Jason M. Ford

William Rapaport, in “How Helen Keller used syntactic semantics to escape from a Chinese Room,” (Rapaport 2006), argues that Helen Keller was in a sort of Chinese Room, and that her subsequent development of natural language fluency illustrates the flaws in Searle’s famous Chinese Room Argument and provides a method for developing computers that have genuine semantics (and intentionality). I contend that his argument fails. In setting the problem, Rapaport uses his own preferred definitions of semantics and syntax, but he does not translate Searle’s Chinese Room argument into that idiom before attacking it. Once the Chinese Room is translated into Rapaport’s idiom (in a manner that preserves the distinction between meaningful representations and uninterpreted symbols), I demonstrate how Rapaport’s argument fails to defeat the CRA. This failure brings a crucial element of the Chinese Room Argument to the fore: the person in the Chinese Room is prevented from connecting the Chinese symbols to his/her own meaningful experiences and memories. This issue must be addressed before any victory over the CRA is announced

Michael Tye’s considered position on visual experience combines representationalism with externalism about color, so when considering spectrum inversion, he needs a principled reason to claim that a person with inverted color vision is seeing things incorrectly. Tye’s responses to the problem of the inverted spectrum ( 2000 , in: Consciousness, color, and content, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and 2002a , in: Chalmers (ed.) Philosophy of mind: classical and contemporary readings, Oxford University Press, Oxford) rely on a teleological approach to the evolution of vision to secure the grounds upon which people with normal color vision can be justly called ‘right’ and those with inverted color vision can be called ‘wrong’. I demonstrate that since the inverted spectrum thought experiment requires that both sorts of vision be behaviorally indistinguishable, no biologically acceptable concept of teleology will allow Tye to draw the distinction he needs

I contend that Alva Noë’s Enactive Approach to Perception fails to give an adequate account of the periphery of attention. Noë claims that our peripheral experience is not produced by the brain’s representation of peripheral items, but rather by our mastery of sensorimotor skills and contingencies. I offer a two-pronged assault on this account of the periphery of attention. The first challenge comes from Mack and Rock’s work on inattentional blindness, and provides robust empirical evidence for the semantic processing (and hence representation) of some wholly unattended stimuli. The second challenge draws on LaBerge’s theory of attention to provide a substantial advantage to peripheral representations, saving time whenever we shift the focus of our attention to something which had been in the periphery, allowing us to respond to that thing more quickly than would be possible if Noë’s account of perception were correct.

In response to new research into the phenomena of inattentional blindness and change- blindness, several philosophers and vision researchers have proposed a novel form of scepticism: they contend that we do not have the conscious experience that we think we have. I will show that this claim is not supported by the evidence usually cited in support of it, and I expose what I believe to be the underlying error motivating this position: the belief that consciousness is either focal (what occupies the focus of attention) or non- existent. Once we appreciate the phenomenology of the periphery of attention, we see that we have the resources to place the problematic phenomena in our peripheral.