Jack Lyons

The cognitive neuropsychological understanding of a cognitive system is roughly that of a ‘mental organ’, which is independent of other systems, specializes in some cognitive task, and exhibits a certain kind of internal cohesiveness. This is all quite vague, and I try to make it more precise. A more precise understanding of cognitive systems will make it possible to articulate in some detail an alternative to the Fodorian doctrine of modularity (since not all cognitive systems are modules), but it will also provide a better understanding of what a module is (since all modules are cognitive systems).

Before imagination became the transcendent and creative faculty promoted by the Romantics, it was for something quite different. Not reserved to a privileged few, imagination was instead considered a universal ability that each person could direct in practical ways. To imagine something meant to form in the mind a replica of a thing—its taste, its sound, and other physical attributes. At the end of the Renaissance, there was a movement to encourage individuals to develop their ability to imagine vividly. Within their private mental space, a space of embodied, sensual thought, they could meditate, pray, or philosophize. Gradually, confidence in the self-directed imagination fell out of favor and was replaced by the belief that the few—an elite of writers and teachers—should control the imagination of the many. This book seeks to understand what imagination meant in early modern Europe, particularly in early modern France, before the Romantic era gave the term its modern meaning. The author explores the themes surrounding early modern notions of imagination (including hostility to imagination) through the writings of such figures as Descartes, Montaigne, François de Sales, Pascal, the Marquise de Se;vigne;, Madame de Lafayette, and Fe;nelon.

Many epistemologists endorse a view I call “evidence essentialism:” if e is evidence of h, for some agent at some time, then necessarily, e is evidence of h, for any agent at any time. I argue that such a view is only plausible if we ignore cognitive diversity among epistemic agents, i.e., the fact that different agents have different—sometimes radically different—cognitive skills, abilities, and proclivities. Instead, cognitive diversity shows that evidential relations are contingent and relative to cognizers. This is especially obvious in extreme cases and in connection with epistemic defeat, but it is also very plausibly true of ordinary agents, and regarding prima facie justification.

Perceptual representations are sometimes said to be iconic, or picture-like. But what does this mean, and is it true? I suggest that the most fruitful way to understand iconicity is in terms of similarity, but there are three importantly different grades of similarity that that might hold between perceptual representations and their objects, and these should be distinguished. It is implausible that all perceptual representations achieve even the weakest grade of iconicity, but I speculatively suggest a “Kantian” view, whereby all perceptual representation involves fillers placed in a “strongly iconic” spatial framework. Those fillers will likely be hybrid structures, with varying grades of iconicity combined with non-iconic elements.

In this chapter, the author regards reliabilism as one of the major achievements of twentieth century philosophy and Alvin Goldman as one of the chief architects of this important theory. It focuses on three related issues in Goldman's epistemology. Goldman has recently been making friendly overtures toward evidentialist epistemologies, and although the author agrees that reliabilism needs some kind of evidentialist element. More specifically, the author think he concedes too much to the evidentialist. In particular, he concedes: that a great many beliefs cannot be justified without evidence, in particular, that some beliefs require nondoxastic evidence; that evidential fit can be understood in non‐process‐reliabilist terms, and that the aforementioned or some similar understanding of evidential fit makes sense of propositional, or ex ante, justification. Goldman has never lost sight of the epistemic significance of ways of coming to believe, and he is well aware of the differences between process reliabilism and indicator reliabilism.

Part of a symposium on Christopher Hill's book, Perceptual experience. Hill argues that perceptual experiences typically represent objects as having exotic properties that he calls Thouless properties. This and his representational pluralism allow him to attribute less perceptual error than the view that experiences represent simple relational properties (only). However, I think it is plausible that perceptual systems do make these sorts of errors, which although pervasive and systematic, are relatively subtle and perfectly explicable. I also express some concerns about representational pluralism, especially in the context of a representationalist view of the phenomenal character of experience.

Traditional epistemology has devoted much attention to the distinctions between perception and inference and between basic and non-basic beliefs. Hot, I develop a different and more general distinction, between what I call "privileged" and "nonprivileged" beliefs; privileged beliefs are justifiable by means of an otherwise substandard argument while nonprivileged beliefs require support by a generally adequate argument for their justification I argue that even coherentists are tacitly committed to this distinction and that one of the chief problems for simple reliabilist theories is that they imply that all beliefs are privileged. Any adequate epistemology has to count some beliefs as privileged and some as nonprivileged, and I suggest a way to modify reliabilist theories to accommodate this result. ;The privileged/nonprivileged belief distinction suggests a framework theory about the structure of epistemic justification, a theory which improves on foundationalism, coherentism, and reliabilism in certain respects. Yet it raises the question of which beliefs are privileged and which are nonprivileged. I argue that whether or not a belief is privileged is determined by the etiology of that belief, and in particular, by the intrinsic nature and the etiology of the psychological faculty that produced that belief. A belief, therefore, is privileged if and only if it is the output of a certain kind of cognitive faculty, or system. Consequently, the beliefs produced by these faculties are such that it is possible to be justified in holding them even in the absence of a generally adequate argument. This does not mean that all the outputs of all such faculties are justified, for such beliefs might still require inferential support or be subject to non-inferential requirements, like reliability And of course, all such beliefs are potentially subject to defeat from other justified beliefs. ;The kind of cognitive faculties I have in mind includes, but is not restricted to, "modules", in Jerry Fodor's sense. The etiological, faculty-oriented view defended hat argues for distinctive, versions of externalism and naturalism in epistemology and holds some promise of illuminating certain traditional epistemological problems