Ori Beck

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.