Seeing and Perceptual Content

There are two widely held assumptions about perception: ascriber-independence (the view that the facts regarding what a subject perceives, as well as what her perceptual states represent, are independent of the interests of those attributing the relevant states to her), and determinacy (the view that perceptual content is relatively determinate). I challenge both of these assumptions, and develop a new approach to perceptual content, with implications for theories of mental content more broadly. In chapter one, I address the question of whether, in addition to low-level features, vision represents ordinary objects. I argue that there is just no fact of the matter. In chapter two, I defend a contextualist account of object-seeing: one that illuminates the inscrutability thesis defended in chapter 1. Finally, in chapter three, I address the question of whether the contents of vision are object-dependent. I argue that it is simply indeterminate whether the particulars we perceive enter into the contents of our perceptual states. I then address various worries about the indeterminacy thesis, arguing that we should embrace the view that there are multiple, equally acceptable, ways to assign contents to our perceptual experiences

The inscrutability of colour similarity

This paper presents a new response to the colour similarity argument, an argument that many people take to pose the greatest threat to colour physicalism. The colour similarity argument assumes that if colour physicalism is true, then colour similarities should be scrutable under standard physical descriptions of surface reflectance properties such as their spectral reflectance curves. Given this assumption, our evident failure to find such similarities at the reducing level seemingly proves fatal to colour physicalism. I argue that we should dispense with this assumption, and thus endorse the inscrutability of colour similarity. This strategy is inspired by parallels between the colour similarity argument and the explanatory gap between mind and body made vivid by Jackson’s (1986) knowledge argument, and in particular by type-B physicalist responses to that argument. This inscrutability response is further motivated by cases in chemistry and biochemistry in which analogous scrutability theses fail to hold. Along the way, I present a challenge to standard formulations of the colour similarity argument based on the extreme context sensitivity of the similarity relation. Most presentations of the argument fail to control for such contextual variation, which raises the distinct possibility that the argument equivocates on the similarity relation across its premises. Although ultimately inconclusive, this context challenge forces a significant reformulation of the colour similarity argument, and highlights the need for much greater care in handling claims about colour similarity

Does Phenomenology Ground Mental Content?

I develop several new arguments against claims about "cognitive phenomenology" and its alleged role in grounding thought content. My arguments concern "absent cognitive qualia cases", "altered cognitive qualia cases", and "disembodied cognitive qualia cases". However, at the end, I sketch a positive theory of the role of phenomenology in grounding content, drawing on David Lewis's work on intentionality. I suggest that within Lewis's theory the subject's total evidence plays the central role in fixing mental content and ruling out deviant interpretations. However I point out a huge unnoticed problem, the problem of evidence: Lewis really has no theory of sensory content and hence no theory of what fixes evidence. I suggest a way of plugging this hole in Lewis's theory. On the resulting theory, which I call " phenomenal functionalism", there is a sense in which sensory phenomenology is the source of all determinate intentionality. Phenomenal functionalism has similarities to the theories of Chalmers and Schwitzgebe

Towards an ontology of common sense

Philosophers from Plotinus to Paul Churchland have yielded to the temptation to embrace doctrines which contradict the core beliefs of common sense. Philosophical realists have on the other hand sought to counter this temptation and to vindicate those core beliefs. The remarks which follow are to be understood as a further twist of the wheel in this never-ending battle. They pertain to the core beliefs of common sense concerning the external reality that is given in everyday experience -the beliefs of folk physics, as we might call them. Just as critics of Churchland et al. have argued that the folk-psychological ontology of beliefs, desires, etc. yields the best explanation we can have of the order of cognitive phenomena conceived from the perspective of first-person experience, so we shall argue that (1) the commonsensical ontology of folk physics yields the best explanation we can have of our externally directed cognitive experience and that (2) an ontology of mesoscopic things, events and processes must play a role, in particular, in our best scientific theory of human action

Representational Advantages

Descriptive metaphysics investigates our naive ontology as this is articulated in the content of our perception or of our pre-reflective thought about the world. But is access to such content reliable? Sceptics about the standard modes of access (introspection, or language-driven intuitions) may think that investigations in descriptive metaphysics can be aided by the controlled findings of cognitive science. Cognitive scientists have studied a promising range of representational advantages, that is, ways in which cognition favours one type of entity over another. The notion of representational advantage is investigated and some scepticism is expressed as to its appropriateness for use in descriptive metaphysics

Surface Impressions: Materiality, Affect, and Bodily Reading Methods in Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851)

By reading different surfaces of Moby-Dick (1851), from the figurative to the material to the embodied, I examine how surface is a relational state. This essay tracks Ishmael’s textual participation with surfaces—or, in other words, how he comes to read, know, and feel—across relational and sensual modes of affect, form, and materiality. Drawing on material text studies, affect studies, New Materialism, and queer studies, I argue that imagined and actual embodied contact enables a kind of sensory, intimate reading method. I engage bodily textual inscription through “impressibility,” following the sensed impressions occurring at the skin. More broadly, I explicate how the inscrutability of embodied, felt texts reveals Queequeg’s “unfeeling” within a structure of sentimental feeling

Inscrutable Grief: Memorializing Japanese American Internment in Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660

During World War II, the United States government interned over 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry. The losses of internment were innumerable: internees had to abandon most personal possessions and leave their friends, homes, and communities, all while mainstream American culture rarely acknowledged these losses. This article explores how Japanese American cultural production helped reshape mainstream conceptions of internment loss, focusing on the immediate post-war period and Miné Okubo’s innovative graphic text, Citizen 13660, the first Japanese American memoir published post-war. Numerous scholars mention Citizen 13660’s mournful notes, but the criticism does not offer a sustained engagement with Okubo’s depictions of public grieving. Such representations expand the range of emotional expressions available to Japanese Americans in the 1940s. However, Okubo signals an awareness of how the greater American public was ill-equipped to comprehend Japanese American grief. I argue that Okubo critiques the stereotype of the “inscrutable” Asian American subject by employing her own aesthetic of inscrutability through her rhetoric and images. If there is no outlet through which Japanese Americans can process or even speak the injuries and losses brought upon them, grief is a forbidden emotion, unreadable in the dominant modes of the time. This text interrogates such denials, working beyond the compulsory restraints of Japanese American self-representations by juxtaposing the supposed lack of interiority with external shows of emotion. The collapsing of categories throughout Okubo’s text thus disrupts representational paradigms of Japanese American experience, opening the door for new representational and reception possibilities.

Images of/and the Postmodern. Review of Spectacular Allegories: Postmodern American Writing and the Politics of Seeing by Josh Cohen

Josh Cohen, in his new book Spectacular Allegories: Postmodern American Writing and the Politics of Seeing, argues that postmodern American novelists ranging from Norman Mailer to Joan Didion, Robert Coover to James Ellroy, do not merely fall into accord with this critique -text good; image bad- but are in fact using the allegorical nature of their encounters with and representations of visual culture as a means of reintroducing the image to history, an attempt to construct a new critical politics of visuality. The possibility of a critical visual agency is raised for Cohen in these writers’ gendered representations of the reversible and dialogic nature of specularity-that the watcher may, at any moment, become the watched-a mutable relationship that is made possible by a perceived crisis in masculine narrative and visual authority, and may undermine the domination imposed by that traditional authority

Inscrutable Grief: Memorializing Japanese American Internment in Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660

During World War II, the United States government interned over 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry. The losses of internment were innumerable: internees had to abandon most personal possessions and leave their friends, homes, and communities, all while mainstream American culture rarely acknowledged these losses. This article explores how Japanese American cultural production helped reshape mainstream conceptions of internment loss, focusing on the immediate post-war period and Miné Okubo’s innovative graphic text, Citizen 13660, the first Japanese American memoir published post-war. Numerous scholars mention Citizen 13660’s mournful notes, but the criticism does not offer a sustained engagement with Okubo’s depictions of public grieving. Such representations expand the range of emotional expressions available to Japanese Americans in the 1940s. However, Okubo signals an awareness of how the greater American public was ill-equipped to comprehend Japanese American grief. I argue that Okubo critiques the stereotype of the “inscrutable” Asian American subject by employing her own aesthetic of inscrutability through her rhetoric and images. If there is no outlet through which Japanese Americans can process or even speak the injuries and losses brought upon them, grief is a forbidden emotion, unreadable in the dominant modes of the time. This text interrogates such denials, working beyond the compulsory restraints of Japanese American self-representations by juxtaposing the supposed lack of interiority with external shows of emotion. The collapsing of categories throughout Okubo’s text thus disrupts representational paradigms of Japanese American experience, opening the door for new representational and reception possibilities.