Susan Hurley Memorial Conference

As mentioned in my previous post, I was at the Susan Hurley Memorial Conference last weekend, so I thought I’d record a few thoughts and comments about it here for comments and discussion. In general, it was a very useful and enjoyable event, and left me with a strong impression of what a creative, energetic and intelligent individual Susan Hurley was. Her untimely death was a tragedy not just for those who knew her, but for the philosophical community as a whole, not least because her work seemed to be reaching new levels just before she died.

The brief to speakers was apparently to talk about something that Susan would have found interesting, rather responding to her work directly, although there was inevitably some crossover between the two. It was touching that many of the speakers chose to begin their talks with personal recollections or anecdotes about the time they spent with Susan, or the impression that she had made upon them. Indeed, the introductory session was given by Susan’s husband, Nick Rawlins, who, along with their son Merryn, was present throughout most of the conference. It was also a distinctly interdisciplinary gathering with many neuro- and cognitive scientists, as well as philosophers, in attendance—a mark of the nature and breadth of Susan’s work.

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.

Williamson on Knowledge

I’m currently reading Timothy Williamson’s book, Knowledge and Its Limits, and there are a few aspects of his view that I find troubling. On the whole, I’m quite sympathetic to Williamson’s project of rehabilitating epistemology as a branch of the philosophy of mind and the idea that knowing is a (purely) mental state. This is of course highly controversial given standard analyses of knowledge as some kind of justified true belief. Given that knowledge is factive and truth is normally taken to be non-mental, most standard analyses deem knowledge to be non-mental (or at least not purely mental) due to the presence of the truth condition. Williamson, on the other hand, argues that the state of knowing is analysable and instead of explaining knowledge in terms of belief, truth, justification, etc., the state of knowing should be taken to be implicated in the latter concepts, hence the slogan ‘knowledge first’.

Williamson’s position is comparable to McDowell’s, who conceives of perception and knowing as ‘taking in’ the relevant facts such that the subject’s mental state cannot be described as being purely internal to its body. McDowell takes this to have major epistemological benefits in that it explains mental states in terms of object-involving Russellian acquaintance-like relations. It also tallies nicely with semantic externalism and the extended mind hypothesis, essentially pushing the boundary of the mental out into the world where (some might say) they belong. In a way, Williamson is simply applying the insight of semantic externalism—that meaning “ain’t in the head”—to the metaphysics of mental states, which, according to Williamson and McDowell, ain’t in the head either.