Perceptions guide our actions and provide us with evidence of the world around us. Illusions and hallucinations can mislead us: they may prompt as to act in ways that do not mesh with the world around us and they may lead us to form false beliefs about that world. The capacity view provides an account of evidence that does justice to these two facts. It shows in virtue of what illusions and hallucinations mislead us and prompt us to (...) act. Moreover, it shows in virtue of what we are in a better epistemic position when we perceive than when we hallucination. In this paper, I develop the capacity view, that is, the view that perceptual experience has epistemic force in virtue of the epistemic and metaphysical primacy of the perceptual capacities employed in perception. By grounding the epistemic force of experience in facts about the metaphysical structure of experience, the capacity view is not only an externalist view, but moreover a naturalistic view of the epistemology of perceptual experience. So it is an externalist and naturalistic alternative to reliabilism. I discuss the repercussions of this view for the justification of beliefs and the epistemic transparency of mental states, as well as, familiar problem cases. (shrink)

This paper defends and develops the capacity view against insightful critiques from Matt McGrath, Adam Pautz, and Ram Neta. In response to Matt McGrath, I show why capacities are essential and cannot simply be replaced with representational content. I argue moreover, that the asymmetry between the employment of perceptual capacities in the good and the bad case is sufficient to account for the epistemic force of perceptual states yielded by the employment of such capacities. In response to Adam Pautz, I (...) show why a perceiver’s belief is better justified than the belief of someone who suffers a subjectively indistinguishable hallucination. I show, moreover, why the capacity view is compatible with standard Bayesian principles and how it accounts for degrees of justification. In response to Ram Neta, I discuss the relationship between evidence and rational confidence, as well as the notion of evidence in light of an externalism about perceptual content. (shrink)

This paper focuses on Schellenberg’s Capacitism about Phenomenal Evidence, according to which if one is in a phenomenal state constituted by employing perceptual capacities, then one is in a phenomenal state that provides phenomenal evidence. This view offers an attractive explanation of why perceptual experience provides phenomenal evidence, and avoids difficulties faced by its contemporary alternatives. However, in spite of the attractions of this view, it is subject to what I call “the (...) alien experience problem”: some alien experiences (e.g. clairvoyant experience) are constituted by employing perceptual capacities, but they do not provide phenomenal evidence. This point is illustrated by a counterexample which is similar to, but also different in some important respects from, Bonjour’s famous clairvoyant Norman example. At the end of the paper, I sketch a restricted version of Capacitism about Phenomenal Evidence by putting some etiological constraint on the perceptual capacities employed. (shrink)

The concept of evidence is among the central concerns of epistemology broadly construed. As such, it has long engaged the intellectual energies of both philosophers of science and epistemologists of a more traditional variety. Here I briefly survey some of the more important ideas to have emerged from this tradition of reflection. I then look somewhat more closely at an issue that has recently come to the fore, largely as a result of Williamson's Knowledge and Its Limits: that of (...) whether one's evidence supervenes on one's non-factive mental states. (shrink)

On the phenomenal view of evidence, seemings are evidence. More precisely, if it seems to S that p, S has evidence for p. Here, I raise a worry for this view of evidence; namely, that it has the counterintuitive consequence that two people who disagree would rarely, if ever, share evidence. This is because almost all differences in beliefs would involve differences in seemings. However, many literatures in epistemology, including the disagreement literature and the (...) permissivism literature, presuppose that people who disagree often do share evidence. I conclude that this is a reason to question the phenomenal view of evidence. (shrink)

Block seems to propose untested answers to empirical questions. Whether consciousness is a “mongrel problem,” rather than a single core fact with many facets, is an empirical issue. Likewise, the intimate relationship between personal consciousness and global access functions cannot be decided pretheoretically. This point is demonstrated by the reader's private experience of foveal versus parafoveal vision, and for conscious versus unconscious representation of the many meanings of common words.

The meta-problem is 'the problem of explaining why we think that there is a problem of consciousness' (Chalmers, 2018, p. 6). This presupposes that we think there is a problem in the first place. We challenge the breadth of this 'we', arguing that there is already sufficient empirical evidence to cast doubt on the claim. We then add to this body of evidence, presenting the results of a new cross-cultural study extending the work of Sytsma and Machery (2010).

The so-called transparency of experience (TE) is the intuition that, in introspecting one’s own experience, one is only aware of certain properties (like colors, shapes, etc.) as features of (apparently) mind-independent objects. TE is quite popular among philosophers of mind and has traditionally been used to motivate Representationalism, i.e., the view that phenomenal character is in some strong way dependent on intentionality. However, more recently, others have appealed to TE to go the opposite way and support the phenomenal (...) intentionality view (PIV), according to which intentionality is in some strong way dependent on phenomenal character. If this line of argument succeeds, then not only TE does not speak in favor of Representationalism, but it actually speaks against it, contrary to the philosophical common-sense of the last two decades. Moreover, the representationalist project of naturalizing phenomenal character turns out to be seriously undermined on the same intuitive grounds that were supposed to make it plausible. In this paper, I reconstruct and discuss the line of argument from TE to PIV and argue that our introspective intuitions (TE) do not push us in the direction of PIV. On the contrary, the line of argument from TE to PIV is (at best) simply too weak to force us to conclude that intentionality depends on phenomenal character in the sense required for PIV to be true. (shrink)

Recent scientific work aiming to give a neurobiological explanation of phenomenal consciousness has largely focused on finding neural correlates of consciousness (NCC). The hope is that by locating neural correlates of phenomenally conscious mental states, some light will be cast on how the brain is able to give rise to such states. In this paper I argue that NCC research is unable to produce evidence of such neural correlates. I do this by considering two alternative interpretations of NCC (...) research—an eliminativist and a disjunctivist interpretation. I show that each of these interpretations is compatible with the scientific data and yet is more parsimonious than accounts involving the supposed phenomenon of phenomenal consciousness. (shrink)

We all have an intuitive grasp of the concept of evidence. Evidence makes beliefs reasonable, justifies jury verdicts, and helps resolve our disagreements. Yet getting clear about what evidence is is surprisingly difficult. Among other possibilities, evidence might consist in physical objects like a candlestick found at the crime scene, propositions like ‘a candlestick was found at the crime scene,’ or experiences like the experience of witnessing a candlestick at the crime scene. This dissertation is a (...) defense of the latter view. Evidence, we will argue, consists in experiences or mental states called ‘seeming states.’ We begin with a look at why the logical positivists came to abandon the experiential or “phenomenal” conception of evidence and adopted what I call “the courtroom conception.” Despite its appeal, we argue that this latter view is too objective; it has trouble playing the role of subjective reasons-provider. Being more subjective, the phenomenal conception deserves another look. However, many have thought that the phenomenal conception itself is unable to fulfill other important roles of evidence. In chapter two we dispute this, arguing that the phenomenal conception can play all four of the chief roles of evidence. Examining the religious epistemology of Alvin Plantinga in chapter three we come to see that the phenomenal conception, while attractive, is in danger of being too subjective. If the phenomenal conception of evidence is to be tenable, it must be offered in conjunction with a conservative epistemic principle which tethers together experiences with the beliefs they evidence in an epistemically appropriate manner. Hence in chapter four we consider a number of conservative epistemic principles and argue for the superiority of one in particular. But these principles have themselves been subject to criticism. For this reason, in chapter five we close by responding to a recent and pressing challenge to conservative principles in epistemology (Michael Bergmann’s dilemma for internalism) which might prevent their deployment alongside the phenomenal conception. If our arguments are correct, the phenomenal conception of evidence is still an attractive account of evidence today. (shrink)

I argue that perceptual experience provides us with both phenomenal and factive evidence. To a first approximation, we can understand phenomenal evidence as determined by how our environment sensorily seems to us when we are experiencing. To a first approximation, we can understand factive evidence as necessarily determined by the environment to which we are perceptually related such that the evidence is guaranteed to be an accurate guide to the environment. I argue that the (...) rational source of both phenomenal and factive evidence lies in employing perceptual capacities that we have in virtue of being perceivers. In showing that both kinds of evidence have the same rational source, I provide a unified account of perceptual evidence and its rational source in perceptual experience. (shrink)

Phenomenal conservatism holds, roughly, that if it seems to S that P, then S has evidence for P. I argue for two main conclusions. The first is that phenomenal conservatism is better suited than is proper functionalism to explain how a particular type of religious belief formation can lead to non-inferentially justified religious beliefs. The second is that phenomenal conservatism makes evidence so easy to obtain that the truth of evidentialism would not be a significant (...) obstacle to justified religious belief. A natural objection to phenomenal conservatism is that it makes evidence too easy to obtain, but I argue this objection is mistaken. (shrink)

Block [Block, N. . Two neural correlates of consciousness. Trends in Cognitive Science, 9, 46–52] and Snodgrass claim that a signal detection theory analysis of qualitative difference paradigms, in particular the exclusion failure paradigm, reveals cases of phenomenal consciousness without access consciousness. This claim is unwarranted on several grounds. First, partial cognitive access rather than a total lack of cognitive access can account for exclusion failure results. Second, Snodgrass’s Objective Threshold/Strategic model of perception relies on a problematic ‘enable’ approach (...) to perception that denies the possibility of intentional control of unconscious perception and any effect of following different task instructions on the presence/absence of phenomenal consciousness. Many of Block’s purported examples of phenomenal consciousness without cognitive access also rely on this problematic approach. Third, qualitative difference paradigms may index only a subset of access consciousness. Thus, qualitative difference paradigms like exclusion failure cannot be used to isolate phenomenal consciousness, any attempt to do so still faces serious methodological problems. (shrink)

Phenomenal Conservatism (the view that an appearance that p gives one prima facie justification for believing that p) is a promising, and popular, internalist theory of epistemic justification. Despite its popularity, it faces numerous objections and challenges. For instance, epistemologists have argued that Phenomenal Conservatism is incompatible with Bayesianism, is afflicted by bootstrapping and cognitive penetration problems, does not guarantee that epistemic justification is a stable property, does not provide an account of defeat, and is not a complete (...) theory of epistemic justification. This book shows that Phenomenal Conservatism is actually immune to some of these problems, though not all of them. Accordingly, it explores the prospects of integrating Phenomenal Conservatism with Explanationism (the view that epistemic justification is a matter of explanatory relations between one’s evidence and propositions supported by that evidence). The resulting theory, Phenomenal Explanationism, has advantages over Phenomenal Conservatism and Explanationism taken on their own. Phenomenal Explanationism is a highly unified, comprehensive internalist theory of epistemic justification that delivers on the promises of Phenomenal Conservatism while avoiding its pitfalls. (shrink)

We discuss at some length evidence from the cognitive science suggesting that the representations of objects based on spatiotemporal information and featural information retrieved bottomup from a visual scene precede representations of objects that include conceptual information. We argue that a distinction can be drawn between representations with conceptual and nonconceptual content. The distinction is based on perceptual mechanisms that retrieve information in conceptually unmediated ways. The representational contents of the states induced by these mechanisms that are available to (...) a type of awareness called phenomenal awareness constitute the phenomenal content of experience. The phenomenal content of perception contains the existence of objects as separate things that persist in time and time, spatiotemporal information, and information regarding relative spatial relations, motion, surface properties, shape, size, orientation, color, and their functional properties. (shrink)

Two important questions arise concerning the properties that constitute the phenomenal characters of our experiences: first, where these properties exist, and, second, whether they are tied to our consciousness of them. Such properties can either exist externally to the perceiving subject, or internally to her. This article argues that phenomenal characters, and specifically the phenomenal characters of colours, may exist independently of consciousness and that they are internal to the subject. We defend this combination of claims against (...) a recent criticism according to which the unconscious phenomenal character of colours exists externally to the subject. We defend internalism about (potentially unconscious) phenomenal character by appealing to recent neuroscientific and behavioural evidence, and by rejecting the claim that externalism about phenomenal character is dialectically in a better position than internalism. In addition, we briefly present certain difficulties for externalist views of phenomenal character. These concern cases where the perceptual relation fails, but a perceptual experience still results. These points suffice to defuse the externalist critique of our view, and support the internalist variant of the consciousness-independence claim as the most plausible account of the unconscious phenomenal character of colours. (shrink)

Qualitative-consciousness arises at the sensory level of olfactory processing and pervades our experience of smells to the extent that qualitative character is maintained whenever we are aware of undergoing an olfactory experience. Building upon the distinction between Access and Phenomenal Consciousness the paper offers a nuanced distinction between Awareness and Qualitative-consciousness that is applicable to olfaction in a manner that is conceptual precise and empirically viable. Mounting empirical research is offered substantiating the applicability of the distinction to olfaction and (...) showing that olfactory qualitative-consciousness can occur without awareness, but any olfactory state that we are aware of being in is always qualitative. Evidence that olfactory sensory states have a qualitatively character in the absence of awareness derives from research on mate selection, the selection of social preference for social interaction and acquaintances, as well as the role of olfactory deficits in causing affective disorders. Furthermore, the conservation of secondary processing measures of olfactory valence during olfactory imagery experiments provides verification that olfactory awareness is always qualitatively conscious—all olfactory consciousness smells phenomenal. (shrink)

A tacit assumption in the field of consciousness studies is that the more empirical evidence a theory can explain, the better it fares when weighed against competitors. If one wants to take seriously the potential for empirical evidence to move forward debates in consciousness studies, there is a need to gather, organize, validate, and compare evidence. We present an inference to the best explanation (IBE) process on the basis of empirical support that is applicable in debates between (...) competing theories of consciousness. Our proposed IBE process consists in four steps: Assimilate, Compile, Validate, and Compare. Until now, the vast majority of the work in the field has consisted in gathering empirical evidence for theories i.e., the assimilation step. To illustrate the feasibility of our proposed IBE process, and what it may look like when applied in practice, we deliver a complete collection (the compilation step) of empirical support for the distinction between A-Consciousness and P-Consciousness and the overflow hypothesis. Finally, we offer an example of the validation step, by scrutinizing the interpretation of aphantasics’ performance on retro-cue paradigms offered in the literature in support of the overflow hypothesis. The compilation we deliver here is the first effort in the IBE process, the end result of which — hopefully — will be the ability of the research community to carry out side-by-side comparisons of theories and the empirical phenomena they claim to explain, i.e., the comparison step. (shrink)

There is surprising evidence that introspection of our phenomenal states varies greatly between individuals and within the same individual over time. This puts pressure on the notion that introspection gives reliable access to our own phenomenology: introspective unreliability would explain the variability, while assuming that the underlying phenomenology is stable. I appeal to a body of neurocomputational, Bayesian theory and neuroimaging findings to provide an alternative explanation of the evidence: though some limited testing conditions can cause introspection (...) to be unreliable, mostly it is our phenomenology itself that is variable. With this account of phenomenal variability, the occurrence of the surprising evidence can be explained while generally retaining introspective reliability. (shrink)

This article re-examines Ned Block‘s ( 1997 , 2007 ) conceptual distinction between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness. His argument that we can have phenomenally conscious representations without being able to cognitively access them is criticized as not being supported by evidence. Instead, an alternative interpretation of the relevant empirical data is offered which leaves the link between phenomenology and accessibility intact. Moreover, it is shown that Block’s claim that phenomenology and accessibility have different neural substrates is highly (...) problematic in light of empirical evidence. Finally, his claim that there can be phenomenology without cognitive accessibility is at odds with his endorsement of the 'same-order-theory' of consciousness. (shrink)

We discuss in some length evidence from the cognitive science suggesting that the representations of objects based on spatiotemporal information and featural information retrieved bottom‐up from a visual scene precede representations of objects that include conceptual information. We argue that a distinction can be drawn between representations with conceptual and nonconceptual content. The distinction is based on perceptual mechanisms that retrieve information in conceptually unmediated ways. The representational contents of the states induced by these mechanisms that are available to (...) a type of awareness called phenomenal awareness constitute the phenomenal content of experience. The phenomenal content of perception contains the existence of objects as separate things that persist in time and time, spatiotemporal information, and information regarding relative spatial relations, motion, surface properties, shape, size, orientation, color, and their functional properties. (shrink)

In this article, we present evidence of a bidirectional coupling between moral concern and the attribution of properties and states that are associated with experience (e.g., conscious awareness, feelings). This coupling is also shown to be stronger with experience than for the attribution of properties and states more closely associated with agency (e.g., free will, thoughts). We report the results of four studies. In the first two studies, we vary the description of the mental capacities of a creature, and (...) assess the effects of these manipulations on moral concern. The third and fourth studies examine the effects of variations in moral concern on attributions of mindedness. Results from the first two studies indicate that moral concern depends primarily on the attribution of experience, rather than the attribution of agency. The results of the latter two studies demonstrate that moral concern increases attributions of mindedness, and that this effect is stronger for attributions of experience than for attributions of agency. (shrink)

Block’s well-known distinction between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness has generated a large philosophical literature about putative conceptual connections between the two. The scientific literature about whether they come apart in any actual cases is rather smaller. Empirical evidence gathered to date has not settled the issue. Some put this down to a fundamental methodological obstacle to the empirical study of the relation between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness. Block (2007) has drawn attention to the methodological puzzle (...) and attempted to answer it. While the evidence Block points to is relevant and important, this paper puts forward a more systematic framework for addressing the puzzle. To give it a label, the approach is to study phenomenal consciousness as a natural kind. The approach allows consciousness studies to move beyond the initial means of identifying instances of the kind, like verbal report, and to find its underlying nature. It is wellrecognised that facts about an underlying kind may allow identification of instances of the kind that do not match the initial means of identification (cp. non-liquid samples of water). This paper shows that the same method can be deployed to investigate phenomenal consciousness independently of access consciousness. (shrink)

Most philosophical or scientific theories suppose that colour composition judgments refer to the way colours appear to us. The dominant view is therefore phenomenalist in the sense that colour composition is phenomenally given to perceivers. This paper argues that there is no evidence for a phenomenalist view of colour composition and that a conventionalist approach should be favoured.

Evidence for unconscious semantic representation suggests that a cognitive unconscious exists. Phenomenal consciousness cannot easily be shown to deal with complex cognitive operations such as those involved in language translation and creativity. A self-organising phenomenal consciousness that controls brain functions also runs into mind/body problems (well recognised in the consciousness studies literature) that Perruchet & Vinter must address.

This chapter explores whether and when experience can be evidence. It argues that experiences can be evidence, and that this claim is compatible with just about any epistemological theory. It evaluates the most promising argument for the conclusion that certain experiences (e.g., seeming to see) are always evidence for believing what the experiences represent. While the argument is very promising, one premise needs further defense. The argument also depends on a certain connection between reasonable belief and the (...) first person perspective. (shrink)

Phenomenal intentionality is a view about the representational content of conscious experiences that grounds the content of experiences in their phenomenal character. The view is motivated by evidence from introspection, as well as theoretical considerations and intuitions. This paper discusses one potential problem with the view. The view has difficulty accounting for the intentionality of color experiences. Versions of the view either fail to count things as part of the content of color experience that should be counted, (...) resulting in verdicts that some color experiences are inaccurate which should not be, or they admit properties as part of their contents that ought not to be admitted, resulting in color experiences being considered to be accurate when they ought not to be considered so. This is a problem because color predicates are usefully employed in sciences such as biology, cognitive science, and engineering. They are used in generalizations that take the form of laws governing the presence and behavior of properties. Scientific practice relies on the assumption that the laws governing how entities behave employ terms that refer to actual properties that entities really have. We should therefore assume that there is some consistent set of properties to which our color terms refer. (shrink)

This paper examines the possibility of finding evidence that phenomenal consciousness is independent of access. The suggestion reviewed is that we should look for isomorphisms between phenomenal and neural activation spaces. It is argued that the fact that phenomenal spaces are mapped via verbal report is no problem for this methodology. The fact that activation and phenomenal space are mapped via different means does not mean that they cannot be identified. The paper finishes by examining (...) how data addressing this theoretical question could be obtained. (shrink)

In the past two decades a number of arguments have been given in favor of the possibility of phenomenal consciousness without attentional access, otherwise known as phenomenal overflow. This paper will show that the empirical data commonly cited in support of this thesis is, at best, ambiguous between two equally plausible interpretations, one of which does not posit phenomenology beyond attention. Next, after citing evidence for the feature-integration theory of attention, this paper will give an account of (...) the relationship between consciousness and attention that accounts for both the empirical data and our phenomenological intuitions without positing phenomenal consciousness beyond attention. Having undercut the motivations for accepting phenomenal overflow along with having given reasons to think that phenomenal overflow does not occur, I end with the tentative conclusion that attention is a necessary condition for phenomenal consciousness. -/- . (shrink)

The main aims in this article are to discuss and criticize the core thesis of a position that has become known as phenomenal conservatism. According to this thesis, its seeming to one that p provides enough justification for a belief in p to be prima facie justified. This thesis captures the special kind of epistemic import that seemings are claimed to have. To get clearer on this thesis, the article embeds it, first, in a probabilistic framework in which updating (...) on new evidence happens by Bayesian conditionalization, and second, a framework in which updating happens by Jeffrey conditionalization. The article spells out problems for both views, and then generalizes some of these to nonprobabilistic frameworks. The main theme of the discussion is that the epistemic import of a seeming should depend on its content in a plethora of ways that phenomenal conservatism is insensitive to. (shrink)

Tracking representationalism is the theory that phenomenal consciousness is a matter of tracking physical properties in an appropriate way. This theory holds that phenomenal character can be explained in terms of representational content, and it also entails that there is unlikely to be a strong correlation between phenomenal character and neural states. However, the empirical evidence shows that both claims cannot be true. So, tracking representationalism is wrong. Its fault is due to ignoring the internal correlation (...) of experience, the existence of which shows that phenomenal character is shaped by neural states to a large extent, so it cannot be wholly explained by representational content. (shrink)

Phenomenal consciousness poses a puzzle for philosophy of science. This arises from two facts: It is common for philosophers (and some scientists) to take its existence to be phenomenologically obvious and yet modern science arguably has little (if anything) to say about it. And, this despite 20 years of work targeting the phenomenon in what I will refer to as the new science of consciousness. How has such a supposedly evident part of our world remained beyond our scientific understanding? (...) One possibility is that there is no such phenomenon. This possibility, however, is undercut by the claim that phenomenal consciousness is phenomenologically obvious. In this paper I argue that this claim is mistaken. Distinguishing between the qualities we are phenomenologically aware of and the classification of those qualities as being mental (as qualia), I present both empirical evidence and theoretical reasons to deny that the latter is phenomenologically obvious. (shrink)

Some advocates of higher-order theories of consciousness believe that the correct theory of consciousness together with empirical facts about animal intelligence make it highly unlikely that animals are capable of having phenomenally conscious experiences. I will argue that even if the higher-order thought (HOT) theory of consciousness is correct, there is good evidence (taken from experiments in mind reading and metacognition, as well as considerations from neurophysiology and evolutionary biology) that at least some nonhuman animals can form the higher-order (...) thoughts and thus will count as phenomenally conscious on HOT theory. (shrink)

According to the Phenomenal Unity Thesis (“PUT”) – most prominently defended by Tim Bayne and David Chalmers – necessarily, any set of phenomenal states of a subject at a time is phenomenally unified. The standard formulation of this thesis is unacceptably vague because it does not specify what it is to be a subject. In this paper, I first consider possible meanings for ‘subject’ as used in PUT and argue that every plausible candidate definition renders the thesis trivially (...) true. I consider and reject Tim Bayne’s proposal that ‘subject’ means ‘human being’. Then I argue, contra Bayne and Chalmers, that PUT is not incompatible with any major theory of consciousness, and contra Michael Tye, that split-brain patients do not provide evidence against PUT. I close by considering some nontrivial alternatives to PUT. (shrink)

My thesis, which I call the phenomenal basing thesis, is that the evidential basing relation obtains between someone’s belief and evidence E only if the mental state associated with E has phenomenal character. In §2, I explain the thesis and provide background. In §3–§6, I show that the phenomenal basing thesis holds for simple basic beliefs, inferential beliefs, and complex basic beliefs, both when the beliefs are being formed and when they are being sustained.

It is an orthodoxy in cognitive science that perception can occur unconsciously. Recently, Hakwan Lau, Megan Peters and Ian Phillips have argued that this orthodoxy may be mistaken. They argue that many purported cases of unconscious perception fail to rule out low degrees of conscious awareness while others fail to establish genuine perception. This paper presents a case of unconscious perception that avoids these problems. It also advances a general principle of ‘phenomenal coherence’ that can insulate some forms of (...) evidence for unconscious perception from the methodological critiques of Lau, Peters and Phillips. (shrink)

Recent work in neuroimaging suggests that some patients diagnosed as being in the persistent vegetative state are actually conscious. In this paper, we critically examine this new evidence. We argue that though it remains open to alternative interpretations, it strongly suggests the presence of consciousness in some patients. However, we argue that its ethical significance is less than many people seem to think. There are several different kinds of consciousness, and though all kinds of consciousness have some ethical significance, (...) different kinds underwrite different kinds of moral value. Demonstrating that patients have phenomenal consciousness — conscious states with some kind of qualitative feel to them — shows that they are moral patients, whose welfare must be taken into consideration. But only if they are subjects of a sophisticated kind of access consciousness — where access consciousness entails global availability of information to cognitive systems — are they persons, in the technical sense of the word employed by philosophers. In this sense, being a person is having the full moral status of ordinary human beings. We call for further research which might settle whether patients who manifest signs of consciousness possess the sophisticated kind of access consciousness required for personhood. (shrink)

Our main aims in this paper is to discuss and criticise the core thesis of a position that has become known as phenomenal conservatism. According to this thesis, its seeming to one that p provides enough justification for a belief in p to be prima facie justified (a thesis we label Standard Phenomenal Conservatism). This thesis captures the special kind of epistemic import that seemings are claimed to have. To get clearer on this thesis, we embed it, first, (...) in a probabilistic framework in which updating on new evidence happens by Bayesian conditionalization, and second, a framework in which updating happens by Jeffrey conditionalization. We spell out problems for both views, and then generalize some of these to non-probabilistic frameworks. The main theme of our discussion is that the epistemic import of a seeming (or experience) should depend on its content in a plethora of ways that phenomenal conservatism is insensitive to. (shrink)

I will adapt part of an argument in Prosser to the case of persistence, to conclude that our experience does not favour any particular theory of persistence—our immediate experience cannot rightly be considered as evidence in this context. Even if it does in fact seem that objects persist by enduring, this cannot be because they do in fact endure; and if things do in fact persist by perduring, this should not be considered to be in spite of appearances. Thus (...) any explanation for why objects are represented in experience as enduring will be one that is independent of the truth of endurantism. (shrink)

The thesis that conceptual content is experiential faces a prima facie objection. Phenomenology is not in general compositional. For example, the experienced color of a thing will change depending on its context. If conceptual phenomenology is also subject to context effects, then thought contents will not be compositional. However, the compositionality of thought content is, arguably, explanatorily indispensable. This paper considers several different conceptions of compositionality, but in the end maintains there is no introspective evidence for conceptual context effects.

The aim of this article is to reveal how the phenomenon of religious conversion is handled in Turkish epics, what causes religious conversion are based, and what situations arise for the individual who religious conversion. Examining the reflections of this phenomenon in epics is important in terms of understanding the approach of the individual and society in the classical period to religious conversion, which is a remarkable issue in our age. The phenomenon of religious conversion, which is as old as (...) human history, has been observed throughout Turkish history in both individual and mass examples. The phenomenon of religious conversion is also depicted in Turkish and world epics, including the Persian variant of the Oghuz Khagan Epic, one of the oldest Turkish epics. In this article, religious conversion events in the Kyrgyz and Uzbek epics, Manas, Gülgaakı, Canış-Bayış, Şeyh San'an, and Alpamış, were examined. The reasons for religious conversion in these epics include dreams, love, existential quests, suggestions, miracles, and being defeated by a Muslim. The epics were analyzed in terms of changing names, circumcision of men, marriage of women, teaching of religion, financial contribution/employment, and placement regarding the situations caused by religious conversion. The stories of Almambet, Gülgaakı, and Şeyh San'an provide details about the relationship of converts with their old and new societies. This study, which has the characteristics of a literary analysis, uses the Comparative Text Analysis Method to reveal attitudes and behaviors related to religious conversion in epics. The research was limited to the Kyrgyz and Uzbek epics, and the sample was selected from the epics in which religious conversion cases of these peoples were evident. (shrink)