Niccolò Nanni

Retentionalism and extensionalism are theories of temporal consciousness. As such, they aim to explain how subjects are aware of temporally extended phenomena as succession. Direct realism and representationalism are theories of general perception: they aim to explain what our perceptual experience consists of and what kinds of objects we perceive. The received view marries retentionalism with representationalism and extensionalism with direct realism. Although some forms of extensionalism departing from direct realism have been advanced, nobody has proposed the fourth combination: retentional direct realism. This paper aims to fill the gap and provide a way to understand how retentionalism and direct realism can be coherently combined. This new theory takes the best of the two worlds, putting together the, arguably, best theory of temporal consciousness with the, arguably, best theory of general perception. And it has an additional advantage: it easily solves one of the main problems for retentionalism in the literature: the problem of repeated contents.

The audio transparency thesis holds that reproduced sound can, in principle, be auditorily indistinguishable from the sound it reproduces. Although transparency is widely regarded as the aesthetic ideal of sound reproduction, most philosophers reject either the possibility or desirability of transparency. This article defends both. I argue that existing challenges to the transparency thesis rely upon two questionable assumptions. The first is that transparency requires qualitative identity of original and reproduced sonic properties. I argue, in contrast, that transparency requires only indistinguishability in auditory experience. This makes transparency compatible with distortion below audible levels, and relative to what the specified hearer(s) can distinguish in auditory experience. The second questionable assumption is that transparency is always a relation between reproduced sound and the sound of the event it originates from, such as a live musical performance. I argue instead that playback of a commercial copy of a recording can be transparent with playback of the master recording it is derived from. On this understanding, transparency is possible in principle and is defensible as the aesthetic ideal of sound reproduction because it enables the listener to hear a recording exactly as it was designed to be heard.

The standard formulation of Relational Quantum Mechanics (RQM) models events through projective measurements, thereby importing idealisations that fail to capture generalized quantum measurements. We show that this limitation is not intrinsic to RQM but to the PVM framework. By identifying relational events with effects—the elements of POVMs that encode physically implemented interactions—RQM becomes fully POVM-native. Events are effect-ascriptions, and relational state updates follow the general Kraus rule, with no appeal to projectors or Hilbert-space dilations. This reformulation constitutes an initial step toward dissolving the “Problem of Generic Measurements” recently raised by Calosi and Riedel [11], thereby naturally accommodating weak, noisy, and continuous measurements. We conclude our analysis by identifying at least three possible metaphysical candidates for our POVM-native formulation of RQM.