Berit Brogaard

ABSTRACT The perennial question of the nature of natural-language understanding has received renewed attention in recent years. Two kinds of natural-language understanding, in particular, have captivated the interest of philosophers: linguistic understanding and utterance understanding. While the literature is rife with discussions of linguistic understanding and utterance understanding, the question of how the two types of understanding explanatorily depend on each other has received relatively scant attention. Exceptions include the linguistic ability/know-how views of linguistic understanding proposed by Dean Pettit and Brendan Balcerak Jackson. On these views, to tacitly linguistically understand a sentence just is to possess the linguistic ability/knowledge-how needed to derive/infer what is said by different utterances of the sentence. Despite their focus on linguistic understanding, both views can straightforwardly explain utterance understanding as the output of a derivation/inference from a representation of the sentence uttered. Here, I take issue with these approaches to utterance understanding and then develop an alternative. More specifically, I distinguish two kinds of utterance understanding, experiential and doxastic, and then argue that experiences of what is said by utterances play distinct rational roles in the two kinds of utterance understanding. I conclude by addressing a recent challenge to my proposal.

In Epistemic Explanations, Ernest Sosa invokes a classical normative threshold account of rational judgment and suspension, according to which it is rational to judge that P iff one has a sufficiently high credence in P, and rational to suspend judgment about P iff one has a middling credence in P. I argue that threshold views of this kind face serious problems traceable to their foundation in classical probability theory. Moreover, I argue, the difficulty of bridging the gap between traditional and gradable (or quantitative) doxastic attitudes should prompt classical threshold theorists to reframe their analysis of traditional doxastic attitudes in terms of gradable ones freed from the constraints of classical probability theory. I develop such a non-classical threshold view, modeled on the Dempster–Shafer theory of evidence. Because this framework relies on non-additive probabilities, how high one’s credence is in P is irrelevant to whether it is rational to judge that P (or not-P) or suspend on P. On the alternative threshold view I propose, whether it is rational to judge or suspend depends instead on the absolute distance between one's probability distribution over P and not-P. This non-classical alternative, I argue, avoids the tensions that beset classical threshold views.

Many naive realists and theorists who hold related positions (e.g., disjunctivism) are primarily motivated by epistemological considerations. They argue that unless we accept naive realism or related forms of direct realism, we cannot overcome the problem of skepticism. This chapter looks closer at this concern and attempts to figure out why naive realism is sometimes thought to be the only reasonable account of perception if one wants to avoid the skeptical problem. It is then argued that the naive realist’s response to the skeptical challenge is ultimately unsatisfactory and that phenomenal dogmatism, a form of epistemic internalism that is reconcilable with a representational view of perception, provides an adequate response to the skeptical problem.

This chapter proposes a version of constitutive panpsychism. Under the condition that one accepts Chalmers’s arguments against type-B materialism, it argues that there are two contenders for explaining consciousness, the first being some version of strong emergence. She criticizes and finally rejects this kind of emergence. The second contender is panpsychism. Brogaard calls her proposal for a constitutive panpsychism ‘the theory of Mentons.’ Following Searle, it is argued that consciousness is best understood as a field-phenomenon according to which the unified field of consciousness changes as informational content is added or deleted from the field. Consequently, this version of panpsychism is not a form of state-panpsychism in which individual particulars bear mental properties. Mentons are construed as elementary particles that carry microexperiences. The chapter discusses different versions of the combination problem, which are answered by her account: the subject combination problem, the palette argument, and finally the revelation argument.

This chapter examines an evidentialist ethics of belief, and W. K. Clifford’s proposal in particular. It argues that regardless of how one understands the notion of evidence, it is implausible that we could have a moral obligation to refrain from believing something whenever we lack sufficient evidence. Alternatively, this chapter argues that there are wide-scope conditional requirements on beliefs but that these requirements can be met without having sufficient evidence for the belief in question. It then argues that we are epistemically, though not morally, required to form epistemically valuable beliefs. However, these beliefs, too, need not be beliefs for which we have sufficient evidence-epistemically good beliefs need not be based on sufficient evidence.

Though predicates of personal taste (PPT) have been given a considerable amount of attention, aesthetic expressions have not. Perhaps this is because it is assumed that aesthetic expressions function semantically as PPTs do. There is, however, good reason to think that this is not so. PPTs are expressions of subjective opinion, whereas aesthetic expressions seem not to be. Qualified art critics are in a better position to evaluate artworks than novices. That observation places us in a difficult position, as critics often contest each others’ judgments, even when no clear error can be found. This finding, together with the observation that aesthetic judgments are not expressions of a subjective opinion, renders both standard non-relativistic semantics and standard relativistic semantics unable to accommodate aesthetic expressions. I outline a semantics that integrates the idea of an expert evaluator. Aesthetic predicates must be treated as a special kind of self-locating properties.

Despite the recent surge in research on, and interest in, synesthesia, the mechanism underlying this condition is still unknown. Feedforward mechanisms involving overlapping receptive fields of sensory neurons as well as feedback mechanisms involving a lack of signal disinhibition have been proposed. Here I show that a broad range of studies of developmental synesthesia indicate that the mechanism underlying the phenomenon may in some cases involve the reinstatement of brain activity in sensory or cognitive streams in a way that is similar to what happens during memory retrieval of semantically associated items. In the chapter’s final sections I look at the relevance of synesthesia research, given the memory model, to our understanding of multisensory perception and common mapping patterns.

I argue for a unified theory of knowledge how that is compatible with the reductionist variety of intellectualism: knowledge how is reducible to knowledge that. But, I argue, there are knowledge states that are not justification entailing and knowledge states that are not belief entailing. Both kinds of knowledge state require the possession of practical abilities. I conclude by arguing that the view defended naturally leads to a disjunctive conception of abilities as either essentially involving mental states or as not essentially involving mental states. Only the former kind of ability is a kind of knowledge state, that is, a knowledge how state.

It has been argued that dogmatism, the view that experience alone can justify belief, has no way of explaining why experiences that are epistemically downgraded by irrational thinking should not play the same justificatory role as experiences that haven’t suffered this fate. In this paper I argue that a recent, initially promising response to this challenge has limited applicability, as it cannot accommodate the experiences that are epistemically downgraded by bias-driven attention. I then argue that dogmatism can be salvaged by denying that genuine high-level properties are presented in experience.

Two of the main debates in philosophy of language concerning time and tense are the debate about the semantics of the tenses in the English language and the debate over whether propositions can be transiently true or false as opposed to always being eternally true or false. The latter quarrel is also known as the 'temporalism‐eternalism debate'. This chapter focuses primarily on these two debates. It briefly looks at the relevance of debates about tense and eternalism/temporalism to metaphysical debates about time. The chapter argues that the debates in philosophy of language are not logically independent of the debates in metaphysics. Kaplan's argument for temporalism rests on the premise that there are tense operators in the English language. This makes the debate about tenses directly relevant to the debate about temporalism versus eternalism.

In Real Conditionals (2001), Bill Lycan develops an event-based account of indicative conditionals, which presents an attractive alternative to the theories advanced by David Lewis, Angelika Kratzer, and Irene Heim. In this chapter, we argue that while Lycan’s semantic theory is explanatorily on a par with the alternatives while employing fewer expressive resources, it ultimately succumbs to problems owing to its treatment of ‘if’-clauses as restricting the domain of a possible event quantifier. We proceed by developing a semantic theory of conditionals that treats ‘if’-clauses as plural definite descriptions denoting a plurality of events and overt quantified and modal expressions as partitives that select a subset of the events denoted by the ‘if’-clause. Our theory differs from previous plural definite accounts of conditionals, which take ‘if’-clauses to be referential plural definite descriptions that restrict an overt or covert possible world quantifier. The proposed theory, we argue, avoids the problems that plague both singular and plural restrictor accounts.

The question of the roles of representation in visual perception – the inspiration for the title of this volume – has witnessed a rapid growth in interest in the philosophy of perception in recent decades. Despite its utter familiarity, the notion of representation that lies at the center of this query remains somewhat illusive. For the purposes of the present introduction, however, we shall use the term broadly to mean, variably, resemblance, causal co-variation, model, prediction, and hypothesis, to mention just a few of its many meanings. The contributions to this volume inquire into the roles of representation in perception, in all of these senses.

Dogmatism holds that an experience or seeming that p can provide prima facie immediate justification for believing p in virtue of its phenomenology. Dogmatism about perceptual justification has appealed primarily to proponents of representational theories of perceptual experience. Call dogmatism that takes perceptual experience to be representational "representational phenomenal dogmatism." As we show, phenomenal seemings play a crucial role in dogmatism of this kind. Despite its conventional appeal to representational theorists, dogmatism is not by definition committed to any particular view of perceptual experience. Naive realists and disjunctivists who hold that perceptual experience is a perceptual relation of direct acquaintance can also endorse dogmatism. Indeed, we argue that they ought to do so. Otherwise, they cannot maintain that relationalism about perceptual experience has an epistemic advantage compared to the representational view. We then show that even if we grant that relationalism has this advantage, only dogmatism that takes perceptual experience to be representational can be extended to account for non-deductive inferential justification. As an account of the latter is required to avoid succumbing to skepticism, relationalism, we argue, does not have the epistemic advantage its defenders claim it has.

There has been a long-standing debate in philosophy and psychology about the role of representation in visual perception. Here, we argue on the basis of evidence from philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience that episodic and schematic memory representations are pivotal to the visual perception of objects and scenes. In the visual perception of objects and scenes, sensory information is initially matched with object and scene templates, or schemas, in long-term memory. The most relevant representations are then selected for encoding in working memory. We furthermore argue that activations of episodic memory representations contribute to the fineness of grain of visual representations. The representational view of visual perception that emerges is what we call the "template tuning view." According to this view, prior information – specifically, long-term memories – shape the representational content of visual perception. In the final section of the chapter, we argue that unlike representational conceptions of visual perception, naïve and direct realist theories have difficulties accommodating these findings.

Molyneux’s question is, very roughly, that of whether a blind person's prior acquaintance with shape properties by touch alone would suffice for visually identifying those properties, if her sight were restored. The question is at least in part an empirical one, and various scientific attempts have been made to answer it not only for sight and haptic touch but also for various other sensory modalities. This paper is not aimed at answering Molyneux’s original or related questions. Rather, our aim here is to bring his question to bear on the nature of multisensory integration. In particular, we argue that variants on Molyneux's question spell trouble for a dominant view of multisensory integration and develop an alternative account that is immune to these problems. Finally, we show that the answer to Molyneux’s original question has interesting consequences for whether our alternative account is true of all cases of multisensory experience.

The basis of perception is the processing and categorization of perceptual stimuli from the environment. Much progress has been made in the science of perceptual categorization. Yet there is still no consensus on how the brain generates sensory individuals, from sensory input and perceptual categories in memory. This chapter argues that perceptual categorization is highly variable across perceivers due to their use of different perceptual strategies for solving perceptual problems they encounter, and that the perceptual system structurally adjusts to the strategies that are most successful. Despite this variability, the different sensory individuals that result when different perceivers rely on different strategies nonetheless correspond to actual external world objects/features. This view is called 'perceptual pluralism'.

Der Abschluß der Gastrulation, der gleichzeitig auch den Anfang der Neurulation bedeutet, ist die zeitliche Grenze, die Beginn eines menschlichen Individuums markiert. Oft wird behauptet, daß jegliche natürliche Veränderung stetig ist. Wie ist es dann aber möglich, eine zeitliche Grenze auszuzeichnen, an der ein menschliches Lebewesen zu existieren beginnt? Man beachte, was geschieht, wenn wir vom Thema zeitlicher Unstetigkeit zum räumlichen übergehen. Lebewesen haben räumliche Grenzen (wie sie durch ihre Haut geformt wird). Die letzteren sind genuine Diskontinuitäten, auch angesichts der Kontinuität der Materie in der physikalischen Welt. Und ebenso müssen wir schließen: Das Leben menschlicher Lebewesen hat zeitliche Grenzen - seinen Beginn und sein Ende - die auch angesichts der Kontinuität physikalischer, chemischer und biologischer Prozesse, in die sie involviert sind, echte Diskontinuitäten sind.

Mereotopology faces problems when its methods are extended to deal with time and change. We offer a new solution to these problems, based on a theory of partitions of reality which allows us to simulate (and also to generalize) aspects of set theory within a mereotopological framework. This theory is extended to a theory of coarse- and fine-grained histories (or finite sequences of partitions evolving over time), drawing on machinery developed within the framework of the so-called ‘consistent histories’ interpretation of quantum mechanics.

The truthmaker theory rests on the thesis that the link between a true judgment and that in the world to which it corresponds is not a one-to-one but rather a one-to-many relation. An analogous thesis in relation to the link between a singular term and that in the world to which it refers is already widely accepted. This is the thesis to the effect that singular reference is marked by vagueness of a sort that is best understood in supervaluationist terms. In what follows we show that the supervaluationist approach to singular reference, when wedded to the truthmaker idea, yields a framework of surprising power, which offers a uniform set of solutions to a range of problems regarding identity, reference and knowledge, problems which have hitherto been dealt with on an ad hoc basis.

The truthmaker theory rests on the thesis that the link between a true judgment and that in the world to which it corresponds is not a one-to-one but rather a one-to-many relation. An analogous thesis in relation to the link between a singular term and that in the world to which it refers is already widely accepted. This is the thesis to the effect that singular reference is marked by vagueness of a sort that is best understood in supervaluationist terms. In what follows we show that the supervaluationist approach to singular reference, when wedded to the truthmaker idea, yields a framework of surprising power, which offers a uniform set of solutions to a range of problems regarding identity, reference and knowledge, problems which have hitherto been dealt with on an ad hoc basis.

The perennial question of the nature of natural-language understanding has received renewed attention in recent years. Two kinds of natural-language understanding, in particular, have captivated the interest of philosophers: linguistic understanding and utterance understanding. While the literature is rife with discussions of linguistic understanding and utterance understanding, the question of how the two types of understanding explanatorily depend on each other has received relatively scant attention. Exceptions include the linguistic ability/know-how views of linguistic understanding proposed by Dean Pettit and Brendan Balcerak Jackson. On these views, to tacitly linguistically understand a sentence just is to possess the linguistic ability/knowledge-how needed to derive/infer what is said by different utterances of the sentence. Despite their focus on linguistic understanding, both views can straightforwardly explain utterance understanding as the output of a derivation/inference from a representation of the sentence uttered. Here, I take issue with these approaches to utterance understanding and then develop an alternative. More specifically, I distinguish two kinds of utterance understanding, experiential and doxastic, and then argue that experiences of what is said by utterances play distinct rational roles in the two kinds of utterance understanding. I conclude by addressing a recent challenge to my proposal.