•  73
    Bodily sense and structural content
    Synthese 202 (5): 1-21. 2023.
    Bodily awareness seems to present the body as a topologically connected whole, composed of many parts. In consequence, the source of topological and mereological content of bodily awareness comes into question. In particular, it may be asked whether (a) such content is provided by the bodily sense, i.e., sensory mechanisms which, like proprioception, presents the body “from the inside,” or (b) it is a product of “exteroceptive” elements of bodily awareness, which represents the body “from the ou…Read more
  •  136
    Representationalism and Olfactory Valence
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1-20. forthcoming.
    One of the crucial characteristics of the olfactory modality is that olfactory experiences commonly present odours as pleasant or unpleasant. Indeed, because of the importance of the hedonic aspects of olfactory experience, it has been proposed that the role of olfaction is not to represent the properties of stimuli, but rather to generate a valence-related response. However, despite a growing interest among philosophers in the study of the chemical senses, no dominant theory of sensory pleasure…Read more
  •  193
    Pain: Modularity and Cognitive Constitution
    The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. forthcoming.
    Discussions concerning the modularity of the pain system have been focused on questions regarding the cognitive penetrability of pain mechanisms. It has been claimed that phenomena such as placebo analgesia demonstrate that the pain system is cognitively penetrated; therefore, it is not encapsulated from central cognition. However, important arguments have been formulated which aim to show that cognitive penetrability does not in fact entail a lack of modularity of the pain system. This paper of…Read more
  •  124
    It is common to characterize pain with touch-related terms, like ‘cutting’, ‘pressing’, ‘sharp’, and ‘pulsing’, or temperature-related terms, like ‘hot’ or ‘burning’. This suggests that many pains are phenomenally multimodal because they are experienced as having some tactile-like or thermal-like character. The goal of this chapter is to investigate the structure of phenomenally multimodal pain experiences. It is argued that the usual accounts of multimodal structure proposed in investigations r…Read more
  •  205
    Perspectival content of visual experiences
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    The usual visual experiences possess a perspectival phenomenology as they seem to present objects from a certain perspective. Nevertheless, it is not obvious how to characterise experiential content determining such phenomenology. In particular, while there are many works investigating perspectival properties of experienced objects, a question regarding how subject is represented in visual perspectival experiences attracted less attention. In order to address this problem, I consider four popula…Read more
  •  152
    Seeing and Hearing Flavours
    In A. Keller & B. D. Young (ed.), Theoretical Perspectives on Smell. 2023.
    According to cognitive psychology, virtually every sensory system influences the way in which flavours are experienced. However, it is less clear which systems are actually constitutive of flavour perception and which have merely causal influence. The paper focuses on the status of vision and audition, which are usually not treated as constitutive in the context of flavour perception. First, it is proposed that the mechanistic explanation debate provides conceptual resources which allow the cons…Read more
  •  467
    Silence Perception and Spatial Content
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (3): 524-538. 2022.
    It seems plausible that visual experiences of darkness have perceptual phenomenal content that clearly differentiates them from absences of visual experiences. I argue, relying on psychological results concerning auditory attention, that the analogous claim is true about auditory experiences of silence. More specifically, I propose that experiences of silence present empty spatial directions like ‘right’ or ‘left’, and so have egocentric spatial content. Furthermore, I claim that such content is…Read more
  •  405
    Tracking representationalism and olfaction
    Mind and Language 38 (2): 446-463. 2022.
    While philosophers of perception develop representational theories of olfactory experiences, there are doubts regarding whether features of olfactory perception can be accommodated within the representationalist framework. In particular, it is argued that the function of olfaction is not to represent stimuli but rather to evaluate it. The paper claims that the major representational accounts of olfaction have problems in accommodating the evaluative aspects of olfactory phenomenology. However, a…Read more
  •  254
    Constitutivity in Flavour Perception
    Erkenntnis 88 (8): 3291-3312. 2021.
    Within contemporary philosophy of perception, it is commonly claimed that flavour experiences are paradigmatic examples of multimodal perceptual experiences. In fact, virtually any sensory system, including vision and audition, is believed to influence how we experience flavours. However, there is a strong intuition, often expressed in these works, that not all of these sensory systems make an equal contribution to the phenomenology of flavour experiences. More specifically, it seems that the ac…Read more
  •  248
    Perceptual experiences of particularity
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    Philosophers of perception often claim that usual perceptual experiences not only present particulars but also phenomenally present them as particulars. Nevertheless, despite the initial plausibility of this thesis, it is not clear what exactly it means to say that particularity is phenomenally presented. The paper aims to provide a deeper analysis of the claim that perceptual experiences phenomenally present objects as particulars. In doing so, I distinguish two theses regarding phenomenally pr…Read more
  •  181
    Is there a tactile field?
    Philosophical Psychology 35 (3): 301-326. 2022.
    It seems that there are important differences concerning the way in which space itself is presented in visual and tactile modalities. In the case of vision, it is usually accepted that visual objects are experienced as located in a visual field. However, it is controversial whether similar field-like characteristics can be attributed to the space in which tactile entities are experienced to be located. The paper investigates whether postulating the presence of a tactile field is justified. I arg…Read more
  •  284
    Spatial content of painful sensations
    Mind and Language 36 (4): 554-569. 2021.
    Philosophical considerations regarding experiential spatial content have focused on exteroceptive sensations presenting external entities, and not on interoceptive experiences that present states of our own body. A notable example is studies on interoceptive touch, in which it is argued that interoceptive tactile experiences have rich spatial content such that tactile sensations are experienced as located in a spatial field. This paper investigates whether a similarly rich spatial content can be…Read more
  •  315
    Contents of Unconscious Color Perception
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 13 (3): 665-681. 2022.
    In the contemporary discussions concerning unconscious perception it is not uncommon to postulate that content and phenomenal character are ‘orthogonal’, i.e., there is no type of content which is essentially conscious, but instead, every representational content can be either conscious or not. Furthermore, this is not merely treated as a thesis justified by theoretical investigations, but as supported by empirical considerations concerning the actual functioning of the human cognition. In this …Read more
  •  133
    Five experiments investigated the role of spatial connectedness between a pair of objects presented in the change detection task for the actual capacity of visual working memory (VWM) in healthy young adults (total N = 405). Three experiments yielded a surprising nonlinear relationship between the proportion of pair-wise connected objects and capacity, with the highest capacity observed for homogenous displays, when either all objects were connected or disjointed. A drop in capacity, ranging fro…Read more
  •  324
    Common Structure of Vision and Olfaction
    Philosophia 49 (4): 1703-1724. 2021.
    According to a common opinion, human olfactory experiences are significantly different from human visual experiences. For instance, olfaction seems to have only rudimentary abilities to represent space; it is not clear whether olfactory experiences have any mereological structure; and while vision presents the world in terms of objects, it is a matter of debate whether there are olfactory object-representations. This paper argues that despite these differences visual and olfactory experiences sh…Read more
  •  597
    Blur and interoceptive vision
    Philosophical Studies 178 (10): 3271-3289. 2021.
    The paper presents a new philosophical theory of blurred vision according to which visual experiences have two types of content: exteroceptive content, characterizing external entities, and interoceptive content, characterizing the state of the visual system. In particular, it is claimed that blurriness-related phenomenology interoceptively presents acuity of vision in relation to eye focus. The proposed theory is consistent with the representationalist thesis that phenomenal character supervene…Read more
  •  271
    The Subject-Dependency of Perceptual Objects
    Erkenntnis 87 (6): 2827-2842. 2022.
    Entities that are, in ordinary perceptual situations, veridically presented as objects can be called ‘perceptual objects’. In the philosophical literature, one can find various approaches to the crucial features that distinguish the class of perceptual objects. While these positions differ in many respects, they share an important general feature: they all characterize perceptual objects as largely subject-independent. More specifically, they do not attribute a significant constitutive role to t…Read more
  •  378
    Introduction to the topical collection "The Structure of Perceptual Objects"—with contributions by Mohan Matthen, EJ Green, Alisa Mandrigin, Blazej Skrzypulec, and Anna Drożdżowicz.
  •  429
    Tropes, Universals and Visual Phenomenology
    Theoria 87 (2): 435-456. 2020.
    Both philosophers of perception and analytic metaphysicians apply the tropes/universals distinction when considering the ontological status of visual properties. One way of arguing in favor of the trope interpretation of visual properties is to claim that the way in which we visually experience properties makes it plausible to characterize them as tropes. In this paper, I argue for a different position, namely that the way in which we visually experience properties provides a serious challenge f…Read more
  •  330
    The structure of audio–visual consciousness
    Synthese 198 (3): 2101-2127. 2019.
    It is commonly believed that human perceptual experiences can be, and usually are, multimodal. What is more, a stronger thesis is often proposed that some perceptual multimodal characters cannot be described simply as a conjunction of unimodal phenomenal elements. If it is the case, then a question arises: what is the additional mode of combination that is required to adequately describe the phenomenal structure of multimodal experiences? The paper investigates what types of audio–visual experie…Read more
  •  677
    The nonclassical mereology of olfactory experiences
    Synthese 198 (1): 867-886. 2019.
    While there is a growing philosophical interest in analysing olfactory experiences, the mereological structure of odours considered in respect of how they are perceptually experienced has not yet been extensively investigated. The paper argues that odours are perceptually experienced as having a mereological structure, but this structure is significantly different from the spatial mereological structure of visually experienced objects. Most importantly, in the case of the olfactory part-structur…Read more
  •  498
    Perceptual Kinds as Supervening Sortals
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 100 (1): 174-201. 2018.
    It seems intuitive that in situations of perceptual recognition additional properties are represented. While much has been written about the significance of such properties for perceptual phenomenology, it is still unclear (a) what is the relation between recognition-based properties and lower-level perceptual properties, and (b) whether it is justified to classify them as kind-properties. Relying on results in cognitive psychology, I argue that recognition-based properties (I) are irreducible, …Read more
  •  45
    Olfactory Objecthood
    Philosophia 47 (3): 881-900. 2019.
    In the contemporary analytic discussions concerning human olfactory perception, it is commonly claimed that (1) olfactory experiences are representations having content and (2) olfactory experiences represent odours, like coffee odour or vanilla odour. However, despite these common assumptions, there seems to be an ontological controversy between two views: the first states that odours are perceptually represented as features and the second states that they are represented as objects. In this pa…Read more
  •  211
    Bradley’s Regress and Visual Content
    Axiomathes 29 (2): 155-172. 2019.
    According to the well-known Bradley’s Regress argument, one cannot explain the unity of states of affairs by referring to relations combining objects with properties. This argument has been widely discussed within analytic metaphysics, but has not been recognized as relevant for the philosophy of perception. I argue that the mainstream characterization of visual content is threatened by the Bradley’s Regress, and the most influential metaphysical solutions to the regress argument cannot be appli…Read more
  •  328
    Visual Endurance and Auditory Perdurance
    Erkenntnis 85 (2): 467-488. 2020.
    Philosophers often state that the persistence of objects in vision is experienced differently than the persistence of sounds in audition. This difference is expressed by using metaphors from the metaphysical endurantism/perdurantism debate. For instance, it is claimed that only sounds are perceived as “temporally extended”. The paper investigates whether it is justified to characterize visually experienced objects and auditorily experienced sounds as different types of entities: endurants and pe…Read more
  •  469
    Transitivity of visual sameness
    Synthese 197 (6): 2695-2719. 2020.
    The way in which vision represents objects as being the same despite movement and qualitative changes has been extensively investigated in contemporary psychology. However, the formal properties of the visual sameness relation are still unclear, for example, whether it is an identity-like, equivalence relation. The paper concerns one aspect of this problem: the transitivity of visual sameness. Results obtained by using different experimental paradigms are analysed, in particular studies using st…Read more
  •  26
    Essential properties are usually thought as properties that things must always possess, whereas accidental properties are considered as changeable. In this paper, we challenge this traditional view. We argue that in some important cases, such as social or biological development, we face not only the change of accidents, but also the change of essences. To analyze this kind of change we propose an alternative view on the relations between the modalities and time. Some properties might be necessar…Read more
  •  50
    In the contemporary analytic discussions concerning human olfactory perception, it is commonly claimed that olfactory experiences are representations having content and olfactory experiences represent odours, like coffee odour or vanilla odour. However, despite these common assumptions, there seems to be an ontological controversy between two views: the first states that odours represented by olfaction should be characterised as features and the second states that they should be interpreted as o…Read more
  • Is Fichte’s Idealism An Example Of Dummett’s Antirealism?
    Studia Philosophica Wratislaviensia 4 (2): 103-109. 2009.
    The aim of paper is to consider some similarities and differences between Fichte’s doctrine of idealism and Dummett’s conception of semantic antirealism. While Fichte built his idealistic view in the classical way as a metaphysical doctrine, Dummet sought to ground the fundamental distinction between realistic and antirealistic theories in alternative semantic conceptions of truth conditions. The main question of the paper is whether it is possible to interpret Fichte’s metaphysical doctrine as …Read more