The two main theories of perceptual reasons in contemporary epistemology can be called Phenomenalism and Factualism. According to Phenomenalism, perceptual reasons are facts about experiences conceived of as phenomenal states, i.e., states individuated by phenomenal character, by what it’s like to be in them. According to Factualism, perceptual reasons are instead facts about the external objects perceived. The main problem with Factualism is that it struggles with bad cases: cases where perceived objects are not (...) what they appear or where there is no perceived object at all. The main problem with Phenomenalism is that it struggles with good cases: cases where everything is perfectly normal and the external object is correctly perceived, so that one’s perceptual beliefs are knowledge. In this paper we show that there is a theory of perceptual reasons that avoids the problems for Factualism and Phenomenalism. We call this view Propositionalism. We use ‘proposition’ broadly to mean the entities that are contents of beliefs and other doxastic attitudes. The key to finding a middle ground between Phenomenalism and Factualism, we claim, is to allow our reasons to be false in bad cases. Despite being false, they are about the external world, not our phenomenal states. (shrink)

This paper begins with a Davidsonian puzzle in the epistemology of perception and introduces two solutions to that puzzle: the Truth-Maker View (TMV) and the Content Model. The paper goes on to elaborate (TMV), elements of which can be found in the work of Kalderon (2011) and Brewer (2011). The central tenant of (TMV) is the claim that one's reason for one's perceptual belief should, in all cases, be identified with some item one perceives which makes the proposition believed (...) true. I defend an argument against (TMV) which appeals to (a) the claim that the reason for which one believes should always to be identified with the explanans of the rationalising explanation to which one's belief is subject and (b) the claim that the explanantia of rationalising explanations must be identified with truths. I finish by replying to two objections to the argument. (shrink)

According to Conceptualists like John McDowell and Bill Brewer, the representational content of perceptual experiences is wholly conceptual. One of the main!and only!arguments they advance for this claim has to do with the epistemological role of perceptual experiences. I focus on Bill Brewers "1999# version of the argument. I show why Brewer fails to satisfactorily motivate the premises of his argument, and suggest that opponents of Conceptualism could accept these premises without thereby endorsing the conclusion. Finally, I consider (...) whether the conclusion really supports Conceptualism. (shrink)

Doxasticism about our awareness of normative (i.e. justifying) reasons – the view that we can recognise reasons for forming attitudes or performing actions only by means of normative judgements or beliefs – is incompatible with the following triad of claims: -/- (1) Being motivated (i.e. forming attitudes or performing actions for a motive) requires responding to and, hence, recognising a relevant reason. -/- (2) Infants are capable of being motivated. -/- (3) Infants are incapable of normative judgement or (...) belief. -/- It should be clear that (3) is true, given that infants lack the required reflective and conceptual capacities. So doxasticists have to reject either (1) or (2) (or both). But this forced choice may be understood as a dilemma for doxasticism. On the hand, doxasticists may adopt a Kantian approach and reject (2), precisely because they think that motivation presupposes the doxastic recognition of reasons, and because infants lack the capacity to doxastically recognise reasons. But this choice seems to wrongly reduce the responses of infants to mere reflexes or instinctive reactions. On the other hand, doxasticists may choose a Humean route and deny (1) by espousing a purely causal or teleological account of motivation. But this would mean detrimentally ignoring the normative nature of (some instances of) motivation. -/- One elegant way of avoiding this dilemma is to give up doxasticism and instead endorse experientialism – the view that we enjoy some experiential access to reasons, which is independent of, and perhaps more fundamental than, our capacity to form normative judgements and beliefs. In this talk, I would like to provide an argument for the existence of such a non-doxastic form of access to reasons. More specifically, I aim to defend the claim that our basic awareness of reasons is phenomenal in nature. What this means is that it forms part of our access from the inside to those of our mental episodes that provide us with access to reasons. In other words, when we introspectively attend to reason-giving mental episodes and what they are about, we have the impression of the presence of a reason for us. My defence of this experientialist alternative to doxasticism will primarily focus on perceptual reasons for first-order beliefs about the external world. (shrink)

Many epistemologists have recently defended views on which all evidence is true or perceptual reasons are facts. On such views a common account of basic perceptual reasons is that the fact that one sees that p is one’s reason for believing that p. I argue that that account is wrong; rather, in the basic case the fact that p itself is one’s reason for believing that p. I show that my proposal is better motivated, solves a (...) fundamental objection that the received view faces, and illuminates the nature of reasons for belief. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 7, Issue 2, pp 114 - 135 It is a commonly accepted assumption in contemporary epistemology that we need to find a solution to ‘closure-based’ sceptical arguments and, hence, to the ‘scepticism or closure’ dilemma. In the present paper I argue that this is mistaken, since the closure principle does not, in fact, do real sceptical work. Rather, the decisive, scepticism-friendly moves are made before the closure principle is even brought into play. If we cannot avoid the (...) sceptical conclusion, this is not due to closure’s holding it in place, but because we’ve already been persuaded to accept a certain conception of perceptual reasons, which both issues a standing invitation to radical scepticism and is endemic in the contemporary literature. Once the real villain of the piece is exposed, it will become clear that the closure principle has been cast in the role of scapegoat in this debate. (shrink)

Genia Schönbaumsfeld has recently argued for the view that our ordinary perceptual reasons provide support for heavyweight metaphysical and epistemological views, such as that there is a mind-independent physical world. Call this the Heavyweight Reasons Thesis. In this paper, I argue that we should reject the Heavyweight Reasons Thesis. I also argue that the rejection of the Heavyweight Reasons Thesis is compatible with the Factive Perceptual Reasons Thesis, the thesis that our perceptual (...) reasons for our ordinary beliefs can be factive, but that factive reasons aren’t necessarily better reasons than subjectively indiscriminable non-factive reasons. (shrink)

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 and internalism, respectively. He answers this motivation by developing a more specific view that he calls the Apparent Factive Attitude view, which pairs an answer to what evidence is provided by a perceptual experience with an answer to why having that perceptual experience provides you with that evidence. In this paper we advance two interconnected problems for Schroeder’s Apparent Factive Attitude view. A traditional intuitive judgment that often motivates internalists is the idea that internal duplicates must necessarily be equally rational in whatever beliefs they have. Schroeder’s arguments rely on a weaker claim - that people who are both internal and historical external duplicates but differ only in the veridicality of a single perceptual experience must be equally rational in whatever beliefs they have. In this way he preserves what he argues to be a more compelling internalist intuition. But our arguments will show that Schroeder’s view is committed to denying an even more compelling internalist intuition yet - that internal duplicates must have the same phenomenology. (shrink)

John McDowell claims that perception provides reasons for empirical beliefs. Perceptual reasons, according to the author of Mind and World, can be identified with passively “taken in” facts. Concepts figure in the acts of acquiring perceptual reasons, even though the acts themselves do not consist in judgments. Thus, on my reading, McDowell’s account of reasons-acquisition can be likened to Descartes’ account of the acquisition of ideas, rather than to Kant’s theory of judgment as an (...) act by means of which one’s cognition comes to be endowed with objective validity. However, unlike Descartes, McDowell does not acknowledge the skeptical challenge which his conception of reasons-acquisition might face. He contends that perception is factive without arguing for the background assumption on which it rests. Hence, as I suggest in my article, the McDowellian claim that perception provides reasons for empirical beliefs is not sufficiently warranted. (shrink)

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 way of responding to new epistemic reasons. The resulting perceptual experiences are epistemically evaluable as justified or unjustified. (shrink)

Two different versions of epistemological disjunctivism have recently been upheld in the literature: a traditional, Justified True Belief Epistemological Disjunctivism (JTBED) and a Knowledge First Epistemological Disjunctivism (KFED). JTBED holds that factive reasons of the form “S sees that p” provide the rational support in virtue of which one has perceptual knowledge, while KFED holds that factive reasons of the form “S sees that p” just are ways of knowing that p which additionally provide justification for believing (...) that p. We argue that both accounts remain ultimately unsatisfactory. JTBED faces two formidable problems: first, it cannot account for animal knowledge, and, second, it does not offer a satisfactory account of how we access factive reasons. Although KFED can solve these two problems, it has some problems of its own. While intuitively knowledge is logically stronger than justified belief, on KFED it turns out to be weaker: knowledge does not entail justified belief, but justified belief does entail knowledge. Nevertheless, disjunctivists are right on at least a couple of points: we standardly justify our perceptual beliefs by appealing to factive reasons such as seeing that p and so factive reasons ought to play some role in our theory of justification. In addition, KFED’s account of our access to factive reasons also is spot on. Rather than going disjunctivist, these insights can be suitably incorporated into a Knowledge First Virtue Epistemology (KFVE). (shrink)

People can be taught to manipulate symbols according to formal mathematical and logical rules. Cognitive scientists have traditionally viewed this capacity—the capacity for symbolic reasoning—as grounded in the ability to internally represent numbers, logical relationships, and mathematical rules in an abstract, amodal fashion. We present an alternative view, portraying symbolic reasoning as a special kind of embodied reasoning in which arithmetic and logical formulae, externally represented as notations, serve as targets for powerful perceptual and sensorimotor systems. Although symbolic reasoning (...) often conforms to abstract mathematical principles, it is typically implemented by perceptual and sensorimotor engagement with concrete environmental structures. (shrink)

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.

John McDowell and Bill Brewer famously defend the view that one can only have empirical beliefs if one’s perceptual experiences serve as reasons for such beliefs, where reasons are understood in terms of subject’s reasons. In this paper I show, first, that it is a consequence of the adoption of such a requirement for one to have empirical beliefs that children as old as 3 years of age have to considered as not having genuine empirical beliefs (...) at all. But we have strong reasons to think that 3-year-old children have empirical beliefs, or so I argue. If this is the case, McDowell and Brewer’s requirement for one to have empirical beliefs faces a strong challenge. After showing this, I propose an alternative requirement for one to have empirical beliefs, and argue that it should be favoured over McDowell and Brewer’s requirement. (shrink)

James Van Cleve raises some objections to my attempt to solve the bootstrapping problem for what I call “basic justification theories.” I argue that given 1 the inference rules endorsed by basic justification theorists, we are a priori (propositionally) justified in believing that perception is reliable. This blocks the bootstrapping result.

In contrast with the two dominant views in Theory of Mind development, the Perceptual Access Reasoning hypothesis of Fabricius and colleagues is that children don’t understand the mental state of belief until around 6 years of age. Evidence for this includes data that many children ages 4 and 5, who pass the standard 2-location false belief task, nonetheless fail the true belief task, and often fail a 3-location false belief task by choosing the irrelevant option. These findings can be (...) explained by the PAR hypothesis but pose challenges for the two dominant views. I argue against an alternate hypothesis which is proposed by Anika Fiebich in a recent paper. According to Fiebich, PAR is not a distinct transitional stage in children’s theory of mind development, but is a fast and frugal System 1 heuristic which fades once children become fluent in social reasoning. However, I point out a number of problems with Fiebich’s proposal and argue for the superiority of the PAR hypothesis. I also present five reasons to be skeptical about the findings of Perner and Horn which purportedly show that 4- and 5-year-olds can pass the 3-location false belief task when suitably modified. This is a further difficulty for Fiebich’s proposal, since she relies on these findings in her fluency theory. Finally, I sketch a dual systems theory of mind account based upon the PAR hypothesis which is different from Fiebich’s. (shrink)

If you want to understand McDowell's spatial metaphors when he talks about perceptual knowledge, place him side-by-side with Dretske on perceptual knowledge. Though McDowell shows no evidence of reading Dretske's writings on knowledge from the late 1960s onwards (McDowell mentions "Epistemic Operators" once in passing), McDowell gives the same four arguments as Dretske for the conclusion that knowledge requires "conclusive" reasons that rule of the possibility of mistake. Despite various differences, we think it is best to read (...) McDowell as re-discovering Dretske on perceptual knowledge. Since Dretske is easy to understand, all of McDowell's metaphors become easy to understand. But what about McDowell's disjunctivism? Turns out McDowell is not an ontological disjunctivist, and his epistemological disjunctivism is really just the banal point that some perceptual experiences provide conclusive reasons for perceptual belief and some do not. Perceptual experiences are either conclusive or inconclusive. Dretske would agree. (shrink)

I interpret and defend Sellars’ intemalist view of perceptual justification which argues that perceivers have evidence for their perceptual beliefs that includes a higher-order belief about the circumstances in which those beliefs arise, and an epistemic belief about the reliability of beliefs that are formed in those circumstances. The pattem of inference that occurs in ordinary cases of perception is elicited.I then defend this account of perceptual evidence against 1) AIston’s objection that ordinary perceivers are not as (...) critical and reflective as this view requires them to be; and 2) the charge that intemalism leads to various forms of infinite regress and circular reasoning. It is granted that subjects must have further grounds for their justifying reasons, and an attempt is made to identify these second-order reasons. In particular, I argue that epistemic beliefs are grounded in the perceiver’s awareness that his present experience-cum-conditions fits into a larger pattem of similar past experiences that were reliably connected with their objects. (shrink)

I interpret and defend Sellars’ intemalist view of perceptual justification which argues that perceivers have evidence for their perceptual beliefs that includes a higher-order belief about the circumstances in which those beliefs arise, and an epistemic belief about the reliability of beliefs that are formed in those circumstances. The pattem of inference that occurs in ordinary cases of perception is elicited.I then defend this account of perceptual evidence against 1) AIston’s objection that ordinary perceivers are not as (...) critical and reflective as this view requires them to be; and 2) the charge that intemalism leads to various forms of infinite regress and circular reasoning. It is granted that subjects must have further grounds for their justifying reasons, and an attempt is made to identify these second-order reasons. In particular, I argue that epistemic beliefs are grounded in the perceiver’s awareness that his present experience-cum-conditions fits into a larger pattem of similar past experiences that were reliably connected with their objects. (shrink)

According to one prominent account of perceptual justification, “dogmatism,” whenever you have perceptual experience as if p, and lack defeaters, you thereby have immediate, prima facie justification for believing that p. The most important challenge is to show how experience can, on its own, provide justification for the belief in its content. Dogmatists often try to meet this challenge by highlighting the phenomenal character of perceptual experience and the mode of presentation of its content and defending their (...) justifying roles by appealing to intuitively plausible examples. What is lacking here, however, is a theoretical framework to sanction and justify those roles going beyond the mere appeal to examples. Finding such a framework is the main goal of this article. I begin by criticizing a prominent response to this challenge, which suggests a composition view of perceptual experience consisting of sensory experiences and seemings. I then highlight the need for a theoretical framework to provide the rationale for the justifying roles that dogmatists allocate to perceptual experience. It is claimed that the framework in question involves the mechanism by which we possess reasons. Adapting the framework to cases where perception functions as a reason, a principled defense of dogmatism is provided. (shrink)

What is the role of conscious experience in the epistemology of perceptual knowledge: how should we characterise what is going on in seeing that o is F in order to illuminate the contribution of seeing o to their status as cases of knowing that o is F? My proposal is that seeing o involves conscious acquaintance with o itself, the concrete worldly source of the truth that o is F, in a way that may make it evident to the (...) subject that o is an instance of ‘x is F’ as she understands this, and hence evident that o is F. Seeing that o is F is thus a way of its being evident that o is F and is therefore a way of knowing that o is F. (shrink)

This paper replies to objections from perceptual distortion against the representationalist thesis that the phenomenal characters of experiences supervene on their intentional contents. It has been argued that some pairs of distorted and undistorted experiences share contents without sharing phenomenal characters, which is incompatible with the supervenience thesis. In reply, I suggest that such cases are not counterexamples to the representationalist thesis because the contents of distorted experiences are always impoverished in some way compared to those of normal experiences. (...) This can be shown by considering limit cases of perceptual distortion, for example, maximally blurry experiences, which manifestly lack details present in clear experiences. I argue that since there is no reasonable way to draw the line between distorted experiences that have degraded content and distorted experiences that do not, we should allow that an increase in distortion is always accompanied by a change in content. This applies to perceptual distortions due to blur, double vision, perspective, and illumination conditions. (shrink)

In this reply, we provide an analysis of Alter et al. response to our earlier paper. In that paper, we reported difficulty in replicating Alter, Oppenheimer, Epley, and Eyre’s main finding, namely that a sense of disfluency produced by making stimuli difficult to perceive, increased accuracy on a variety of reasoning tasks. Alter, Oppenheimer, and Epley argue that we misunderstood the meaning of accuracy on these tasks, a claim that we reject. We argue and provide evidence that the tasks were (...) not too difficult for our populations and point out that in many cases performance on our tasks was well above chance or on a par with Alter et al.’s participants. Finally, we reiterate our claim that the distinction between answer fluency and perceptual fluency is genuine, and argue that Thompson et al. provided evidence that these are distinct factors that have different downstream effects on cognitive processes. (shrink)

There is good reason to think that, in every case of perceptual consciousness, there is something of which we are conscious; but there is also good reason to think that, in some cases of perceptual consciousness—for instance, hallucinations—there is nothing of which we are conscious. This paper resolves this inconsistency—which we call the presentation problem—by (a) arguing that ‘conscious of’ and related expressions function as intensional transitive verbs and (b) defending a particular semantic approach to such verbs, on (...) which they have readings that lack direct objects or themes. The paper further argues that this approach serves not only as a linguistic proposal about the semantics of ‘conscious of’, but also as a proposal about the metaphysics of conscious states. (shrink)

Both common sense and dominant traditions in art criticism and philosophical aesthetics have it that aesthetic features or properties are perceived. However, there is a cast of reasons to be sceptical of the thesis. This paper defends the thesis—that aesthetic properties are sometimes represented in perceptual experience—against one of those sceptical opponents. That opponent maintains that perception represents only low-level properties, and since all theorists agree that aesthetic properties are not low-level properties, perception does not represent aesthetic properties. (...) I offer a novel argument—what I call the argument from seeing-as—against that sceptic which moves from consideration of ambiguous figures to consideration of visual art. It concludes that aesthetic properties are sometimes perceived and delivers a general lesson for philosophy of perception. Contrary to extant theories of rich perceptual content, aesthetic properties are far better candidates for high-level perceptual contents than standardly theorized rich contents like natural kinds. (shrink)

I take it for granted that sense experiential states provide reasons for empirical beliefs; indeed this claim forms the first premise of my central argument for (CC). 1 The subsequent stages of the argument are intended to establish that a person has such a reason for believing something about the way things are in the world around him only if he is in some mental state or other with a conceptual content: a conceptual state. Thus, given that sense experiential (...) states do provide reasons for empirical beliefs, they must have conceptual content. (shrink)

Our epistemology can shape the way we think about perception and experience. Speaking as an epistemologist, I should say that I don’t necessarily think that this is a good thing. If we think that we need perceptual evidence to have perceptual knowledge or perceptual justification, we will naturally feel some pressure to think of experience as a source of reasons or evidence. In trying to explain how experience can provide us with evidence, we run the risk (...) of either adopting a conception of evidence according to which our evidence isn’t very much like the objects of our beliefs that figure in reasoning (e.g., by identifying our evidence with experiences or sensations) or the risk of accepting a picture of experience according to which our perceptions and perceptual experiences are quite similar to beliefs in terms of their objects and their representational powers. But I think we have good independent reasons to resist identifying our evidence with things that don’t figure in our reasoning as premises and I think we have good independent reason to doubt that experience is sufficiently belief-like to provide us with something premise-like that can figure in reasoning. We should press pause. We shouldn’t let questionable epistemological assumptions tell us how to do philosophy of mind. I don’t think that we have good reason to think that we need the evidence of the senses to explain how perceptual justification or knowledge is possible. Part of my scepticism derives from the fact that I think we can have kinds of knowledge where the relevant knowledge is not evidentially grounded. Part of my scepticism derives from the fact that there don’t seem to be many direct arguments for thinking that justification and knowledge always requires evidential support. In this paper, I shall consider the three arguments I’ve found for thinking that justification and knowledge do always require evidential support and explain why I don’t find them convincing. I think that we can explain perceptual justification, rationality, and defeat without assuming that our experiences provide us with evidence. In the end, I think we can partially vindicate Davidson’s (notorious) suggestion that our beliefs, not experiences, provide us with reasons for forming further beliefs. This idea turns out to be compatible with foundationalism once we understand that foundational status can come from something other than evidential support. (shrink)

This paper articulates and argues for the plausibility of the Presentation View of Perceptual Knowledge, an under-discussed epistemology of perception. On this view, a central epistemological role of perception is that of making subjects aware of their surroundings. By doing so, perception affords subjects with reasons for world-directed judgments. Moreover, the very perceived concrete entities are identified as those reasons. The former claim means that the position is a reasons-based epistemology; the latter means that it endorses (...) a radically anti-psychologist conception of reasons. First, I articulate and motivate the Presentation View. Then, I defend the view from three incarnations of a major objection levelled within the ranks of reasons-based epistemologies: McDowell’s version of the accusation that a view like this falls prey to the Myth of the Given. I argue that all three incarnations fail to show the Presentation View to be inadequate. The first version holds that a general characterization of the Myth clearly shows that it is an incoherent idea. The second version holds that endorsing the Myth makes it impossible to construe non-conceptual items as items that can stand in rational relations to judgements and beliefs. The third version holds that endorsing the Myth leads to a conception where perceptual experiences merely cause, but do not warrant, our perceptual beliefs and judgements. I explain in detail how the Presentation View has the elements to respond to each of these objections. (shrink)

Perceptual experience supports the assignment of confidences in belief – doxastic confidences. To explain this fact, many philosophers appeal to Perceptual Indeterminacy, which holds that perceptual content can be more or less determinate. Others instead appeal to Perceptual Confidence, which says that perceptual experience supports doxastic confidences because it assigns confidences too. Morrison argues that a primary reason to favour Perceptual Confidence is that it is uniquely capable of accounting for bell-shaped doxastic confidence distributions; (...) we call this the bell curve objection to Perceptual Indeterminacy. Here we show that two recent defences of Perceptual Indeterminacy, due to Nanay and Raleigh and Vindrola, fail to adequately address the bell curve objection. But we also argue that all is not lost for proponents of Perceptual Indeterminacy. They can counter the bell curve objection by embracing a third view, which we call Perceptual Noise. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of what the attitude of hope consists in. We argue that shortcomings in recent theories of hope have methodological roots in that they proceed with little regard for the rich body of literature on the emotions. Taking insights from work in the philosophy of emotions, we argue that hope involves a kind of normative perception. We then develop a strategy for determining the content of this perception, arguing that hope is a perception of practical (...) class='Hi'>reasons. Our proposal stands in contrast with familiar views on which hope is fundamentally about the good. We conclude by considering the increasingly popular idea that some hopes are non-intentional and thus, by implication, non-perceptual. We reply by arguing that our perceptual theory plausibly generalizes to these instances of hope. (shrink)

This is an excerpt of a report that highlights and explores five questions that arose from the Network for Sensory Research workshop on perceptual learning and perceptual recognition at the University of York in March, 2012. This portion of the report explores the question: Can perceptual experience be modified by reason?

Perceptual appearances of personality can be highly inaccurate, for example, when they rely on race, masculinity, and attractiveness, factors that have little to do with personality, as well as when they are the result of perceiver effects, such as an idiosyncratic tendency to view others negatively. This raises the question of whether these types of appearances can provide immediate justification for our judgments about personality. I argue that there are three reasons that we should think that they can. (...) The inaccuracy of these types of appearances is not nearly as widespread as it may initially seem. Even thin-slicing in zero-acquaintance conditions seems to reliably track many personality traits. The thought that perceptual appearances of personality can justify our beliefs only in conjunction with background information rests on a failure to acknowledge the existence of genuine high-level perceptual appearances of personality. Perceiver effect cases are not unlike cases in which we have inaccurate low-level perceptual appearances in unfavorable perceptual conditions. (shrink)

Perceptual Dogmatism holds that if it perceptually seems to S that p, then S has immediate prima facie justification for the belief that p. Various philosophers have made the notion of a perceptual seeming more precise by distinguishing perceptual seemings from both sensations and beliefs to accommodate a) the epistemic difference between perceptual judgments of novices and experts, and, b) the problem of the speckled hen. Using somewhat different terminology, perceptual seemings are supposed to be (...) high-level percepts instead of low-level sensations. I argue that although it is right that perceptual seemings should not be identified with sensations, they should also not be identified with percepts. There is no strong reason to assume that sensations and percepts exist as separate conscious states, and it appears therefore best to identify perceptual seemings simply with perceptual experiences interpreted as entities incorporating aspects from both sensations and percepts. However, even with this plausible identification in hand, the speckled hen will remain problematic for PD. (shrink)

According to the perceptual theory of introspection, introspection is a kind of perception of our mental life. To evaluate the perceptual theory’s plausibility, we obviously need to know what entitles a mental phenomenon to the qualification “perceptual.” I start by arguing that this task is complicated by the fact that we really have two notions of the perceptual: a functional notion and a phenomenological notion. The heart of the chapter is an argument that even if we (...) have no reason to think that introspection is a kind of perception in the functional sense, we do have strong reasons to think it is a kind of perception in the phenomenological sense. In the phenomenological sense, I argue, two features are central to a phenomenon’s status as perceptual: its involving direct awareness of the perceived, and its taking a distinctively perceptual attitude toward it. The bulk of the chapter consists in (i) an argument from inference to the best explanation for the thesis that introspection involves direct awareness of the introspected, and (ii) a more direct argument that introspection involves an attitude almost identical to the attitude distinctive of sensory perception. The chapter then closes with responses to some of the standard objections to the perceptual theory. (shrink)

In the recent metaethical literature there has been significant interest in the prospects for what I am denoting ‘Perceptual Intuitionism’: the view that normal ethical agents can and do have non-inferential justification for first-order ethical beliefs by having ethical perceptual experiences, e.g., Cullison 2010, McBrayer 2010, Vayrynen 2008. If true, it promises to constitute an independent a posteriori intuitionist epistemology, providing an alternative to intuitionist accounts which posit a priori intuition and/or emotion as sources of non-inferentially justified ethical (...) beliefs. As it is formulated, it is plausible that a necessary con- dition for the view is the truth of Ethical Perception: normal ethical agents can and do have perceptual experiences as of the instantiation of ethical properties. In this paper a sophisticated and promising account of Ethical Perception is offered. Extant objections are shown to fail. However, it will be argued that it is far from obvious that the account of Perceptual Intuitionism which emerges constitutes an independent alternative to other intuitionist accounts. This is because we have reason to think that ethical perceptual experience may be epistemically dependent on other epistemic sources, e.g. a priori intuition or emotion. (shrink)

In "The Epistemic Significance of Perceptual Learning," Elijah Chudnoff (this issue) argues that cases from perceptual learning show that perception not only generates reasons for beliefs but also preserves those reasons over time in perceptual learning cases. In this paper, we dispute the idea that perceptual learning enables the preservation of perceptual reasons. We then argue for an alternative view, viz. the view that perceptual learning is epistemically significant insofar as it (...) modifies our perceptual system in such a way as to make us capable of perceiving subtle low-level properties (e.g. lightness) and high-level properties (e.g. chess configurations). Acquiring the capacity to perceive these properties is what enables us to achieve expertise in a variety of subject matters (e.g. chicken sexing, chess playing, language fluency). Along the way, we argue against two main points in Chudnoff’s paper. The first is that, pace Chudnoff, perceptual learning does not result in the acquisition of new facts. It only results in the acquisition of a new perceptual capacity. The second is that experiences resulting from perceptual learning can always serve as immediate justifiers of beliefs and hence do not need supporting background information in order to serve as reasons. (shrink)

A straightforward way of thinking about perception is in terms of perceptual representation. Perception is the construction of perceptual representations that represent the world correctly or incorrectly. This way of thinking about perception has been questioned recently by those who deny that there are perceptual representations. This article examines some reasons for and against the concept of perceptual representation and explores some potential ways of resolving this debate. Then it analyzes what perceptual representations may (...) be: if they attribute properties to entities, what are these attributed properties, and what are the entities they are attributed to. (shrink)

According to Perceptual Fundamentalism we can have justified perceptual beliefs solely in virtue of having perceptual experiences with corresponding contents. Recently, it has been argued that Perceptual Fundamentalism entails that it is possible to gain an a priori justified belief that perception is reliable by engaging in a suppositional reasoning process of a priori bootstrapping. But I will show that Perceptual Fundamentalists are not committed to a priori bootstrapping being a rational reasoning process. On the (...) most plausible versions of Perceptual Fundamentalism, a priori bootstrapping cannot be used to rationally support anti-sceptical beliefs about the reliability of perception. Moreover, seeing why Perceptual Fundamentalists are not committed to a priori bootstrapping will help us to better understand the nature of the perceptual entitlements that Perceptual Fundamentalists posit, or at least should posit. (shrink)

Joint attention customarily refers to the coordinated focus of attention between two or more individuals on a common object or event, where it is mutually “open” to all attenders that they are so engaged. We identify two broad approaches to analyse joint attention, one in terms of cognitive notions like common knowledge and common awareness, and one according to which joint attention is fundamentally a primitive phenomenon of sensory experience. John Campbell’s relational theory is a prominent representative of the latter (...) approach, and the main focus of this paper. We argue that Campbell’s theory is problematic for a variety of reasons, through which runs a common thread: most of the problems that the theory is faced with arise from the relational view of perception that he endorses, and, more generally, they suggest that perceptual experience is not sufficient for an analysis of joint attention. (shrink)