Bill Brewer

The metaphysics of ordinary objects is an increasingly vibrant field of study for philosophers. This volume gathers insights from a number of leading authors, who together tackle the central issues in contemporary debates about the subject. Their essays engage with topics including composition, persistence, perception, categories, images, artifacts, truthmakers, metaontology, and the relationship between the manifest and scientific images. Exploring the nature of everyday things, the contributors situate their arguments and the latest research against the background of the field's development. Moreover, many essays propose new ideas and approaches, looking ahead to the future of the metaphysical study of ordinary objects. Featuring numerous clearly explained examples and with thoughtful links drawn to other, related disciplines such as pragmatism, this wide-ranging volume fills a major gap in the literature and will be important for scholars working in metaphysics.

Normal perception involves conscious experience of the world. What I call the Content View, (CV), attempts to account for this in terms of the representational content of perception (Brewer, 2011, esp. ch. 4). I offer a new argument here against this view. Ascription of personal level content, either conceptual or nonconceptual, depends on the idea that determinate predicational information is conveyed to the subject. This determinate predication depends upon the exercise of certain personal level capacities for categorization and discrimination. Exercise of such personal level capacities depends in turn upon conscious selective attention. Yet conscious visual acquaintance with the world is the prior ground for the possibility of any such conscious selective attention. Acquaintance obtains throughout the visual field: where conscious attention is not actually directed as well as where it is. So acquaintance does not depend upon conscious selective attention. Thus, acquaintance is not sufficient for the exercise of the relevant personal level capacities. Exercise of these capacities is nevertheless necessary for personal level content. Therefore visual acquaintance cannot be understood in terms of perceptual content: basic conscious experience of the world is not a matter of anything like the predication involved in perceptual content. It is rather the relational ground for the possibility of such predication.

Asks how exactly perceptual experiences do provide reasons for empirical beliefs. My answer is that they furnish the subject with certain essentially experiential demonstrative contents—‘that is thus’ —his grasp of which provides him with a reason to endorse them in belief. For a person's grasp of such contents, as referring to the mind‐independent objects that they do, and predicating the mind‐independent properties that they do, essentially involves his appreciation of them as the joint upshot of the way things are anyway, in the mind‐independent world around him, and his current point of view upon them and other relevant circumstances of perception. That is to say, he necessarily understands that his current apprehension that things are thus is in part due to the very fact that they are. He therefore recognizes the relevant content ashis apprehension of the facts, his epistemic opennessto the way things mind‐independently are out there.

Aims to clarify the epistemological outlook that arises from my positive elucidation of the truth of, and also to offer further defence against a number of key objections. Firstly, I explain the position of my own views in the context of the standard opposition between foundationalist and coherentist theories of perceptual knowledge. This brings out precisely the sense in which I succeed in capturing the ‘undeniable datum’ with which I begin Ch. 2, that perception is a basicsource of knowledge about the mind‐independent spatial world. Secondly, I go on to consider two broadly sceptical objections, firstly, from the possibility of perceptual imagination, and secondly, from the possibility of perceptual error. Thirdly, I consider whether my own position is in any way susceptible to objections parallel to those that I myself direct at its classical foundationalist opponents. Fourthly, and finally, I discuss the way in which I am able to capture the intuitive phenomenon of a foreground and background in perceptual consciousness: surely far more is, in some sense ‘experienced’ by a person in perception that is the subject matter of any perceptual demonstrative content that is in the market to be endorsed by him in belief.

A person’s authoritative self-knowledge about the contents of his or her own beliefs is thought to cause problems for content externalism, for it appears to yield arguments constituting a wholly non-empirical source of empirical knowledge: knowledge that certain particular objects or kinds exist in the environment. I set out this objection to externalism, and present a new reply. Possession of an externalist concept is an epistemological skill: it depends upon the subject’s possession of demonstratively-based knowledge about the object or kind to which it refers. Thus, a person’s knowledge that he or she has an externalist belief, since this depends upon actually having that belief, and therefore upon possessing the relevant externist concept, presupposes knowledge about the object/kind in question, which provides a direct and perfectly empirical source of knowledge that this object/kind exists. Hence, the putatively problematic arguments do not constitute a non-empirical source of such empirical knowledge.

In his comments, Richard Fumerton carefully develops two fundamental concerns with my views, which he interprets sympathetically, and almost entirely correctly. Before turning to these concerns, though, I must make one point about his concise opening statement of my principal claims. As I hope is clear from my précis, perceptual experiences provide reasons for empirical beliefs not simply in virtue of sharing demonstrative content with them. The key idea is that a person cannot properly grasp the objective content of these experiences—that is, he cannot actually have experiences of particular things in the mind-independent world around him—without understanding that his apprehension that things are thus and so out there is in part due to the fact that they are. He therefore recognizes the relevant content as his epistemic openness to the way things objectively are. This is clearly central to my overall position.

I take it for granted that sense experiential states provide reasons for empirical beliefs; indeed this claim forms the first premise of my central argument for (CC). 1 The subsequent stages of the argument are intended to establish that a person has such a reason for believing something about the way things are in the world around him only if he is in some mental state or other with a conceptual content: a conceptual state. Thus, given that sense experiential states do provide reasons for empirical beliefs, they must have conceptual content.

Draws out the fatal consequences of thesis for any reliabilist account of perceptual knowledge; also contains extended critical discussions of the classical foundationalistand classical coherentistattempts to elucidate the truth of. Both of these are attempts to give what I call a second‐orderaccount, on which perceptual experiences provide reasons for empirical beliefs only in virtue of the subject's second‐order reflection upon the reliability of the first‐order process by which such experiences produce such beliefs, where the first and second orders are independent of each other in the sense that he might equally have acquired the same beliefs by just the same first‐order method yet not have had the second‐order knowledge in question. In order to give a satisfying elucidation of the truth of, then, as I believe we must, we should look to a first‐orderaccount, on which the truth of emerges directly out of a correct account of a person's possession of certain beliefs about the mind‐independent world around him, out of an elaboration of what is involved in his grasping their determinate empirical contents, rather than from any independent requirement upon his second‐order reflection upon the process by which he acquires such beliefs.

Offers the Switching Argument for the claim,, that only reason‐giving relations between perceptual experiences and empirical beliefs could possibly serve the content‐determining role required by. Non‐reason‐giving relations between perceptual experiences and basic empirical beliefs would necessarily leave the subject quite ignorant of which mind‐independent object his belief is supposed to be about, in a way that is incompatible with his having the understanding required for this to be a belief of his, about just that thing, at all. Along with the assumption that we have beliefs about a mind‐independent spatial world, and entail, that perceptual experiences provide reasons for empirical beliefs, the main thesis of Part I of the book.

Discusses a number of developments and consequences of my position. Firstly, there is the very important issue of the relation between the basic, essentially experiential, perceptual demonstrative contents that I have been considering up to this point, and the more detached, linguistically articulated and categorized judgements that a person more standardly makes on the basis of perception, and that constitute the normal expression of his perceptual knowledge about the world around him. Secondly, I argue that my account entails a version of Russell's Principle of Acquaintance, which I elucidate, on which singular reference is possible only to objects about which the subject is in a position to acquire, or to express, non‐inferential knowledge Thirdly, I exploit this version of the Principle of Acquaintance to provide what seems to me to be a fully satisfying response to an important objection to the possibility of combining a so‐called externalist theory of empirical content, of the kind that I myself favour and draw on in my account of perceptual knowledge, with a plausible account of a person's knowledge of the contents of his own beliefs.

Offers the Strawson Argument for the claim,, that the most basic beliefs about the spatial world have their contents only in virtue of their standing in certain relations with perceptual experiences. Only an experiential presentation of the particular mind‐independent thing in question suffices to tie down knowledgeable reference to spatial particulars in the face of the permanent epistemic possibility of massive qualitative reduplication of any sector of the physical world elsewhere in the universe. So the possibility of beliefs about mind‐independent particulars depends upon the most basic such beliefs’ standing in certain content‐fixing relations with perceptual experiences of the objects in question.

Notoriously, Berkeley combines his denial of the existence of mind-independent matter with the insistence that most of what common sense claims about physical objects is perfectly true (1975a, 1975b).1 As I explain (§ 1), he suggests two broad strategies for this reconciliation, one of which importantly subdivides. Thus, I distinguish three Berkeleyian metaphysical views. The subsequent argument is as follows. Reflection, both upon Berkeley’s ingenious construal of science as approaching towards an essentially indirect identification of the causal-explanatory ground of the order and nature of our ideas in God’s volitional strategy, and also upon the currently orthodox status of a Humean principle about the a posteriority of causation, points towards an isomorphism between the three Berkeleyian views and three more modern metaphysical views, explicitly advertised as realist, in at least some sense which is supposed to be in stark contrast with Berkeley’s anti-realist immaterialism (§ 2). The real distinctions between the three modern views, and, correspondingly, between the three Berkeleyian views, are semantic rather than genuinely metaphysical (§ 3). All six views share a fundamental assumption, that the causal explanatory grounds of the order and nature of our experiences are distinct from the direct objects of those experiences, in a techinical sense to be made precise, in virtue of which they fail ultimately to sustain our intuitive commitment to empirical realism, the thesis that physical objects are, both the very things which are presented..

Barry Stroud begins his investigation into the metaphysics of colour with a discussion of the elusiveness of the genuinely philosophical quest for reality. He insists upon a distinction between two ways in which the idea of a correspondence between perceptions or beliefs and the facts may be understood: first, as equivalent to the plain truth of the perceptions/beliefs in question; second, as conveying the metaphysical reality of the corresponding features of the world. I begin by voicing some suspicion about this distinction. Then I go on to consider various aspects of his central argument against the likelihood of any successful unmasking explanation in connection with colour. The final moves of this argument seem to me to be unstable. Either his conclusion that the unmasker’s overall strategy is self-defeating is stronger than is warranted, or his insistence that no conclusive result is established in connection with the fundamental quest for reality is unduly cautious, depending on how precisely the dependence, which he rightly insists upon, of the identification of perceptions of colour upon some identification of colour properties themselves, is to be taken.

Commonsense appears committed to enduring macroscopic material objects that exclude each other from their precise location at all times. I elaborate a specific version of the commonsense commitment and consider its merits in connection with an important line of objection concerning the relation between material objects and their parts. The central thesis is that amongst persisting macroscopic material objects there are Natural Continuants, NCs, whose unity at a time and over time is entirely independent of our concepts, which occupy their precise spatial location Exclusively at all times, and which ground Artificial Continuants, ACs, by partition, collection, and approximation. I call the position the Natural Continuants View (NCV). Section “The Natural Continuants View” offers a provisional characterization. Section “Spatial Partition” considers a familiar puzzle concerning the idea that material objects may survive the loss of a part in order to provide intuitive motivation for (NCV) and to elaborate its commitments concerning (spatial) parts. The result is an account of the way in which NCs ground ACs by spatial partition. Section “Collection and Approximation” turns to a consideration of collections and assemblages of NCs. Section “Conclusion” concludes.

I agree with a great deal in Helen Steward's paper. I am especially sympathetic to her suggestion that we gain metaphysical illumination by considering various ways in which we arrive at ideas of certain kinds of individuals by abstraction from those of more basic kinds. My aim is to pursue that suggestion by exploring the proposal that a grounding node in this form of abstraction may be characterized by Exclusivity in spatial location. Steward claims that we arrive at our ideas of specific events and processes by different modes of abstraction in cases where a more basic persisting individual undergoes some kind of change. I argue that the most basic individuals in this hierarchy of abstraction are enduring substances that occupy their spatial location exclusively at all times: no two such substances are ever precisely collocated.

We perceive a world of mind-independent macroscopic material objects such as stones, tables, trees, and animals. Our experience is the joint upshot of the way these things are and our route through them, along with the various relevant circumstances of perception; and it depends on the normal operation of our perceptual systems. How should we characterise our perceptual experience so as to respect its basis and explain its role in grounding empirical thought and knowledge? I offered an answer to this question in Perception and its objects. Here I aim to clarify some of my central arguments and to develop and defend the position further in the light of subsequent critical discussion.