Reasons and Perception

This chapter is organized around four central questions about the role of reasons in the epistemology of perception. The 'whether?' question: does perception provide us with reasons for belief about the external world? The 'how?' question: how does perception provide us with reasons for belief about the external world? The 'when?' question: when does perception provide us with reasons for belief about the external world? The 'what?' question: what are the reasons that perception provides us with for belief about the external world

Perceptual objectivity and consciousness : a relational response to Burge’s challenge

My question is: does phenomenal consciousness have a critical role in explaining the way conscious perceptions achieve objective import? I approach it through developing a dilemma I label ‘Burge’s Challenge’, which is implicit in his approach to perceptual objectivity. It says, crudely: either endorse the general structure of his account of how objective perceptual import is achieved (an account I label ‘Caused Representation’), and give up on a role for consciousness. Or, relinquish Caused Representation, and possibly defend a role for consciousness. Someone I call Burge* holds we should embrace the first horn of the dilemma. A second response, roughly the relationalist approach, opts for the second horn. The third option, implicit in many current approaches to perceptual consciousness, is to reject the dilemma. The paper argues for a version of the second response. The key argument turns on the development of a sceptical challenge to justify the assumption that we perceive particular intrinsic property instantiations, rather than their structural equivalents. The suggestion will be that only the relationalist approach can meet it in the way we think it is met. If this is right, there is a prima facie case for taking relationalist responses to the dilemma seriously. I end with two objections to this response, which might be made by the real Burge in defence of opting for the first horn of the dilemma, and by phenomenal intentionalists in defence of rejecting the dilemma. I use discussion of these to highlight one of the main issues that should be pursued in order to make good the claim that we should embrace the horn of the dilemma that Burge* rejects

In defence of naïve realism

This thesis offers a defence of naive realism. As I understand it, naive realism involves a claim about the structure of perception, and about the nature of perceptual experience, that is, the sensory experience that one enjoys when perceiving something. It claims that perception is psychologically direct, in that perceptual experience, in its very nature, suffices to put one in contact with normal, mind-independent objects. And it understands this nature in terms of it being presentational of these objects. After explaining the core commitments of naive realism and presenting the salient alternative views of the nature of perceptual experience and perception, I go on to consider motivations for why it is a position that is worth defending. I discuss epistemological, metaphysical and phenomenological reasons for why naive realism should be the place where we begin our theorising about perception, and why we should defend it as strongly as we can. I then present the two main challenges to the naive realist view, the arguments from illusion and hallucination. The possibility of these two kinds of sensory experience is held to make the naive realist view of the nature of perceptual experience untenable. I present a modified form of adverbialism as the best way for the naive realist to understand the nature of perceptual experience if they want to successfully accommodate the possibility of illusory experience. On this approach, perceptual experience is the sensing of the object of perception by a subject. Next I consider the disjunctive response to the challenge that hallucination presents to the naive realist, according to which we should conceive of perceptual and hallucinatory experience as having fundamentally different natures. I argue that such a disjunctivism needs to take an extreme form in which the only positive nature to hallucinatory experience is its being subjectively indiscriminable from perceptual experience. This position is rejected on the grounds that it maintains an implausible view about the nature of sensory experience. Finally, I consider an alternative way in which the naive realist can deal with hallucination. This is to claim that perceptual and hallucinatory experience can share the same nature, while at the same time perceptual experience can be understood as presentational of the objects of perception. This strategy will require the naive realist to adopt a stance about the metaphysical nature of the entities to which one can be related in experience

The Nature of Intuitive Justification

In this paper I articulate and defend a view that I call phenomenal dogmatism about intuitive justification. It is dogmatic because it includes the thesis: if it intuitively seems to you that p, then you thereby have some prima facie justification for believing that p. It is phenomenalist because it includes the thesis: intuitions justify us in believing their contents in virtue of their phenomenology—and in particular their presentational phenomenology. I explore the nature of presentational phenomenology as it occurs perception, and I make a case for thinking that it is present in a wide variety of logical, mathematical, and philosophical intuitions

The Immediate Object of Perception : A Sense-datum

The question of what we immediately perceive from the first-person point of view has been an issue of philosophizing since the beginning of Western philosophy. However, many philosophers have not considered all theoretical and practical consequences concerning identity and causation in perceptual experience between a perceiver and the external world. Despite their meritorious studies, philosophers have failed to completely understand how the causal series of events affects what we immediately experience. Using facts relating to perceivers, logical reasoning, introspection, and philosophical theories, the aim of this research is to show that objects of sense have been contradictorily and confusedly associated with several objects in philosophy of perception. The research problem is that of whether the entity external to a perceiver is identical to the immediate object of perceptual experience. The research starts from the basic beliefs that things appear in experience and that there is causality in perceptual experience. After presenting philosophical theories of perception, the concept ‘sense-datum’, a characterization of ‘perception’, and basic arguments for perceiving the inner private sense-datum, the study examines Bertrand Russell’s and G. E Moore’s arguments for a claim that we always perceive mind-internal sense-data. This claim is problematic if ‘sense-datum’ is considered as being under the category of substance. Nonetheless, evidence for a claim in direct realism and eliminative materialism that the immediate object of perception is an external entity leads to circularity and identity problems. Finally, by means of a demonstration based on understanding and facts in perceivers and perceptual phenomena, the research concludes that the external entity is not identical to the immediate object of perceptual experience. Perceptual experience does not directly reach the external world, and the objects of sense are not independent of the perceiver.Kysymys siitä, mitä oikeastaan havaitsemme välittömästi 1. persoonan näkökulmasta, on ollut filosofoinnin kohteena länsimaisen filosofian alkuajoista lähtien. Kuitenkaan kaikkia teoreettisia ja käytännöllisiä seurauksia, jotka liittyvät identtisyyteen ja kausaalisuuteen havaintokokemuksessa havaitsijan ja ulkomaailman välillä, ei ole oivallettu. Huolimatta filosofien ansiokkaista tutkimuksista he eivät ole täysin ymmärtäneet kausaalisen tapahtumasarjan vaikutusta siihen, mitä koemme välittömästi. Käyttäen havaitsijoita koskevia faktoja, loogista päättelyä, introspektiota omakohtaisessa havaintotilanteessa ja filosofista aineistoa tämän tutkimuksen tarkoitus on osoittaa, että aistien objektit on yhdistetty ristiriitaisesti ja sekavasti useisiin eri kohteisiin havainnon filosofiassa. Tutkimusongelmana on, onko havaitsijan ulkopuolella oleva entiteetti identtinen välittömän havaintokokemuksen kohteen kanssa. Tutkimus lähtee perususkomuksista, että asioita ilmenee kokemuksessa ja että kausaalisuus on havaintokokemuksessa. Sen jälkeen kun on esitelty havainnon filosofian teorioita, aistinsisällön eli sense-datumin käsite, havainnon luonnehdinta ja perusargumentteja sisäisen, yksityisen objektin havaitsemisen puolesta, tutkimus käy läpi Bertrand Russellin ja G. E. Mooren todistuksia väitteelle, että havaitsemme aina mielensisäisiä objekteja. Tämä väite osoittautuu ongelmalliseksi, jos ”sense-datum” käsitetään substanssin kategoriassa. Seuraavaksi tutkimus näyttää suoran realismin ja eliminatiivisen materialismin perusteiden johtavan kehämäisyyteen ja identtisyysongelmiin. Lopuksi ymmärrykseen sekä havaitsijoihin ja havainnon ilmiöihin liittyviin faktoihin perustuvien todisteiden avulla tutkimus päätyy johtopäätelmään, että ulkoinen entiteetti ei ole identtinen välittömän havaintokokemuksen kohteen kanssa. Havaintokokemus ei suoraan tavoita ulkomaailman entiteettejä eivätkä aistien objektit ole havaitsijasta riippumattomia.Siirretty Doriast

RECONSIDERING MORAL PERCEPTION: THE DIALECTICAL EMERGENCE OF MORAL PERCEPTUAL CONTENTS DURING EXPERIENCE VIA COGNITIVE PENETRATION AND OPPRESSIVE SOCIALIZATION’S SUPPRESSION OF OUR ABILITY TO ‘SEE’ MORAL REASONS FOR HUMANIZATION AND LIBERATION

Moral perceptions occur when a subject makes an immediate discernment about the moral features of an occurrent experience. This project taxonomizes theories of moral perception into the following two camps: experientialism and judgementalism. I defend a version of experientialism, Moral Perceptual Orientation, by arguing that we, in addition to making moral judgments, have genuine perceptions with moral content during occurrent experience. I then go on to advance a framework for understanding how these perceptions are curated by our background beliefs by developing a view of dialectical consciousness. I do this by synthesizing Herbert Marcuse’s perspective on the epistemic subject with the Phenomenological division of Feminist Affect theory using Buddhist (Mahāyānan) moral psychology to account for the formation of those background beliefs, habits of thought, and affects which shape our moral perceptions. Lastly, I argue that oppressive modes of socialization can curate our moral perceptions by reproducing moral ignorance. This, in turn, perpetuates a form of moral blindness to moral reasons during occurrent experience, something which is a defining feature of our epistemic lives wherever domination and brutalization are valued, personally or structurally, over liberation and humanization

Believing rationally given your actual beliefs: on Susanna Rinard’s pragmatism

Susanna Rinard (2017, 2019, 2022) offers a refined pragmatist view of how to theorize normatively about beliefs. However, David Christensen (2020) disputes Rinard’s claim on rationality by presenting some seeming counterexamples of her theory. In this paper, I challenge Christensen\u27s objections to Rinard\u27s theory. First, I introduce Rinard\u27s theory of belief rationality. Second, I introduce Christensen’s cases that allegedly debunk Rinard’s thesis. Third, I refine Rinard’s theory of rationality by arguing that the rationality of an agent\u27s belief can be based on what is best for them given their existing beliefs, emotions, and perceptual experiences. Last, I will redescribe the cases Christensen presents to capture how people ordinarily deliberate in everyday life when undergoing tensions between their mental states. I will contend that the refined version of Rinard’s theory that I propose can offer a clearer picture of why Christensen fails in his attempt to reject Rinard’s original theory

Intuition, perception, and emotion: A critical study of the prospects for contemporary ethical intuitionism

This thesis is a critical study of the prospects for contemporary accounts of ethical intuitionism. Ethical intuitionism is an epistemological theory about the nature of our justified ethical beliefs, whose central claim is that we have at least some non-inferentially justified beliefs. Having been out of favour for much of the latter-part of the twentieth century, ethical intuitionism is enjoying something of a renaissance. Contemporary proponents of the view have shown that ethical intuitionism need not fall foul of the main objections previously brought against it. Furthermore, developments in epistemology have helped to make the notion of non-inferential justification (and the associated view, epistemological foundationalism) more philosophically respectable. As I will suggest, non-inferentially justified belief paradigmatically involves a belief that is justified by a non-doxastic state. In this thesis I will consider four accounts of ethical intuitionism which each claim that a particular kind of non-doxastic state can ground justified ethical beliefs: understandings, intellectual seemings, perceptual experiences and emotional experiences. Note that contemporary ethical intuitionists do not commit themselves to there being a distinctively ethical non-doxastic state. Rather, contemporary ethical intuitionists adopt a sort of innocence by association strategy, suggesting that that we gain non-inferential justification in ethics in much the same way as we get non-inferential justification in other domains. It is my purpose in this thesis to subject each of these four accounts of contemporary ethical intuitionism to sustained philosophical criticism. Although I do not think that ethical intuitionism is implausible, it is my view that the current enthusiasm for the position ought to be seriously tempered, and that much work will need to be done in order to make it acceptable as a meta-ethical view. Firstly, with regard to the understanding (self-evidence) account I argue that there are serious problems with the view that the substantive Rossian principles are non-inferentially justifiably believed on the basis of an adequate understanding of their content. Secondly, I go on to suggest, inter alia, that proponents of the intellectual seemings account of intuitionism cannot appeal to their favoured general epistemological principle in order to ground their ethical epistemology. Given this, much work needs to be done on their part in order to show why we ought to think that intellectual seemings with an ethical content that is substantive get to justify. Thirdly, against the ethical perception account I suggest that even if it is true that ethical agents have perceptual experiences which represent ethical properties, it is not at all obvious that this supports ethical intuitionism, since insofar as such experiences get to justify, it seems plausible that they will ground inferentially or mediately justified beliefs. I do, however, suggest that a related perceptual view may be able to ground a plausible account of non-inferentially justified ethical beliefs. Finally, I consider the ethical emotions account. Given that this is a relatively new view on the philosophical scene I spend much of my time defending it against some serious recent objections brought against it. However, I will also suggest that there are question marks surrounding the epistemological credentials of emotional experiences and that much work will therefore need to be done in order to make the view that emotional experiences do in fact non-inferentially justify ethical beliefs acceptable

Casullo on Experiential Justification

In A Priori Justification, Albert Casullo argues that extant attempts to explicate experiential justification—by stipulation, introspection, conceptual analysis, thought experimentation, and/or appeal to intuitions about hypothetical cases—are unsuccessful. He draws the following conclusion: “armchair methods” such as these are inadequate to the task. Instead, empirical methods should be used to investigate the distinction between experiential and non-experiential justification and to address questions concerning the nature, extent, and existence of the a priori. In this essay, I show that Casullo has not refuted armchair explications of experiential justification, in particular those that appeal to introspectively accessible phenomenology. I do this by presenting a phenomenal theory of experiential justification that has a significant degree of initial plausibility and survives Casullo’s general attack on such theories. As a result, a premise in the central argument for Casullo’s signature proposal concerning the a priori is undermined

Subjects, Experiences, and the Passage of Time: A neo-Parfittian account

The A and B-theorists of time disagree over whether time passes in reality. The B-theorist denies it does, and so, despite its successes, stands at an intuitive disadvantage. The A-theorist on the other hand is able to argue that our experience of time provides evidence of its passage. This ‘argument from experience’ expresses what I take to be the main motivation behind the A-theory. My aim is to provide the B-theorist with a response. The general thrust is that the argument from experience rests upon a mistaken view about the self – namely, Non-Reductionism. If we instead assume a Reductionist view, it should be rejected. Derek Parfit argues that, given Reductionism, it can be an empty question whether persons persists through change. After defining and justifying Reductionism, I argue for a stronger claim: it is always an empty question whether persons – and their experiences – persist. That is to say, what we naturally describe as a single persisting person (or experience) could just as accurately be described as a series of distinct momentary persons (or experiences). This claim is defended, then put to work against the argument from experience. Firstly, I argue it follows from this claim that we could not have veridical experiences of temporal passage. So, even if we do experience time as passing, we couldn’t take this as evidence that time really does pass. Finally, I propose a cognitive error account of temporal experience whereby although we believe we experience time as passing, this belief is false. I argue that the intuition to the contrary should be regarded as a side effect of a faulty, Non-Reductionist conceptual scheme. If we were to assimilate a Reductionist conceptual scheme instead, it would be impossible to conceptualise an experience of passage. In other words, time would not seem to pass