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Jack C. Lyons [28]Jack Lyons [17]Jack Coady Lyons [1]
  1. Perception and Basic Beliefs: Zombies, Modules and the Problem of the External World.Jack C. Lyons - 2009 - New York, US: Oxford University Press. Edited by Jack Lyons.
    This book offers solutions to two persistent and I believe closely related problems in epistemology. The first problem is that of drawing a principled distinction between perception and inference: what is the difference between seeing that something is the case and merely believing it on the basis of what we do see? The second problem is that of specifying which beliefs are epistemologically basic (i.e., directly, or noninferentially, justified) and which are not. I argue that what makes a belief a (...)
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  2. Circularity, reliability, and the cognitive penetrability of perception.Jack Lyons - 2011 - Philosophical Issues 21 (1):289-311.
    Is perception cognitively penetrable, and what are the epistemological consequences if it is? I address the latter of these two questions, partly by reference to recent work by Athanassios Raftopoulos and Susanna Seigel. Against the usual, circularity, readings of cognitive penetrability, I argue that cognitive penetration can be epistemically virtuous, when---and only when---it increases the reliability of perception.
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  3. Algorithm and Parameters: Solving the Generality Problem for Reliabilism.Jack C. Lyons - 2019 - Philosophical Review 128 (4):463-509.
    The paper offers a solution to the generality problem for a reliabilist epistemology, by developing an “algorithm and parameters” scheme for type-individuating cognitive processes. Algorithms are detailed procedures for mapping inputs to outputs. Parameters are psychological variables that systematically affect processing. The relevant process type for a given token is given by the complete algorithmic characterization of the token, along with the values of all the causally relevant parameters. The typing that results is far removed from the typings of folk (...)
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  4. The Structure of Defeat: Pollock's Evidentialism, Lackey's Framework, and Prospects for Reliabilism.Peter J. Graham & Jack C. Lyons - 2021 - In Jessica Brown & Mona Simion (eds.), Reasons, Justification, and Defeat. Oxford Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Epistemic defeat is standardly understood in either evidentialist or responsibilist terms. The seminal treatment of defeat is an evidentialist one, due to John Pollock, who famously distinguishes between undercutting and rebutting defeaters. More recently, an orthogonal distinction due to Jennifer Lackey has become widely endorsed, between so-called doxastic (or psychological) and normative defeaters. We think that neither doxastic nor normative defeaters, as Lackey understands them, exist. Both of Lackey’s categories of defeat derive from implausible assumptions about epistemic responsibility. Although Pollock’s (...)
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  5. Should Reliabilists Be Worried About Demon Worlds?Jack C. Lyons - 2012 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 86 (1):1-40.
    The New Evil Demon Problem is supposed to show that straightforward versions of reliabilism are false: reliability is not necessary for justification after all. I argue that it does no such thing. The reliabilist can count a number of beliefs as justified even in demon worlds, others as unjustified but having positive epistemic status nonetheless. The remaining beliefs---primarily perceptual beliefs---are not, on further reflection, intuitively justified after all. The reliabilist is right to count these beliefs as unjustified in demon worlds, (...)
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  6. Inferentialism and cognitive penetration of perception.Jack C. Lyons - 2016 - Episteme 13 (1):1-28.
    Cognitive penetration of perception is the idea that what we see is influenced by such states as beliefs, expectations, and so on. A perceptual belief that results from cognitive penetration may be less justified than a nonpenetrated one. Inferentialism is a kind of internalist view that tries to account for this by claiming that some experiences are epistemically evaluable, on the basis of why the perceiver has that experience, and the familiar canons of good inference provide the appropriate standards by (...)
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  7. Unconscious Evidence.Jack Lyons - 2016 - Philosophical Issues 26 (1):243-262.
    Can beliefs that are not consciously formulated serve as part of an agent's evidence for other beliefs? A common view says no, any belief that is psychologically immediate is also epistemically immediate. I argue that some unconscious beliefs can serve as evidence, but other unconscious beliefs cannot. Person-level beliefs can serve as evidence, but subpersonal beliefs cannot. I try to clarify the nature of the personal/subpersonal distinction and to show how my proposal illuminates various epistemological problems and provides a principled (...)
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  8. Perceptual belief and nonexperiential looks.Jack Lyons - 2005 - Philosophical Perspectives 19 (1):237-256.
    The “looks” of things are frequently invoked (a) to account for the epistemic status of perceptual beliefs and (b) to distinguish perceptual from inferential beliefs. ‘Looks’ for these purposes is normally understood in terms of a perceptual experience and its phenomenal character. Here I argue that there is also a nonexperiential sense of ‘looks’—one that relates to cognitive architecture, rather than phenomenology—and that this nonexperiential sense can do the work of (a) and (b).
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  9. Epistemological Problems of Perception.Jack Lyons - 2016 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    An introductory overview of the main issues in the epistemology of perception.
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  10. Testimony, induction and folk psychology.Jack Lyons - 1997 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 75 (2):163 – 178.
    An influential argument for anti-reductionism about testimony, due to CAJ Coady, fails, because it assumes that an inductive global defense of testimony would proceed along effectively behaviorist lines. If we take seriously our wealth of non-testimonially justified folk psychological beliefs, the prospects for inductivism and reductionism look much better.
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  11. Experiential evidence?Jack C. Lyons - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 173 (4):1053-1079.
    Much of the intuitive appeal of evidentialism results from conflating two importantly different conceptions of evidence. This is most clear in the case of perceptual justification, where experience is able to provide evidence in one sense of the term, although not in the sense that the evidentialist requires. I argue this, in part, by relying on a reading of the Sellarsian dilemma that differs from the version standardly encountered in contemporary epistemology, one that is aimed initially at the epistemology of (...)
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  12. Perception and Intuition of Evaluative Properties.Jack C. Lyons - 2018 - In Anna Bergqvist & Robert Cowan (eds.), Evaluative Perception. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
    Outside of philosophy, ‘intuition’ means something like ‘knowing without knowing how you know’. Intuition in this broad sense is an important epistemological category. I distinguish intuition from perception and perception from perceptual experience, in order to discuss the distinctive psychological and epistemological status of evaluative property attributions. Although it is doubtful that we perceptually experience many evaluative properties and also somewhat unlikely that we perceive many evaluative properties, it is highly plausible that we intuit many instances of evaluative properties as (...)
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  13. (1 other version)Unencapsulated Modules and Perceptual Judgment.Jack C. Lyons - 2015 - In A. Raftopoulos J. Zeimbekis (ed.), Cognitive Penetrability. Oxford University Press. pp. 103-122.
    To what extent are cognitive capacities, especially perceptual capacities, informationally encapsulated and to what extent are they cognitively penetrable? And why does this matter? Two reasons we care about encapsulation/penetrability are: (a) encapsulation is sometimes held to be definitional of modularity, and (b) penetrability has epistemological implications independent of modularity. I argue that modularity does not require encapsulation; that modularity may have epistemological implications independently of encapsulation; and that the epistemological implications of the cognitive penetrability of perception are messier than (...)
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  14. What we talk about when we talk about epistemic justification.Jack C. Lyons - 2016 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 59 (7-8):867-888.
    Stewart Cohen argues that much contemporary epistemological theorizing is hampered by the fact that ‘epistemic justification’ is a term of art and one that is never given any serious explication in a non-tendentious, theory-neutral way. He suggests that epistemologists are therefore better off theorizing in terms of rationality, rather than in terms of ‘epistemic justification’. Against this, I argue that even if the term ‘epistemic justification’ is not broadly known, the concept it picks out is quite familiar, and partly because (...)
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  15. (1 other version)Goldman on Evidence and Reliability.Jack C. Lyons - 2016 - In Hilary Kornblith & Brian McLaughlin (eds.), Goldman and his Critics. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
    Goldman, though still a reliabilist, has made some recent concessions to evidentialist epistemologies. I agree that reliabilism is most plausible when it incorporates certain evidentialist elements, but I try to minimize the evidentialist component. I argue that fewer beliefs require evidence than Goldman thinks, that Goldman should construe evidential fit in process reliabilist terms, rather than the way he does, and that this process reliabilist understanding of evidence illuminates such important epistemological concepts as propositional justification, ex ante justification, and defeat.
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  16. The Disunity of Perception: An Introduction.Indrek Reiland & Jack Lyons - 2015 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 96 (4):443-445.
  17. Evidence, experience, and externalism.Jack C. Lyons - 2008 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 86 (3):461 – 479.
    The Sellarsian dilemma is a famous argument that attempts to show that nondoxastic experiential states cannot confer justification on basic beliefs. The usual conclusion of the Sellarsian dilemma is a coherentist epistemology, and the usual response to the dilemma is to find it quite unconvincing. By distinguishing between two importantly different justification relations (evidential and nonevidential), I hope to show that the Sellarsian dilemma, or something like it, does offer a powerful argument against standard nondoxastic foundationalist theories. But this reconceived (...)
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  18. Clades, Capgras, and Perceptual Kinds.Jack Lyons - 2005 - Philosophical Topics 33 (1):185-206.
    I defend a moderate (neither extremely conservative nor extremely liberal) view about the contents of perception. I develop an account of perceptual kinds as perceptual similarity classes, which are convex regions in similarity space. Different perceivers will enjoy different perceptual kinds. I argue that for any property P, a perceptual state of O can represent something as P only if P is coextensive with some perceptual kind for O. 'Dog' and 'chair' will be perceptual kinds for most normal people, 'blackpool (...)
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  19. Two dogmas of empirical justification.Jack C. Lyons - 2020 - Philosophical Issues 30 (1):221-237.
    Nearly everyone agrees that perception gives us justification and knowledge, and a great number of epistemologists endorse a particular two-part view about how this happens. The view is that perceptual beliefs get their justification from perceptual experiences, and that they do so by being based on them. Despite the ubiquity of these two views, I think that neither has very much going for it; on the contrary, there’s good reason not to believe either one of them.
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  20.  80
    Carving the mind at its (not necessarily modular) joints.Jack C. Lyons - 2001 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 52 (2):277-302.
    The cognitive neuropsychological understanding of a cognitive system is roughly that of a ‘mental organ’, which is independent of other systems, specializes in some cognitive task, and exhibits a certain kind of internal cohesiveness. This is all quite vague, and I try to make it more precise. A more precise understanding of cognitive systems will make it possible to articulate in some detail an alternative to the Fodorian doctrine of modularity (since not all cognitive systems are modules), but it will (...)
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  21. In defense of epiphenomenalism.Jack C. Lyons - 2006 - Philosophical Psychology 19 (6):76-794.
    Recent worries about possible epiphenomenalist consequences of nonreductive materialism are misplaced, not, as many have argued, because nonreductive materialism does not have epiphenomenalist implications but because the epiphenomenalist implications are actually virtues of the theory, rather than vices. It is only by showing how certain kinds of mental properties are causally impotent that cognitive scientific explanations of mentality as we know them are possible.
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  22.  20
    Contents of the approximate number system.Jack C. Lyons - 2021 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 44.
    Clarke and Beck argue that the approximate number system represents rational numbers, like 1/3 or 3.5. I think this claim is not supported by the evidence. Rather, I argue, ANS should be interpreted as representing natural numbers and ratios among them; and we should view the contents of these representations are genuinely approximate.
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  23. Response to critics.Jack Lyons - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 153 (3):477-488.
    Response to Horgan, Goldman, and Graham. Part of a book symposium on my _Perception and Basic Beliefs_.
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  24. The New Critical Thinking: An Empirically Informed Introduction (2nd edition).Jack C. Lyons & Barry Ward - 2024 - New York: Routledge.
    This innovative text is psychologically informed, both in its diagnosis of inferential errors, and in teaching students how to watch out for and work around their natural intellectual blind spots. It also incorporates insights from epistemology and philosophy of science that are indispensable for learning how to evaluate premises. The result is a hands-on primer for real world critical thinking. The authors bring a fresh approach to the traditional challenges of a critical thinking course: effectively explaining the nature of validity, (...)
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  25. The cognitive impenetrability of early vision: What’s the claim?Jack Lyons - 2020 - Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia 11 (3):372-384.
    Raftopoulos’s most recent book argues, among other things, for the cognitive impenetrability of early vision. Before we can assess any such claims, we need to know what’s meant by “early vision” and by “cognitive penetration”. In this contribution to this book symposium, I explore several different things that one might mean – indeed, that Raftopoulos might mean – by these terms. I argue that whatever criterion we choose for delineating early vision, we need a single criterion, not a mishmash of (...)
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  26. Precis of Perception and Basic Beliefs.Jack Lyons - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 153 (3):443 - 446.
    Part of a book symposium with Terry Horgan, Alvin Goldman, and Peter Graham.
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  27.  57
    The epistemological import of morphological content.Jack C. Lyons - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 169 (3):537-547.
    Morphological content (MC) is content that is implicit in the standing structure of the cognitive system. Henderson and Horgan claim that MC plays a distinctive epistemological role unrecognized by traditional epistemic theories. I consider the possibilities that MC plays this role either in central cognition or in peripheral modules. I argue that the peripheral MC does not play an interesting epistemological role and that the central MC is already recognized by traditional theories.
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  28. General Rules and the Justification of Probable Belief in Hume’s Treatise.Jack C. Lyons - 2001 - Hume Studies 27 (2):247-278.
    An examination of the role played by general rules in Hume's positive (nonskeptical) epistemology. General rules for Hume are roughly just general beliefs. The difference between justified and unjustified belief is a matter of the influence of good versus bad general rules, the good general rules being the "extensive" and "constant" ones.
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  29. “Methods, Processes, and Knowledge”.Jack Lyons - 2023 - In Luis R. G. Oliveira (ed.), Externalism about Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Methods have been a controversial element in theories of knowledge for the last 40 years. Recent developments in theories of justification, concerning the identification and individuation of belief-forming processes, can shed new light on methods, solving some longstanding problems in the theory of knowledge. We needn’t and shouldn’t shy away from methods; rather, methods, construed as psychological processes of belief-formation, need to play a central role in any credible theory of knowledge.
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  30. Representational analyticity.Jack C. Lyons - 2005 - Mind and Language 20 (4):392–422.
    The traditional understanding of analyticity in terms of concept containment is revisited, but with a concept explicitly understood as a certain kind of mental representation and containment being read correspondingly literally. The resulting conception of analyticity avoids much of the vagueness associated with attempts to explicate analyticity in terms of synonymy by moving the locus of discussion from the philosophy of language to the philosophy of mind. The account provided here illustrates some interesting features of representations and explains, at least (...)
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  31.  22
    Factivity, hallucination, and justification.Jack C. Lyons - 2024 - Synthese 203 (5):1-29.
    Veridically perceiving puts us in a better epistemic position than, say, hallucinating does, at least in that veridical perception affords knowledge of our environment in a way that hallucination does not. But is there any _further_ epistemic advantage? Some authors have recently argued that veridical perception provides a superior epistemic benefit over hallucination not just concerning knowledge, but concerning justification as well. This contrasts with a traditional view according to which experience provides justification irrespective of whether it’s veridical or hallucinatory. (...)
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  32.  78
    Lesion studies, spared performance, and cognitive systems.Jack C. Lyons - 2003 - Cortex 39 (1):145-7.
    A short discussion piece arguing that the neuropsychological phenomenon of double dissociations is most revealing of underlying cognitive architecture because of the capacities that are spared, more than the capacities that are lost.
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  33.  24
    Hill on perceptual contents, Thouless properties, and representational pluralism.Jack C. Lyons - 2024 - Mind and Language 39 (1):96-101.
    Part of a symposium on Christopher Hill's book, Perceptual experience. Hill argues that perceptual experiences typically represent objects as having exotic properties that he calls Thouless properties. This and his representational pluralism allow him to attribute less perceptual error than the view that experiences represent simple relational properties (only). However, I think it is plausible that perceptual systems do make these sorts of errors, which although pervasive and systematic, are relatively subtle and perfectly explicable. I also express some concerns about (...)
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  34. Sosa on reflective knowledge and Knowing Full Well.Jack Lyons - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 166 (3):609-616.
    Part of a book symposium on Ernest Sosa's Knowing Full Well. An important feature of Sosa's epistemology is his distinction between animal knowledge and reflective knowledge. What exactly is reflective knowledge, and how is it superior to animal knowledge? Here I try to get clearer on what Sosa might mean by reflective knowledge and what epistemic role it is supposed to play.
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  35. Perception and virtue reliabilism.Jack C. Lyons - 2009 - Acta Analytica 24 (4):249-261.
    In some recent work, Ernest Sosa rejects the “perceptual model” of rational intuition, according to which intuitions (beliefs formed by intuition) are justified by standing in the appropriate relation to a nondoxastic intellectual experience (a seeming-true, or the like), in much the way that perceptual beliefs are often held to be justified by an appropriate relation to nondoxastic sense experiential states. By extending some of Sosa’s arguments and adding a few of my own, I argue that Sosa is right to (...)
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  36.  40
    Three grades of iconicity in perception.Jack C. Lyons - 2022 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 1 (2):1-26.
    Perceptual representations are sometimes said to be iconic, or picture-like. But what does this mean, and is it true? I suggest that the most fruitful way to understand iconicity is in terms of similarity, but there are three importantly different grades of similarity that that might hold between perceptual representations and their objects, and these should be distinguished. It is implausible that all perceptual representations achieve even the weakest grade of iconicity, but I speculatively suggest a “Kantian” view, whereby all (...)
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  37.  57
    Cognitive diversity and the contingency of evidence.Jack C. Lyons - 2022 - Synthese 200 (3):1-20.
    Many epistemologists endorse a view I call “evidence essentialism:” if e is evidence of h, for some agent at some time, then necessarily, e is evidence of h, for any agent at any time. I argue that such a view is only plausible if we ignore cognitive diversity among epistemic agents, i.e., the fact that different agents have different—sometimes radically different—cognitive skills, abilities, and proclivities. Instead, cognitive diversity shows that evidential relations are contingent and relative to cognizers. This is especially (...)
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  38.  33
    Comments on Henry Jackman's "Transparency, Responsibility, and Self-Knowledge".Jack Lyons - 2009 - Southwest Philosophy Review 25 (2):41-44.
  39.  9
    Message from the New Editor.Jack Lyons - 2016 - Philosophical Topics 44 (2):3-3.
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  40. Critical Notice: Seemings and Justification, ed. Chris Tucker. [REVIEW]Jack Lyons - 2014 - Analysis 75 (1):153-164.
    A review of Chris Tucker's collection of papers on phenomenal conservatism.
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  41. Scepticism and Reliable Belief, written by José L. Zalabardo. [REVIEW]Jack C. Lyons - 2016 - International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 6 (4):412-417.
  42.  85
    Empiricism, Perceptual Knowledge, Normativity, and Realism: Essays on Wilfrid Sellars, by Willem A. deVries (ed). [REVIEW]Jack Lyons - 2013 - Mind 122 (485):274-278.
  43.  33
    Review of Athanassios Raftopoulos, Cognition and Perception: How Do Psychology and Neural Science Inform Philosophy?[REVIEW]Jack Lyons - 2010 - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2010 (1).
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