Alvin Goldman

(? - 2024)

What are the conceptually necessary and sufficient conditions for a person, or organism, to perceive a given object? More precisely, what is the nature of our ordinary thought about perception that gives rise to our willingness or unwillingness to say that S perceives O? Some form of causal theory of perception is now, I think, widely accepted. Such a theory maintains that it is part of our concept of perception that S perceives O only if O causes a percept, or perceptual state, of S. I accept this causal requirement, though with some qualification. The crucial problem for the theory of perception is what must be added to the causal requirement. Not all causes of a percept are said to be perceived. Smith looks at a tree illuminated by the sun, when the sun is not itself in view. His visual percept is caused by the tree, but not only the tree. The percept's causal ancestry includes the sun and the array of light two inches from Smith's eyes. Why do we say that he sees the tree, but not the sun or the array of light? What principles underlie this invidious choice among causes? Similarly, we think of a bat as perceiving objects in his path, but not as perceiving himself. Yet, since he emits the sonar signals these objects reflect, he is himself a cause of his percepts. Why don't we say he perceives himself?

Epistemology has had a strongly individualist orientation, at least since Descartes. Knowledge, for Descartes, starts with the fact of one’s own thinking and with oneself as subject of that thinking. Whatever else can be known, it must be known by inference from one’s own mental contents. Achieving such knowledge is an individual, rather than a collective, enterprise. Descartes’s successors largely followed this lead, so the history of epistemology, down to our own time, has been a predominantly individualist affair.

Pierre Jacob (2008) raises several problems for the alleged link between mirroring and mindreading. This response argues that the best mirroring-mindreading thesis would claim that mirror processes cause, rather than constitute, selected acts of mindreading. Second, the best current evidence for mirror-based mindreading is not found in the motoric domain but in the domains of emotion and sensation, where the evidence (ignored by Jacob) is substantial. Finally, simulation theory should distinguish low-level simulation (mirroring) and high-level simulation (involving pretense or imagination). Jacob implies that bi-level simulationism creates an unbridgeable 'gap' in intention reading, but this is not a compelling challenge.

This article aims to say what democracy is or what the predicate ‘democratic’ means, as opposed to saying what is good, right, or desirable about it. The basic idea—by no means a novel one—is that a democratic system is one that features substantial equality of political power. More distinctively it is argued that ‘democratic’ is a relative gradable adjective, the use of which permits different, contextually determined thresholds of democraticness. Thus, a system can be correctly called ‘democratic’ even if it does not feature perfect equality of power. The article's central undertaking is to give greater precision to the operative notion of power. No complete or fully unified measure of power is offered, but several conceptual tools are introduced that help give suitable content to power measurement. These tools include distinctions between conditional versus unconditional power and direct versus indirect power. Using such tools, a variety of prima facie problems for the power equality approach are addressed and defused. Finally, the theory is compared to epistemic and deliberative approaches to democracy; and reasons are offered for the attractiveness of democracy that flows from the power equality theme.

This chapter considers how imagination generates emotion. ‘Supposition-imagination’ (S-imagination) is distinguished from ‘enactment-imagination’ (E-imagination). The former kind of imagination involves entertaining or supposing various hypothetical scenarios; with the latter kind of imagination, one tries to create a kind of facsimile of a mental state. Thus, one might try to create a perception-like state as in visual imagination or motoric imagination. It is argued that this much richer form of imagination generates typical emotional reactions to fiction. Emotional reactions to fiction are generated in several different ways, including a process in which we E-imagine being a hypothetical reader or observer of fact.