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Are Colors Secondary Qualities?In Lawrence Nolan (ed.), Primary and secondary qualities: the historical and ongoing debate, Oxford University Press. 2011.
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Either/Or: in A. Haddock and F. MacphersonIn Adrian Haddock & Fiona Macpherson (eds.), Disjunctivism: perception, action, knowledge, Oxford University Press. 2008.
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1Either/orIn Adrian Haddock & Fiona Macpherson (eds.), Disjunctivism: perception, action, knowledge, Oxford University Press. 2008.This essay surveys the varieties of disjunctivism about perceptual experience. Disjunctivism comes in two main flavours, metaphysical and epistemological. Metaphysical disjunctivism is the view usually associated with the disjunctivist label, and whenever ‘disjunctivism’ occurs here unprefixed, it refers to this view. After some initial discussion of (metaphysical) disjunctivism (sections 1–3), we explain epistemological disjunctivism in section 4. The rest of the essay is solely concerned with ex…Read more
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18Philosophical issues about colour visionIn L. Nagel (ed.), Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, Macmillan. 2002.The primary issues concern whether objects have colours, and what sorts of properties the colours are. Some philosophers hold that nothing is coloured, others that colour are powers to affect perceivers, and others that colours are physical properties.
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29Colors and reflectancesIn Alex Byrne & David R. Hilbert (eds.), Readings on Color, Volume 1: The Philosophy of Color, Mit Press. 1997.When we open our eyes, the world seems full of colored opaque objects, light sources, and transparent volumes. One historically popular view, _eliminativism_, is that the world is not in this respect as it appears to be: nothing has any color. Color _realism_, the denial of eliminativism, comes in three mutually exclusive varieties, which may be taken to exhaust the space of plausible realist theories. Acccording to _dispositionalism_, colors are _psychological_ dispositions: dispositions to pro…Read more
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What phenomenal consciousness is likeIn Rocco J. Gennaro (ed.), Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness: An Anthology, John Benjamins. 2004.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
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Inverted qualiaIn Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Metaphysics Research Lab. 2014.
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146Introspection and evidenceIn Maria Lasonen-Aarnio & Clayton Littlejohn (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evidence, Routledge. pp. 318-28. 2024.
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171Ashley on gender identityJournal of Controversial Ideas 4 (1): 1-10. 2024.‘Gender identity’ was clearly defined sixty years ago, but the dominant conceptions of gender identity today are deeply obscure. Florence Ashley’s 2023 theory of gender identity is one of the latest attempts at demystification. Although Ashley’s paper is not fully coherent, a coherent theory of gender identity can be extracted from it. That theory, we argue, is clearly false. It is psychologically very implausible, and does not support ‘firstperson authority over gender’, as Ashley claims. We a…Read more
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Introspection and evidenceIn Maria Lasonen-Aarnio & Clayton Littlejohn (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evidence, Routledge. 2024.
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280Seeing or Saying?Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 108 (2): 528-535. 2024.Comment on Brogaard's Seeing and Saying (OUP 2018)
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549Whither naive realism? - IPhilosophical Perspectives (1): 1-20. 2023.Different authors offer subtly different characterizations of naïve realism. We disentangle the main ones and argue that illusions provide the best proving ground for naïve realism and its main rival, representationalism. According to naïve realism, illusions never involve per- ceptual error. We assess two leading attempts to explain apparent perceptual error away, from William Fish and Bill Brewer, and conclude that they fail. Another lead- ing attempt is assessed in a companion paper, which al…Read more
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851More on "Gender Identity"Archives of Sexual Behavior. 2023.Continuing correspondence on 'gender identity'.
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13Readings on Color, Volume 2: The Science of Color (edited book)MIT Press. 1997.These volumes will serve as useful resources for anyone interested in philosophy of color perception or color science.
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1BIn Samuel D. Guttenplan (ed.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, Blackwell. 1994.Introductory texts in the philosophy of mind often begin with a discussion of behaviourism, presented as one of the few theories of mind that have been conclusively refuted. But matters are not that simple: behaviourism, in one form or another, is still alive and kicking.
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5Experience and ContentIn Fiona Macpherson (ed.), The Admissible Contents of Experience, Wiley-blackwell. 2011.The ‘content view’, in slogan form, is ‘Perceptual experiences have representational content’. I explain why the content view should be reformulated to remove any reference to ‘experiences’. I then argue, against Bill Brewer, Charles Travis and others, that the content view is true. One corollary of the discussion is that the content of perception is relatively thin (confined, in the visual case, to roughly the output of ‘mid‐level’ vision). Finally, I argue (briefly) that the opponents of the c…Read more
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3934The origin of "gender identity"Archives of Sexual Behavior. 2023.A Letter to the Editor about the origin of "gender identity" and deficiencies in its current definition
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45Color PrimitivismErkenntnis 66 (1-2). 2006.The typical kind of color realism is reductive: the color properties are identified with properties specified in other terms (as ways of altering light, for instance). If no reductive analysis is available — if the colors are primitive sui generis properties — this is often taken to be a convincing argument for eliminativism. That is, realist primitivism is usually thought to be untenable. The realist preference for reductive theories of color over the last few decades is particularly striking i…Read more
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12Unique huesBehavioral and Brain Sciences 20 (2): 184-185. 1997.Saunders & van Brakel argue, inter alia, that there is for the claim that there are four unique hues (red, green, blue, and yellow), and that there are two corresponding opponent processes. We argue that this is quite mistaken
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23Truest blueAnalysis 67 (1): 87-92. 2007.1. The “puzzle” Physical objects are coloured: roses are red, violets are blue, and so forth. In particular, physical objects have fine-grained shades of colour: a certain chip, we can suppose, is true blue (unique, or pure blue). The following sort of scenario is commonplace. The chip looks true blue to John; in the same (ordinary) viewing conditions it looks (slightly) greenish-blue to Jane. Both John and Jane are “normal” perceivers. Now, nothing can be both true blue and greenish-blue; since…Read more
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11Purple Haze: The Puzzle of ConsciousnessPhilosophical Review 111 (4): 594-597. 2002.This much-anticipated book is a detailed elaboration and defense of Levine’s influential claim that there is an “explanatory gap” between the mental and the physical.
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14Do we see more than we can access?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 5 (5-6): 501-502. 2007.Short commentary on a paper by Ned Block
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13Color realism revisitedBehavioral and Brain Sciences 26 (6): 791-793. 2003.Our reply is in four parts. The first part, R1, addresses objections to our claim that there might be “unknowable” color facts. The second part, R2, discusses the use we make of opponent process theory. The third part, R3, examines the question of whether colors are causes. The fourth part, R4, takes up some issues concerning the content of visual experience.
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29Color realism reduxBehavioral and Brain Sciences 26 (1): 52-59. 2003.Our reply is in three parts. The first part concerns some foundational issues in the debate about color realism. The second part addresses the many objections to the version of physicalism about color ("productance physicalism") defended in the target article. The third part discusses the leading alternative approaches and theories endorsed by the commentators.
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100Color realism and color scienceBehavioral and Brain Sciences 26 (1): 3-21. 2003.The target article is an attempt to make some progress on the problem of color realism. Are objects colored? And what is the nature of the color properties? We defend the view that physical objects (for instance, tomatoes, radishes, and rubies) are colored, and that colors are physical properties, specifically types of reflectance. This is probably a minority opinion, at least among color scientists. Textbooks frequently claim that physical objects are not colored, and that the colors are "subje…Read more
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17Against the PCA-analysisAnalysis 58 (1): 38-44. 1998.Jonardon Ganeri, Paul Noordhof, and Murali Ramachandran (1996) have proposed a new counterfactual analysis of causation. We argue that this – the PCA-analysis – is incorrect. In section 1, we explain David Lewis’s first counterfactual analysis of causation, and a problem that led him to propose a second. In section 2 we explain the PCA-analysis, advertised as an improvement on Lewis’s later account. We then give counterexamples to the necessity (section 3) and sufficiency (section 4) of the PCA-an…Read more