Many current neurophysiological, psychophysical, and psychological approaches to vision rest on the idea that when we see, the brain produces an internal representation of the world. The activation of this internal representation is assumed to give rise to the experience of seeing. The problem with this kind of approach is that it leaves unexplained how the existence of such a detailed internal representation might produce visual consciousness. An alternative proposal is made here. We propose that seeing is a way (...) of acting. It is a particular way of exploring the environment. Activity in internal representations does not generate the experience of seeing. The out- side world serves as its own, external, representation. The experience of seeing occurs when the organism masters what we call the gov- erning laws of sensorimotor contingency. The advantage of this approach is that it provides a natural and principled way of accounting for visual consciousness, and for the differences in the perceived quality of sensory experience in the different sensory modalities. Sev- eral lines of empirical evidence are brought forward in support of the theory, in particular: evidence from experiments in sensorimotor adaptation, visual “filling in,” visual stability despite eye movements, change blindness, sensory substitution, and color perception. (shrink)

Pure representationalism or intentionalism for phenomenal experience is the theory that all introspectible qualitative aspects of a conscious experience can be analyzed as qualities that the experience non-conceptually represents the world to have. Some philosophers have argued that experiences such as afterimages, phosphenes and double vision are counterexamples to the representationalist theory, claiming that they are non- representational states or have non-representational aspects, and they are better explained in a qualia-theoretical framework. I argue that these states are fully (...) representational states of a certain kind, which I call “automatically non-endorsed representations”, experiential states the veridicality of which we are almost never committed to, and which do not trigger explicit belief or disbelief in the mind of the subject. By investigating descriptive accounts of afterimages by two qualia theorists, I speculate that the mistaken claims of some anti-representationalists might be rooted in confusing two senses of the term “seeming”. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on the long‐term implications of exotic activities that can be experienced through Qualia Surfing: how they might seep into every nook and cranny of our culture, redefining what it means to be human. It produces a quick survey of different types and degrees of qualia surfing. Today, even the most utopian visions of the future contain a worm at their heart: the inevitable decline of humanity into a state of boredom and stagnation. The chapter discusses (...) the subject of abstract qualia because there are changes that could be made to uploaded brain that would give sensations of newness over and above simple sensory qualia. The most complete form of qualia surfing would involve a visit to a domain – a place where a group of people go to create some way of life or historical epoch, but with constraint that outside memories are checked at the door. (shrink)

This paper argues for the reality of qualia as aspects of phenomenal experience. The argument focuses on color vision and develops a dispositionalist, subjectivist account of what it is for an object to be colored. I consider objections to dispositionalism on epistemological, metaphysical, and 'ordinary' grounds. I distinguish my representative realism from sense-data theories and from recent 'representational' or 'intentional' theories, and I argue that there is no good reason to adopt a physicalist stance that denies the reality (...) of qualia as phenomenally available intentional contents in Brentano's original sense of 'intentionality'. (shrink)

According to representionalists, qualia-the introspectible properties of sensory experience-are exhausted by the representational contents of experience. Representationalists typically advocate an informational psychosemantics whereby a brain state represents one of its causal antecedents in evolutionarily determined optimal circumstances. I argue that such a psychosemantics may not apply to certain aspects of our experience, namely, our experience of space in vision, hearing, and touch. I offer that these cases can be handled by supplementing informational psychosemantics with a procedural psychosemantics whereby (...) a representation is about its effects instead of its causes. I discuss conceptual and empirical points that favor a procedural representationalism for our experience of space. (shrink)

I argue that the inverted spectrum hypothesis is nota possibility we should take seriously. The principlereason is that if someone's qualia were inverted inthe specified manner there is reason to believe thephenomenal difference would manifest itself inbehaviour. This is so for two reasons. First, Isuggest that qualia, including phenomenal colours, arepartly constituted by an affective component whichwould be inverted along with the connected qualia. Theresulting affective inversions will, given theintimate connections that exist between emotions andbehaviour, likely manifest (...) themselves in behaviour, inwhich case the underlying phenomenal differences canbe functionally captured. Second, I argue that othersense modalities lack the structural featuresnecessary for undetectable inversion which, because oftheir analogy with colour qualia, weakens theplausibility of such an inversion in the original caseof vision. (shrink)

In his paper “Double Vision, Phosphenes and Afterimages: Non-Endorsed Representations rather than Non-Representational Qualia,” Işık Sarıhan addresses the debate between strong representationalists and qualia theorists. He argues that qualia theorists like Ned Block and Amy Kind who cite double-vision, afterimages, etc., as evidence for the existence of qualia are mistaken about the actual nature of these states. According to Sarıhan, these authors confuse the fact that these states are non-endorsed representational states with the fact (...) that they are at least partly non-representational. I argue that Sarıhan’s argument contains gaps that suggest that he misidentifi es the mistake that leads these qualia theorists to their conclusion. In my view, these qualia theorists do not confuse the fact that the states in question are non-endorsed states with the fact that they are non-representational, but rather mistake certain representational contents, or certain aspects of these contents, for qualia. (shrink)

Scientific realists argue that a good track record of multi-agent, and multiple method, validation of empirical claims is itself evidence that those claims, at least partially and approximately, reflect ways nature actually is independent of the ways we conceptualize it. Constructivists contend that successes in validating empirical claims only suffice to establish that our ways of modelling the world, our “constructions,” are useful and adequate for beings like us. This essay presents a thought experiment in which beings like us intersubjectively (...) validate claims about properties of particular things in nature under conditions in which those beings have profoundly different personal phenomenological experiences of those properties. I submit that the thought experiment scenario parallels our actual situation, and argue that this shows that successes in intersubjectively validating empirical claims are indeed enough to claim victory for the realist. More specifically, I champion a variation of realism that marries Ronald Giere’s brand of ‘perspectival realism’ with Philip Kitcher’s ‘real realism,’ and posits that causal relations between ourselves and properties instantiated in nature ground our references to the relevant properties even though our conceptions of them are perspective relative. (shrink)

Perception is a first-person internal sensation induced within the nervous system at the time of arrival of sensory stimuli from objects in the environment. Lack of access to the first-person properties has limited viewing perception as an emergent property and it is currently being studied using third-person observed findings from various levels. One feasible approach to understand its mechanism is to build a hypothesis for the specific conditions and required circuit features of the nodal points where the mechanistic operation of (...) perception take place for one type of sensation in one species and to verify it for the presence of comparable circuit properties for perceiving a different sensation in a different species. The present work explains visual perception in mammalian nervous system from a first-person frame of reference and provides explanations for the homogeneity of perception of visual stimuli above flicker fusion frequency, the perception of objects at locations different from their actual position, the smooth pursuit and saccadic eye movements, the perception of object borders, and perception of pressure phosphenes. Using results from temporal resolution studies and the known details of visual cortical circuitry, explanations are provided for (a) the perception of rapidly changing visual stimuli, (b) how the perception of objects occurs in the correct orientation even though, according to the third-person view, activity from the visual stimulus reaches the cortices in an inverted manner and (c) the functional significance of well-conserved columnar organization of the visual cortex. A comparable circuitry detected in a different nervous system in a remote species-the olfactory circuitry of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster-provides an opportunity to explore circuit functions using genetic manipulations, which, along with high-resolution microscopic techniques and lipid membrane interaction studies, will be able to verify the structure-function details of the presented mechanism of perception. (shrink)

Representation and content in some (actual) theories of perception -- Representation in perception and cognition : task analysis, psychological functions, and rule instantiation -- Perception as unconscious inference -- Representation and constraints : the inverse problem and the structure of visual space -- On perceptual constancy -- Getting objects for free (or not) : the philosophy and psychology of object perception -- Color perception and neural encoding : does metameric matching entail a loss of information? -- Objectivity and subjectivity revisited (...) : color as a psychobiological property -- Sense data and the mind body problem -- The reality of qualia -- The sensory core and the medieval foundations of early modern perceptual theory -- Postscript (2008) on Ibn al-Haytham's (Alhacen's) theory of vision -- Attention in early scientific psychology -- Psychology, philosophy, and cognitive science : reflections on the history and philosophy of experimental psychology -- What can the mind tell us about the brain? : psychology, neurophysiology, and constraint -- Introspective evidence in psychology. (shrink)

Different explanations of color vision favor different philosophical positions: Computational vision is more compatible with objectivism (the color is in the object), psychophysics and neurophysiology with subjectivism (the color is in the head). Comparative research suggests that an explanation of color must be both experientialist (unlike objectivism) and ecological (unlike subjectivism). Computational vision's emphasis on optimally prespecified features of the environment (i.e., distal properties, independent of the sensory-motor capacities of the animal) is unsatisfactory. Conceiving of visual perception (...) instead as the visual guidance of activity in an environment that is determined largely by that very activity suggests new directions for research. (shrink)

In this book Gerald Vision argues for a new causal theory, one that engages provocatively with direct realism and makes no use of a now discredited subjectivism.

Certain conceivable situations figure as premises in arguments for the conclusion that conscious experiences have nonphysical properties or qualia. Frank Jackson's knowledge argument considers the hypothetical scientist Mary, who despite having complete scientific knowledge of colour vision, supposedly lacks knowledge of qualia. Both Saul Kripke's and David Chalmers' modal arguments involve zombies, conceivable creatures physically identical to us who lack qualia. Several physicalists have replied to all these objections by endorsing the phenomenal concept reply. Without trying (...) to undermine this reply in general, I argue that recent versions of it proposed by John Perry and David Papineau are unsatisfactory. (shrink)

This essay, published shortly before the 2020 U.S. presidential election (mired in controversy over a potential judicial appointment to the Supreme Court), celebrates Daniel Callahan's prescient book Abortion: Law, Choice and Morality. Nothing could be timelier. Callahan's central question was the “moral and social” struggle requisite for coherent policies and laws regulating abortion. He rejected “one‐value” positions and strove to develop an expansive middle ground. He decried emotion untutored by reason, crude polemics, and bludgeoning: his recipe for a “noxious brew.” (...) Callahan's way of thinking preceded the development of a critical health humanities, the advent of moral foundations theory in psychology, and the philosophical concept of a moral imagination. Each of these inheres in his rigorous approach to the abortion problem. His honesty and humility led to a sea change in his position on abortion. Fifty years later, much can still be learned from Callahan's arguments—about abortion and other bioethics issues—most importantly, in how we address wider social issues in these polarized times. (shrink)

The sensorimotor theory of vision successfully blends in with the currently developing action-oriented account of cognition. As a theory of phenomenal consciousness, however, it suffers from the same shortcomings as the theories O'Regan & Noë (O&N) criticize. This is mainly due to the failure to avoid the explanatory gap by rejecting one notion of qualia while retaining the concept of experience with qualitative features in general.

What is color? What is color vision? Most philosophers answer by reference to humans: to human color qualia, or to the environmental properties or "quality spaces" perceived by humans. It is argued, with reference to empirical findings concerning comparative color vision and the evolution of color vision, that all such attempts are mistaken. An adequate definition of color vision must eschew reference to its outputs in the human cognition and refer only to inputs: color (...) class='Hi'>vision consists in the use of wavelength discrimination in the construction of visual representations. A color quality is one that is generated from such processing. (shrink)

This dissertation argues for a "bundle thesis" of phenomenal consciousness: that the ways things seem to subjects are constituted by bundles of representational and functional properties. I argue that qualia are determined not only by intrinsic properties, but also by relational properties to other bodily and mental states . The view developed on the basis of this claim is called "phenomenal holism." ;Part I examines the current literature on phenomenal consciousness, sorting out various conceptual and historical issues. In particular, (...) I show that current research falls into two camps: that claiming there is no coherent view of phenomenal consciousness or of how it can be studied, and that claiming that phenomenal consciousness is constituted by non-relational and non-causal/functional/representational properties. Neither camp believes that materialist theories of consciousness are possible. ;Part II counters the specific objections these writers raise against materialist theories. First I show that some of the most prominent objections are founded upon an implicit and misguided assumption: that qualia are non-relational simples, based on what I call the segregationist intuition. Then, more specifically, I argue: that while Kripke's argument from a posteriori necessity against the identity-theory is committed to the absence of an appearance/reality distinction, its presumptions entail this distinction; and that the symmetrical development of the possibility of "hidden qualia" shows that absent qualia and zombie arguments against functionalism are absurd. This last argument is extended to argue against the possibility of inverted spectra. It is concluded that none of the standard objections to materialist theories carry significant weight. ;Part III turns to relational theories of consciousness, and supports an "integrationist intuition" about the mind. I first show that higher-order perception and higher-order thought theories are inadequate, in spite of correctly construing consciousness relationally. I then go on to develop the bundle theory, drawing support from empirical research on vision and pain. The dissertation concludes by defending phenomenal holism and integrationist views of mind more generally, and setting directions for future research. (shrink)

How ought we differentiate the senses? What, say, distinguishes vision from audition? The question comes in two versions. First, there is the traditional problem of individuating the senses in humans. Second, there is also an important question about what sensory modalities we ought to attribute to non-human animals, a version of the question that has been virtually ignored by philosophers. Modality ought to be construed as an “avenue into” an organism for information external to the central nervous system. Six (...) proposed criteria found in the philosophical literature concerning the senses are reviewed. Initially, four criteria—physics, neurobiology, behavior, and evolutionary or developmental dedication—are shown to be individually necessary and jointly sufficient. Next, two criteria—Aristotle's proper objects of sensation criterion and Grice's sensation or qualia criterion—are considered and rejected. One overarching goal here is to show that there is interesting contemporary work left to be done on this ancient philosophical question. (shrink)

Representational theories of mind cannot individuate the sense modalities in a principled manner. According to representationalism, the phenomenal character of experiences is determined by their contents. The usual objection is that inverted qualia are possible, so the phenomenal character of experiences may vary independently of their contents. But the objection is inconclusive. It raises difficult questions about the metaphysics of secondary qualities and it is difficult to see whether or not inverted qualia are possible. This paper proposes an (...) alternative test of representationalism. Do experiences in different sense modalities have the same phenomenal character when they share content? Psychological work on the perception of shape through vision and spatial hearing is discussed. This work shows that visual and auditory experiences differ in phenomenal character even in so far as they represent similar properties. This objection to representationalism does not invite questions about secondary qualities or depend on establishing metaphysical possibilities. (shrink)

Cerebral energy supply is insufficient to support continuous neuronal processing of the plethora of time-constant objects that we are aware of. As a result, the brain is forced to limit processing resources to cases of change. The neuronally generated world is thus temporally discontinuous. This parallels the fact that, in all relevant microscopic fundamental equations of nature, temporal change plays a dominant role. When a scientist calculates a “solution” to such an equation, integration over time is an essential step. The (...) present Hypothesis expresses that the step from neuronal activity to phenomenal content of consciousness is reflective of a “solution:” the main source of the incomprehensibility of consciousness is proposed to result from the introduction of phenomenal time-constant entities. These are “filled-in” via integration, even though neuronal data only exists for changes to these entities. In this way, a temporally continuous picture of the world phenomenally appears. Qualia are “initial conditions,” which are required for integration and cannot be deduced from present data. Phenomenal “identity” is related to qualia. Inattentive visual perception, which is only rarely investigated, offers insights into these relationships. Introspectively, unattended vision appears rich because percepts are cumulated over long time spans, whereas attentive perception relies purely on present neuronal signals. The present Hypothesis is that a brief neuronal activity can signify long-lasting and constant phenomenal content of consciousness. Experimental support is presented that comes from discrepancies between neuronal activity and perception: transient neuronal responses to sustained stimuli, “filling-in,” change blindness, identity vs. close resemblance. (shrink)

When an object looks red to an observer, the visual experience of the observer has two important features. The experience visually represents the object as having a property—being red. And the experience has a phenomenological character; that is, there is something that it is like to have an experience of seeing an object as red. Let qualia be the properties that give our sensory and perceptual experiences their phenomenological character. This essay takes up two related problem for a nonreductive (...) account of qualia. Some have argued that on such an account there is no room in a physicalist ontology for qualia. Section 1 shows how qualia might fit into a physicalist ontology. The second problem begins with the observation that there is a gap in scientific accounts of color experience; there is no explanation of why the features of the brain that determine our color experiences give those experiences their phenomenological character. Building on the results of Sect. 1, Sect. 2 develops an account of color perception that bridges this gap and shows how qualia give color perception its phenomenological character. To get a grip on the issues involved the paper begins by considering some aspects of a physicalist account of color. (shrink)

Perceptual and recursion-based faculties have long been recognized to be vital constituents of human (and, in general, animal) cognition. However, certain faculties such as the visual and the linguistic faculty have come to receive far more academic and experimental attention, in recent decades, than other recognized categories of faculties. This paper seeks to highlight the imbalance in these studies and bring into sharper focus the need for further in-depth philosophical treatments of faculties such as especially hearing, touch, and proprioception, besides (...) other faculties such as the olfactory and gustatory ones. It also seeks to bring to bear the debate on the role of qualia in perception and overall in cognition in its thesis of the significance of these other modular faculties for genuine insights into cognition as a (now) technologically expanded domain. (shrink)

Archaeologies of Vision will be a landmark work for all scholars of visual culture as well as for those engaged with continental philosophy.

The “brain in a vat” thought experiment is presented and refuted by appeal to the intuitiveness of what the author informally calls “the eye for an eye principle”, namely: Conscious mental states typically involved in sensory processes can conceivably successfully be brought about by direct stimulation of the brain, and in all such cases the utilized stimulus field will be in the relevant sense equivalent to the actual PNS or part of it thereof. In the second section, four classic problems (...) of Functionalism are given novel solutions based on the inclusion of peripheral nervous processes as constituents of mental states: The mad pain problem, the problem of pseudo-normal vision, the China-brain problem, and the triviality problem. (shrink)

A major part of the mind–body problem is to explain why a given set of physical processes should give rise to qualia of one sort rather than another. Colour hues are the usual example considered here, and there is a lively debate between, for example, Hardin, Levine, Jackson, Clark and Chalmers as to whether the results of colour vision science can provide convincing explanations of why colours actually look the way they do. This paper examines carefully the type (...) of explanation that is needed here, and it is concluded that it does not have to be reductive to be effective. What needs to be explained more than anything is why inverted hue scenarios are more intuitive than other sensory inversions: and the issue of physicalism versus dualism is only of marginal relevance here. (shrink)

Visual percepts frequently appear chromatically rich, yet their paucity in reportable information has led to widely accepted minimalist models of vision. The discrepancy may be resolved by positing that the richness of natural scenes is reflected in phenomenal consciousness but not in detail in the phenomenal judgments upon which reports about qualia are based. Conceptual awareness (including phenomenal judgments) arises from neural mechanisms that categorize objects, and also from mechanisms that conceptually characterize textural properties of pre-categorically segmented regions (...) in the visual field. Experimental evidence suggests that complex images instigate the generation of so-called ensemble phenomenal judgments. These involve concepts that categorize global attributes of segmented areas but carry no information pertaining to details. It is then argued that there are cogent reasons for believing that phenomenal percepts (i.e. qualia) arising from chromatically complex stimuli cohere in this ensemble sense with both the stimulus and with the resulting ensemble phenomenal judgments. Thus, spatially detailed retinal images are deemed to yield correspondingly detailed phenomenal experiences that are in turn conceptually apprehended via a relatively small number of ensemble phenomenal judgments. Lastly, it is suggested that the bridge locus for chromatically rich phenomenal experiences is most plausibly located early in the cortical visual pathway. (shrink)

Applying Michel Henry’s philosophical framework to the phenomenological analysis of religious experience, the author introduces a concept of material introspection and a new theory of the constitution of religious experience in phenomenologically material interiority. As opposed to ordinary mental self-scrutiny, material introspection happens when the usual outgoing attention is reverted onto embodied self-awareness in search of mystical self-knowledge or union with God. Such reversal posits the internal field of consciousness with the self-disclosure of phenomenological materiality. As shown by the example (...) of Vedantic self-inquiry, material introspection is conditioned on the attitude ‘I “see” myself’ and employs reductions which relieve phenomenological materiality from the structuring influence of intentionality; the telos of material introspection is expressed by the inward self-transcendence of intentional consciousness into purified phenomenological materiality. Experience in material introspection is constituted by the self-affection and self-luminosity of phenomenological materiality; experience is recognized as religious due to such essential properties as the capacity of being selffulfilled, and specific qualitative “what it’s like”(s). Drawing on more than 5000 live accounts of internal religious experience, it is shown that introspective attention can have different trajectories, producing, within a temporal extension of material introspection, different spatial modifications of embodied selfawareness and a variety of corresponding religious experiences. (shrink)

Although philosophers acknowledge the significance of blindsight for theories of mind---indeed, some try to trade on it---they have not given the phenomenon the extended treatment it deserves. In helping to fill this gap, I argue that despite attempts to use it in undermining qualia , blindsight supports realism about qualia, and an identity theoretic account of them. ;In Chapter 1 I argue against attempts by Dennett and the Churchlands to use blindsight in undermining qualia. I complement this (...) by criticizing their more general arguments against qualia. ;In Chapter 2 I argue that blindsight in fact supports realism about qualia. To do so I bring together four separate points from the literature and add to them a fifth, adapted from an observation by Jerry Fodor. ;In Chapter 3 I argue that blindsight is best explained by saying that the qualia patients conspicuously lack are causally involved in normal vision. I also argue that this is not ruled out by principled objections of the usual sort, and is best cashed out by identity-theory. ;In the Conclusion I discuss some of the other areas of philosophical concern on which blindsight has been thought to bear: color-theory, intentionality, theories of knowledge, and issues in perception. (shrink)

The essay is concentrated on emotional affects caused by representation of violence in the case of Russia’s war against Ukraine and beyond. Instant accessibility to first-hand visual information created fertile soil for planting and then multiplying manipulative strategies of one or another political interest. Meanwhile, the demand for shocking content continues to steadily rise because it guarantees popularity, spectacle and even a form of pleasure. This, in turn, supports a very propagandistic version of reality where violence plays a central role (...) in the overall design and transmission of contents, which is driven by shock as an affective medium. Blind Spot, Gradual Loss of Vision and Speck in the Eye represent a body of works by Mykola Ridnyi, address the question of what potential response(s) could be given by artistic interventions understood as a dialectical and critical framework able to face and make visible the problem of dehumanization through violence? (shrink)

Long considered "the noblest of the senses," vision has increasingly come under critical scrutiny by a wide range of thinkers who question its dominance in Western culture. These critics of vision, especially prominent in twentieth-century France, have challenged its allegedly superior capacity to provide access to the world. They have also criticized its supposed complicity with political and social oppression through the promulgation of spectacle and surveillance. Martin Jay turns to this discourse surrounding vision and explores its (...) often contradictory implications in the work of such influential figures as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Guy Debord, Luce Irigaray, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. Jay begins with a discussion of the theory of vision from Plato to Descartes, then considers its role in the French Enlightenment before turning to its status in the culture of modernity. From consideration of French Impressionism to analysis of Georges Bataille and the Surrealists, Roland Barthes's writings on photography, and the film theory of Christian Metz, Jay provides lucid and fair-minded accounts of thinkers and ideas widely known for their difficulty. His book examines the myriad links between the interrogation of vision and the pervasive antihumanist, antimodernist, and counter-enlightenment tenor of much recent French thought. Refusing, however, to defend the dominant visual order, he calls instead for a plurality of "scopic regimes." Certain to generate controversy and discussion throughout the humanities and social sciences, _Downcast Eyes_ will consolidate Jay's reputation as one of today's premier cultural and intellectual historians. (shrink)

Mental capacities for perceiving, remembering, thinking, and planning involve the processing of structured mental representations. A compositional semantics of such representations would explain how the content of any given representation is determined by the contents of its constituents and their mode of combination. While many have argued that semantic theories of mental representations would have broad value for understanding the mind, there have been few attempts to develop such theories in a systematic and empirically constrained way. This paper contributes to (...) that end by developing a semantics for a ‘fragment’ of our mental representational system: the visual system’s representations of the bounding contours of objects. At least three distinct kinds of composition are involved in such representations: ‘concatenation’, ‘feature composition’, and ‘contour composition’. I sketch the constraints on and semantics of each of these. This account has three principal payoffs. First, it models a working framework for compositionally ascribing structure and content to perceptual representations, while highlighting core kinds of evidence that bear on such ascriptions. Second, it shows how a compositional semantics of perception can be compatible with holistic, or Gestalt, phenomena, which are often taken to show that the whole percept is ‘other than the sum of its parts’. Finally, the account illuminates the format of a key type of perceptual representation, bringing out the ways in which contour representations exhibit domain-specific form of the sort that is typical of structured icons such as diagrams and maps, in contrast to typical discursive representations of logic and language. (shrink)

Parmenides didn't mention reference as such, but if he had he would have undoubtedly agreed with the philosophers who nowadays hold what is called "the axiom of existence": that one can only refer to what exists. The sources of possible support for this view are examined and rejected. Primary support for the axiom is given by two sorts of argument; one concerning quantification, the other summarizing a standard Parmenidean puzzle. Weaknesses in both are exposed. Finally, the relations between the axiom (...) and connected claims about predication and truth are probed, and an attempt is made to determine the limits of the mutual support these claims give one another. (shrink)

The evidence of blindsight is occasionally used to argue that we can see things, and thus have perceptual belief, without the distinctive visual awareness accompanying normal sight; thereby displacing phenomenality as a component of the concept of vision. I maintain that arguments to this end typically rely on misconceptions about blindsight and almost always ignore associated visual (or visuomotor) pathologies relevant to the lessons of such cases. More specifically, I conclude, first, that the phenomena very likely do not result (...) from dissociations within a single system, but from the interaction of evolutionarily distinct, if interacting, systems; second, that a closer study of spared motor abilities indicates that verbal responses of patients result not from degraded vision but from proprioception; and, finally, above chance verbal responses, being forced guesses, are not tentative beliefs and cannot become beliefs just by training patients to have more confidence in their responses. (shrink)

In Veritas, Gerald Vision defends the correspondence theory of truth -- the theory that truth has a direct relationship to reality -- against recent attacks, and critically examines its most influential alternatives. The correspondence theory, if successful, explains one way in which we are cognitively connected to the world; thus, it is claimed, truth -- while relevant to semantics, epistemology, and other studies -- also has significant metaphysical consequences. Although the correspondence theory is widely held today, Vision points (...) to an emerging orthodoxy in philosophy that claims that truth as such carries no significant weight in philosophical explanations. He devotes much of the book to a criticism of that outlook and to a less vulnerable formulation of the correspondence theory.Vision defends the correspondence theory by both presenting evidence for correspondence and examining the claims made by such alternative theories as deflationism, minimalism, and pluralism. The techniques of the argument are thoroughly analytic, but the problem confronted is broadly humanistic. The question examined -- how we, as thinking beings, are connected to and manage to cope in a world that was not designed for our comfort or convenience -- is more likely to be raised by continentalists, but is approached here with the tools of clarity and precision more highly prized in analytic philosophy. The book seeks to avoid both the obscurantism that infects much continental thought and the overly technical concerns and methodology that limit the interest of much work in analytic philosophy. It thus provides a rigorous but largely nontechnical treatment of the topic that will be of interest not only to readers familiar with philosophy but also to those with a background in literary theory and linguistics. (shrink)

The objective of the present review on the evolution of Green Chemistry, since its emergence until 2016, aimed an integrated vision of its progress along the three phases of its development: emergence, divulgation and consolidation. The methodology involved the analysis of a selection of bibliography on the evolution of GC collected from issues of the ACS symposia series; editorials in specialized GC journals; and commemorative birthday papers/editorials of these journals and of the GC itself. The analysis allowed to identify (...) and discuss the characteristics and conceptions of GC agents about fundamental concepts and procedures, in order to visualize and better understand the state of knowledge and the subject areas that make up the field. The main alterations identified in the evolution of GC were: it acquired a better defined identity, with more participation of academy and increased scope; was progressively framed in sustainability; has been aspiring to a holistic frame and to a change on the nature of the innovation for its implementation, from incremental to transformative. The analysis suggests that for supporting expansion and consolidation of GC the following aspects deserve attention: full validation of chemical greenness by metrics; better characterization of the frontiers of GC research areas/themes; increased integration between academy and industry; and penetration in chemistry curricula. Its basic philosophy being the practice of a chemistry more focused on the environment preservation, GC means a new stage in nature and in the history of Chemistry. (shrink)

According to a common opinion, human olfactory experiences are significantly different from human visual experiences. For instance, olfaction seems to have only rudimentary abilities to represent space; it is not clear whether olfactory experiences have any mereological structure; and while vision presents the world in terms of objects, it is a matter of debate whether there are olfactory object-representations. This paper argues that despite these differences visual and olfactory experiences share a hierarchical subject/property structure. Within this structure, olfactorily experienced (...) odours and visual objects have the same status: they are primary subjects which unify other represented elements into perceptual units. (shrink)

Emergentism is generally viewed as a non‐materialist alternative to physicalism, although the exceptionally tolerant may count it as consistent with their physicalism. It disarms the threat of Causal Exclusion. The popular conception of explored emergentism is played off against two forms, including physical states and tokens of conscious states (c‐states). Emergentism competes not only with physicalism, but also with panpsychism. Panpsychism is the view that all matter has a conscious aspect. Panpsychism (and its various forms) suffers from several problems. This (...) chapter summarizes a few of the major ones. It scratches the surface of the issues separating emergentism and physicalism, on the one hand, and emergentism and panpsychism, on the other. However, perhaps enough has been divulged to show that emergentism is a live option, a serious candidate when trying to discover a c‐state's place in concrete reality. (shrink)