Umrao Sethi

Causalists contend that you see a specific object (rather than a lookalike, or no object at all) because that object sits at the beginning of an appropriate causal chain that terminates in your visual experience. We argue that neither standard causalists nor their non‐causalist opponents can adequately accommodate a striking asymmetry between perception and thought. The asymmetry concerns the conditions under which a thought or sensory experience can inherit its object from another thought or sensory experience. Accommodating this asymmetry instead requires adopting a new and radical causalist view with important implications for the metaphysics of sensory experience.

Empirical arguments in the philosophy of perception have become increasingly influential. In this paper, we evaluate the prospects for one such argument—the Argument from Structure—in light of the a priori constraint that we must give a unified account of visual experience. We argue that, correctly understood, the kinds of empirical findings marshalled in support of an internalist conclusion about color experience (or secondary quality experience more broadly) provide similar support for an externalist conclusion about shape experience (or primary quality experience more broadly). When coupled with the a priori requirement that we give a uniform metaphysical account of the two kinds of experience, we find ourselves with two arguments, equal in force, for opposing internalist and externalist conclusions about visual experience as a whole. Such empirical arguments, then, rather than taking us beyond the limitations of armchair theorizing, effectively leave us with a dialectical stalemate.

This paper takes as inspiration two central themes of Markus Gabriel’s work. The first is a radically permissive attitude to existence, on which fictional, economic, social, and aesthetic objects all exist relative to a “field of sense.” The second is a broad resistance to psychologism. On Gabriel’s view, objects are constituted by the ways in which they appear in a field, where these ways of appearing are wholly objective or “ways things are in themselves.” In this paper, I develop a view of sensible appearances as objective, yet qualitatively imbued properties that objects possess independent of being perceived. I then argue for a naïve realist account of sensory experience on which perceivers stand in a “diaphanous” two-place relation of awareness to these appearance qualities.

In his rich and expansive paper, Crispin Wright argues that the introduction of skeptical scenarios does not move the needle in the debate between internalist and externalist accounts of perceptual justification. To evaluate whether a subject in a sceptical scenario is justified, we need to evaluate the relative importance of different epistemic values. But the disagreement between the internalist and externalist can be traced back to a difference in which epistemic values they prioritize. Internalists, who value rational coherence, argue that an agent in a skeptical scenario ought to align her beliefs with her evidence, and therefore ought to believe that the world is as it seems. Externalists, who value the acquisition of knowledge, argue that an agent in a skeptical situation ought not believe that the world is as it seems because doing so will lead her into error. In these comments, I suggest that reframing some aspects of the dialectic reveals options that Wright does not consider. Crucially, if one adopts an externalist view of perceptual experience alongside an internalist conception of justification--a combination of commitments taken on by many metaphysical disjunctivists--one can endorse both epistemic values of rationality and knowledge and therefore escape the stalemate that Wright describes.

We often speak of an entity existing only in the mind, but what exactly do we mean when we speak this way? In this paper, I look at different accounts of what it is for something to exist in the mind. I argue that none of these accounts do justice to a specific set of cases involving sensory phenomena like after-images, phosphenes and hallucinations. When a subject experiences a green after-image, we may say that the greenness that the subject sees exists only in her mind, but if I am right, we have no good account of what this amounts to. I then offer a diagnosis for why standard accounts fail in the case of sensory experience, and outline a more promising approach.

There is a straightforward view of perception that has not received adequate consideration because it requires us to rethink basic assumptions about the objects of perception. In this paper, I develop a novel account of these objects—the sensible qualities—which makes room for the straightforward view. I defend two primary claims. First, I argue that qualities like color and shape are “ontologically flexible” kinds. That is, their real definitions allow for both physical objects and mental entities to be colored or shaped. Second, a single instance of these qualities can be attributed to more than one entity. Just as we attribute the same instance of a material property to a statue and to the clay that constitutes it, single instances of sensible qualities should be attributed both to the physical objects perceived and to the perceptual states that have those instances as their objects.

ABSTRACT On the traditional picture, accidents must inhere in substances in order to exist. Berkeley famously argues that a particular class of accidents—the sensible qualities—are mere ideas—entities that depend for their existence on minds. To defend this view, Berkeley provides us with an elegant alternative to the traditional framework: sensible qualities depend on a mind, not in virtue of inhering in it, but in virtue of being perceived by it. This metaphysical insight, once correctly understood, gives us the resources to solve a central problem that still plagues the philosophy of perception—the problem of how, given the power of the mind to create phenomenally rich experiences, ordinary perception can nonetheless be said to acquaint us with the mind-independent world.

Working with the assumption that properties depend for their instantiation on substances, I argue against a unitary analysis of instantiation. On the standard view, a property is instantiated just in case there is a substance that serves as the bearer of the property. But this view cannot make sense of how properties that are mind-dependent depend for their instantiation on minds. I consider two classes of properties that philosophers often take to be mind-dependent: sensible qualities like color and bodily sensations like itches. Given that the mind is never itself literally red or itchy, we cannot explain the instantiation of these qualities as a matter of their having a mental bearer. Appealing to insights from Berkeley, I defend a view on which a property can be instantiated not in virtue of having a bearer—mental or material—but rather in virtue of being the object of a conscious act of perception. In the second half of the paper, I suggest that the best account of sensible qualities and bodily sensations ultimately makes use of both varieties of instantiation.

Many neuroimaging studies of semantic memory have argued that knowledge of an object's perceptual properties are represented in a modality-specific manner. These studies often base their argument on finding activation in the left-hemisphere fusiform gyrus-a region assumed to be involved in perceptual processing-when the participant is verifying verbal statements about objects and properties. In this paper, we report an extension of one of these influential papers-Kan, Barsalou, Solomon, Minor, and Thompson-Schill (2003 )-and present evidence for an amodal component in the representation and processing of perceptual knowledge. Participants were required to verify object-property statements (e.g., "cat-whiskers?"; "bear-wings?") while they were being scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We replicated Kan et al.'s activation in the left fusiform gyrus, but also found activation in regions of left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and middle-temporal gyrus, areas known to reflect amodal processes or representations. Further, only activations in the left IFG, an amodal area, were correlated with measures of behavioural performance.

I develop a view of perception that does justice to Price's intuition that all sensory experience acquaints us with sensible qualities like colour and shape. Contrary to the received opinion, I argue that we can respect this intuition while insisting that ordinary perception puts us in direct contact with the mind-independent world. In other words, Price's intuition is compatible with naïve realism. Both hallucinations and ordinary perceptions acquaint us with instances of the same kinds of sensible qualities. While the instances in hallucination are mind-dependent, those in veridical perception are not. The latter are ontologically over-determined —they have their existence guaranteed both in virtue of having a material bearer and in virtue of being perceived by a mind. Such over-determined instances are mind-independent—they can continue to exist unperceived, because, in addition to the minds that perceive them, their existence is guaranteed by the material objects that are their bearers.