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20I—The Presidential Address: The Objectivity of PerceptionProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 121 (1): 1-20. 2021.We believe that the ordinary physical objects that we perceive continue to exist unperceived; and this is intuitively an aspect of any authentic characterization of how the world appears to us in perception. But how can experience present its objects as continuing to exist beyond that very experience of them? Here I aim to explain this phenomenon. I start with an insight from Evans (1985). Familiar attempts to implement this insight fail, in my opinion. Here I introduce, motivate, defend, and el…Read more
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16Perception and ContentIn Jakob Lindgaard (ed.), John McDowell, Blackwell. 2008-03-17.This chapter contains sections titled: The Possibility of Falsity The Involvement of Generality Notes References.
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153Discussion of Bill Brewer's “Perceptual Experience and Empirical Reason”Analytic Philosophy 59 (1): 19-32. 2018.What is the role of conscious experience in the epistemology of perceptual knowledge: how should we characterise what is going on in seeing that o is F in order to illuminate the contribution of seeing o to their status as cases of knowing that o is F? My proposal is that seeing o involves conscious acquaintance with o itself, the concrete worldly source of the truth that o is F, in a way that may make it evident to the subject that o is an instance of ‘x is F’ as she understands this, and hence…Read more
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Objects and the explanation of perceptionIn Johan Gersel, Rasmus Thybo Jensen, Morten S. Thaning & Søren Overgaard (eds.), In the light of experience: new essays on perception and reasons, Oxford University Press. 2018.
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Attention and direct realismIn Adam Pautz & Daniel Stoljar (eds.), Blockheads! Essays on Ned Block’s Philosophy of Mind and Consciousness, Mit Press. 2019.
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87Perception of continued existence unperceivedPhilosophical Issues 30 (1): 24-38. 2020.Philosophical Issues, Volume 30, Issue 1, Page 24-38, October 2020.
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43Empirical reason: Answers to Gupta, McDowell, and SiegelPhilosophical Issues 29 (1): 366-377. 2019.Philosophical Issues, EarlyView.
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46Empirical reason: Questions for Gupta, McDowell, and SiegelPhilosophical Issues 29 (1): 311-323. 2019.Philosophical Issues, EarlyView.
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50The Nature of Ordinary Objects (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2018.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 contributor…Read more
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107Consciousness and content in perceptionPhilosophical Perspectives 31 (1): 41-54. 2017.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 lev…Read more
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Spatial Representation. Problems in philosophy and psychologyRevue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 191 (1): 119-120. 2001.
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Workshop participantsIn Naomi Eilan, Rosaleen A. McCarthy & Bill Brewer (eds.), Spatial representation: problems in philosophy and psychology, Blackwell. pp. 400. 1993.
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47Self-Knowledge and ExternalismThe Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 5 39-47. 2000.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 demonst…Read more
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67RepliesPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 63 (2): 449-464. 2001.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 th…Read more
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315Perceptual experience has conceptual contentIn Matthias Steup & John Turri (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Epistemology, Blackwell. 2013.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 empir…Read more
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Introduction: ActionIn Naomi M. Eilan (ed.), Spatial representation: problems in philosophy and psychology, Blackwell. 1993.
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218Experience and Reason in PerceptionRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 43 203-227. 1998.The question I am interested in is this. What exactly is the role of conscious experience in the acquisition of knowledge on the basis of perception? The problem here, as I see it, is to solve simultaneously for the nature of this experience, and its role in acquiring and sustaining the relevant beliefs, in such a way as to vindicate what I regard as an undeniable datum, that perception is a basic source of knowledge about the mind-independent world, in a sense of ‘basic’ which is also to be elu…Read more
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142Notoriously, 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…Read more
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56The Mind's Construction: The Ontology of Mind and Mental Action. By Matthew Soteriou. Oxford: Oxford University Press2013, pp. 400, £55. ISBN: 978-0-19-967845-7 (review)Philosophy 90 (2): 346-356. 2015.
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171Stroud’s Quest for Reality (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 68 (2): 408-414. 2004.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 s…Read more
London, London, City of, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Areas of Interest
17th/18th Century Philosophy |