•  199
    opinionated review of some of the recent work on the phenomenal unity of consciousness.
  • The Relational View of Perception: New Essays (edited book)
    with Ori Beck
    Routledge. forthcoming.
  •  847
    On the Possibility of Hallucinations
    Mind 129 (515): 737-768. 2020.
    Many take the possibility of hallucinations to imply that a relationalist account, according to which perceptual experiences are constituted by direct relations to ordinary mind-independent objects, is false. The common reaction among relationalists is to adopt a disjunctivist view that denies that hallucinations have the same nature as perceptual experiences. This paper proposes a non-disjunctivist response to the argument from hallucination by arguing that the alleged empirical and a priori ev…Read more
  •  943
    Unity, Mereology and Connectivity
    Analysis 74 (3): 509-520. 2014.
    The goal of this paper is to raise a few questions about Bayne s mereological account of the unity of consciousness. In Section 1, I raise a few clarificatory questions about the account and the thesis that consciousness is necessarily unified. In Sections 2 and 3, I offer an alternative view of unity of consciousness and contrast it with Bayne's view. I call this view the connectivity account. These sections prepare the ground for the main question of this article: why should we prefer Bayne's …Read more
  •  74
    Revisiting Phenomenal Intentionality
    Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia 7 (1): 99-107. 2016.
    : This essay has two goals. The goal of the first section is to raise a few clarificatory questions about the exact contour of Crane’s account of intentionality, its relation to phenomenology, and his motivation for it. The second section aims to describe a general worry about programs that combine a broadly anti-externalist outlook on intentionality with the idea that there is an intimate connection between phenomenology and intentionality. I argue that programs like this either suffer from a p…Read more
  •  784
    Perceptual experience has the phenomenal character of encountering a mind-independent objective world. What we encounter in perceptual experience is not presented to us as a state of our own mind. Rather, we seem to encounter facts, objects, and properties that are independent from our mind. In short, perceptual experience has phenomenal objectivity. This paper proposes and defends a Kantian account of phenomenal objectivity that grounds it in experiences of lawlike regularities. The paper offer…Read more
  •  738
    It is common to hold that our conscious experiences at a single moment are often unified. But when consciousness is unified, what are the fundamental facts in virtue of which it is unified? On some accounts of the unity of consciousness, the most fundamental fact that grounds unity is a form of singularity or oneness. These accounts are similar to Newtonian views of space according to which the most fundamental fact that grounds relations of co-spatiality between various points (or regions) of a…Read more
  •  1186
    The geometry of visual space and the nature of visual experience
    Philosophical Studies 172 (7): 1813-1832. 2015.
    Some recently popular accounts of perception account for the phenomenal character of perceptual experience in terms of the qualities of objects. My concern in this paper is with naturalistic versions of such a phenomenal externalist view. Focusing on visual spatial perception, I argue that naturalistic phenomenal externalism conflicts with a number of scientific facts about the geometrical characteristics of visual spatial experience
  •  66
    Some theorists hold that the human perceptual system has a component that receives input only from units lower in the perceptual hierarchy. This thesis, that we shall here refer to as the encapsulation thesis, has been at the center of a continuing debate for the past few decades. Those who deny the encapsulation thesis often rely on the large body of psychological findings that allegedly suggest that perception is influenced by factors such as the beliefs, desires, goals, and the expectations o…Read more
  •  130
    In defense of Epistemic Modesty
    Philosophical Issues 21 (1): 312-331. 2011.
    An ambitious project in epistemology is to show that we have justification for anti-skeptical beliefs such as the belief that we are not brains in vats. A much less ambitious project is to account for how perceptual experience justifies ordinary perceptual beliefs like the belief that there is a cat in front of me. One problem is that these two projects are entangled in such manner that the failure of the anti-skeptical project seems to entail the failure of the project of accounting for the jus…Read more
  •  1269
    This paper argues that a common form of representationalism has trouble accommodating empirical findings about visual space perception. Vision science tells us that the visual system systematically gives rise to different experiences of the same spatial property. This, combined with a naturalistic account of content, suggests that the same spatial property can have different veridical looks. I use this to argue that a common form of representationalism about spatial experience must be rejected. …Read more
  •  271
    Is Perceptual Phenomenology Thin?
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 83 (2): 366-397. 2011.