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96Virtue Epistemology and Epistemic ResponsibilityIn Luis R. G. Oliveira (ed.), Externalism about Knowledge, Oxford University Press. 2023.Virtue epistemologies about knowledge have traditionally been divided into two camps: virtue reliabilism and virtue responsibilism. Initially, what set them apart was that virtue responsibilism took intellectual character virtues and responsible agency to be necessary to knowledge acquisition, whereas virtue reliabilism took reliable cognitive faculties to be constitutive of it instead. Despite recent concessions between these camps, there are residual disagreements. Chapter 8 focuses primarily …Read more
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91Predictive Processing and Object RecognitionIn Tony Cheng, Ryoji Sato & Jakob Hohwy (eds.), Expected Experiences: The Predictive Mind in an Uncertain World, Routledge. 2023.Predictive processing models of perception take issue with standard models of perception as hierarchical bottom-up processing modulated by memory and attention. The predictive framework posits that the brain generates predictions about stimuli, which are matched to the incoming signal. Mismatches between predictions and the incoming signal – so-called prediction errors – are then used to generate new and better predictions until the prediction errors have been minimized, at which point a percept…Read more
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80Perceptual variation in object perception: A defence of perceptual pluralismIn Aleksandra Mroczko-Wąsowicz & Rick Grush (eds.), Sensory individuals: unimodal and multimodal perspectives, Oxford University Press. 2023.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…Read more
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59Template Tuning and Graded ConsciousnessIn Juraj Hvorecký, Tomáš Marvan & Michal Polák (eds.), Conscious and Unconscious Mentality: Examining their Nature, Similarities, and Differences, Routledge. 2023.Whether visual perceptual consciousness is gradable or dichotomous has been the subject of fierce debate in recent years. If perceptual consciousness is gradable, perceivers may have less than full access to—and thus be less than fully phenomenally aware of—perceptual information that is represented in working memory. This raises the question: In virtue of what can a subject be less than fully perceptually conscious? In this chapter, we provide an answer to this question, according to which inex…Read more
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84The Center Must Not Hold: White Women Philosophers on the Whiteness of PhilosophyLexington Books. 2010.In this collection, white women philosophers engage boldly in critical acts of exploring ways of naming and disrupting whiteness in terms of how it has defined the conceptual field of philosophy. Focuses on the whiteness of the epistemic and value-laden norms within philosophy itself, the text dares to identify the proverbial elephant in the room known as white supremacy and how that supremacy functions as the measure of reason, knowledge, and philosophical intelligibility.
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279Moral Partiality and Duties of LovePhilosophies 8 (5): 83. 2023.In this paper, I make a case for the view that we have special relationship duties (also known as “associative duties”) that are not identical to or derived from our non-associative impartial moral obligations. I call this view “moral partialism”. On the version of moral partialism I defend, only loving relationships can normatively ground special relationship duties. I propose that for two capable adults to have a loving relationship, they must have mutual non-trivial desires to promote each ot…Read more
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384Friendship Love and Romantic LoveIn Diane Jeske (ed.), Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Friendship, Routledge. pp. 166-178. 2022.While much has been written on love, the question of how romantic love differs from friendship love has only rarely been addressed. This chapter focuses on shedding some light on this question. I begin by considering goal-oriented approaches to love. These approaches, I argue, have the resources needed to account for the differences between friendship love and romantic love. But purely goal-oriented accounts fail on account of their utilitarian gloss of our loved ones. Even when they circumvent …Read more
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24Dogmatism, Seemings, and Non-Deductive Inferential JustificationIn Kevin McCain, Scott Stapleford & Matthias Steup (eds.), Seemings: New Arguments, New Angles, Routledge. 2023.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 ap…Read more
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Dogmatism (in press)In Kurt Sylvan, Ernest Sosa, Jonathan Dancy & Matthias Steup (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Epistemology, 3rd edition, Wiley Blackwell. forthcoming.This entry does not have an abstract. The following is a summary. Dogmatism, as popularized by Jim Pryor (2000), holds that the perceptual experience or perceptual phenomenal seeming that p can confer at least some degree of immediate, prima facie propositional justification on the belief that p. This entry begins by explaining what we mean by "propositional," "immediate," and "prima facie." Propositional justification contrasts with doxastic justification. We then discuss different kinds of d…Read more
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1Seemings and Seeming Reports (in press)In Kurt Sylvan (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Epistemology, 3rd edition, Wiley-blackwell (forthcoming). forthcoming.
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165Blindsight Is Unconscious PerceptionIn Juraj Hvorecký, Tomáš Marvan & Michal Polák (eds.), Conscious and Unconscious Mentality: Examining their Nature, Similarities, and Differences, Routledge. 2023.The question of whether blindsight is a form of unconscious perception continues to spark fierce debate in philosophy and psychology. One side of the debate holds that while the visual information categorized in blindsight is not access-conscious, it is nonetheless a form of perception, albeit a form of unconscious perception. The opposition, by contrast, holds that blindsight is just a form of degraded conscious perception that makes the categorized information harder to access because it is de…Read more
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9Centered Worlds and the Content of PerceptionIn Steven D. Hales (ed.), A Companion to Relativism, Wiley‐blackwell. 2011.This chapter contains sections titled: Abstract Relativistic Content The Argument from Primitive Colors The Argument from the Inverted Spectrum The Argument from Dual Looks The Argument from Duplication Conclusion References.
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3Synesthesia as a Challenge for RepresentationalismIn Justin Sytsma & Wesley Buckwalter (eds.), A Companion to Experimental Philosophy, Wiley. 2016.Synesthesia is a condition in which features that ordinarily are processed by distinct perceptual or cognitive streams are bound together in a single stream, yielding an aberrant perceptual, image‐like or thought‐like experience. One of the most common forms of synesthesia is grapheme‐color synesthesia. It is divided into two distinct forms: Projector synesthesia, which tends to be perception‐like, and associator synesthesia, which tends to be more like imagery or thought. There has been an ongo…Read more
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4SupernaturalIn Graham Oppy (ed.), A Companion to Atheism and Philosophy, Wiley. 2019.This chapter first discusses what it would be for something to be supernatural. I argue that there are good reasons not to reject supernaturalism. The essay then considers whether there is an interesting connection between atheism and the supernatural. One topic central to this question is that of whether atheistic belief can be rationally tied to the rejection of belief in anything supernatural. I argue that it cannot, because – as we will see – it is highly implausible that the world encompass…Read more
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1Against Naturalism about TruthIn Kelly James Clark (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Naturalism, Wiley. 2016.I distinguish in this chapter between a weak and a strong form of ontological naturalism. Strong ontological naturalism is the view that all truths can be deduced, at least in principle, from truths about physical entities at the lowest level of organization, for example, truths about the elementary particles and forces. Weak ontological naturalism is the view that only physical properties can be causally efficacious. Strong ontological naturalism entails weak ontological naturalism, but not vic…Read more
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1680On Luck, Responsibility and the Meaning of LifePhilosophical Papers 34 (3): 443-458. 2005.A meaningful life, we shall argue, is a life upon which a certain sort of valuable pattern has been imposed by the person in question - a pattern which involves in serious ways the person having an effect upon the world. Meaningfulness is thus a special kind of value which a human life can bear. Two interrelated difficulties face ths proposal. One concerns responsiblity: how are we to account for the fact that a life that satisfies the above criteria can have more meaning than a life with the sa…Read more
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181Cognitive Penetrability and High‐Level Properties in Perception: Unrelated Phenomena?Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 96 (4): 469-486. 2015.There has been a recent surge in interest in two questions concerning the nature of perceptual experience; viz. the question of whether perceptual experience is sometimes cognitively penetrated and that of whether high-level properties are presented in perceptual experience. Only rarely have thinkers been concerned with the question of whether the two phenomena are interestingly related. Here we argue that the two phenomena are not related in any interesting way. We argue further that this lack …Read more
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342Love in Contemporary Psychology and NeuroscienceIn Adrienne M. Martin (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Love in Philosophy, Routledge Handbooks in Philoso. pp. 465-478. 2018.The three most central questions in recent psychological and neuroscientific approaches to love are: (1) the question of why people fall in love, (2) the question of what love is, and (3) the question of what causes unhealthy love to develop. This chapter provides an overview and discussion of the main answers to these questions in psychology and neuroscience.
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Perceptual reportsIn Mohan Matthen (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Perception, Oxford University Press Uk. 2015.
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1Virtue epistemology in the zombie apocalypse : hungry judges, heavy clipboards, and group polarizationIn Mark Alfano & Abrol Fairweather (eds.), Epistemic Situationism, Oxford University Press. 2017.
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Knowledge-How and perceptual learningIn Markos Valaris & Stephen Hetherington (eds.), Knowledge in Contemporary Philosophy, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2018.
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15Cognitive dissonance and the logic of racismIn Berit Brogaard & Dimitria Electra Gatzia (eds.), The Philosophy and Psychology of Ambivalence: Being of Two Minds, Routledge. 2020.There is no abstract for this chapter. The following is a summary. We distinguish between, explicit, inadvertent, and habitual racist actions. We argue that while inadvertent bigots and habitual racists are inclined to (sincerely) deny that they committed a racially motivated action, they have different reasons for their denial. Inadvertent bigots are denying it because, however deeply they search, they are not going to find any such motive. Habitual racists, by contrast, may hold explicit egali…Read more
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1The philosophical and psychological significance of ambivalence : an introductionIn Berit Brogaard & Dimitria Electra Gatzia (eds.), The Philosophy and Psychology of Ambivalence: Being of Two Minds, Routledge. 2020.There is no abstract for this chapter, which introduces the reader to the papers in the book. The following is only a sample of the chapter: It is quite common for people not to be able to make up their minds. One of the most famous literary examples comes from Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, in which the protagonist Hamlet poses the well-known question “To be or not to be, that is the question,” while contemplating suicide. In the play, Hamlet is expressing discontent about life, as he thinks of the…Read more
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580Against and for Ethical Naturalism Or: How Not To "Naturalize" EthicsAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 59 (4): 327-352. 2022.Moral realism and ethical naturalism are both highly attractive ethical positions but historically they have often been thought to be irreconcilable. Since the late 1980s defenders of Cornell Realism have argued that the two positions can consistently be combined. They make three constitutive claims: (i) Moral properties are natural kind properties that (ii) are identical to (or supervene) on descriptive functional properties, which (iii) causally regulate our use of moral terms. We offer new ar…Read more
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35Hatred: Understanding Our Most Dangerous EmotionOxford University Press. 2020.Hatred: Understanding Our Most Dangerous Emotion The first in-depth philosophical analysis of personal hate and group hate, Hate: Understanding Our Most Dangerous Emotion explores how personal hatred can foster domestic violence and emotional abuse, how hate-proneness is a main contributor to the aggressive tendencies of borderlines, narcissists and psychopaths, how seemingly ordinary people embark on some of history's worst hate crimes, and how cohesive groups, subjected to spontaneous forces o…Read more
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Phenomenal seemings and sensible dogmatismIn Chris Tucker (ed.), Seemings and Justification: New Essays on Dogmatism and Phenomenal Conservatism, Oxford University Press. 2013.
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256Dogmatism and Ampliative InferenceVeritas – Revista de Filosofia da Pucrs 66 (1). 2021.The evidential role of experience in justifying beliefs has been at the center of debate in philosophy in recent years. One view is that experience, or seeming, can confer immediate justification on belief in virtue of its representational phenomenology. Call this view “representational dogmatism.” Another view is that experience confers immediate justification on belief in virtue of its relational phenomenology. Call this view “relational dogmatism.” The goal of this paper is to pit these two v…Read more
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1Psychedelics: A Window into Perceptual ProcessingIn Chris Letheby & Philip Gerrans (eds.), Philosophical Perspectives on Psychedelic Psychiatry, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.In this chapter, we first present findings indicating that psilocybin-induced visual distortions and impaired executive functioning originate in temporary disruptions of bottom-up and top-down attentional mechanisms. We then revisit a recent predictive processing account of psychedelic experiences and argue that it lacks the resources to provide an adequate account of psychedelic experiences. Lastly, we propose an alternative theory of perceptual processing that can explain how the psilocybin-in…Read more
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