•  197
    Sensible individuation
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (1): 168-191. 2022.
    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 entit…Read more
  •  68
    Conscious Experience: A Logical Inquiry
    Philosophical Review 130 (4): 609-614. 2021.
  •  665
    Mind-Dependence in Berkeley and the Problem of Perception
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 99 (4): 648-668. 2021.
    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 under…Read more
  •  525
    The Varieties of Instantiation
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association 7 (3): 417-437. 2021.
    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 colo…Read more
  •  18
    Conceptual Representations of Perceptual Knowledge
    with Edward E. Smith, Nicholas Myers, Spiro Pantazatos, Ted Yanagihara, and Joy Hirsch
    Cognitive Neuropsychology 29 (3): 237-248. 2012.
    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, a…Read more
  •  138
    Sensible Over-Determination
    Philosophical Quarterly 70 (280): 588-616. 2020.
    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 sens…Read more