107 research outputs found
Molyneux's Question Within and Across the Senses
This chapter explores how our understanding of Molyneuxâs question, and of the possibility of an experimental resolution to it, should be affected by recognizing the complexity that is involved in reidentifying shapes and other spatial properties across differing sensory manifestations of them. I will argue that while philosophers today usually treat the question as concerning âthe relations between perceptions of shape in different sensory modalitiesâ (Campbell 1995, 301), in fact this is only part of the questionâs real interest, and that the answer to the question also turns on how shape is perceived within each of sight and touch individually
Does Visual Spatial Awareness Require the Visual Awareness of Space?
Many philosophers have held that it is not possible to experience a spatial object, property, or relation except against the background of an intact awareness of a space that is somehow âabsoluteâ. This paper challenges that claim, by analyzing in detail the case of a brain-damaged subject whose visual experiences seem to have violated this condition: spatial objects and properties were present in his visual experience, but space itself was not. I go on to suggest that phenomenological argumentation can give us a kind of evidence about the nature of the mind even if this evidence is not absolutely incorrigible
Intending is Believing: A Defense of Strong Cognitivism
We argue that intentions are beliefsâbeliefs that are held in light of, and made rational by, practical reasoning. To intend to do something is neither more nor less than to believe, on the basis of oneâs practical reasoning, that one will do it. The identification of the mental state of intention with the mental state of belief is what we call strong cognitivism about intentions. It is a strong form of cognitivism because we identify intentions with beliefs, rather than maintaining that beliefs are entailed by intentions or are components of them
On the matching of seen and felt shape by newly sighted subjects
How do we recognize identities between seen shapes and felt ones? Is this due to associative learning, or to intrinsic connections these sensory modalities? We can address this question by testing the capacities of newly sighted subjects to match seen and felt shapes, but only if it is shown that the subjects can see the objects well enough to form adequate visual representations of their shapes. In light of this, a recent study by R. Held and colleagues fails to demonstrate that their newly sighted subjectsâ inability to match seen and felt shape was due to a lack of intermodal connections rather than a purely visual deficit, as they may not have been able visually to represent 3D shape in the perspective-invariant way required for intermodal matching. However, the study could be modified in any of several ways to help avoid this problem
Assertion and transparent self-knowledge
We argue that honesty in assertion requires non-empirical knowledge that what one asserts is what one believes. Our argument proceeds from the thought that to assert honestly, one must follow and not merely conform to the norm âAssert that p only if you believe that pâ. Furthermore, careful consideration of cases shows that the sort of doxastic self-knowledge required for following this norm cannot be acquired on the basis of observation, inference, or any other form of detection of oneâs own doxastic states. It is, as we put it, transparent rather than empirical self-knowledge
Risking Belief
This chapter discusses how we should think about experiences that threaten to radically transform our understanding of the world. While it can be rational to treat the âdoxastically transformativeâ potential of an experience as a reason to choose against it, such a decision must be based in something more than the fact that this experience would alter oneâs current beliefs. It only in light of knowledge of how things are that a person can choose rationally against transformative processes that would destroy this knowledge
Self-Knowledge and Its Limits
This is a review essay of Quassim Cassam, Self-Knowledge for Humans (Oxford, 2014) and John Doris, Talking to Our Selves (Oxford, 2015). In it I question whether Cassam succeeds in his challenge to Richard Moran's account of first-personal authority, and whether Doris is right that experimental evidence for unconscious influences on behavior generates skeptical worries on accounts that regard accurate self-knowledge as a precondition of agency
Tradition as Transmission: A Partial Defence
This paper is part of a symposium on Linda Zagzebski's EPISTEMIC AUTHORITY (OUP, 2012). It focuses on Zagzebski's argument that the transmission of information through a chain of testimony weakens its evidential value. This argument is shown to rest on an overly simplistic model of testimonial transmission that does not apply to religious traditions. The real problem with modeling religious traditions just as transmitters of information is that this assumes a conception of religious knowledge that is too "insular" with respect to other things the believer knows, as well as aspects of religious faith that go beyond the mere acceptance of doctrines
Understanding 'Practical Knowledge'
The concept of practical knowledge is central to G.E.M. Anscombe's argument in Intention, yet its meaning is little understood. There are several reasons for this, including a lack of attention to Anscombe's ancient and medieval sources for the concept, and an emphasis on the more straightforward concept of knowledge "without observation" in the interpretation of Anscombe's position. This paper remedies the situation, first by appealing to the writings of Thomas Aquinas to develop an account of practical knowledge as a distinctive form of thought that "aims at production" of things that lie within an agent's power; and then by showing how this Thomistic understanding of practical cognition seems to have been Anscombe's, too. Having done this, I question whether the thesis that agential knowledge is practical knowledge entails that an agent always has non-observational knowledge of what she is intentionally doing. I answer "Not": Anscombe's claims to the contrary rest on a misleading assimilation of human beings' finite agency to that of an infinite agent like Go
Hubert Dreyfus on Practical and Embodied Intelligence
This chapter treats Hubert Dreyfusâ account of skilled coping as part of his wider project of demonstrating the sovereignty of practical intelligence over all other forms of intelligence. In contrast to the standard picture of human beings as essentially rational, individual agents, Dreyfus argued powerfully on phenomenological and empirical grounds that humans are fundamentally embedded, absorbed, and embodied. These commitments are present throughout Dreyfusâ philosophical writings, from his critique of Artificial Intelligence research in the 1970s and 1980s to his rejection of John McDowellâs conceptualism in his 2005 APA Presidential Address. The present chapter articulates Dreyfusâ proposal for a contentless, non-mentalistic form of intentionality by contrasting his position with that of his U.C. Berkeley colleague John Searle and defending it as a plausible alternative to the so-called âStandard Storyâ of intentional action as the effect of an agentâs mental states
- âŠ