-
337Color in the theory of colors? Or: Are philosophers' colors all white?In George Yancy (ed.), The Center Must Not Hold: White Women Philosophers on the Whiteness of Philosophy, Lexington Books. 2010.Let’s say that a philosophical theory is white just in case it treats the perspective of the white (perhaps Western male) as objective.1 The potential dangers of proposing or defending white theories are two-fold. First, if not all of reality is objective, a fact which I take to be established beyond doubt,2 then white theories could well turn out to be false.3 A white theory is unwarranted (and indeed false) when it treats nonobjective reality as objective. Second, by proposing or defending unw…Read more
-
596What Mary Did Yesterday: Reflections on Knowledge-whPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 78 (2). 2009.Reductionists about knowledge-wh hold that "s knows-wh" (e.g. "John knows who stole his car") is reducible to "there is a proposition p such that s knows that p, and p answers the indirect question of the wh-clause." Anti-reductionists hold that "s knows-wh" is reducible to "s knows that p, as the true answer to the indirect question of the wh-clause." I argue that both of these positions are defective. I then offer a new analysis of knowledge-wh as a special kind of de re knowledge
-
155Seeing as a Non-Experiental Mental State: The Case from Synesthesia and Visual ImageryIn Richard Brown (ed.), Consciousness Inside and Out: Phenomenology, Neuroscience, and the Nature of Experience, Springer Studies in Brain and Mind. 2013.The paper argues that the English verb ‘to see’ can denote three different kinds of conscious states of seeing, involving visual experiences, visual seeming states and introspective seeming states, respectively. The case for the claim that there are three kinds of seeing comes from synesthesia and visual imagery. Synesthesia is a relatively rare neurological condition in which stimulation in one sensory or cognitive stream involuntarily leads to associated experiences in a second unstimulated st…Read more
-
343Rationality and Irrationality: Proceeedings of the 23rd International Wittgenstein Symposium, 13-19 August 2000, Kirchberg Am Wechsel (edited book, review)Öbv&Hpt. 2001.This volume consists of the invited papers presented at the 23rd International Wittgenstein Conference held in Kirchberg, Austria in August 2000. Among the topics treated are: truth, psychologism, science, the nature of rational discourse, practical reason, contextualism, vagueness, types of rationality, the rationality of religious belief, and Wittgenstein. Questions addressed include: Is rationality tied to special sorts of contexts? ls rationality tied to language? Is scientific rationality t…Read more
-
487Is Color Experience Cognitively Penetrable?Topics in Cognitive Science 9 (1): 193-214. 2017.Is color experience cognitively penetrable? Some philosophers have recently argued that it is. In this paper, we take issue with the claim that color experience is cognitively penetrable. We argue that the notion of cognitive penetration that has recently dominated the literature is flawed since it fails to distinguish between the modulation of perceptual content by non-perceptual principles and genuine cognitive penetration. We use this distinction to show that studies suggesting that color exp…Read more
-
667In defense of hearing meaningsSynthese 195 (7): 2967-2983. 2018.According to the inferential view of language comprehension, we hear a speaker’s utterance and infer what was said, drawing on our competence in the syntax and semantics of the language together with background information. On the alternative perceptual view, fluent speakers have a non-inferential capacity to perceive the content of speech. On this view, when we hear a speaker’s utterance, the experience confers some degree of justification on our beliefs about what was said in the absence of de…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
PhilPapers Editorships
Philosophy of Language |