Ori Beck

Neil Mehta puts forward a pluralist theory of conscious perception, on which to consciously perceive is to deploy not just one, but two distinct kinds of sensory awareness in concert. Here I present three reservations regarding one of these kinds awareness - deep awareness. First, Mehta introduces deep awareness as a relation whose deployment explains the putative fact that conscious states unerringly reveal to us a substantial portion of the essences of sensory quality universals (“revelation” and “infallibility” theses). I both undermine a part of Mehta’s defense of revelation and infallibility, and argue that revelation is false. Second, the main theoretical purpose for which Mehta introduces deep awareness is to explain the presence of hard problems of consciousness. Mehta calls this explanation “the E theory”. I argue that this theory is false. Third, a central upshot of Mehta’s theory of deep awareness is that to have an experience in which you are deeply aware of a universal U is to have an experience whose phenomenal character is partly constituted by U. I argue that this is false.

We present a novel challenge to Inheritance – roughly, the thesis that the phenomenal character of an experience is determined by the external things that the subject experiences. The challenge is based on Weber’s Law, an old and well-established psychophysical finding. The challenge is novel, first, because it undermines Inheritance indirectly, by focusing on an independently interesting, related thesis about how phenomenal dissimilarities are determined; second, because it only minimally appeals to introspective judgments; and third, because the standard response to earlier challenges, which is to propose “alternative” properties that our experiences are of, is ineffective against it. Along the way we discuss interesting questions about the nature of physical length, measurement theory, and the metaphysics of dissimilarities.

Susanna Schellenberg’s capacitism opens up a novel way of theorizing about perceptual experience. While representationalists explain experience’s phenomenal and epistemic features by drawing on the notion of representation, and while relationalists explain the same by drawing on the notion of an acquaintance relation, Schellenberg’s capacitism steps in a new direction: It suggests that perceptual experiences are fundamentally constituted by employments of perceptual capacities; and it is this constitution that explains why experiences have representational content, phenomenal character and epistemic force. Here I wish to focus on capacitism’s account of experience’s epistemic force. While I wholeheartedly applaud capacitism’s invocation of capacities in its account of experience’s epistemic force, I also worry that if the invocation is to succeed, the account needs to be further developed.

Suppose you perceive a ball’s redness, and on that basis come to believe that the ball is red. Is it necessary that, if you have the basis that you do have for your belief, then your belief is true? In other words, is your belief conclusively based? After motivating the project of answering this question in the affirmative, I argue that the traditional positive relationalist answer (given, in importantly different ways, by Johnston, Schellenberg, and on at least some readings, McDowell) fails, because it entails (falsely!) that a ball’s yellowness and a ball's redness cannot both be successfully perceived yet appear the same to the perceiver. I then develop an alternative positive relationalist answer to the conclusive basis question, which is free of the false entailment.

Confronted with the great variety one can find today in the work of those often labelled (either by themselves or by others) as “relationalists”, “naïve realists” or “disjunctivists”, one could be excused for thinking that relationalism has no common core, but is instead a constellation of views, which at best bear a kind of family resemblance to each other. We believe that this impression would be inaccurate. Relationalism is best thought of not as a constellation of loosely interrelated views, but as a single wellspring of views, which has both a common core, and a variety of versions which differ from each other along two central axes of variation. In the first half of this introduction, we articulate this structure of relationalist views by constructing a common logical space for them. In the introduction’s second part, we use this logical space to introduce the various contributions this volume collects.

Relationalism is the view in philosophy of mind that particulars in our environment are constituents of conscious perception. It is an important theory of perceptual experience, offering explanations of perception's phenomenal character and its epistemic and semantic role. However, it is has also been criticised for a lack of empirical grounding. In this outstanding collection an international team of contributors examine relationalism and consider its role in philosophy of mind and perception across four key areas: The significance of empirical evidence to the theory of relationalism Dependence of experience on the subject's internal makeup Hallucinations and the unity of perceptual experience Relationalism and empirical knowledge. The Relational View of Perception: New Philosophical Essays will be of great interest to advanced students and scholars in philosophy of mind. Contributors: Rami Ali, Dominic Alford-Duguid, Ori Beck, Alex Byrne, Elijah Chudnoff, Peter Epstein, Craig French, E. J. Green, Roberta Locatelli, Heather Logue, Farid Masrour, Alva Noë, Adam Pautz, Ian Phillips, Thomas Raleigh, Susanna Schellenberg, Umrao Sethi, Matthew Soteriou, and Lisa Titus.

The volume offers a lively and wide-ranging debate on the major questions of perceptual epistemology, including how perceptual experiences can bestow positive epistemic standing to empirical judgments and beliefs; the relative epistemic import of veridical and non-veridical perceptual experiences; the relation between experience and knowledge; and the nature of experience in view of its epistemic linkages to discursive contents. The volume is centered around five cutting-edge essays by leading authors in these areas—Anil Gupta, Andrea Kern, Christopher Peacocke, Susanna Schellenberg and Crispin Wright—along with no less than thirty contributions scrutinizing and critically discussing the essays, prompting detailed rejoinders from the lead authors. The volume closes with an extensive debate between Annalisa Coliva, Gupta and Wright. Taken as a whole, the volume covers much ground in epistemology of perception and displays a variety of approaches and perspectives through fruitful and accessible exchanges. It will be of interest not only to researchers working in perceptual epistemology but also to students new to the subject.

In the early 1980’s van Inwagen presented the Direct Argument for the incompatibility of determinism with moral responsibility. In the course of the ensuing debate, Fischer, McKenna and Loewenstein have replied, each in their own way, that versions of the Direct Argument do not pose even a prima facie threat to compatibilism. Their grounds were that versions of the Direct Argument all use the “Transfer NR” inference rule in a dialectically problematic way. I rebut these replies here. By so doing, I hope to set the Direct Argument debate on a more fruitful path.

Unconscious perceptions have recently become a focal point in the debate for and against naive realism. In this paper I defend the naive realist side. More specifically, I use an idea of Martin’s to develop a new version of naive realism—neuro-computational naive realism. I argue that neuro-computational naive realism offers a uniform treatment of both conscious and unconscious perceptions. I also argue that it accommodates the possibility of phenomenally different conscious perceptions of the same items, and that it can answer a further challenge to naive realism raised by Berger and Nanay.

The phenomenal particularity thesis says that if a mind-independent particular is consciously perceived in a given perception, that particular is among the constituents of the perception’s phenomenology. Martin, Campbell, Gomes and French and others defend this thesis. Against them are Mehta, Montague, Schellenberg and others, who have produced strong arguments that the phenomenal particularity thesis is false. Unfortunately, neither side has persuaded the other, and it seems that the debate between them is now at an impasse. This paper aims to break through this impasse. It argues that we have reached the impasse because two distinct conceptions of phenomenology—a “narrow” conception and a “broad” conception—are compatible with our what-it-is-like characterizations of phenomenology. It also suggests that each of these two conceptions has its own theoretical value and use. Therefore, the paper recommends a pluralistic position, on which we acknowledge that there are two kinds of phenomenology: narrow phenomenology and broad phenomenology. The phenomenal particularity thesis is true only with respect to the latter.

Leibniz's views about human freedom are much debated today. While traditionalists hold that Leibniz was a compatibilist about freedom, some commentators are now suggesting that Leibniz can be read as an incompatibilist. This exciting new reading is often based on Leibniz's "Necessary and Contingent Truths" (AVI, 4 B, 1514-1524; henceforth: NCT). This paper shall argue that NCT supports not only an understanding of Leibniz as a freedom incompatibilist, but more radically, as embracing a particularly intriguing kind of libertarianism. On this Leibnizian brand of libertarianism, a human action may be both free and unavoidable (in the sense that the agent could not have acted otherwise).

Perceptions are externally-directed—they present us with a mind-independent reality, and thus contribute to our abilities to think about this reality, and to know what is objectively the case. But perceptions are also internally-dependent—their phenomenologies depend on the neuro-computational properties of the subject. A good theory of perception must account for both these facts. But naive realism has been criticized for failing to accommodate internal-dependence. This paper evaluates and responds to this criticism. It first argues that a certain version of naive realism, often called “selectionism”, does indeed struggle with internal-dependence. It then develops an alternate version of naive realism which does not. This alternate version, inspired by an idea of Martin’s, accommodates the internal-dependence of perceptions by recognizing the role that the subject’s neuro-computational properties play in shaping perceptual phenomenology. At the same time, it retains the distinctive naive realist account of the external-directedness of perceptions.