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.)

MindGrad 2009 Call for Papers

Well, the CFP for this year’s MindGrad conference went out on PHILOS-L a few weeks ago and we’ve already had lots of people sign up to our Facebook event and follow @MindGrad on Twitter. As previously mentioned, both Alva Noë and Tim Crane (also on Twitter as @timcrane) have agreed to give keynote talks at the conference, which I’m personally very excited about. Since then the organising committee has been busy applying for funding and making general arrangements for the conference, and we’re hoping to make this the best MindGrad yet.

I hope that some of the readers of this blog will consider submitting a paper and/or attending the conference. Having attended last year’s MindGrad, I can confirm that it’s a very enjoyable event, and there will be responses to graduate papers given by members of the Warwick faculty plus plenty of time for Q&A, so it’s a good chance to gain valuable feedback on your work, as well as experience of presenting at a graduate conference. We hope to be able to cover accommodation and transport costs of everyone whose papers are accepted, plus a few others who would not otherwise be able to attend, so it’s well worth submitting a paper. (Unfortunately, I’m not allowed to submit anything myself as I’m on the organising committee, but I guess there’s always next year!)

Further information can be found on the conference web site, or I’d be happy to answer questions via the comments section below.

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.

MindGrad Conference

For the past five years, the University of Warwick has held a graduate conference in the philosophy of mind  called—surprisingly enough—MindGrad. It is (or so I am told) normally organised by second year Ph.D. students working in that general area, and seeing as I was the only new philosophy of mind Ph.D. student starting at Warwick this year, it has fallen me to organise this year’s conference. Not that I mind, you understand, as it’s a great opportunity to invite some top notch philosophers to come and speak on topics relating to my research, and the range of graduate papers on offer at last year’s conference was excellent.

The conference itself is scheduled for the first weekend in December (5th–6th), and I’m happy to say that both keynote speakers have now confirmed. They are Alva Noë, who works on phenomenology, philosophy of cognitive science, embodiment, extended mind and consciousness, and Tim Crane, philosopher of mind and perception, Head of Department at UCL and soon to be Knightbridge Professor at the University of Cambridge. Both will, I’m sure, be excellent and I’m really looking forward to some fascinating discussions of graduate papers in light of their considerable experience and philosophical 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.

New Philosophical Gourmet Report

Well, a new edition of the Philosophical Gourmet Report (PGR for short) came out yesterday with the University of Warwick making a very respectable—if slightly lacklustre—joint ninth in the UK rankings. As expected, Oxford, along with St Andrews, Cambridge and the various London colleges, continue to dominate the top slots with the overall ordering being very similar to the 2006 rankings.

Although I must admit to being rather sceptical about the utility of such global rankings, there’s no doubt that they provide an interesting reflection of the way that various departments are regarded within the profession. When it comes to postgraduate study, I suspect that it’s as important to choose the department—and in particular the supervisor—that is most suited towards one’s intended area, rather than going to the institution with the highest overall ranking. The PGR’s subject specific rankings are quite useful in this regard since they reflect the perception of each department’s strengths on a subject by subject basis, although this can again be a bit hit and miss since the PGR is based upon peer evaluation rather than a direct attempt to measure the quality of the relevant research, as per the UK RAE rankings, for example.

Work in Progress Seminar

I gave a talk at last week’s graduate work in progress (WiP) seminar on Williamson’s account of knowledge and some of the issues I’ve blogged about here recently. In particular, I developed an objection concerning the explanatory value of Williamson’s account, which I then tried to defend the account against on the basis of the burden of proof argument given below.

I think it would be fair to say that my suggestions met with mixed reactions. On the one hand, not everyone felt that I was being fair to Williamson by characterising his account as saying nothing particularly substantive about the nature of knowledge given the fact that he had written an entire book on the subject. On the other hand, some found it difficult to accept that there could be a satisfying explanation of something—in this case whether a given belief either does or does not constitute knowledge—without providing a complete set of necessary and sufficient conditions, which was exactly the position I was arguing against. Conversely, others felt that the constraints upon a theory of knowledge I set up begged the question against the Williamsonian view, even though I was claiming that these constraints could be met by the view provided that they are not interpreted too strongly (i.e. as mandating a set of general principles for knowledge, rather than the requirement to give a principled explanation of each of its instances).

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…