Recent themes in the philosophy of perception

I spent most of last weekend at a University of Warwick workshop on Perception, Consciousness and Reference. The workshop featured some of the key players in current debates about perceptual experience and knowledge, including John Campbell, Tim Crane, Barry Stroud, and Charles Travis, alongside Warwick regulars such as Bill Brewer, Quassim Cassam, Naomi Eilan and Matt Soteriou.

Rather than rehearsing the papers and arguments that were presented here, I thought it might be more useful and interesting to try to summarise some of the main themes that emerged from the workshop, many of which will form part of my own research in this area over the coming months. (I apologise in advance for the sketchiness and generality of these remarks, which are intended to give an overview rather than a detailed analysis of  these complex and difficult issues.)

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.

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.

New Books

I’ve recently taken delivery of a couple of books that are currently on my reading list. They are Timothy Williamson’s The Philosophy of Philosophy (2007, Blackwell Publishing) and The Possibility of Knowledge by Quassim Cassam (2007, Oxford University Press).

The first of these has been recommended to me by several people and is based upon Williamson’s Brown University lectures on metaphilosophy (hence the title). As I’m still reading Williamson’s previous book, Knowledge and Its Limits, I’ll probably concentrate on finishing that one first before reading The Philosophy of Philosophy some time this summer.

Ways of Knowing

I’m currently attending a series of seminars by Quassim Cassam entitled Knowledge and Explanation in which he is discussing (amongst other things) the relation between perceptual terms, like seeing, hearing, and so on, and knowing. Such terms are commonly referred to as ways of knowing, which is a phrase Cassam uses often—in fact, it’s the title of a paper he has written on the subject. Taken on its own, however, this phrase is ambiguous and could have either of the following two senses:

1. A way by which one arrives at a state of knowing.
2. A particular kind or class of knowledge.

Cassam, I take it, favours the first sense according to which, for example, seeing x a way in which we can get into the position of knowing x. Williamson, on the other hand, favours the second, since on his view a way of knowing is a determinate of the determinable ‘knowledge’. Williamson compares ways of knowing to colours in that everything which is some particular colour (i.e. way of knowing) is, ipso facto, coloured (cf. knowledge), and vice versa. Thus a way of knowing is just one particular form or class of knowledge, rather than a way of arriving at a state (i.e. knowledge) that is distinct from the way of knowing.

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.

Welcome to my New Blog

Welcome to Inverted Spectrum, my new philosophy blog. In it I hope to discuss matters relating to my Ph.D. research in the philosophy of mind, perception and epistemology, as well as other issues of philosophical interest, news, web links, etc.

This site is something of an experiment in that it’s the first time that I’ve published a blog via a web-based service like WordPress. It takes over from my old philosophy blog, The Real World, which will continue to be available via my home page at www.keithwilson.org.uk, but which I don’t intend to update for the foreseeable future (the main reason being that it takes too long and is too fiddly to maintain this site in conjunction with my other online content, although perhaps that will become easier with the latest version of iWeb).

My main web site also includes some more information about myself, my philosophical interests and writing, so feel free to check it out if you’re interested. I also intend to post some of the more recent talks and papers that I’m writing on Academia.edu, an excellent site that enables academics working in different areas to network and share their work online (although when I do so I will normally link to them from a blog post here as well, so there’s no need to watch both sites).

Thanks for stopping by and I hope you’ll enjoy, comment on and discuss the material that I post here. Studying philosophy has always been something of an adventure for me, and I look forward to sharing part of that journey with some fellow travellers through the wonderful medium of the Internet. Or something like that…