•  804
    Transparency, belief, intention
    Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 85 201-21. 2011.
    This paper elaborates and defends a familiar ‘transparent’ account of knowledge of one's own beliefs, inspired by some remarks of Gareth Evans, and makes a case that the account can be extended to mental states in general, in particular to knowledge of one's intentions.
  •  39
    Consciousness, Color, and Content (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 68 (1): 245-247. 2004.
    Somewhat at random, I shall pick chapter 7 for a closer look. Tye distinguishes three versions of the view that colors are “mind-independent, illumination-independent properties”, which we frequently see physical objects as possessing. The first is emergentism, according to which colors are “simple qualities” that nomologically supervene on the physical facts: there is a possible world exactly like the actual world physically, but in which nothing is colored. Brute nonreductive physicalism is th…Read more
  •  422
    Knowing what I see
    In Declan Smithies & Daniel Stoljar (eds.), Introspection and Consciousness, Oxford University Press. 2012.
    How do I know that I see a cat? A curiously under-asked question. The paper tries to answer it.
  •  30
  •  181
    Intentionalism Defended
    Philosophical Review 110 (2): 199-240. 2001.
    Traditionally, perceptual experiences—for example, the experience of seeing a cat—were thought to have two quite distinct components. When one sees a cat, one’s experience is “about” the cat: this is the representational or intentional component of the experience. One’s experience also has phenomenal character: this is the sensational component of the experience. Although the intentional and sensational components at least typically go together, in principle they might come apart: the intentiona…Read more
  •  338
    Hmm… Hill on the paradox of pain
    Philosophical Studies 161 489-96. 2012.
    Critical discussion of Chris Hill's perceptual theory of pain.
  •  840
    Recollection, perception, imagination
    Philosophical Studies 148. 2010.
    Remembering a cat sleeping (specifically, recollecting the way the cat looked), perceiving (specifically, seeing) a cat sleeping, and imagining (specifically, visualizing) a cat sleeping are of course importantly different. Nonetheless, from the first-person perspective they are palpably alike. The paper addresses two questions: Q1. What are these similarities (and differences)? Q2. How does one tell that one is recalling (and so not perceiving or imagining)?
  •  36
    Dennett versus Gibson
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21 (6): 751-752. 1998.
    Pessoa et al. misinterpret some of Dennett's discussion of filling-in. Their argument against the representational conception of vision and for a Gibsonian alternative is also flawed.
  •  30
    Problems of Vision: Rethinking the Causal Theory of Perception
    Philosophical Review 108 (3): 415. 1999.
    Problems of Vision is divided into three parts. The first part argues for the “insight at [the] core” of the causal theory of perception.
  •  121
    It will not have escaped notice that the defendant in this afternoon
  •  82
    <b>1</b>. Let us say that a thought is _about an object _o just in case the truth value of the thought at any possible world W depends on how things are with _o_ in W. Thus the thought that the first Chancellor of the German Empire was an astute diplomatist is not about Bismark, because that thought is true in a world W iff, in W, whoever happens to be the first Chancellor was an astute diplomatist, and that may well not be Bismark. On Russell.
  •  494
    Perception and conceptual content
    In Matthias Steup & John Turri (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Epistemology, Blackwell. pp. 231--250. 2005.
    Perceptual experiences justify beliefs—that much seems obvious. As Brewer puts it, “sense experiential states provide reasons for empirical beliefs” (this volume, xx). In Mind and World McDowell argues that we can get from this apparent platitude to the controversial claim that perceptual experiences have conceptual content: [W]e can coherently credit experiences with rational relations to judgement and belief, but only if we take it that spontaneity is already implicated in receptivity; that is…Read more
  •  30
    Comments
    Dialectica 60 (3). 2006.
  •  50
    An introduction to meta-ethics for non-philosophers
  •  758
    Sensory qualities, sensible qualities, sensational qualities
    In Brian P. McLaughlin, Ansgar Beckermann & Sven Walter (eds.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy of mind, Oxford University Press. 2007.
    Philosophers of mind have distinguished (and sometimes conflated) various qualities. This article tries to sort things out.
  •  54
    Our reply is in four parts. The first part addresses objections to our claim that there might be "unknowable" color facts. The second part discusses the use we make of opponent process theory. The third part examines the question of whether colors are causes. The fourth part takes up some issues concerning the content of visual experience. Our target article had three aims: (a) to explain clearly the structure of the debate about color realism; (b) to introduce an interdisciplinary audience to t…Read more
  •  454
    Introspection
    Philosophical Topics 33 (1): 79-104. 2005.
    I know various contingent truths about my environment by perception. For example, by looking, I know that there is a computer before me; by hearing, I know that someone is talking in the corridor; by tasting, I know that the coffee has no sugar. I know these things because I have some built-in mechanisms specialized for detecting the state of my environment. One of these mechanisms, for instance, is presently transducing electromagnetic radiation (in a narrow band of wavelengths) coming from the…Read more
  •  1
    Spin control
    In Enrique Villanueva (ed.), Perception, Ridgeview. pp. 261--74. 1996.
  • Forthcoming “Something about Mary”
    Grazer Philosophische Studien 62 (1). 2001.
  •  276
    The terminology surrounding the dispute between higher-order and first-order theories of consciousness is piled so high that it sometimes obscures the view. When the debris is cleared away, there is a real prospect
  •  170
    Disjunctivism: Contemporary Readings (edited book)
    MIT Press. 2009.
    Classic texts that define the disjunctivist theory of perception.
  •  146
    Although the proper formulation and assessment of Ludwig Wittgenstein's argument (or arguments) against the possibility of a private language continues to be disputed, the issue has lost none of its urgency. At stake is a broadly Cartesian conception of experiences that is found today in much philosophy of mind.
  •  1
    The Emergent Mind
    Dissertation, Princeton University. 1993.
    Emergentists such as Samuel Alexander and C. Lloyd Morgan held that the mental is causally efficacious, supervenes on the physical, but does so mysteriously. We must accept the emergent mind, in Alexander's phrase, with "natural piety". Emergentism emerged late last century and all but disappeared in the twentieth. This dissertation attempts to revive the position. ;To explain psycho-physical supervenience is to provide a proof of the mental facts from the physical facts, such that mental vocabu…Read more
  •  185
    Cosmic hermeneutics
    Philosophical Perspectives 13 347--84. 1999.
  •  23
    Matters of Metaphysics
    Philosophical Review 102 (2): 285. 1993.
  •  776
    McDowell and Wright on Anti-Scepticism etc.
    In Dylan Dodd & Elia Zardini (eds.), Scepticism and Perceptual Justification, Oxford University Press. 2014.
    On the assumption that we may learn from our elders and betters, this paper approaches some fundamental questions in perceptual epistemology through a dispute between McDowell and Wright about external world scepticism.
  •  201
    Inverted qualia
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2004.
    Qualia inversion thought experiments are ubiquitous in contemporary philosophy of mind. The most popular kind is one or another variant of Locke's hypothetical case of