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Summary What is the role of perception in providing rational support for beliefs? Can perceptual states or events provide any rational support at all? According to a traditional foundationalism, perceptual states all by themselves were rationally inert, and only introspective beliefs in which the subjects self-ascribes such states played a role in the justifying external-world beliefs. One of the main issues is whether perception can ever provide rational support for external worlds beliefs, without the help of introspective beliefs. If they can, then several further questions arise. Which beliefs do perceptual states provide justification for? What is the relationship between the beliefs that a perceptual state can justify, and the contents of the perceptual state? Are perceptual states ever sufficient to provide justification, or do they need help from other factors?  Which features of the perceptual states are relevant to providing justification? What is the role of concepts in perceptual justification? How is the internal structure of perceptual states related to their rational role?  Does consciousness have any special rational role? What difference does it make for the rational role of perception whether disjunctivism, sense-datum theory, intentionalism, or other theories are correct about the nature of perceptual experience? Are the distinctions between perceptual states, events, and processes important for understanding the rational role of perception?
Key works Two elaborate but classic discussions of perceptual justification are Sellars 1956 and McDowell 1994McDowell 1994 argues against Davidson 1986, who in turn locates perception within coherentist theory that seems to exclude it from playing any rational role.  Pryor 2000 , Huemer 2006, and Campbell 2002 argue for a central role of conscious experience in providing justification. Goldman 1986 lays the basis for reliabilist theories of justification and their application to perception. McDowell 1983 set off discussion of whether hallucinations and non-hallucinations can have the same rational role.
Introductions Siegel & Silins 2015  provides an overview of the topic. The first chapter of McDowell 1994 sets up the problem in terms of an opposition between foundationalism and coherentism. The opening pages of both McDowell 1994 and Gupta 2006 make it seem counterintuitive to deny perceptual states any rational role.
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  1. Bodiless Affect.Ron C. de Weijze - manuscript
    Mind and body have been reunited by the "affective turn" in philosophy and (neuro-) psychology. Yet, for centuries they have been painstakingly kept apart, for a specific reason. Methodologically, to find out about the world, apply justice or follow news, independent confirmation has always been indispensable. As it turns out, it also plays an important role in our personal everyday lives, to stay away from depersonalization- or derealization disorders and mainly to become and stay happy.
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  2. I Feel Your Pain: Acquaintance & the Limits of Empathy.Emad Atiq & Stephen Mathew Duncan - forthcoming - Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind.
    The kind of empathy that is communicated through expressions like “I feel your pain” or “I share your sadness” is important, but peculiar. For it seems to require something perplexing and elusive: sharing another’s experience. It’s not clear how this is possible. We each experience the world from our own point of view, which no one else occupies. It’s also unclear exactly why it is so important that we share others' pains. If you are in pain, then why should it (...)
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  3. Consciousness and its place in epistemology. [REVIEW]Jacob Berger - forthcoming - Philosophical Psychology.
    Although phenomenal consciousness strikes many as quite mysterious, many think that it must also be quite significant. Some have urged, for example, that consciousness is the ground of moral value...
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  4. Reflection, fallibilism, and doublethink.Rhys Borchert - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    A distinctive feature of Juan Comesaña's epistemological account is the possibility of an agent possessing a false proposition as evidence. Comesaña argues that there are a number of theoretical virtues of his account once we accept this possibility, however, one might expect that there are particular vices of his account as well. Littlejohn and Dutant (2021) claim that a reflective agent who accepts Comesaña's view is rationally compelled to update their credences differently than unreflective agents, or else they will be (...)
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  5. Moderatism and Truth.Santiago Echeverri - forthcoming - Canadian Journal of Philosophy.
    According to MODERATISM, perceptual justification requires that one independently takes for granted propositional hinges like <There is an external world>, <I am not a brain in a vat (BIV)>, and so on. This view faces the truth problem: to offer an account of truth for hinges that is not threatened by skepticism. Annalisa Coliva has tried to solve the truth problem by combining the claim that external world propositions have a substantive truth property like correspondence with the claim that hinges (...)
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  6. Seemings and Moore’s Paradox.R. M. Farley - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-22.
    Phenomenal conservatives claim that seemings are sui generis mental states and can thus provide foundational non-doxastic justification for beliefs. Many of their critics deny this, claiming, instead, that seemings can be reductively analyzed in terms of other mental states—either beliefs, inclinations to believe, or beliefs about one’s evidence—that cannot provide foundational non-doxastic justification. In this paper, I argue that no tenable semantic reduction of ‘seems’ can be formulated in terms of the three reductive analyses that have been proposed by critics (...)
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  7. Dogmatism, Seemings, and Non-Deductive Inferential Justification.Dimitria Gatzia & Berit Brogaard - forthcoming - In K. McCain, S. Stapleford & M. Setup (eds.), Seemings: New Arguments, New Angles. Routledge.
    Dogmatism holds that an experience or seeming that p can provide prima facie immediate justification for believing p in virtue of its phenomenology. Dogmatism about perceptual justification has appealed primarily to proponents of representational theories of perceptual experience. Call dogmatism that takes perceptual experience to be representational "representational phenomenal dogmatism." As we show, phenomenal seemings play a crucial role in dogmatism of this kind. Despite its conventional appeal to representational theorists, dogmatism is not by definition committed to any particular view (...)
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  8. Review of Perception: Essays After Frege, by Charles Travis. [REVIEW]James Genone - forthcoming - Mind.
  9. What's Wrong With Testimony? Defending the Epistemic Analogy between Testimony and Perception.Peter Graham - forthcoming - In Jennifer Lackey & Aidan McGlynn (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Social Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    This chapter states the contrast between presumptivism about testimonial warrant (often called anti-reductionism) and strict reductionism (associated with Hume) about testimonial warrant. Presumptivism sees an analogy with modest foundationalism about perceptual warrant. Strict reductionism denies this analogy. Two theoretical frameworks for these positions are introduced to better formulate the most popular version of persumptivism, a competence reliabilist account. Seven arguments against presumptivism are then stated and critiqued: (1) The argument from reliability; (2) The argument from reasons; (3) the argument from (...)
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  10. The New Evil Demon Problem at 40.Peter J. Graham - forthcoming - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
  11. Sensory Modality and Perceptual Reasons.Alex Grzankowski & Mark Schroeder - forthcoming - Episteme:1-7.
    Perception can provide us with a privileged source of evidence about the external world – evidence that makes it rational to believe things about the world. In Reasons First, Mark Schroeder offers a new view on how perception does so. The central motivation behind Schroeder’s account is to offer an answer to what evidence perception equips us with according to which it is what he calls world-implicating but non-factive, and thereby to glean some of the key advantages of both externalism (...)
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  12. Not So Phenomenal!Maria Lasonen-Aarnio & John Hawthorne - forthcoming - The Philosophical Review.
    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 (...)
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  13. The Hard Problem of Access for Epistemological Disjunctivism.Grad Paweł - forthcoming - Episteme:1-20.
    In this paper, I identify the hard problem of access for epistemological disjunctivism (ED): given that perceptual experience E is opaque with respect to its own epistemic properties, subject S is not in a position to know epistemic proposition (i) (that E is factive with respect to empirical proposition p) just by having E and/or reflecting on E. This is the case even if (i) is true. I first motivate the hard problem of access (Section 2) and then reconstruct and (...)
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  14. In touch with the facts: epistemological disjunctivism and the rationalisation of belief.Edgar Phillips - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    The idea of believing for a good reason has both normative and psychological content. How are these related? Recently, a number of authors have defended a ‘disjunctivist’ view of rationalisation, on which a good reason can make a subject’s responses to it intelligible in a way that mere ‘apparent reasons’ cannot. However, little has been said about the possible epistemological significance of this view or its relationship to more familiar forms of disjunctivism in the philosophy of perception. This paper examines (...)
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  15. Disjunctivism and Scepticism.Duncan Pritchard & Chris Ranalli - forthcoming - In Baron Reed & Diego E. Machuca (eds.), Skepticism: From Antiquity to the Present. Bloomsbury Academic.
    An overview of the import of disjunctivism to the problem of radical scepticism is offered. In particular, the disjunctivist account of perceptual experience is set out, along with the manner in which it intersects with related positions such as naïve realism and intentionalism, and it is shown how this account can be used to a motivate an anti-sceptical proposal. In addition, a variety of disjunctivism known as epistemological disjunctivism is described, and it is explained how this proposal offers a further (...)
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  16. Experience and Defeat.Nicholas Silins - forthcoming - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
  17. Undercutting Defeat and Edgington's Burglar.Scott Sturgeon - forthcoming - In Lee Walters John Hawthorne (ed.), Conditionals, Probability & Paradox: themes from the Philosophy of Dorothy Edgington.
    This paper does four things. First it lays out an orthodox position on reasons and defeaters. Then it argues that the position just laid out is mistaken about “undercutting” defeaters. Then the paper explains an unpublished thought experiment by Dorothy Edgington. And then it uses that thought experiment to motivate a new approach to undercutting defeaters.
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  18. The epistemic import of phenomenal consciousness.Paweł Jakub Zięba - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy:1-37.
    This paper controverts the ability of intentionalism about perception to account for unique epistemic significance of phenomenal consciousness. More specifically, the intentionalist cannot explain the latter without denying two well-founded claims: the transparency of experience, and the possibility of unconscious perception. If they are true, intentionality of perception entails that phenomenal consciousness has no special epistemic role to play. Although some intentionalists are ready to bite this bullet, by doing so they effectively undermine one of the standard motivations of their (...)
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  19. On the Epistemic Significance of Perceptual Structure.Dominic Alford-Duguid - 2023 - Philosophical Quarterly 74 (1):1-23.
    Our awareness of the boundedness of the spatial sensory field—a paradigmatic structural feature of visual experience—possesses a distinctive epistemic role. Properly understood, this result undermines a widely assumed picture of how visual experience permits us to learn about the world. This paper defends an alternative picture in which visual experience provides at least two kinds of non-inferential justification for beliefs about the external world. Accommodating this justification in turn requires recognising a new way for visual experience to encode information about (...)
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  20. Physicists Don't Yet Understand Color Qualities (2nd edition).Brent Allsop - 2023 - Journal of Neuralphilosophy 2 (1).
    You can demonstrate a subjective quality like redness is different from red light. If you add a device that converts a red signal into a green one, between the retina and the optic nerve, the strawberry will seem green. It’s not about light hitting the retina, it’s about how the signal is processed. In this case, the greenness must be a quality of our conscious knowledge of the strawberry, not of the red light landing on the retina. If you use (...)
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  21. Learning from experience and conditionalization.Peter Brössel - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (9):2797-2823.
    Bayesianism can be characterized as the following twofold position: (i) rational credences obey the probability calculus; (ii) rational learning, i.e., the updating of credences, is regulated by some form of conditionalization. While the formal aspect of various forms of conditionalization has been explored in detail, the philosophical application to learning from experience is still deeply problematic. Some philosophers have proposed to revise the epistemology of perception; others have provided new formal accounts of conditionalization that are more in line with how (...)
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  22. Skepticism Is Wrong for General Reasons.Elijah Chudnoff - 2023 - International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 13 (2):95-104.
    According to Michael Bergmann’s “intuitionist particularism,” our position with respect to skeptical arguments is much the same as it was with respect to Zeno’s paradoxes of motion prior to our developing sophisticated theories of the continuum. We observed ourselves move, and that closed the case in favor of the ability to move, even if we had no general theory about that ability. We observe ourselves form justified beliefs, and that closes the case in favor of the ability to form justified (...)
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  23. Veridical Perceptual Seemings.Elijah Chudnoff - 2023 - In Kevin McCain, Scott Stapleford & Matthias Steup (eds.), Seemings: New Arguments, New Angles. Routledge.
    What is the epistemic significance of taking a veridical perceptual experience at face value? To first approximations, the Minimal View says that it is true belief, and the Maximal View says that it is knowledge. I sympathetically explore the prospects of the Maximal View.
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  24. A‐Rational Epistemological Disjunctivism.Santiago Echeverri - 2023 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 106 (3):692-719.
    According to epistemological disjunctivism (ED), in paradigmatic cases of perceptual knowledge, a subject, S, has perceptual knowledge that p in virtue of being in possession of reasons for her belief that p which are both factive and reflectively accessible to S. It has been argued that ED is better placed than both knowledge internalism and knowledge externalism to undercut underdetermination-based skepticism. I identify several principles that must be true if ED is to be uniquely placed to attain this goal. After (...)
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  25. Radical Skepticism and Epistemic Intuition by Michael Bergmann. [REVIEW]Charles Goldhaber - 2023 - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
    Michael Bergmann's Radical Skepticism and Epistemic Intuition develops a response to radical skepticism inspired by commonsense philosophers, such as Reid and Moore. Bergmann argues against radical skepticism on the grounds of its conflicting with strongly-held "epistemic intuitions" about the "epistemic value or goodness” of our particular perceptual, recollective, introspective and a priori beliefs. I press concerns about whether Bergmann's "intuitionist particularist" response can diagnose the source of skepticism, and argue that his methodology turns out to itself be strikingly skeptical.
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  26. Does Knowledge Entail Justification?Peter J. Graham - 2023 - Journal of Philosophical Research 48:201-211.
    Robert Audi’s Seeing, Knowing, and Doing argues that knowledge does not entail justification, given a broadly externalist conception of knowledge and an access internalist conception of justification, where justification requires the ability to cite one’s grounds or reasons. On this view, animals and small children can have knowledge while lacking justification. About cases like these and others, Audi concludes that knowledge does not entail justification. But the access internalist sense of “justification” is but one of at least two ordinary senses (...)
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  27. Against the very idea of a perceptual belief.Grace Helton & Bence Nanay - 2023 - Analytic Philosophy 64 (2):93-105.
    The aim of this paper is to argue that there is no unproblematic way of delineating perceptual beliefs from non-perceptual beliefs. The concept of perceptual belief is one of the central concepts not only of philosophy of perception but also of epistemology in a broad foundationalist tradition. Philosophers of perception talk about perceptual belief as the interface between perception and cognition and foundationalist epistemologists understand perceptual justification as a relation between perceptual states and perceptual beliefs. We consider three ways of (...)
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  28. Reasoning and Perceptual Foundationalism.Zoe Jenkin - 2023 - Journal of Philosophical Research 48:191-200.
    This commentary considers Audi’s treatment of four fundamental topics in the epistemology of perception: inference, the basing relation, the metaphysics of reasons and grounds, and the relationship between knowledge and justification.
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  29. The Structure of Phenomenal Justification.Uriah Kriegel - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (2):282-297.
    An increasing number of epistemologists defend the notion that some perceptual experiences can immediately justify some beliefs and do so in virtue of (some of) their phenomenal properties. But this view, which we may call phenomenal dogmatism, is also the target of various objections. Here I want to consider an objection that may be put as follows: what is so special about perceptual phenomenology that only it can immediately justify beliefs, while other kinds of phenomenology—including quite similar ones—remain ‘epistemically inert’? (...)
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  30. Nonsubjectivism About How Things Seem.Matthew Mcgrath - 2023 - In Kevin McCain, Scott Stapleford & Matthias Step (eds.), Seemings: New Arguments, New Angles.
    We regularly appeal to claims of the form it seems that p in defense of a claim p. When we do so, we typically take it seems that p to be a reason for thinking that p but also a reason that “gets at” a relevant body of facts and its support for p. Other things being equal, we should want to vindicate our ordinary beliefs on this matter. We should want to vindicate the claim that facts about things seeming (...)
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  31. Précis of Thinking and Perceiving.Dustin Stokes - 2023 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 30 (3):181-191.
  32. Cognitive penetration and implicit cognition.Lucas Battich & Ophelia Deroy - 2022 - In J. Robert Thompson (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Implicit Cognition. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 144-152.
    Cognitive states, such as beliefs, desires and intentions, may influence how we perceive people and objects. If this is the case, are those influences worse when they occur implicitly rather than explicitly? Here we show that cognitive penetration in perception generally involves an implicit component. First, the process of influence is implicit, making us unaware that our perception is misrepresenting the world. This lack of awareness is the source of the epistemic threat raised by cognitive penetration. Second, the influencing state (...)
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  33. Why (getting) the phenomenology of recognition (right) matters for epistemology.Hagit Benbaji - 2022 - Philosophical Explorations 25 (2):232-250.
    Are kind properties presented to us in visual experience? I propose an account of kind recognition that incorporates two conflicting intuitions: Kind properties a...
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  34. Perceptual learning and reasons‐responsiveness.Zoe Jenkin - 2022 - Noûs 57 (2):481-508.
    Perceptual experiences are not immediately responsive to reasons. You see a stick submerged in a glass of water as bent no matter how much you know about light refraction. Due to this isolation from reasons, perception is traditionally considered outside the scope of epistemic evaluability as justified or unjustified. Is perception really as independent from reasons as visual illusions make it out to be? I argue no, drawing on psychological evidence from perceptual learning. The flexibility of perceptual learning is a (...)
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  35. Crossmodal Basing.Zoe Jenkin - 2022 - Mind 131 (524):1163-1194.
    What kinds of mental states can be based on epistemic reasons? The standard answer is only beliefs. I argue that perceptual states can also be based on reasons, as the result of crossmodal interactions. A perceptual state from one modality can provide a reason on which an experience in another modality is based. My argument identifies key markers of the basing relation and locates them in the crossmodal Marimba Illusion (Schutz & Kubovy 2009). The subject’s auditory experience of musical tone (...)
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  36. Swami Vivekananda's Vedāntic Cosmopolitanism.Swami Medhananda - 2022 - Oxford University Press.
    "Swami Vivekananda, the nineteenth-century Hindu monk who introduced Vedåanta to the West, is undoubtedly one of modern India's most influential philosophers. Unfortunately, his philosophy has too often been interpreted through reductive hermeneutic lenses. Typically, scholars have viewed him either as a modern-day exponent of âSaçnkara's Advaita Vedåanta or as a "Neo-Vedåantin" influenced more by Western ideas than indigenous Indian traditions. In Swami Vivekananda's Vedåantic Cosmopolitanism, Swami Medhananda rejects both of these prevailing approaches to offer a new interpretation of Vivekananda's philosophy, (...)
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  37. Perceiving as knowing in the predictive mind.Daniel Munro - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (4):1177-1203.
    On an ‘internalist’ picture, knowledge isn’t necessary for understanding the nature of perception and perceptual experience. This contrasts with the ‘knowledge first’ picture, according to which it’s essential to the nature of successful perceiving as a mental state that it’s a way of knowing. It’s often thought that naturalistic theorizing about the mind should adopt the internalist picture. However, I argue that a powerful, recently prominent framework for scientific study of the mind, ‘predictive processing,’ instead supports the knowledge first picture. (...)
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  38. Aesthetic perception and the puzzle of training.Madeleine Ransom - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2):1-25.
    While the view that we perceive aesthetic properties may seem intuitive, it has received little in the way of explicit defence. It also gives rise to a puzzle. The first strand of this puzzle is that we often cannot perceive aesthetic properties of artworks without training, yet much aesthetic training involves the acquisition of knowledge, such as when an artwork was made, and by whom. How, if at all, can this knowledge affect our perception of an artwork’s aesthetic properties? The (...)
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  39. Religiöse Erfahrung: Inhalt, epistemische Signifikanz und Expertise.Eva Schmidt - 2022 - In Martin Breul & Klaus Viertbauer (eds.), Der Glaube und seine Gründe: Beiträge zur Religiösen Epistemologie. Tübingen, Deutschland: pp. 11-30.
    This article investigates whether religious experience can be conceived in such a way that the perceiver's religious expertise (via cognitive penetration or perceptual learning) contributes to the justificatory power of the experience. It also considers what kind of content religious experience would have to have to be able to justify standard types of religious beliefs. It argues that, against first impressions, religious expertise cannot supplement perceptual justification. At the same time, to the extent that religious experience has singular contents or (...)
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  40. The Limited Phenomenal Infallibility Thesis.Christopher Stratman - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    It may be true that we are epistemically in the dark about various things. Does this fact ground the truth of fallibilism? No. Still, even the most zealous skeptic will probably grant that it is not clear that one can be incognizant of their own occurrent phenomenal conscious mental goings-on. Even so, this does not entail infallibilism. Philosophers who argue that occurrent conscious experiences play an important epistemic role in the justification of introspective knowledge assume that there are occurrent beliefs. (...)
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  41. The experience, representational content, and epistemology of perceptual and intellectual impressions.Ida Toivonen - 2022 - Metascience 32 (1):67-70.
  42. Perceptual warrant and internal access.John Zeimbekis - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 180 (1):191-206.
    Perceptual beliefs that categorize objects can be justified by demonstrating basic properties (eg shapes) of the objects. In these justifications, perceptual justifiers have different contents to the beliefs they justify. I argue that the justifications are not inferential. Subjects are unlikely to have bodies of beliefs adequate to inferentially justify the beliefs they actually form on the strength of their object recognition abilities, especially when recognition depends on stimulus-dependent retrieval of visual memories. Instead, I argue, the justifications exploit a partial (...)
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  43. Motivation as an epistemic ground.Peter Antich - 2021 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 21 (4):775-790.
    In several papers, Mark Wrathall argued that French phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, identifies a sui generis type of grounding, one not reducible to reason or natural causality. Following the Phenomenological tradition, Merleau-Ponty called this form of grounding “motivation,” and described it as the way in which one phenomenon spontaneously gives rise to another through its sense. While Wrathall’s suggestion has been taken up in the practical domain, its epistemic import has still not been fully explored. I would like to take up (...)
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  44. Motivation and the Primacy of Perception: Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Knowledge.Peter Antich - 2021 - Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.
    In "Motivation and the Primacy of Perception," I offer an interpretation and defense of Merleau-Ponty's thesis of the "primacy of perception," namely, that knowledge is ultimately founded in perceptual experience. I use Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological conception of "motivation" as an interpretative key. As I show, motivation in this sense amounts to a novel form of epistemic grounding, one which upends the classical dichotomy between reason and natural causality, justification and explanation. The purpose of my book is to show how this novel (...)
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  45. The Myth of Stochastic Infallibilism.Adam Michael Bricker - 2021 - Episteme 18 (4):523-538.
    There is a widespread attitude in epistemology that, if you know on the basis of perception, then you couldn't have been wrong as a matter of chance. Despite the apparent intuitive plausibility of this attitude, which I'll refer to here as “stochastic infallibilism”, it fundamentally misunderstands the way that human perceptual systems actually work. Perhaps the most important lesson of signal detection theory (SDT) is that our percepts are inherently subject to random error, and here I'll highlight some key empirical (...)
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  46. How Judgments of Visual Resemblance are Induced by Visual Experience.Alon Chasid & Alik Pelman - 2021 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 28 (11-12):54-76.
    Judgments of visual resemblance (‘A looks like B’), unlike other judgments of resemblance, are often induced directly by visual experience. What is the nature of this experience? We argue that the visual experience that prompts a subject looking at A to judge that A looks like B is a visual experience of B. After elucidating this thesis, we defend it, using the ‘phenomenal contrast’ method. Comparing our account to competing accounts, we show that the phenomenal contrast between a visual experience (...)
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  47. Cognitive penetration and informational encapsulation: Have we been failing the module?Sam Clarke - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (8):2599-2620.
    Jerry Fodor deemed informational encapsulation ‘the essence’ of a system’s modularity and argued that human perceptual processing comprises modular systems, thus construed. Nowadays, his conclusion is widely challenged. Often, this is because experimental work is seen to somehow demonstrate the cognitive penetrability of perceptual processing, where this is assumed to conflict with the informational encapsulation of perceptual systems. Here, I deny the conflict, proposing that cognitive penetration need not have any straightforward bearing on the conjecture that perceptual processing is composed (...)
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  48. Knowledge and Sensory Knowledge in Hume's Treatise.Graham Clay - 2021 - Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy 10:195-229.
    I argue that the Hume of the Treatise maintains an account of knowledge according to which (i) every instance of knowledge must be an immediately present perception (i.e., an impression or an idea); (ii) an object of this perception must be a token of a knowable relation; (iii) this token knowable relation must have parts of the instance of knowledge as relata (i.e., the same perception that has it as an object); and any perception that satisfies (i)-(iii) is an instance (...)
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  49. An epistemological problem for minimalist views about composition.Dean Da Vee - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):9649-9668.
    Some philosophers accept what I call minimalist views about composition. They either deny that composition ever occurs, or they only allow that composition occurs when some things are taken up into a life. While minimalists often take their views to be somewhat revisionary, they usually want to distinguish their views from truly radical views such as the view that there is no external world at all. They often do this by noting that, although they don’t believe that there are tables, (...)
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  50. Perception as a Multi-Stage Process: A Reidian Account.Marina Folescu - 2021 - Journal of Scottish Philosophy 19 (1):57-74.
    The starting point of this paper is Thomas Reid's anti-skepticism: our knowledge of the external world is justified. The justificatory process, in his view, starts with and relies upon one of the main faculties of the human mind: perception. Reid's theory of perception has been thoroughly studied, but there are some missing links in the explanatory chain offered by the secondary literature. In particular, I will argue that we do not have a complete picture of the mechanism of perception of (...)
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