Why indeed? Yet the postulation of just such nonconceptual states of consciousness is crucial to Professor Sellars’s account of the way in which sensing is essential to perceiving.

This paper is concerned with Chisholm's "adverbial theory of sensing". An attempt is made to give a literal statement of what it means "to sense redly" which is consistent with what Chisholm says about sensing and also meets various objections to adverbial theories. The paper concludes with a brief consideration of why it is that Chisholm does not offer an adverbial theory of perceiving, or of thinking in general, as well as of sensing.

You and I reach for a dollar bill on the floor, each saying “I saw it first.” The content of what we say is identically the same. How then is your claim referred to you and mine to me? We argue that the reference of self-ascriptions is effected by the occasion of the occurrence of the first-person indexical rather than by the content of the thought or assertion which then occurs. That this is true has further implications for exotic, self-fulfilling (...) self-ascriptions, like the Cartesian Cogito ; for views like those of Geach and Anscombe, who hold that ‘I’ is not a singular referring expression at all; and for views which hold that the first-person indexical is a singular referring expression with a very special, “systematically ambiguous” content. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with Chisholm's "adverbial theory of sensing". An attempt is made to give a literal statement of what it means "to sense redly" which is consistent with what Chisholm says about sensing and also meets various objections to adverbial theories. The paper concludes with a brief consideration of why it is that Chisholm does not offer an adverbial theory of perceiving, or of thinking in general, as well as of sensing.

This paper is concerned with Chisholm's "adverbial theory of sensing". An attempt is made to give a literal statement of what it means "to sense redly" which is consistent with what Chisholm says about sensing and also meets various objections to adverbial theories. The paper concludes with a brief consideration of why it is that Chisholm does not offer an adverbial theory of perceiving, or of thinking in general, as well as of sensing.

This paper is concerned with Chisholm's "adverbial theory of sensing". An attempt is made to give a literal statement of what it means "to sense redly" which is consistent with what Chisholm says about sensing and also meets various objections to adverbial theories. The paper concludes with a brief consideration of why it is that Chisholm does not offer an adverbial theory of perceiving, or of thinking in general, as well as of sensing.

The paper proposes an outline of a reconciliatory approach to the perennial controversy between epistemological realism and anti-realism (constructionism). My main conceptual source in explaining this view is the philosophy of pragmatism, more specifically, the epistemological theories of George H. Mead, John Dewey, and also William James’ radical empiricism. First, the paper analyzes the pragmatic treatment of the goal-directedness of action, especially with regard to Mead’s notion of attitudes, and relates it to certain contemporary epistemological theories provided by the cognitive (...) sciences (Maturana, Rizzolatti, Clark). Against this background, the paper presents a philosophical as well as empirical justification of why we should interpret the environment and its objects in terms of possibilities for action. In Mead’s view, the objects and events of our world emerge within stable patterns of organism-environment interactions, which he called “perspectives”. According to pragmatism as well as the aforementioned cognitive scientists, perception and other cognitive processes include not only neural processes in our heads but also the world itself. Elaborating on Mead’s concept of perspectives, the paper argues in favor of the epistemological position called “constructive realism.”. (shrink)