Jessica Anne Heine

You learn that you disagree about P with someone who—according to your evidence—should be your equal in discerning whether P. Some argue that rationality requires weighing your judgment and your Peer’s judgment equally. I show that this ‘equal weight view’ requires the undefended stipulation that your evidence suggests zero correlation between your success in initially determining whether P and your success in reevaluating P in the face of Peer Disagreement. I describe a Peer Disagreement in which self-trust is rationally mandated, given that this further stipulation fails. Finally, I suggest that default, asymmetric self-trust in the face of Peer Disagreement is justified, given a reasonable expectation of a baseline correlation between success in initial determinations whether P and success in reevaluations of P in the face of Peer Disagreement.

This paper defends the following principle: For any visually perceptible set of objects and any visual phenomenal character, there could be a veridical perception of exactly those objects with that character. This principle is rejected by almost all contemporary theories of perception, yet rarely addressed directly. Many have taken the apparent inconceivability of a certain sort of “shape inversion” — as compared to the more plausible, frequently discussed “color inversion” — as evidence that the spatial characters of our perceptions are uniquely suited to and/or revelatory of the structure of their objects, such that alleged perceptions of those objects that differed radically in spatial character could not be veridical. I argue that these conclusions are unjustified: I claim that the difficulty involved in constructing coherent “shape inversion” scenarios is attributable to the complex relations among visual and tactile shape experiences, as opposed to relations between shape experiences and worldly shape properties.