Normal service will be resumed…

I realise that haven’t posted anything here for a while, partly because I’ve been very busy with various projects, and partly because I’m having a bit of a rethink about my chosen research topic (more on which soon). In the meantime, here’s a cartoon of my pet fish reading M.G.F. Martin’s ‘The Reality of Appearances’ from the excellent Byrne and Logue collection on disjunctivism:

Eve does philosophy

Gupta’s non-propositional conception of experience

Last week, I attend an excellent talk and seminar from Anil Gupta, author of Empiricism and Experience, in which he presented his non-propositional conception of experience and its contribution to rational thought, along with his latest thoughts on the metaphysics of experience.

Gupta’s central thesis can be simply stated as the claim that rational entitlement to knowledge is not generated solely by present experience, but by experience in conjunction with the prior metaphysical and experiential standing of the subject. It is this pre-existing ‘view’ that the subject brings to experience that yields entitlement to knowledge, thereby enabling them to make rational judgements even in cases where their ontology is radically mistaken; e.g. they are a ‘brain in a vat’ (BIV). This contrasts with views, such as Pryor’s dogmatism, that take experience itself to confer prima facie rational entitlement, and Wright’s entitlement of cognitive project, which flows from the logical structure of rational enquiry.

Ned Block on Disjunctivism

In the last few days I had the good fortune to attend a couple of talks here at Warwick by Ned Block. In the first of these, which I discuss below, Block set about attacking the disjunctivist conception of experience put forward by (amongst others) Mike Martin, Alva Noë and Susan Hurley. On this object-involving view of experience, not only semantic content but also the phenomenal character of experience itself is said to be externally individuated—a view which Block has argued against elsewhere, and which is defended by Michael Tye. This goes beyond the widely accepted arguments put forward by Putnam, Burge, et al., and results in a view upon which the felt qualities of experience are partly (although not necessarily wholly) constituted by external objects.

Block confessed from the outset that he was relatively ignorant of the literature on disjunctivism, which is admittedly sprawling and difficult to interpret. For those who have not come across the term, disjunctivism is, to put it crudely, the view that experience or mental state types should not be individuated on the basis of their phenomenal character—i.e. ‘what it’s like’ for the subject—but also on the basis of external properties, such as their epistemic status. Thus, a veridical perceptual episode and a hallucination would be taken to be two different types of experience whose only common factor is that they are phenomenally indistinguishable from one another, and where this need not be taken to indicate any other common factor at the level of the mental.