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Husserl and Disjunctivism: Reply to BowerJournal of the History of Philosophy 61 (3): 499-513. 2023.
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Particular Thoughts & Singular ThoughtRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 51 173-214. 2002.A long-standing theme in discussion of perception and thought has been that our primary cognitive contact with individual objects and events in the world derives from our perceptual contact with them. When I look at a duck in front of me, I am not merely presented with the fact that there is at least one duck in the area, rather I seem to be presented withthisthing (as one might put it from my perspective) in front of me, which looks to me to be a duck. Furthermore, such a perception would seem …Read more
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Austerity and IllusionPhilosophers' Imprint 20 (15): 1-19. 2020.Many contemporary theorists charge that naïve realists are incapable of accounting for illusions. Various sophisticated proposals have been ventured to meet this charge. Here, we take a different approach and dispute whether the naïve realist owes any distinctive account of illusion. To this end, we begin with a simple, naïve account of veridical perception. We then examine the case that this account cannot be extended to illusions. By reconstructing an explicit version of this argument, we show…Read more
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In defense of the armchair: Against empirical arguments in the philosophy of perceptionNoûs 57 (4): 784-814. 2022.A recurring theme dominates recent philosophical debates about the nature of conscious perception: naïve realism’s opponents claim that the view is directly contradicted by empirical science. I argue that, despite their current popularity, empirical arguments against naïve realism are fundamentally flawed. The non-empirical premises needed to get from empirical scientific findings to substantive philosophical conclusions are ones the naïve realist is known to reject. Even granting the contentiou…Read more
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The causal theory of perceptionPhilosophical Quarterly 42 (168): 277-296. 1992.
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Special relativity without one-way velocity assumptions: Part IPhilosophy of Science 37 (1): 81-99. 1970.The Reichenbach-Grunbaum thesis of the conventionality of simultaneity is clarified and defended by developing the consequences of the Special Theory when assumptions are not made concerning the one-way speed of light. It is first shown that the conventionality of simultaneity leads immediately to the conventionality of all relative speeds. From this result, the general-length-contraction and time-dilation relations are then derived. Next, the place of time-dilation and length-contraction effect…Read more
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The formulation of disjunctivism: A response to fishProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 105 (1): 129-141. 2005.Fish proposes that we need to elucidate what 'disjunctivism' stands for, and he also proposes that it stands for the rejection of a principle about the nature of experience that he calls the decisiveness principle. The present paper argues that his first proposal is reasonable, but then argues, in Section II, that his positive suggestion does not draw the line between disjunctivism and non-disjunctivism in the right place. In Section III, it is argued that disjunctivism is a thesis about the spe…Read more
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The Rediscovery of the MindPhilosophical Quarterly 44 (175): 259-260. 1994.
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Afterimages and SensationPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 87 (2): 417-453. 2012.
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Perception: Essays After FregeOxford University Press. 2013.
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Sense and Content: Experience, Thought and Their RelationsOxford University Press. 1983.
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Intentional ObjectsRatio 14 (4): 298-317. 2001.
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The intrinsic quality of experiencePhilosophical Perspectives 4 31-52. 1990.
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Seven Puzzles of Thought and How to Solve Them: An Originalist Theory of ConceptsOxford University Press. 2012.
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The GivenIn Joseph K. Schear (ed.), Mind, reason, and being-in-the-world: the McDowell-Dreyfus debate, Routledge. pp. 229-249. 2013.In The Mind and the World Order, C.I. Lewis made a famous distinction between the immediate data ‘which are presented or given to the mind’ and the ‘construction or interpretation’ which the mind brings to those data (1929: 52). What the mind receives is the datum – literally, the given – and the interpretation is what happens when we being it ‘under some category or other, select from it, emphasise aspects of it, and relate it in particular and unavoidable ways’ (1929: 52). So although any atte…Read more
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Sense-dataStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2005.Sense data are the alleged mind-dependent objects that we are directly aware of in perception, and that have exactly the properties they appear to have. For instance, sense data theorists say that, upon viewing a tomato in normal conditions, one forms an image of the tomato in one's mind. This image is red and round. The mental image is an example of a “sense datum.” Many philosophers have rejected the notion of sense data, either because they believe that perception gives us direct awareness of…Read more
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The Objects of ThoughtOxford University Press. 2013.
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Why explain visual experience in terms of content?In Bence Nanay (ed.), Perceiving the world, Oxford University Press. pp. 254--309. 2010.
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Is Perception a Propositional Attitude?Philosophical Quarterly 59 (236): 452-469. 2009.It is widely agreed that perceptual experience is a form of intentionality, i.e., that it has representational content. Many philosophers take this to mean that like belief, experience has propositional content, that it can be true or false. I accept that perceptual experience has intentionality; but I dispute the claim that it has propositional content. This claim does not follow from the fact that experience is intentional, nor does it follow from the fact that experiences are accurate or inac…Read more
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Naturalizing the MindMIT Press. 1995.
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Reflective disjunctivismAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 80 (1). 2006.
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A Naïve Realist Theory of ColourOxford University Press UK. 2016.A Naive Realist Theory of Colour defends the view that colours are mind-independent properties of things in the environment, that are distinct from properties identified by the physical sciences. This view stands in contrast to the long-standing and wide-spread view amongst philosophers and scientists that colours don't really exist - or at any rate, that if they do exist, then they are radically different from the way that they appear. It is argued that a naive realist theory of colour best exp…Read more
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A neglected account of perceptionDialectica 62 (3): 307-322. 2008.I aim to draw the reader's attention to an easily overlooked account of perception, namely that there are no perceptual experiences, that to perceive something is to stand in an external, purely non-Leibnizian relation to it. I introduce the Purely Relational account of perception by discussing a case of it being overlooked in the writings of G.E. Moore, though we also find the same move in J. Cook Wilson, so it has nothing to do with an affection for sense-data. I then discuss the relation betw…Read more
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Reference and ConsciousnessOxford University Press. 2002.
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The limits of self-awarenessPhilosophical Studies 120 (1-3): 37-89. 2004.The disjunctive theory of perception claims that we should understand statements about how things appear to a perceiver to be equivalent to statements of a disjunction that either one is perceiving such and such or one is suffering an illusion (or hallucination); and that such statements are not to be viewed as introducing a report of a distinctive mental event or state common to these various disjoint situations. When Michael Hinton first introduced the idea, he suggested that the burden of proo…Read more
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The silence of the sensesMind 113 (449): 57-94. 2004.There is a view abroad on which perceptual experience has representational content in this sense: in it something is represented to the perceiver as so. On the view, a perceptual experience has a face value at which it may be taken, or which may be rejected. This paper argues that that view is mistaken: there is nothing in perceptual experience which makes it so that in it anything is represented as so. In that sense, the senses are silent, or, in Austin's term, dumb. Perceptual experience is no…Read more
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The transparency of experienceMind and Language 17 (4): 376-425. 2002.
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PerceptionRoutledge. 1994.Questions about perception remain some of the most difficult and insoluble in both epistemology and in the philosophy of mind. This controversial but highly accessible introduction to the area explores the philosophical importance of those questions by re-examining what had until recent times been the most popular theory of perception - the sense-datum theory. Howard Robinson surveys the history of the arguments for and against the theory from Descartes to Husserl. He then shows that the objecti…Read more
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Naïve Realism, Hallucination, and Causation: A New Response to the Screening Off ProblemAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (2): 368-382. 2019.This paper sets out a novel response to the ‘screening off problem’ for naïve realism. The aim is to resist the claim (which many naïve realists accept) that the kind of experience involved in hallucinating also occurs during perception, by arguing that there are causal constraints that must be met if an hallucinatory experience is to occur that are never met in perceptual cases. Notably, given this response, it turns out that, contra current orthodoxy, naïve realists need not adopt any particul…Read more
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Hallucination And ImaginationAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (2): 287-302. 2015.What are hallucinations? A common view in the philosophical literature is that hallucinations are degenerate kinds of perceptual experience. I argue instead that hallucinations are degenerate kinds of sensory imagination. As well as providing a good account of many actual cases of hallucination, the view that hallucination is a kind of imagination represents a promising account of hallucination from the perspective of a disjunctivist theory of perception like naïve realism. This is because it pr…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Perception |
Free Will |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Action |
Metaphysics |