tasks of explaining what it means for a system to give rise to experience and what constitutes the content of experience (qualia) in computational terms are particularly challenging, given the multiple realizability of computation. In this paper, we identify a set of conditions that a (...) computational theory must satisfy for it to constitute not just a sufficient but a necessary, and therefore naturalistic and intrinsic, explanation of qualia. We show that a common assumption behind many neurocomputational theories of the mind, according to which mind states can be formalized solely in terms of instantaneous vectors of activities of representational units such as neurons, does not meet the requisite conditions, in part because it relies on inactive units to shape presently experienced qualia and implies a homogeneous representation space, which is devoid of intrinsic structure. We then sketch a naturalistic computational theory of qualia, which posits that experience is realized by dynamical activity-space trajectories (rather than points) and that its richness is measured by the representational capacity of the trajectory space in which it unfolds. (shrink)

§1 The Disjunctive Conception of Experience Descartes was surely right that while normal waking experience, dreams and hallucinations are characteristically distinguished at a purely phenomenological level, — by contrasts of spatial perspective, coherence, clarity of image, etc., — it is not essential that they be so.1 What is it like for someone who dreams that he is sitting, clothed in his dressing gown, in front of his fire can in principle be subjectively indistinguishable from what it is like (...) to perceive that one is doing so, fully conscious and awake. The same holds for multi-sense hallucination and, it is assumed, would hold of the experience of an envatted brain in the usual postulated scenario. This thought — that normal perceptual experience allows in principle of perfect phenomenological counterfeit — is, to the best of my knowledge, nowhere seriously challenged in John McDowell's writings.2 What he rejects is an idea that builds upon and would be potentially explanatory of it: the Lockean idea that, as far as the states enjoyed by the experiencing subject are concerned, there is actually no generic distinction between dream, hallucination, and wakeful perception: — that one and the same type of state of consciousness is involved in all three cases, and that which (if any) of the three a particular occurrence of the type falls under is a matter of how it is caused. On this model, the distinction between Descartes' notional fully lucid dream and the corresponding raft of perceptions of his dressing-gowned, sedentary state is like that between a certain kind of sunburn and nettle rash. For Disjunctivism, however, the Lockean — as McDowell likes to say, “Highest Common Factor” — conception of perceptual experience and its potential counterfeits is a conceptual error. There is no single type of state of consciousness present in each of dreaming, perceiving and hallucinating, whose instances fall under one or other of those characterisations purely by virtue of their aetiology.. (shrink)

My aim is to provide an analysis of cognitive experience from the point of view of philosophy of mind, by identifying and describing different components or features present in it. But different things are called ‘experience’ and some are more complex than other. I will first examine different uses of the word ‘experience’ to clear the way and to avoid cases of circularity. Then I try to restrict the investigation and introduce the mode and content of (...) class='Hi'>experience, and take BonJour’s suggestion of what cognitive experience is as a starting point. In my view, the two main features of experience are Horizontal Intentionality and Vertical Intentionality. The first is the most striking and fundamental; it constitutes the continuity of experience. Vertical Intentionality selects objects of experience, so that our experience is always experience of something. In Perception, something is identified and recognized by the application of concepts. Attention is required, especially when we get involved in complicated operations or manipulations. Finally, the last feature is constituted by a huge set of dispositions, particularly abilities to keep track our thoughts and former experiences. Cognitive Experience in the full sense is the result of the interaction and mutual support of these features. (shrink)

The view I've been defending in the theory of justification I have termed ‘propositionalism’. It counsels beginning inquiry into the nature of justification by adopting a particular form of evidentialism, according to which the first task is to describe the abstract relation of evidencing that holds between propositional contents. Such an approach has a variety of implications for the theory of justification itself, and many of the motivations for the view are of a standard internalist variety. Some of these motivations (...) will be described in due course, but there is also a further motivation to mention here as well. Such a theory, beyond enabling a theory to satisfy typical internalist strictures, also allows a strong relationship between the theory of justification and more standard confirmation theory where claims are confirmed and disconfirmed by information gleaned from experiments and other sources. It is a natural and pleasing result if confirmation theory can be embedded within the theory of justification developed in the context of more traditional epistemology. (shrink)

The phenomenal properties of conscious mental states happen to be exclusively accessible from the first-person perspective. Consequently, some philosophers consider their existence to be incompatible with materialist metaphysics. In this paper I criticise one particular argument that is based on the idea that for something to be real it must (at least in principle) be accessible from an intersubjective perspective. I argue that the exclusively subjective access to phenomenal contents can be explained by the very particular nature of the epistemological (...) relation holding between a subject and his own mental states. Accordingly, this subjectivity does not compel us to deny the possibility that phenomenal contents are ontologically objective properties. First, I present the general form of the argument that I will discuss. Second, I show that this argument makes use of a criterion of reality that is not applicable to the case of subjective experience. Third, I discuss a plausible objection and give an argument for rejecting observation models of self-knowledge of phenomenal contents. These models fall prey to the homunculus illusion. (shrink)

This paper develops the account of our experience and knowledge of time put forward by Russell in his Theory of Knowledge manuscript. While Russell ultimately abandons the project after it receives severe criticism from Wittgenstein (though several chapters derived from it appear as articles in The Monist), in producing this manuscript time, and particularly the notion of the present time, play a central role in Russell’s account of experience. In the present discussion, I propose to focus largely on (...) Russell’s writing in 1912–3, comparing this with some of the remarks made about memory by Moore in 1910–11. My motivation is twofold. First as a matter of scholarship, to reveal an original interpretation of Russell’s notion of immediate memory and of his view of our experience and knowledge of time over this period. Second as a matter of philosophical curiosity. There has been an increase in interest in temporal experience in contemporary discussions of the philosophy of mind, from memory and the imagination to the temporal aspects of perceptual experience. Russell’s writing in 1912–3 provides us with a philosophically interesting account of temporal experience which has points of contact with contemporary debates. (shrink)

Background In June 2016, Canada legalized medical assistance in dying (MAiD). From the outset, some healthcare institutions (including faith-based and non-faith-based hospitals, hospices, and residential aged care facilities) have refused to allow aspects of MAiD onsite, resulting in patient transfers for MAiD assessments and provision. There have been media reports highlighting the negative consequences of these “institutional objections”, however, very little research has examined their nature and impact. Methods This study reports on findings from 48 semi-structured qualitative interviews conducted with (...) MAiD assessors and providers, MAiD team members (working to coordinate care and lead MAiD programs in institutions and health authorities), and family caregivers on their experiences with institutional objection. Participants were recruited from the Canadian provinces of British Columbia, Ontario, and Nova Scotia. Data were analyzed using inductive thematic analysis. Results Themes identified were: (1) basis for institutional objection (with objections commonly rooted in religious values and a particular philosophy of palliative care); (2) scope of objection (demonstrating a wide range of practices objected to); (3) lack of transparency regarding institutional position; (4) impacts on patients; (5) impacts on health practitioners; and (6) catalysts for change. Participants reported that many institutions’ objections had softened over time, lessening barriers to MAiD access and adverse impacts on patients and health practitioners. Participants attributed this positive change to a range of catalysts including advocacy by health practitioners and family members, policymaking by local health authorities, education, and relationship building. Nevertheless, some institutions, particularly faith-based ones, retained strong objections to MAiD, resulting in forced transfers and negative emotional and psychological impacts on patients, family members, and health practitioners. Conclusions This paper adds to the limited evidence base about the impacts of institutional objection and can inform practical and regulatory solutions in Canada and abroad. Reform is needed to minimize the negative impacts on patients, their caregivers, and health practitioners involved in MAiD practice. (shrink)