Susanna Schellenberg

Is self-knowledge a requirement of rationality, like consistency, or means-ends coherence? Many claim so, citing the evident impropriety of asserting, and the alleged irrationality of believing, Moore-paradoxical propositions of the form. If there were nothing irrational about failing to know one's own beliefs, they claim, then there would be nothing irrational about Moore-paradoxical assertions or beliefs. This article considers a few ways the data surrounding Moore's paradox might be marshaled to support rational requirements to know one's beliefs, and finds that none succeed.

Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) aims to overcome the opacity of black box systems, i.e., to make them understandable to suitable stakeholders. In this chapter, I investigate how understanding depends on how much is at stake in a context. I support the intuition that understanding is sensitive to the stakes with a pair of cases. I further use this pair of cases to spell out how exactly the stakes affect understanding, particularly, outright understanding why. To do so, I connect discussions of the concept of understanding with debates on pragmatic encroachment and on inductive risk. I zoom in on one necessary condition on understanding specifically, viz. the epistemic justification condition, according to which the beliefs involved in understanding have to be supported by sufficient evidence and have to cohere sufficiently well. I argue that, where the stakes are high, there are more stringent standards for sufficient evidence and coherence, and that this explains the stakes-sensitivity of understanding.

I develop and defend the view that subjects are necessarily psychologically able to revise their beliefs in response to relevant counter-evidence. Specifically, subjects can revise their beliefs in response to relevant counter-evidence, given their current psychological mechanisms and skills. If a subject lacks this ability, then the mental state in question is not a belief, though it may be some other kind of cognitive attitude, such as a supposition, an entertained thought, or a pretense. The result is a moderately revisionary view of belief: while most mental states we thought were beliefs are beliefs, some mental states which we thought were beliefs are not beliefs. The argument for this view draws on two key claims: First, subjects are rationally obligated to revise their beliefs in response to relevant counter-evidence. Second, if some subject is rationally obligated to revise one of her mental states, then that subject can revise that mental state, given her current psychological mechanisms and skills. Along the way to defending these claims, I argue that rational obligations can govern activities which reflect on one’s rational character, whether or not those activities are under one’s voluntary control. I also show how the relevant version of epistemic ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ survives an objection which plagues other variants of the principle.

Philosophers of mind tend to hold one of two broad views about mental representation: they are either robustly realist about mental representations, taking them to have determinate, objective content independent of attributors’ explanatory interests and goals, or they embrace some form of anti-realism, holding that mental representations are at best useful fictions. It is becoming increasingly clear that neither view is satisfactory. Realists disagree about the basis for objective content, and computational neuroscientists and psychologists, while making widespread use of representational talk in articulating their theories, seem indifferent to the efforts of these philosophers to articulate a secure foundation for such talk, suggesting a disconnect between the preoccupations of philosophers of cognitive science and actual practice in these sciences. Fictionalists, for their part, must deny that representational mental states can be causes of cognition and behavior, and that appeal to mental representation can be genuinely explanatory, views that flatly contradict assumptions central to both science and everyday life. I develop and defend a distinctive ‘third way’ – a view I call a deflationary account of mental representation – that both resolves philosophical worries about content and best fits actual practice in science and everyday life. According to the deflationary account, appeal to mental representation does indeed purport to pick out causes of behavior, but the attribution of content to these causes is best understood as a pragmatically motivated gloss, justified in part by attributors’ explanatory interests and goals. Content plays an explanatory role in the deflationary account, but one quite different than that assumed by robust representational realists.

On a now orthodox view, humans and many other animals possess a “number sense,” or approximate number system, that represents number. Recently, this orthodox view has been subject to numerous critiques that question whether the ANS genuinely represents number. We distinguish three lines of critique – the arguments from congruency, confounds, and imprecision – and show that none succeed. We then provide positive reasons to think that the ANS genuinely represents numbers, and not just non-numerical confounds or exotic substitutes for number, such as “numerosities” or “quanticals,” as critics propose. In so doing, we raise a neglected question: numbers of what kind? Proponents of the orthodox view have been remarkably coy on this issue. But this is unsatisfactory since the predictions of the orthodox view, including the situations in which the ANS is expected to succeed or fail, turn on the kind of number being represented. In response, we propose that the ANS represents not only natural numbers, but also non-natural rational numbers. It does not represent irrational numbers, however, and thereby fails to represent the real numbers more generally. This distances our proposal from existing conjectures, refines our understanding of the ANS, and paves the way for future research.

The first premise of Schellenberg’s particularity argument reads, “If a subject S perceives a particular α, then S discriminates and singles out α” (2018: 25). But this is false if seeing a ganzfeld is possible (i.e., a homogeneous field without any particulars to discriminate). In response, Schellenberg argues that seeing a ganzfeld is impossible by appealing to the ganzfeld effect (viz. hallucinatory experiences caused by ganzfeld exposure) exclusively as a ‘sense of blindness’. I present two challenges for this line of reasoning. The first concerns the need to account for the long delay before blindness is reported (if it is reported at all) and the second concerns the need to be consistent with potential causes of ganzfeld hallucinations (in general, not exclusive to the sense of blindness). I show how Schellenberg’s particularity argument can meet the first challenge but struggles to meet the second. I present evidence based on considerations related to sensory deprivation and that follow from the predictive processing theory of cognition, which describes seeing a ganzfeld as the cause of ganzfeld hallucinations. If correct, this means that you can see a homogeneous field, and thus we ought to be skeptical of the soundness of Schellenberg’s particularity argument. I conclude with a possible strategy for rehabilitating the particularity argument that reconceptualizes perceptual experience as fundamentally multimodal, constituted by both exteroceptive and interoceptive sensation.

According to Schellenberg, our perceptual experiences have the epistemic force they do because they are exercises of certain sorts of capacity, namely capacities to discriminate particulars—objects, property-instances and events—in a sensory mode. She calls her account the “capacity view.” In this paper, I will raise three concerns about Schellenberg’s capacity view. The first is whether we might do better to leave capacities out of our epistemology and take content properties as the fundamental epistemically relevant features of experiences. I argue we would. The second is whether Schellenberg’s appeal to factive and phenomenal evidence accommodates the intuitive verdicts about the bad case that she claims it does. I argue it does not. The third is whether Schellenberg’s account of factive evidence is adequate to capture nuances concerning the justification for singular but nondemonstrative perceptual beliefs, such as the belief that’s NN, where NN is a proper name. I argue it is not. If I am right, these points suggest a mental-state-first account of perceptual justification, rather than a capacity-first account, and one which treats the good and bad cases alike in respect of justification and complicates the relation between perceptual content and what one is justified in believing

The paper considers how phenomenologically-minded philosophers should think about the phenomenon Susanna Schellenberg (2016) calls perceptual particularity: in perception, we experience objects in their particularity. For example, if I see a pumpkin, I do not simply see the properties it shares with other objects, such as orange and roundness. What I see is a particular pumpkin that has all these properties. Much work has been done to investigate the phenomenon, but relatively few philosophers have addressed the concern of this paper: how should those sympathetic with Husserlian phenomenology approach perceptual particularity? I will explore this issue by engaging with two recent Husserlian accounts of perceptual particularity, i.e. those defended by A. D. Smith (2008) and Walter Hopp (2011). Both of them focus on a kind of perceptual particularity that Schellenberg describes as semantic. I will argue that this is not the best use of the theoretical resources offered by their theories. The Husserlian ideas invoked by Smith and Hopp are more fruitful when they are applied to a different kind of perceptual particularity, which Schellenberg describes as phenomenological. The nature of phenomenological particularity is itself a complex issue, and I shall argue that a satisfactory analysis of it can be formulated on the basis of Hopp’s Husserlian theory.

In her paper, ‘Action and Self-location in Perception’, Susanna Schellenberg argues that perceptual experience of an object's intrinsic spatial properties, such as its size and shape, requires a capacity to act. More specifically, Schellenberg argues that, to have a perceptual experience of an object's intrinsic spatial properties, a subject needs to have a certain practical conception of space, or a spatial know-how. That, in turn, requires self-locating representations, which locate the subject, relative to the perceptual object, as a perceiver and an agent, viz., someone who has a capacity for actions. She also makes two objections, viz., the unification objection and the sentient statue objection, to Alva Noë's sensorimotor view, a different account of how perceptual experience depends on actions. I will argue that her objections jointly render problematic not only Noë's but also her own view.

In this paper, I argue for a new solution to Mary’s puzzle in Jackson’s famous knowledge argument. We are told that imprisoned Mary knows all facts or truths about color and color vision. On her release, she learns something new according to B-type of materialism and according to property dualism. I argue that this cognitive improvement can only be accounted for in terms of what Schellenberg has recently called “capacitism,” namely the claim that that experience is constitutively a matter of discriminating and singling out particulars by employing perceptual capacities. Of course, I am not claiming that knowing the phenomenal character is simply the possession of abilities, let alone that the phenomenal character is a sort of know-how. That is why my claim is not affiliated with Lewis and Nemirow's ability hypothesis position. I take for granted here a sort of property-representationalism, according to which the phenomenal character of experience supervenes on the cluster of properties that the respective experiences represent. On her release, Mary acquires those perceptual abilities on the basis of which she learns to discriminate all shades of color. And after applying her old physical concept RED to the shade of red, she comes to know what it is like to experience red (propositional knowledge).

One sometimes believes a proposition without grasping it. For example, a complete achromat might believe that ripe tomatoes are red without grasping this proposition. My aim in this paper is to shed light on the difference between merely believing a proposition and grasping it. I focus on two possible theories of grasping: the inferential theory, which explains grasping in terms of inferential role, and the phenomenal theory, which explains grasping in terms of phenomenal consciousness. I argue that the phenomenal theory is more plausible than the inferential theory.

The main question of this paper is: how do we manage to know what our own degrees of belief are? Section 1 briefly reviews and criticizes the traditional functionalist view, a view notably associated with David Lewis and sometimes called the theory-theory. I use this criticism to motivate the approach I want to promote. Section 2, the bulk of the paper, examines and begins to develop the view that we have a special kind of introspective access to our degrees of belief. I give an initial assessment of the view by examining its compatibility with leading theories of introspection. And I identify a challenge for the view, and explain why I'm optimistic that the view can overcome it.

The internalism-externalism debate is one of the oldest debates in epistemology. Internalists assert that the justification of our beliefs can only depend on facts internal to us, while externalists insist that justification can depend on additional, for example environmental, factors. Clayton Littlejohn proposes and defends a new strategy for resolving this debate. Focussing on the connections between practical and theoretical reason, he explores the question of whether the priority of the good to the right might be used to defend an epistemological version of consequentialism, and proceeds to formulate a new 'deontological externalist' view. On this view, the justificatory status of a belief depends upon whether it is fit for the purposes of practical reasoning. Only beliefs that meet externalist standards are fit for such a purpose. If we want to understand how a wide range of norms (e.g., moral norms) apply to rational agents regardless of what their evidence or outlook is like, we have to embrace an externalist account of the justification.

Some mental states seem to be "of" or "about" things, or to "say" something. For example, a thought might represent that grass is green, and a visual experience might represent a blue cup. This is intentionality. The aim of this book is to explain this phenomenon. Once we understand intentionality as a phenomenon to be explained, rather than a posit in a theory explaining something else, we can see that there are glaring empirical and in principle difficulties with currently popular tracking and functional role theories of intentionality, which aim to account for intentionality in terms of tracking relations and functional roles. This book develops an alternative theory, the phenomenal intentionality theory (PIT), on which the source of intentionality is none other than phenomenal consciousness, the subjective, felt, or qualitative aspect of mental life. While PIT avoids the problems that plague tracking and functional role theories, it faces its own challenges in accounting for the rich and complex contents of thoughts and the contents of nonconscious states. In responding to these challenges, this book proposes a novel version of PIT, on which all intentionality is phenomenal intentionality, though we in some sense represent many non-phenomenal contents by ascribing them to ourselves. This book further argues that phenomenal consciousness is an intrinsic feature of mental life, resulting in a view that is radically internalistic in spirit: Our phenomenally represented contents are literally in our heads, and any non-phenomenal contents we in some sense represent are expressly targeted by us.

This paper critically examines currently influential transparency accounts of our knowledge of our own beliefs that say that self-ascriptions of belief typically are arrived at by “looking outward” onto the world. For example, one version of the transparency account says that one self-ascribes beliefs via an inference from a premise to the conclusion that one believes that premise. This rule of inference reliably yields accurate self-ascriptions because you cannot infer a conclusion from a premise without believing the premise, and so you cannot infer from a premise that you believe the premise unless you do believe it. I argue that this procedure cannot be a source of justification, however, because one can be justified in inferring from p that q only if p amounts to strong evidence that q is true. This is incompatible with the transparency account because p often is not very strong evidence that you believe that p. For example, unless you are a weather expert, the fact that it will rain is not very strong evidence that you believe it will rain. After showing how this intuitive problem can be made precise, I conclude with a broader lesson about the nature of inferential justification: that beliefs, when justified, must be underwritten by beliefs, when justified, must be underwritten by evidential relationships between the facts or propositions which those beliefs represent.

What is it for a picture to depict a scene? The most orthodox philosophical theory of pictorial representation holds that depiction is grounded in resemblance. A picture represents a scene in virtue of being similar to that scene in certain ways. This essay presents evidence against this claim: curvilinear perspective is one common style of depiction in which successful pictorial representation depends as much on a picture's systematic differences with the scene depicted as on the similarities; it cannot be analyzed in terms of similarity alone. The same problem arises for many other kinds of depiction. The essay concludes that depiction in general is not grounded in resemblance but geometrical transformation.