Matthew Soteriou

This chapter discusses what account should be given of the ontology of perceptual accomplishments that take time (such as listening to a musical performance). The following questions are addressed. Do these perceptual accomplishments involve a succession of distinct, discrete experiences? If not, then what account should be given of the respect in which different temporal parts of the events one perceives are experienced as successively present? Are the boundaries of the experienced present the temporal boundaries of a perceptual experience, or should they be conceived of in some other way? The chapter outlines a conception of process that can help address these questions by illuminating the place and role of notions of continuity, succession, and boundary in an account of our experience over extended intervals of time. It is suggested that this account is relevant to explaining the sense one might have that the present is both fleeting and incessant.

This chapter argues that mental action has a significant role to play in an account of the autonomous agency and self-governance that self-conscious agents can exercise in having the capacity to engage in practical deliberation, plan, and make decisions. The chapter explains how agents exercise self-determination in deciding to act. The accounts of intention offered by Bratman and Velleman are considered in the context of arguing that the obtaining of the mental state acquired in deciding to act embodies an epistemic perspective on future action that is significantly different from that embodied in ordinary beliefs about the future. This accounts for a difference between, on the one hand, the epistemic perspective that one has on one's future from the standpoint of practical reason and, on the other hand, the epistemic perspective that one has one's future from the standpoint of theoretical reason.

This chapter introduces the question of the place of mental action in an account of the metaphysics of mind. The chapter speculates on some of the background to the relative neglect of the topic of mental action in accounts of consciousness, mentality, and action, and then outlines some of the distinctive features of O’Shaughnessy's approach to the place of the mental will in an account of consciousness. This serves to introduce some of the main questions about mental agency and conscious thinking that are addressed in Part II of the book.

This chapter focuses on aspects of the temporal phenomenology of conscious sensory experience. In particular, it discusses debates about our experience of events and the so-called ‘specious present’. It is argued that the right account of the ontology of conscious experience can help resolve puzzles that arise in these debates. Considerations are introduced that speak in favour of a relationalist view of the phenomenal character of conscious sensory experience. It is argued that a psychological relation of perceptual acquaintance has an indispensable role to play in accommodating the temporal transparency of perceptual experience.

This chapter discusses whether conscious sensory experience has a distinctive sensuous character and whether introspective reflection has a significant role to play in an investigation of that character. The chapter outlines some prominent and conflicting claims that philosophers have made about what is manifest to one in having a conscious sensory experience, and comments on how differences in these articulations can affect the direction taken by philosophical enquiry. The following issues are introduced and considered: (i) the way in which sense-datum theorists, such as Moore, Russell, Broad, and Price appeal to a relation of perceptual acquaintance in their accounts of perceptual experience; (ii) the claim that perceptual experience has a representational content with veridicality conditions; (iii) the relational views of perceptual experience advocated by naïve realists.

This chapter starts by discussing the idea that the activity of consciously thinking is, in some sense, private to its subject. The chapter then reconsiders Geach's argument for the claim that there is no stream of conscious thought. It defends the claim that there is a respect in which there can be said to be a stream of conscious thought, while preserving the idea that there are important ontological distinctions to be drawn between the conscious cognitive and conscious sensory aspects of our mental lives. An account of the ontology of the conscious mental act of judging is proposed, according to which a distinctive form of self-knowledge accompanies the conscious mental act of judging. It is suggested that the significance of this form of self-knowledge is to be understood in terms of its role in agential mental activity.

This chapter investigates the place and role of mental agency in suppositional reasoning and self-critical reflection. It considers Descartes’ suggestion that when one is engaged in these activities, which are the essential elements of Descartes’ method of doubt, ‘the mind uses its own freedom’. The chapter considers similar proposals made by O’Shaughnessy and Korsgaard. The chapter articulates what is right in these proposals, and in identifying where we should locate the role of mental agency in these forms of conscious reasoning it provides a critique of Galen Strawson's proposal that the role of mental action in thinking and reasoning can at best be ‘merely catalytic’ and ‘indirect’.

This chapter argues that important explanatory roles should be assigned to structural features of the relation of perceptual acquaintance. It is argued that we should appeal to these structural features in accounting for certain aspects of the phenomenology of our perception of space, time, and absence. These structural features of the relation of perceptual acquaintance are shown to be relevant to some of the phenomenal differences between some of the different modalities of sense perception (e.g. vision and bodily awareness). The chapter highlights some of the differences between the ways in which our conscious perceptual awareness of space and time are structured, and suggests ways in which these differences may be relevant to some of our different intuitions about space and time themselves.

This chapter introduces Geach's argument for rejecting William James’ suggestion that our conscious mental lives include a ‘stream of conscious thought’. The chapter explains Geach's claim that the propositional content of thought is a ‘non-successive unity’, and it shows how Geach's argument depends on assumptions about the temporal character of elements of the stream of consciousness. O’Shaughnessy's proposal about the ontology of the stream of consciousness is introduced, and these ontological concerns are connected with debates about sensory experience that are framed in terms of the relation between representational content and phenomenal character. A proposal about the ontology of experience is introduced and it is suggested that this proposal can help diagnose the intuition that there is an ‘explanatory gap’ associated with attempts to understand the relation between phenomenal and physical/functional features of conscious experience.

This chapter considers how the proposed account of the epistemology of mental action, and the proposed account of the self-knowledge involved in conscious thinking, bear on an account of one's knowledge of what one believes. The chapter also explores some of the ways in which the ethics of belief, and accounts of the suspension of judgement and belief revision, may be affected by the fact that we are, as self-conscious subjects, capable of engaging in agential epistemic conscious mental activity, including self-critical reflection.

This chapter discusses whether the claim that experience is ‘transparent’ undermines the claim that one can engage in the pre-judgemental activity of introspectively attending to an experience one is undergoing. The chapter considers the question of what is involved in noticing, looking at, and watching an object that one perceives, in order to elucidate what further activity may be involved in cases of introspectively attending to the experience itself. An account of the ontology of our knowledge of the phenomenology of experience is outlined and this is applied in the course of defending a proposal about what the relationalist should say about the conscious character of hallucinations.

This chapter considers the question of the place and role of mental action in an account of conscious thinking, and, more generally, the metaphysics of mind. It is argued that mental action has an essential role to play in an account of issues in the epistemology of mind that are central to our understanding of the sort of conscious thinking that self-conscious subjects can engage in. It is argued that in order to accommodate adequately these connections between mental action, the epistemology of mind, and conscious thinking, we need the right account of the ontology of conscious thinking, and that the right account of the ontology of conscious thinking should lead us to reject the notion that we can conceive of mental actions as reducible to mental processes (e.g. transitions between mental states) that enable and explain overt bodily action.

This chapter argues that intention-in-action plays a role in providing us with a distinctive form of knowledge of what we are doing when we perform our intended actions. The chapter considers how this account of intention-in-action bears on an account of our knowledge of our own mental actions and how this, in turn bears, on an account of our knowledge of what we are doing when we are consciously thinking. The chapter considers some of O’Shaughnessy's claims about the role of the ‘mental will’ in an account of the state of wakeful consciousness in the self-conscious subject – in particular, some claims he makes about the differences between dreaming and wakeful states of consciousness. In light of this discussion, it is argued that the avenue to self-knowledge afforded by intention-in-action plays a central and significant role in the ordinary, awake, conscious mental life of a self-conscious subject.

This chapter focuses on the similarities between, and differences between, the phenomenology of conscious perceptual experience and the phenomenology of acts of perceptual imagination and perceptual recollection. An account of the ontology of perceptual imagination and perceptual recollection (including episodic recollection) is proposed that can accommodate and explain these similarities and differences. According to this proposal, conscious sensory experience is represented in acts of perceptual imagination and perceptual recollection. This account of perceptual imagination and perceptual recollection invokes a form of knowledge that only a phenomenally conscious subject can possess – a form of knowledge of what it is (or was) like to have conscious sensory experience.

This chapter argues that we should appeal to the ontological category of ‘occurrent state’ in order to accommodate the distinctive form of conscious contact with time that our conscious sensory experiences provide us with. The chapter draws out some consequences of this account of the ontology of conscious sensory experience, pertaining to our experience of the ‘passage of time’, the ‘continuity’ of conscious sensory experience, the diachronic unity of consciousness, and Dennet's ‘Multiple Drafts’ model of consciousness.

When we are awake, we occupy a spatiotemporal perspective, and while occupying that spatiotemporal perspective we can simultaneously exercise a capacity to represent a distinct spatiotemporal perspective that we do not occupy—for example, when we imagine or recollect events. The first half of the paper compares and contrasts the ways in which this capacity is exercised in imagination and episodic recollection. The second half of the paper draws on the above accounts in order to frame hypotheses about the ways in which perspectives can feature in dreams. The paper argues that some unusual and distinctive features of dreams can be explained by making intelligible the idea that it is possible to represent a spatiotemporal perspective while failing to meet the conditions required for occupying a such perspective. In such circumstances, one fails to occupy a conscious perspective that makes possible even the minimal orienting knowledge ‘I am here now’.

Howard Robinson's Perception is now rightly regarded as essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the sense-datum theory of perception and its motivations. It should also be regarded as essential reading for those with a more general philosophical interest in perception and sensory consciousness. As well as discussing the history of the sense-datum theory, and the nature of sense-data and their relation to the physical world, Robinson offers critiques of physicalist theories of perception, intentional/representational theories, adverbial theories, and naive realist/disjunctivist theories. Along the way he also discusses Wittgenstein's private language argument and the nature of secondary qualities. Over the course of the book we are presented with a sustained, and forthright, defence of a sense-datum theory in its traditional form. The arguments are clear, briskly delivered, and challenging. Here I highlight two key elements in Robinson's case for a sense-datum theory, which I think pose an especially serious challenge for his opponents. These are his articulation and defence of the ‘phenomenal principle’ and his ‘revised’ causal argument for sense-data.

This chapter focuses on the phenomenology of mental agency by addressing the question of the ontological category of the conscious mental acts an agent is aware of when engaged in such directed mental activities as conscious calculation and deliberation. An argument is offered for the claim that the mental acts in question must involve phenomenally conscious mental events that have temporal extension. The problem the chapter goes on to address is how to reconcile this line of thought with Geach's arguments for the claim that mental acts like judging lack temporal extension.

This chapter discusses the causal requirements on perceptual success in putative cases of the perception of absence – in particular, in cases of hearing silence and seeing darkness. It is argued that the key to providing the right account of the respect in which we can perceive silence and darkness lies in providing the right account of the respect in which we can have conscious perceptual contact with intervals of time and regions of space within which objects can potentially be perceived. In this account, a significant explanatory role is assigned to comparatively invariant structural features of our conscious experience of regions of space and intervals of time. The chapter discusses how the explanatory role assigned to these structural features affects our view of the causal requirements on perceptual success

Perceptual experiences are often divided into the following three broad categories: veridical perceptions, illusions, and hallucinations. For example, when one has a visual experience as of a red object, it may be that one is really seeing an object and its red colour (veridical perception), that one is seeing a green object (illusion), or that one is not seeing an object at all (hallucination). Many maintain that the same account should be given of the nature of the conscious experience that occurs in each of these three cases. Those who hold a disjunctive theory of perception deny this. Disjunctivists typically reject the claim that the same kind of experience is common to all three cases because they hold views about the nature of veridical perception that are inconsistent with it

This paper addresses the following questions: what account should be given of the state of wakeful consciousness, and what explanatory roles should be assigned to that state? Those questions are taken up after some discussion of the related but distinct question of what it is to be awake. On the view proposed here, in seeking to provide an account of the state of wakeful consciousness one should be aiming to provide an account of a point of view that is associated with the distinctive form of awareness to which one surfaces when one wakes up. Our specification of that point of view should appeal to the awake subject’s temporal point of view, and the epistemic orientation and agential perspective it embodies. The explanatory roles that can be assigned to the state of wakeful consciousness are the explanatory roles that can be assigned to that point of view.

The aim in this paper is to focus on one of the proposals about successful perception that has led its adherents to advance some kind of disjunctive account of experience. The proposal is that we should understand the conscious sensory experience involved in successful perception in relational terms. I first try to clarify what the commitments of the view are, and where disagreements with competing views may lie. I then suggest that there are considerations relating to the conscious character of our perception of events that speak in its favour

Sosa : 7–18, 2005) argues that we should reject the orthodox conception of dreaming—the view that dream states and waking states are “intrinsically alike, though different in their causes and effects”. The alternative he proposes is that “to dream is to imagine”. According to this imagination model of dreaming, our dreamt conscious beliefs, experiences, affirmations, decisions and intentions are not “real” insofar as they are all merely imagined beliefs, experiences, affirmations, decisions and intentions. This paper assesses the epistemic implications of Sosa’s imagination model of dreaming. Section 1 outlines and assesses the reasons Sosa gives for thinking that his imagination model of dreaming introduces a new dimension to debates about dream scepticism. Sosa argues that his imagination model of dreaming invites a more radical version of dream scepticism, and also makes available a novel and more powerful response to dream scepticism. Objections are raised to both of those claims. This leads to a challenge to Sosa’s imagination model of dreaming. This is the concern that Sosa’s imagination model of dreaming lacks the resources to accommodate the intuition that there is something illusory or misleading about one’s situation when one is dreaming, and as a result his account of dreams fails to accommodate the common intuition that there is a sceptical problem about dreaming but not about dreamless sleep. Section 2 of the paper elaborates a version of the imagination model of dreaming that can overcome that challenge. This version of the imagination model of dreaming goes beyond what Sosa explicitly commits to when he outlines his view of dreams, however, it exploits ideas that are integral to a key theme in Sosa’s recent writings on virtue reliabilism—namely his proposal that epistemic agency should be accorded a central place in that approach to knowledge, and his related proposal that agency is exercised in conscious judgement. An implication of this version of the imagination model of dreaming is that an elucidation of a connection between the wakeful condition and our capacity to exercise agency over our mental lives should be central to an account of the nature, and epistemic significance of, wakeful consciousness. The final section of the paper considers whether this version of the imagination model of dreaming has anything novel to contribute to debates about dream scepticism.

In the first part of the paper I try to explain why the disjunctive theory of perception can seem so counterintuitive by focusing on two of the standard arguments against the view-the argument from subjective indiscriminability and the causal argument. I suggest that by focusing on these arguments, and in particular the intuitions that lie behind them, we gain a clearer view of what the disjunctive theory is committed to and why. In light of this understanding, I then present an argument for the disjunctive theory based on the claim that the content of experience is particular and not general

A variety of different proposals have been made about the nature of sounds. Although these proposals differ in a number of significant respects, some common assumptions appear to be made by their advocates: (1) the assumption that sounds possess audible, acoustic features, such as timbre, pitch, and loudness (and so the assumption that a sound is not a property that is identical to any one of those audible features); and (2) the assumption that sounds are one kind of thing. The second assumption is rarely defended in debates about sound and auditory perception. This chapter explores ways in which such debates are affected if the relevant assumption is rejected.

This chapter introduces some of the main issues and themes addressed by the contributors to this book. It provides an overview of debates concerning the scope of our mental agency — i.e. which aspects of our mental lives should be regarded as mental actions. There is a discussion of some of the different structures mental agency may take, and whether any such structures are distinctive of mental, as opposed to bodily, action. The chapter also highlights some of the connections that have been forged between accounts of mental agency and debates about self-knowledge, and the ontology and phenomenology of mind.