Discriminability

It is obvious both that some changes are too small for us to perceive and that we can perceive constant motion. Yet according to Fara, these two facts are in conflict, and one must be rejected. I show that conflict arises only from accepting a `zoëtrope conception' of change experience, according to which change experience is analysed in terms of a series of very short-lived sensory atoms, each lacking in dynamic content. On pain of denying the phenomenologically obvious, we must (...) reject the zoëtrope conception. I offer an alternative account, according to which the dynamic content of our experience at short timescales is metaphysically dependent on the content of experience over longer timescales. Moreover, at short timescales such content is purely determinable. (shrink)

Reductive strong representationalists accept the Common Kind thesis about subjectively indistinguishable sensory hallucinations, illusions, and veridical experiences. I show that this doesn’t jibe well with their declared phenomenal externalism and argue that there is no sense in which the phenomenal character of sensory experiences is constituted by the sensible properties represented by these experiences, as representationalists claim.

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)

Consciousness and confidence seem intimately related. Accordingly, some researchers use confidence ratings as a measure of, or proxy for, consciousness. Rosenthal discusses the potential connections between the two, and rejects confidence as a valid measure of consciousness. He argues that there are better alternatives to get at conscious experiences such as direct subjective reports of awareness (i.e. subjects’ reports of perceiving something or of the degree of visibility of a stimulus). In this chapter, we offer a different perspective. Confidence ratings (...) in general, and metacognitive measures in particular, may offer important advantages over subjective ratings. The arguments we offer here are supported by empirical, practical and socio-strategic considerations. However, we do not suggest consciousness and confidence are interchangeable. We recognize the limitations of confidence ratings in some experimental designs and for some research questions. Nevertheless, we also address a potential conceptual link between consciousness and confidence that stems from Rosenthal’s very own work on mental quality space theory. (shrink)

In this paper, I raise an objection to Philip Goff’s “Revelation Thesis” as articulated in his Consciousness and Fundamental Reality. In Section 1 I present the Revelation Thesis in the context of Go ff’s broader defence of pan-psychism. In Section 2 I argue that the Revelation Thesis entails the identity of indiscriminable phenomenal properties. In Section 3 I argue that the identity of indiscriminable phenomenal properties is false. The upshot is that the Revelation Thesis is false.

.Can we treat people in a discriminatory way in virtue of how we think about them? In this essay, I argue that the answer is yes. According to the constitutive claim, stereotyping constitutes discrimination, either sometimes or always. This essay defends the constitutive claim and explores the deeper justifications for it. I also sketch the constitutive claim’s larger ethical significance. One upshot is that we can wrongfully discriminate against (or in favor of) others in thought, even if we keep our (...) views of others to ourselves. Second, if stereotyping is a form of discrimination, theories of wrongful discrimination bear on the ethical questions associated with stereotyping, including this one: under what conditions is it wrong to stereotype? In closing, I introduce an intriguing possibility, namely, that stereotyping is wrong if and when it constitutes wrongful discrimination. (shrink)

In this paper I claim that perceptual discriminatory skills rely on a suitable type of environment as an enabling condition for their exercise. This is because of the constitutive connection between environment and perceptual discriminatory skills, inasmuch as such connection is construed from an ecological approach. The exercise of a discriminatory skill yields knowledge of affordances of objects, properties, or events in the surrounding environment. This is practical knowledge in the first-person perspective. An organism learns to perceive an object by (...) becoming sensitized to its affordances. I call this position ecological disjunctivism. A corollary of this position is that a case of perception and its corresponding case of hallucination—which is similar to the former only in some respects—are different in nature. I show then how the distinguishability problem is addressed by ecological disjunctivism. (shrink)

Internalism and externalism disagree about whether agents who are internally the same can differ in their mental states. But what is it for two agents to be internally the same? Standard formulations take agents to be internally the same in virtue of some metaphysical fact, for example, that they share intrinsic physical properties. Our aim in this chapter is to argue that such formulations should be rejected. We provide the outlines of an alternative formulation on which agents are internally the (...) same in virtue of facts about their epistemic capacities. The resulting formulation is one on which internalism and externalism are views about the extent to which an agent’s mental states can vary independently of the capacity for introspective discrimination. We suggest that this epistemic formulation of internalism and externalism picks out a substantive disagreement in philosophical theorizing about the nature of the mind. (shrink)

Conscious experiences are characterized by mental qualities, such as those involved in seeing red, feeling pain, or smelling cinnamon. The standard framework for modeling mental qualities represents them via points in geometrical spaces, where distances between points inversely correspond to degrees of phenomenal similarity. This paper argues that the standard framework is structurally inadequate and develops a new framework that is more powerful and flexible. The core problem for the standard framework is that it cannot capture precision structure: for example, (...) consider the phenomenal contrast between seeing an object as crimson in foveal vision versus merely as red in peripheral vision. The solution I favor is to model mental qualities using regions, rather than points. I explain how this seemingly simple formal innovation not only provides a natural way of modeling precision, but also yields a variety of further theoretical fruits: it enables us to formulate novel hypotheses about the space and structures of mental qualities, formally differentiate two dimensions of phenomenal similarity, generate a quantitative model of the phenomenal sorites, and define a measure of discriminatory grain. A noteworthy consequence is that the structure of the mental qualities of conscious experiences is fundamentally different from the structure of the perceptible qualities of external objects. (shrink)

The debate between relationalism and representationalism in the philosophy of perception seems to have come to a standstill where opponents radically disagree on methodological principles or fundamental assumptions. According to Fish (this volume) this is because, not unlike Kuhnian scientific paradigms, the debate displays some elements of incommensurability. This diagnosis makes advancing the debate impossible. I argue that what is hindering progress is not a clash of research programmes, but a series of misunderstandings that can be avoided by disentangling the (...) different questions each theory is invested in and by making explicit the hidden assumptions at play in the debate. One such central assumption is what I call the Superficiality Constraint. This is the idea that the phenomenal character of experience is superficial with respect to introspection. I argue that we can make progress in the debate by assessing to what extent and at what cost relationalism can accommodate this constraint. (shrink)

Discrimination is a central epistemic capacity but typically, theories of discrimination only use discrimination as a vehicle for analyzing knowledge. This paper aims at developing a self-contained theory of discrimination. Internalist theories of discrimination fail since there is no compelling correlation between discriminatory capacities and experiences. Moreover, statistical reliabilist theories are also flawed. Only a modal theory of discrimination is promising. Versions of sensitivity and adherence that take particular alternatives into account provide necessary and sufficient conditions on discrimination. Safety in (...) contrast is not sufficient for discrimination as there are cases of safety that are clearly instances of discrimination failure. The developed account of discrimination between objects will be extended to discrimination between kinds and between types. (shrink)

In this chapter, I put forward and sustain an articulation of the notion of bodily skill based on ecological psychology, and I show how it is relevant for the debate between Dreyfus and McDowell about skillful coping and also for the debate about whether know-how is reducible or not to propositional knowledge. The right metaphor to understand bodily skills is not the computer metaphor but the radio metaphor. These skills result from a process of organism attunement to its environment.

Carter and Pritchard (2016) and Pritchard (2010, 2012, 2016) have tried to reconcile the intuition that perceptual knowledge requires only limited discriminatory abilities with the closure principle. To this end, they have introduced two theoretical innovations: a contrast between two ways of introducing error-possibilities and a distinction between discriminating and favoring evidence. I argue that their solution faces the “sufficiency problem”: it is unclear whether the evidence that is normally available to adult humans is sufficient to retain knowledge of the (...) entailing proposition and come to know the entailed proposition. I submit that, on either infallibilist or fallibilist views of evidence, Carter and Pritchard have set the bar for deductive knowledge too low. At the end, I offer an alternative solution. I suggest that the knowledge-retention condition of the closure principle is not satisfied in zebra-like scenarios. (shrink)

As a philosophical paradigm, differential heterogenesis offers us a novel descriptive vantage with which to inscribe Deleuze’s virtuality within the terrain of “differential becoming,” conjugating “pure saliences” so as to parse economies, microhistories, insurgencies, and epistemological evolutionary processes that can be conceived of independently from their representational form. Unlike Gestalt theory’s oppositional constructions, the advantage of this aperture is that it posits a dynamic context to both media and its analysis, rendering them functionally tractable and set in relation to other (...) objects, rather than as sedentary identities. Surveying the genealogy of differential heterogenesis with particular interest in the legacy of Lautman’s dialectic, I make the case for a reading of the Deleuzean virtual that departs from an event-oriented approach, galvanizing Sarti and Citti’s dynamic a priori vis-à-vis Deleuze’s philosophy of difference. Specifically, I posit differential heterogenesis as frame with which to examine our contemporaneous epistemic shift as it relates to multi-scalar computational modeling while paying particular attention to neuro-inferential modes of inductive learning and homologous cognitive architecture. Carving a bricolage between Mark Wilson’s work on the “greediness of scales” and Deleuze’s “scales of reality”, this project threads between static ecologies and active externalism vis-à-vis endocentric frames of reference and syntactical scaffolding. (shrink)

It is tempting to think that one’s perceptual evidence comprises just what issues from perceiving with each of the respective sensory modalities. However, empirical, rational, and phenomenological considerations show that one’s perceptual evidence can outstrip what one possesses due to perceiving with each separate sense. Some novel perceptual evidence stems from the coordinated use of multiple senses. This paper argues that some perceptual evidence in this respect is distinctively multisensory.

According to a certain kind of naïve or folk understanding of physical matter, everyday ‘solid’ objects are composed of a homogeneous, gap-less substance, with sharply defined boundaries, which wholly fills the space they occupy. A further claim is that our perceptual experience of the environment represents or indicates that the objects around us conform to this sort of conception of physical matter. Were this further claim correct, it would mean that the way that the world appears to us in experience (...) conflicts with the deliverances of our best current scientific theories in the following respect: perceptual experience would be intrinsically misleading concerning the structure of physical matter. I argue against this further claim. Experience in itself is not committed to, nor does it provide evidence for, any such conception of the nature of physical matter. The naïve/folk conception of matter in question cannot simply be ‘read-off’ from perceptual appearances. (shrink)

Does the scope of beliefs that people can form on the basis of perception remain fixed, or can it be amplified with learning? The answer to this question is important for our understanding of why and when we ought to trust experts, and also for assessing the plausibility of epistemic foundationalism. The empirical study of perceptual expertise suggests that experts can indeed enrich their perceptual experiences through learning. Yet this does not settle the epistemic status of their beliefs. One might (...) hold that the background knowledge of experts is the cause of their enriched perceptual experience – what is known as cognitive permeation – and so their subsequent beliefs are only mediately justified because they are epistemically dependent on this background knowledge. I argue against this view. Perceptual expertise is not the result of cognitive permeation but is rather the result of perceptual learning, and perceptual learning does not involve cognition in a way that entails cognitive permeation. Perceptual expertise thus provides a means of widening the scope of the immediately justified beliefs that experts can form. (shrink)

Many of our sources of knowledge only afford us knowledge that is inexact. When trying to see how tall something is, or to hear how far away something is, or to remember how long something lasted, we may come to know some facts about the approximate size, distance or duration of the thing in question but we don’t come to know exactly what its size, distance or duration is. In some such situations we also have some pointed knowledge of how (...) inexact our knowledge is. That is, we can knowledgeably pinpoint some exact claims that we do not know. We show that standard models of inexact knowledge leave little or no room for such pointed knowledge. We devise alternative models that are not afflicted by this shortcoming. (shrink)

Some people have stressed that there is a close analogy between meaning experiences, i.e., experiences as of understanding concerning linguistic expressions, and seeing-in experiences, i.e., pictorial experiences of discerning a certain item – what a certain picture presents, viz. the picture’s subject – in another item – the picture’s vehicle, the picture’s physical basis. Both can be seen as fusion experiences, in the minimal sense that they are experiential wholes made up of different aspects. Actually, two important similarities between such (...) experiences may lead one to think that they are experiences of the same type. In this paper, however, I will try to show that notwithstanding such similarities, these experiences are typologically different. For there are two dissimilarities between such experiences that are more relevant on this typological concern than their similarities. Indeed, unlike meaning experiences, seeing-in experiences are first of all recognitional experiences of a sort that makes them perceptual experiences as well. Moreover, again unlike meaning experiences, seeing-in experiences are fusion experiences in the substantial sense that the experiential whole is more than the sum of its experiential parts taken in isolation, for when such parts figure in that whole, they interact with each other. In a nutshell, unlike meaning experiences, seeing-in experiences are proper fusion experiences. (shrink)

According to Duncan Pritchard’s version of epistemological disjunctivism, in paradigm cases of perceptual knowledge, one’s knowledge that p is grounded in one’s seeing that p, and one can, by reflection alone, come to know that they see that p. In this paper, I argue that the epistemic conception of introspective indiscriminability is incompatible with epistemological disjunctivism, so understood. This has the consequence that theories of the nature of sensory experience which accept the epistemic conception of introspective indiscriminability—such as phenomenal character (...) disjunctivism and certain forms of naïve realism—are inconsistent with epistemological disjunctivism, so understood. I then argue that proponents of epistemological disjunctivism face a formidable challenge explaining in what sense, if any, one can have purely reflective knowledge of their factive rational support. (shrink)

Good’s theorem is the apparent platitude that it is always rational to ‘look before you leap’: to gather information before making a decision when doing so is free. We argue that Good’s theorem is not platitudinous and may be false. And we argue that the correct advice is rather to ‘make your act depend on the answer to a question’. Looking before you leap is rational when, but only when, it is a way to do this.

In his book “Seeing Dark Things” (2008), Roy Sorensen provides many wonderfully ingenious arguments for many surprising, counter-intuitive claims. One such claim in particular is that when we a silhouetted object – i.e. an opaque object lit entirely from behind – we literally see its back-side – i.e. we see the full expanse of the surface facing away from us that is blocking the incoming light. Sorensen himself admits that this seems a tough pill to swallow, later characterising it as (...) “the most controversial thesis of the book” (2011, p199). -/- I will argue against Sorensen’s controversial thesis and in favour of what seems to me to be a much more natural and commonsensical alternative: when we see a silhouetted object, what we see is its edge and only its edge – so we do not see its entire back-side. (shrink)

Several essays in this volume exploit the idea that in visual experience, and in other forms of consciousness, something is present to consciousness, or phenomenally present to the experiencing subject. This is a venerable idea. Hume, for example, understood conscious experience in terms of the various items ‘present to the mind’. However, it is not obvious how the idea should be understood and there are grounds for worrying that there is no good way of making it precise. Here I explore (...) a way of making precise the idea that properties of things, such as their shapes and colours, are present to us in visual experience. I argue that this important idea is coherent, well motivated and empirically plausible, provided that we reject two traditional assumptions: that maximally determinate properties, rather than just determinable properties, are visually present; that we can tell through introspection exactly which properties are visually present to us. (shrink)

Epistemological Disjunctivism is a view about paradigm cases of perceptual knowledge. Duncan Pritchard claims that it is particularly well suited to accounting for internalist and externalist intuitions. A number of authors have disputed this claim, arguing that there are problems for Pritchard’s way with internalist intuitions. I share the worry. However, I don’t think it has been expressed as effectively as it can be. My aim in this paper is to present a new way of formulating the worry, in terms (...) of an “explanatory challenge”. The explanatory challenge is a simple, yet powerful and illuminating challenge for Epistemological Disjunctivism. It is illuminating in the sense that it shows us why Epistemological Disjunctivism must take on certain internalistically problematic commitments. A secondary aim of this paper is to examine whether the recently much-discussed distinction between justifications and excuses in epistemology can support an adequate response. I will argue that it cannot. (shrink)

The debate about cinematic motion revolves around the question of whether the movement of cinematic images is real. That the movement we perceive in film should be construed as the movement of images is taken for granted. But this is a mistake. There is no reason to suppose that cinematic images of moving objects are themselves perceived to be moving. All that is necessary is to perceive these images as continuously changing images of one and the same object.

Based on Pritchard’s distinction (2012, 2016) between favoring and discriminating epistemic grounds, and on how those grounds bear on the elimination of skeptical possibilities, I present the dream argument as a moderate skeptical possibility that can be reasonably motivated. In order to block the dream argument skeptical conclusion, I present a version of phenomenological disjunctivism based on Noë’s actionist account of perceptual consciousness (2012). This suggests that perceptual knowledge is rationally grounded because it is a form of embodied achievement – (...) what I call embodied rationality –, which offers a way of dissolving the pseudo-problem of epistemic immodesty, namely, the seemingly counterintuitive thesis that one can acquire rationally grounded knowledge that one is not in a radical skeptical scenario. (shrink)

Planar geometry was exploited for the computation of symmetric visual curves in the image plane, with consistent variations in local parameters such as sagitta, chordlength, and the curves’ height-to-width ratio, an indicator of the visual area covered by the curve, also called aspect ratio. Image representations of single curves (no local image context) were presented to human observers to measure their visual sensation of curvature magnitude elicited by a given curve. Nonlinear regression analysis was performed on both the individual and (...) the average data using two types of model: (1) a power function where. (shrink)

Naive realists hold that experience is to be understood in terms of an intimate perceptual relation between a subject and aspects of the world, relative to a certain standpoint. Those aspects of the world themselves shape the contours of consciousness. But blurriness is an aspect of some of our experiences that does not seem to come from the world. I argue that this constitutes a significant challenge to some forms of naive realism. But I also argue that there is a (...) robust form of naive realism which is unfazed by the blurriness of some of our experiences, even when that blurriness is understood as a subjective modification of consciousness. (shrink)

In a series of recent papers, Timothy Williamson has argued for the surprising conclusion that there are cases in which you know a proposition in spite of its being overwhelmingly improbable given what you know that you know it. His argument relies on certain formal models of our imprecise knowledge of the values of perceptible and measurable magnitudes. This paper suggests an alternative class of models that do not predict this sort of improbable knowing. I show that such models are (...) motivated by independently plausible principles in the epistemology of perception, the epistemology of estimation, and concerning the connection between knowledge and justified belief. (shrink)

Several psychological experiments have suggested that concepts can influence perceived color (e.g., Delk and Fillenbaum in Am J Psychol 78(2):290–293, 1965, Hansen et al. in Nat Neurosci 9(11):1367–1368, 2006, Olkkonen et al. in J Vis 8(5):1–16, 2008). Observers tend to assign typical colors to objects even when the objects do not have those colors. Recently, these findings were used to argue that perceptual experience is cognitively penetrable (Macpherson 2012). This interpretation of the experiments has far-reaching consequences: it implies that the (...) way we think of objects determines how we see them, thus threatening the role of perception in justifying beliefs. In this paper, I show that the psychological findings can be accounted for without admitting cognitive penetrability. An underestimated but key feature of the experiments is that observers had to judge colors in borderline cases, in conditions of reduced acuity, or on the basis of color-concepts instead of matching. Such judgments are sensitive to the form of bias that Tversky and Kahneman (Science 185:1124–1131, 1974) have termed ‘anchoring’. Adopting a suggestion from Raffman (Philos Rev 103(1):41–74, 1994), I argue that the way subjects in the experiments think of the objects could affect their color judgments without altering their color experiences. (shrink)

In this paper I show that a variety of Cartesian Conceptions of the mental are unworkable. In particular, I offer a much weaker conception of limited discrimination than the one advanced by Williamson (2000) and show that this weaker conception, together with some plausible background assumptions, is not only able to undermine the claim that our core mental states are luminous (roughly: if one is in such a state then one is in a position to know that one is) but (...) also the claim that introspection is infallible with respect to our core mental states (where a belief that C obtains is infallible just in case if one believes that C obtains then C obtains). The upshot is a broader and much more powerful case against the Cartesian conception of the mental than has been advanced hitherto. (shrink)

According to the monitoring theory of consciousness, a mental state is conscious in virtue of being represented in the right way by a monitoring state. David Rosenthal, William Lycan, and Uriah Kriegel have developed three different influential versions of this theory. In order to explain colour experiences, each of these authors combines his version of the monitoring theory of consciousness with a specific account of colour representation. Even though Rosenthal, Lycan, and Kriegel disagree on the specifics, they all hold that (...) colours are represented by a single type of mental state. The main goal of this paper is to show that a more complex account of colour representation is needed for the monitoring theory of consciousness to do justice to the phenomenology of colour experiences. In particular, I will argue that the fine-grained character of colour experience?that is, the fact that perceivers can become conscious of small differences between colours?requires that colour representation be construed in terms of two different types of mental states, namely sensory states that represent appearance properties and colour representations that represent physical colours. (shrink)

I respond to the separate commentaries by Jacob Berger, Charlie Pelling, and David Pereplyotchik on my paper, “Color-Consciousness Conceptualism.” I resist Berger’s suggestion that mental colors ever enter consciousness without accompaniment by deployments of concepts of their extra-mental counterparts. I express concerns about Pelling’s proposal that a more uniform conceptualist treatment of phenomenal sorites can be gained by a simple appeal to the partial overlap of the extensions of some concepts. I question the relevance to perceptual consciousness of the arguments (...) for demonstrative concepts that Pereplyotchik attacks. (shrink)

The goal of the present paper is to defend against a certain line of attack the view that conscious experience of color is no more fine-grained that the repertoire of non- demonstrative concepts that a perceiver is able to bring to bear in perception. The line of attack in question is an alleged empirical argument - the Diachronic Indistinguishability Argument - based on pairs of colors so similar that they can be discriminated when simultaneously presented but not when presented across (...) a memory delay. My aim here is to show that this argument fails. (shrink)

Taking a series of colour patches, starting with one that clearly looks red, and making each so similar in colour to the previous one that it looks the same as it, we appear to be able to show that a yellow patch looks red. I ask whether phenomenal sorites paradoxes, such as this, are subject to a unique kind of solution that is unavailable in relation to other sorites paradoxes. I argue that they do not need such a solution, nor (...) do they succumb to one. In particular, I reject the claim made by Fara and Raffman that looks the same is a transitive relation, which would allow us to solve phenomenal sorites paradoxes by denying the possibility of the required kind of sorites series. (shrink)

According to the epistemic theory of hallucination, the fundamental psychological nature of a hallucinatory experience is constituted by its being 'introspectively indiscriminable', in some sense, from a veridical experience of a corresponding type. How is the notion of introspective indiscriminability to which the epistemic theory appeals best construed? Following M. G. F. Martin, the standard assumption is that the notion should be construed in terms of negative epistemics: in particular, it is assumed that the notion should be explained in terms (...) of the impossibility that a hallucinator might possess a certain type of knowledge on a certain basis. I argue that the standard assumption is mistaken. I argue that the relevant notion of introspective indiscriminability is better construed in terms of positive epistemics: in particular, I argue that the notion is better explained by reference to the fact that it would be rational for a hallucinator positively to make a certain type of judgement, were that judgement made on a certain basis. (shrink)

Of the many families of words that are thought to be vague, so-called observational predicates may be both the most fascinating and the most confounding. Roughly, observational predicates are terms that apply to objects on the basis of how those objects appear to us perceptually speaking. ‘Red’, ‘loud’, ‘sweet’, ‘acrid’, and ‘smooth’ are good examples. Delia Graff explains that a “predicate is observational just in case its applicability to an object (given a fixed context of evaluation) depends only on the (...) way that object appears” (2001, 3). By the same token observational predicates are, as Crispin Wright observes, terms “whose senses are taught entirely by ostension” (1976). Like other vague predicates, observational words appear to generate sorites paradoxes. Consider for example a series of 20 colored patches progressing from a clearly red one to a clearly orange one, so ordered that each patch is just noticeably different in hue from the one before. The following argument then seems forced upon us: (1) Patch #1 is red. (2) Any patch that differs only slightly in hue from a red patch is itself red. (3) Therefore patch #20 is red. Premise (2) expresses what Wright has called the tolerance of ‘red’: the application of the predicate tolerates small changes in a decisive parameter (here, hue). Of course, most vague predicates, hence most versions of the sorites, are not observational. For instance, given a series of. (shrink)

This volume analyzes and studies how vagueness occurs and matters as a specific problem in the context of theories that are primarily about something else.

Fallibilists about looks deny that the relation of looking the same as is non-transitive. Regarding familiar examples of coloured patches suggesting that such a relation is non-transitive, they argue that, in fact, indiscriminable adjacent patches may well look different, despite their perceptual indiscriminability: it’s just that we cannot notice the relevant differences in the chromatic appearances of such patches. In this paper, I present an argument that fallibilism about looks requires commitment to an empirically false consequence. To succeed in deflecting (...) putative cases of non-transitivity, fallibilists would have to claim that there can’t be any perceptual limitations of any kind on human chromatic discrimination. But there are good reasons to think such limitations exist. (shrink)

Studies show that there are widespread intrasubjective and intersubjective color variations among normal perceivers. These variations have serious ramifications in the debate about the nature and ontology of color. It is typical to think of the debate about color as a dispute between objectivists and subjectivists. Objectivists hold that colors are perceiver-independent physical properties of objects while subjectivists hold that they are either projections onto external objects or dispositions objects have to look colored. I argue that individual color variations present (...) difficulties, albeit not the same kind, for both objectivism and subjectivism. Lastly, I propose an alternative account that handles such variations nicely. (shrink)

Let's be externalists about perceptual consciousness and think the form of veridical perceptual consciousness includes /seeing this or that mind-independent particular and its colors/. Let's also take internalism seriously, granting that spectral inversion and hallucination can be "phenomenally" the same as normal seeing. Then perceptual consciousness and phenomenality are different, and so we need to say how they are related. It's complicated!<br><br>Phenomenal sameness is (against all odds) /reflective indiscriminability/. I build a "displaced perception" account of reflection on which indiscriminability stems (...) from shared "qualia". Qualia are compatible with direct realism: while they generate an explanatory gap (and colors do not), so does /seeing/; qualia are excluded from perceptual consciousness by its "transparency"; instead, qualia are aspects of thought about the perceived environment. <br><br>The asymmetry between my treatments of color and seeing is grounded in the asymmetry between ignorance and error: while inversion shows that normal subjects are ignorant of the natures of the colors, hallucination shows not that perceivers are ignorant of the nature of seeing but that hallucinators are prone to error about their condition. Past literature has treated inversion and hallucination as on a par: externalists see error in both cases, while internalists see mutual ignorance. My account is so complicated because plausible results require mixing it up. (shrink)

Conscious visual perception can fail in many circumstances. However, little is known about the causes and processes leading to failures of visual awareness. In this study, we introduce a new signal detection measure termed subjective discriminability of invisibility that allows one to distinguish between subjective blindness due to reduction of sensory signals or to lack of attentional access to sensory signals. The SDI is computed based upon subjective confidence in reporting the absence of a target . Using this new measure, (...) we found that target misses were subjectively indistinguishable from physical absence when contrast reduction, backward masking and flash suppression were used, whereas confidence was appropriately modulated when dual task, attentional blink and spatial uncertainty methods were employed. These results show that failure of visual perception can be identified as either a result of perceptual or attentional blindness depending on the circumstances under which visual awareness was impaired. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between perceptual knowledge and discrimination in the light of the so-called ‘relevant alternatives’ intuition. It begins by outlining an intuitive relevant alternatives account of perceptual knowledge which incorporates the insight that there is a close connection between perceptual knowledge and the possession of relevant discriminatory abilities. It is argued, however, that in order to resolve certain problems that face this view, it is essential to recognise an important distinction between favouring and discriminating epistemic support that (...) is often overlooked in the literature. This distinction complicates the story regarding how an alternative becomes relevant, and in doing so weakens the connection between perceptual knowledge and discrimination. The theory that results, however—what I term a ‘two-tiered’ relevant alternatives theory of perceptual knowledge—accommodates many of our intuitions about perceptual knowledge and so avoids the revisionism of some recent proposals in the epistemological literature. (shrink)

According to the Ability Hypothesis, knowing what it is like to have experience E is just having the ability to imagine or recognize or remember having experience E. I examine various versions of the Ability Hypothesis and point out that they all face serious objections. Then I propose a new version that is not vulnerable to these objections: knowing what it is like to experience E is having the ability todiscriminate imagining or having experience E from imagining or having any (...) other experience. I argue that if we replace the ability to imagine or recognize with the ability to discriminate, the Ability Hypothesis can be salvaged. (shrink)

Definitions of phenomenal types (Nelson Goodman’s definition of qualia, Sydney Shoemaker’s phenomenal types, Austen Clark’s physicalist theory of qualia) imply that numerically distinct experiences can be type-identical in some sense. However, Goodman also argues that objects cannot be replicated in respect of continuous and densely ordered types. In that case, how can phenomenal types be defined for sizes, shapes and colours, which appear to be continuously ordered types? Concentrating on size, I will argue for the following points. (§2) We cannot (...) deny the possibility of replication in respect of dense types, because this would imply that particulars have determinable sizes, shapes and colours. (§3) Phenomenal sizes and shapes are determinable types; objective, or super-determinate, sizes and shapes are unknowable. (§4) We can define and know, prior to verification, groupings of objective sizes for which indiscriminability is transitive. (§5) Phenomenal identity has to be defined on the basis of these transitive groupings, because finer-grained criteria (such as Goodman’s) lead to definition of objective identity. The quality space of phenomenal types consists of overlapping but not dense types, and this prevents a collapse of phenomenal types. (shrink)

Most solutions to the sorites reject its major premise, i.e. the quantified conditional . This rejection appears to imply a discrimination between two elements that are supposed to be indiscriminable. Thus, the puzzle of the sorites involves in a fundamental way the notion of indiscriminability. This paper analyzes this relation and formalizes it, in a way that makes the rejection of the major premise more palatable. The intuitive idea is that we consider two elements indiscriminable by default, i.e. unless we (...) know some information that discriminates between them. Specifically, following Rough Set Theory, two elements are defined to be indiscernible if they agree on the vague property in question. Then, a is defined to be indiscriminable from b if a is indiscernible by default from b . That is to say, a is indiscriminable from b if it is consistent to assume that a and b agree on the relevant vague property. (shrink)