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4924The Epistemology of PerceptionIn Mohan Matthen (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Perception, Oxford University Press. 2015.An overview of the epistemology of perception, covering the nature of justification, immediate justification, the relationship between the metaphysics of perceptual experience and its rational role, the rational role of attention, and cognitive penetrability. The published version will contain a smaller bibliography, due to space constraints in the volume.
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4479Do visual experiences have contents?In Bence -Nanay (ed.), Perceiving the World, Oxford University Press. 2010.This paper defends the Content View: the thesis that all visual experiences have contents.
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3740Cognitive Penetrability and Perceptual JustificationNoûs 46 (2). 2012.In this paper I argue that it's possible that the contents of some visual experiences are influenced by the subject's prior beliefs, hopes, suspicions, desires, fears or other mental states, and that this possibility places constraints on the theory of perceptual justification that 'dogmatism' or 'phenomenal conservativism' cannot respect.
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2934Affordances and the Contents of PerceptionIn Berit Brogaard (ed.), Does Perception Have Content?, Oxford University Press. pp. 39-76. 2014.
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2742How Is Wishful Seeing Like Wishful Thinking?Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 95 (2): 408-435. 2017.This paper makes the case that when wishful thinking ill-founds belief, the belief depends on the desire in ways can be recapitulated at the level of perceptual experience. The relevant kinds of desires include motivations, hopes, preferences, and goals. I distinguish between two modes of dependence of belief on desire in wishful thinking: selective or inquiry-related, and responsive or evidence-related. I offers a theory of basing on which beliefs are badly-based on desires, due to patterns of…Read more
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2172Can Selection Effects on Experience Influence its Rational Role?In Tamar Szabó Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Oxford Studies in Epistemology: Volume 4, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 240. 2013.I distinguish between two kinds of selection effects on experience: selection of objects or features for experience, and anti-selection of experiences for cognitive uptake. I discuss the idea that both kinds of selection effects can lead to a form of confirmation bias at the level of perception, and argue that when this happens, selection effects can influence the rational role of experience.
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1864Attention and perceptual justificationIn Adam Pautz & Daniel Stoljar (eds.), Blockheads! Essays on Ned Block’s Philosophy of Mind and Consciousness, Mit Press. 2019.
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1785Attention and perceptual adaptationBehavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (3): 205-206. 2013.Commentary on Andy Clark's target article on predictive coding.
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1782The epistemic impact of the etiology of experiencePhilosophical Studies 162 (3): 697-722. 2013.In this paper I offer a theory of what makes certain influences on visual experiences by prior mental states (including desires, beliefs, moods, and fears) reduce the justificatory force of those experiences. The main idea is that experiences, like beliefs, can have rationally assessable etiologies, and when those etiologies are irrational, the experiences are epistemically downgraded.
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1700Rich or thin?In Bence Nanay (ed.), Current Controversies in Philosophy of Perception, Routledge. pp. 59-80. 2016.Siegel and Byrne debate whether perceptual experiences present rich properties or exclusively thin properties
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1692Bias and PerceptionIn Erin Beeghly & Alex Madva (eds.), An Introduction to Implicit Bias: Knowledge, Justice, and the Social Mind, Routledge. pp. 99-115. 2020.chapter on perception and bias including implicit bias.
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1358Consciousness, Attention, and JustificationIn Elia Zardini & Dylan Dodd (eds.), Scepticism and Perceptual Justification, Oxford University Press. 2014.We discuss the rational role of highly inattentive experiences, and argue that they can provide rational support for beliefs.
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1323Perception as Guessing Versus Perception as Knowing: Replies to Clark and PeacockeRes Philosophica 95 (4): 761-784. 2018.A summary of The Rationality of Perception, and my replies to symposium papers on it by Andy Clark and Christopher Peacocke.
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1224Inference Without ReckoningIn Brendan Balcerak Jackson & Magdalena Balcerak Jackson (eds.), Reasoning: New Essays on Theoretical and Practical Thinking, Oxford University Press. pp. 15-31. 2019.I argue that inference can tolerate forms of self-ignorance and that these cases of inference undermine canonical models of inference on which inferrers have to appreciate (or purport to appreciate) the support provided by the premises for the conclusion. I propose an alternative model of inference that belongs to a family of rational responses in which the subject cannot pinpoint exactly what she is responding to or why, where this kind of self-ignorance does nothing to undermine the intelligen…Read more
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1125Which Properties Are Represented in PerceptionIn Tamar S. Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Perceptual Experience, Oxford University Press. pp. 481-503. 2005.In discussions of perception and its relation to knowledge, it is common to distinguish what one comes to believe on the basis of perception from the distinctively perceptual basis of one's belief. The distinction can be drawn in terms of propositional contents: there are the contents that a perceiver comes to believe on the basis of her perception, on the one hand; and there are the contents properly attributed to perception itself, on the other. Consider the content
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1123The Problem of Culturally Normal BeliefIn Robin Celikates, Sally Haslanger & Jason Stanley (eds.), Ideology: New Essays, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.This paper defends an analysis of the epistemic contours of the interface between individuals and their cultural milieu.
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1091How can perceptual experiences explain uncertainty?Mind and Language 37 (2): 134-158. 2020.Can perceptual experiences be states of uncertainty? We might expect them to be, if the perceptual processes from which they're generated, as well as the behaviors they help produce, take account of probabilistic information. Yet it has long been presumed that perceptual experiences purport to tell us about our environment, without hedging or qualifying. Against this long-standing view, I argue that perceptual experiences may well occasionally be states of uncertainty, but that they are never pr…Read more
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1028Vigilantism and Political VisionWashington University Review of Philosophy 2 1-42. 2022.Vigilantism, commonly glossed as “taking the law into one’s own hands,” has been analyzed differently in studies of comparative politics, ethnography, history, and legal theory, but has attracted little attention from philosophers. What can “taking the law into one’s hands” amount to? How does vigilantism relate to mobs, protests, and self-defense? I distinguish between several categories of vigilantism, identify the questions they are most useful for addressing, and offer an analysis on which v…Read more
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1016Epistemic Evaluability and Perceptual FarceIn A. Raftopoulos & J. Ziembekis (eds.), Cognitive Effects on Perception: New Philosophical Perspectives, . 2015.
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988Cognitive Penetrability: Modularity, Epistemology, and EthicsReview of Philosophy and Psychology 6 (4): 531-545. 2015.Introduction to Special Issue of Review of Philosophy and Psychology. Overview of the central issues in cognitive architecture, epistemology, and ethics surrounding cognitive penetrability. Special issue includes papers by philosophers and psychologists: Gary Lupyan, Fiona Macpherson, Reginald Adams, Anya Farennikova, Jona Vance, Francisco Marchi, Robert Cowan.
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977The uneasy heirs of acquaintancePhilosophical Issues 29 (1): 348-365. 2019.My contribution to the first round of a tetralog with Bill Brewer, Anil Gupta, and John McDowell. Each of us has written a response to the writings of the other three philosophers on the topic "Empirical Reason". My initial contribution focuses on what we know a priori about perception. In the second round, we will each respond to the each writer's first-round contributions.
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944Epistemic ChargeProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 115 (3pt3): 277-306. 2015.I give some reasons to think that perceptual experiences redound on the rational standing of the subject, and explore the consequences of this idea for the global structure of justification.
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918The Structure of Episodic Memory: Ganeri's ‘Mental Time Travel and Attention’Australasian Philosophical Review 1 (4): 374-394. 2017.We offer a framework for assessing what the structure of episodic memory might be, if one accepts the Buddhist denial of persisting selves. This paper is a response to Jonardon Ganeri's paper "Mental time travel and attention", which explores Buddhaghosa's ideas about memory. (It will eventually be published with a reply by Ganeri).
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885What Does Philosophy Contribute to the Study of the Mind?The Philosophers' Magazine 88 52-63. 2020.Written for newcomers to philosophy, especally experimental scientists and people in the literary humanities. I focus on the role of fiction and fictional examples in the philosophy of mind, and highlight three roles for invented situations: posing a loaded question (think of Frank Jackson’s Mary), illustrating a philosphical problem, and testing normative and modal hypotheses.
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873Are there Edenic Grounds of Perceptual Intentionality?Analysis 73 (2): 329-344. 2013.This is a critical piece on *The Character of Consciousness* by David Chalmers. It focuses on Chalmers's two-stage view of perceptual content and the epistemology of perceptual belief that flows from this theory, and criticizes his theories of Edenic concepts, perceptual acquaintance, and perceptual belief.
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865The Rationality of Perception : Replies to Lord, Railton, and PautzPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 101 (3): 764-771. 2020.My replies to Errol Lord, Adam Pautz, and Peter Railton's commentaries on The Rationality of Perception (2017).
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781Salience Principles for DemocracyIn Sophie Archer (ed.), Salience: A Philosophical Inquiry, Routledge. pp. 235-266. 2022.I discuss the roles of journalism in aspirational democracies, and argue that they generate set of pressures on attention that apply to people by virtue of the type of society they live in. These pressures, I argue, generate a problem of democratic attention: for journalism to play its roles in democracy, the attentional demands must be met, but there are numerous obstacles to meeting them. I propose a principle of salience to guide the selection and framing of news stories that I argue may help…Read more
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725Reply to Fumerton, Huemer, and McGrathPhilosophical Studies 162 (3): 749-757. 2013.Fumerton, Huemer, and McGrath each contributed to a symposium on "The Epistemic Impact of the Etiology of Experience" in Philosophical Studies. These are my replies their contributions.
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718The Epistemology of Perception (short version)In Mohan Matthen (ed.), Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Perception, Oxford University Press. 2015.This is a much shorter version of our entry on the Epistemology of Perception, which will be published in the Oxford Handbook for the Philosophy of Perception in 2013. The longer version has far more references in it, whereas this version is pared down to the essentials.
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704Skill and expertise in perceptionIn Ellen Fridland & Carlotta Pavese (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Skill and Expertise, Routledge. pp. 306-313. 2020.Entry in Routledge handbook of skill and expertise. Discusses social perception, perceptual expertise, knowing what things look like, and a bit about about aesthetics at the end.
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