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Abstract: Sense-data, if they exist, could conceivably provide foundations for empirical knowledge. Those who are opposed to empirical foundationalism are therefore also prone to reject sense-data and arguments for their existence, e.g., Rorty, Bonjour; while foundationalists are prone to accept the existence of sense-data, e.g., Russell, Ayer, Broad, Price, Lewis. An exception to this is the position of Roderick Chisholm who accepts empirical foundationalism but rejects the existence of sense-data
Abstract: The construction and analysis of arguments supposedly are a philosopher's main business, the demonstration of truth or refutation of falsehood his principal aim. In Sense and Sensibilia, J.L. Austin does something entirely different: He discusses the sense-datum doctrine of perception, with the aim not of refuting it but of 'dissolving' the 'philosophical worry' it induces in its champions. To this end, he 'exposes' their 'concealed motives', without addressing their stated reasons. The paper explains where and why this at first sight outrageous aim and approach are perfectly sensible, how exactly Austin proceeds, and how his approach can be taken further. This shows Austin to be a pioneer of the currently much discussed notion of philosophy as therapy, reveals a subtle and unfamiliar use of linguistic analysis that is not open to the standard objections to ordinary language philosophy, and yields a novel and forceful treatment of the sense-datum doctrine
Abstract: The concept of appearance has had the historical misfortune of being associated with a Kantian or idealist program in metaphysics. Within this program, appearances are treated as "internal objects" that are immaterial and exert no causal powers over the physical world. However, there is a more mundane and innocuous notion of appearance, in which to say that x appears to y is just to say that y perceives x. In this more mundane sense of the term, an appearance is a perceived object ? qua perceived. In this paper, I try and develop an account of the metaphysic of appearances in this more mundane sense. The account is developed within the framework of Trope Theory. After defining the notion of a "phenomenal trope," I construe appearances as special bundles of phenomenal tropes. I then use this account to develop an approach to the thorny issue of appearance individuation
Abstract: This paper develops an adverbial theory of consciousness. Adverbialism is described and endorsed and defended from its near rival, an identity thesis in which conscious mental states are those that the mental subject self-knows immediately that he or she is "in". The paper develops an account of globally supported self-ascription to embed this neo-Brentanian view of experiencing consciously within a more general account of the relation between consciousness and self-knowledge. Following O'Shaughnessy, person level consciousness is explained as a feature of the bundle of mental capacities characteristic of persons: person level consciousness involves a capacity holism. Drawing on Kant, it is argued that if a person is in a mental state intentionally directed to an object then such a subject can "self token" such knowledge. The content of that self-knoweldge supervenes on the possession of a global set of capacities, and this capacity for self-ascription depends on the fact that our experience has a perspectival character with, as it were, nothing at the vanishing point of this perspective. The fact that one can attach the cogito to any one of one's representation shows a truth about the unity of the conscious life of a person that cannot be stated and this capacity is distinguished from self-conscious thinking about oneself. This approach is contrasted to Shoemaker's functionalist treatment of the self-tokening of conscious states and of "self-blindness". It is argued that to be fully consistent, Shoemaker has to abandon the claim that introspectionism is guilty of a self-scanning model or rational control as he seems committed to that model too
Abstract: Representationalists argue that phenomenal states are intentional states of a special kind. This paper offers an account of the kind of intentional state phenomenal states are: they are underived intentional states. This account of phenomenal states is equivalent to two theses: first, all possible phenomenal states are underived intentional states; second, all possible underived intentional states are phenomenal states. I clarify these claims and argue for each of them. I also address objections which touch on a range of topics, including meaning holism and concept empiricism. I conclude with a brief discussion of the consequences of the proposed view for the project of naturalizing consciousness.
Abstract: It is close to current orthodoxy that perceptual experience is to be characterized, at least in part, by its representational content, roughly, by the way it represents things as being in the world around the perceiver. Call this basic idea the content view (CV)
Abstract: Representationalists currently cannot explain counter-examples that involve _indeterminate _perceptual content, but a _double content_ (DC) view is more promising. Four related cases of perceptual imprecision are used to outline the DC view, which also applies to imprecise photographic content. Next, inadequacies in the more standard single content (SC) view are demonstrated. The results are then generalized so as to apply to the content of any kinds of non-conventional representation. The paper continues with evidence that a DC account provides a moderate rather than extreme realist account of perception, and it concludes with an initial analysis of the failure of nomic covariance accounts of information in indeterminacy cases
Abstract: 1. Introduction When it comes to perception, representationalism is all the rage. Representationalism is a claim about the phenomenal character of perceptual experiences: According to representationalism, phenomenal character is fully determined by the representational content of perceptual experiences (cf. Tye 2002, 45). In other words, phenomenal character, what it is like, for instance, to have an experience as of something red, is either supervenient upon or identical with that experience
Abstract: H. H. Price (1932) held that experience is essentially presentational. According to Price, when one has an experience of a tomato, nothing can be more certain than that there is something of which one is aware. Price claimed that the same applies to hallucination. In general, whenever one has a visual experience, there is something of which one is aware, according to Price. Call this thesis Item-Awareness
Abstract: Strong or Pure Intentionalism is the claim that the phenomenal character of any perceptual experience can be exhaustively characterized solely by reference to its Intentional content. Strong or Pure Anti -Intentionalism is the claim that the phenomenal character of any perceptual experience can be exhaustively characterized solely by reference to its non-Intentional properties
Abstract: Realism concerning a given domain of things is the view that the things in that domain exist, and are as they are, quite independently of anyone
Abstract: The naive realist takes a veridical visual experience to be an immediate relation to external entities. Is this how such an experience is phenomenally, by its phenomenal character? Only if there can be phenomenal error, since a hallucinatory experience phenomenally matching such a veridical experience would then be phenomenally but not in fact such a relation. Fortunately, such phenomenal error can be avoided: the phenomenal character of a visual experience involves immediate awareness of a sort of picture of external entities, as on a representative theory of perception. The attraction of naive realism results from an erroneous projection of the immediacy of the subject's awareness of this picture onto the external entities pictured
Abstract: Phenomenal Naivete is a sort of marriage of a pair of doctrines which have lately received extensive attention separately in the literature in philosophy of mind and epistemology: representationalism and attitude externalism, respectively. (Central discussions of these doctrines are Siewert 1998 and Williamson 2000.) Roughly and briefly: representationalism is the doctrine that phenomenal characters (various types of consciousness) are belief-like properties, in that they involve commitments to theses about how the world is—in particular, the environment of the subject, furnished with its tables and chairs. And attitude externalism is the doctrine that factive, or knowledge-like properties can be mental: while the instantiation of such a property may metaphysically necessitate some non-mental fact, it still marks out a purely mental natural kind
Abstract: My aim is to arrive at a better understanding of the distinction between direct realism and representationalism by offering a critical analysis of Steven Nadler
Abstract: Since the demise of the Sense-Datum independent objects or events to be objects Theory and Phenomenalism in the last cenof perception; however, unlike Direct Retury, Direct Realism in the philosophy of alists, Indirect Realists take this percepperception has enjoyed a resurgence of tion to be indirect by involving a prior popularity.1 Curiously, however, although awareness of some tertium quid between there have been attempts in the literature the mind and external objects or events.3 to refute some of the arguments against Idealists and Phenomenalists agree with Direct Realism, there has been, as of yet, the Indirect Realists
Abstract: McDowell has argued that external world scepticism is a pressing problem only in so far as we accept, on the basis of the argument from illusion, the claim that perceiving that p and hallucinating that p involve a highest common factor
Abstract: In his Dewey Lectures,1 Hilary Putnam argues that contemporary philosophy cannot solve nor see its way past the traditional problem of how language or thought hooks on to
Abstract: Paul Pietroski, McGill University The general topic of_ Mind and World_, the written version of John McDowell's 1991 John Locke Lectures, is how `concepts mediate the relation between minds and the world'. And one of the main aims is `to suggest that Kant should still have a central place in our discussion of the way thought bears on reality' (1).1 In particular, McDowell urges us to adopt a thesis that he finds in Kant, or perhaps in Strawson's Kant: the content of experience is conceptualized; _what_ we experience is always the kind of thing that we could also believe. When an agent has a veridical experience, she `takes in, for instance sees, _that things are thus and so_' (9). McDowell's argument for this thesis is indirect, but potentially powerful. He discusses a tension concerning the roles of experience and conceptual capacities in thought, and he claims that the only adequate resolution involves granting that experiences have conceptualized content. The tension, elaborated below, can be expressed roughly as follows: judgments must be somehow constrained by features of the external environment, else judgments would be utterly divorced from the world they purport to be about; yet our judgments must be somehow free of external control, else we could give no sense to the idea that we are responsible for our judgments
Abstract: A theory is disjunctive insofar as it distinguishes genuine from non-genuine cases of some phenomenon P on the grounds that no salient feature of cases of one type is common to cases of the other type. Genuine and non-genuine cases of P are, in this sense, fundamentally different. Those who advocate disjunctivist theories have (for the most part) been concerned with perception and perceptual knowledge. This entry outlines two such theories: the disjunctivist theory of experience (cf. Brewer, Hinton, Martin, Snowdon, Travis) and the disjunctivist theory of appearances (McDowell)
Abstract: The question how to account for illusion has had a prominent role in shaping theories of perception throughout the history of philosophy. Prevailing philosophical wisdom today has it that phenomena of illusion force us to choose between the following two options. First, reject altogether the early modern empiricist idea that the core subjective character of perceptual experience is to be given simply by citing the object presented in that experience. Instead we must characterize perceptual experience entirely in terms of its representational content. Second, retain the early modern idea that the core subjective character of experience is simply constituted by the identity of its direct objects, but admit that these must be mind-dependent entities, distinct from the mind-independent physical objects we all know and love. I argue here that the early modern empiricists had an indispensable insight. The idea that the core subjective character of perceptual experience is to be given simply by citing the object presented in that experience is more fundamental than any appeal to perceptual content, and can account for illusion, and indeed hallucination, without resorting to the problematic postulation of any mind-dependent such objects
Abstract: This essay surveys the varieties of disjunctivism about perceptual experience. Disjunctivism comes in two main ?avours, metaphysical and epistemological. Metaphysical disjunctivism is the view usually associated with the disjunctivist label, and whenever
Abstract: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research LXXI (2005), 367-383. I argue that one reason for being a disjunctivist advanced by McDowell (having to do with the indefeasibility of perceptual knowledge) fails because it ignores the distinction between justification and warrant
Abstract: Right now, I see a computer in front of me. Now, according to current philosophical orthodoxy, I could have the very same perceptual experience that I
Abstract: Early formulations of disjunctivism about perception refused to give any positive account of the nature of hallucination, beyond the uncontroversial fact that they can in some sense seem to the same to the subject as veridical perceptions. Recently, some disjunctivists have attempt to account for hallucination in purely epistemic terms, by developing detailed account of what it is for a hallucinaton to be indiscriminable from a veridical perception. In this paper I argue that the prospects for purely epistemic treatments of hallucinations are dim, and that this undermines the case for disjunctivism
Abstract: Descartes was surely right that while normal waking experience, dreams and hallucinations are characteristically distinguished at a purely phenomenological level,
Abstract: In this paper we consider, and reject, Harold Langsams defenceof the Theory of Appearing, in this journal (1997), in the faceof three standard arguments against it. These arguments are:the argument from hallucination; the argument from the samecause-same effect principle; and the argument from perceptualtime-gap
