Experience and Reason in Perception

1998 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
pp. 203-227
Author(s):  
Bill Brewer

The question I am interested in is this. What exactly is the role of conscious experience in the acquisition of knowledge on the basis of perception? The problem here, as I see it, is to solve simultaneously for the nature of this experience, and its role in acquiring and sustaining the relevant beliefs, in such a way as to vindicate what I regard as an undeniable datum, that perception is a basic source of knowledge about the mind-independent world, in a sense of ‘basic’ which is also to be elucidated. I shall sketch the way in which I think that this should be done. In section I, I argue that perceptual experiences must provide reasons for empirical beliefs. In section II, I explain how they do so. My thesis is that a correct account of the sense in which perceptual experiences are experiences of mind-independent things is itself an account of the way in which they provide peculiarly basic reasons for beliefs about the world around the perceiver.

2021 ◽  
pp. 320-342
Author(s):  
Valia Allori

Quantum mechanics is a groundbreaking theory: it not only is extraordinarily empirically adequate but also is claimed to having shattered the classical paradigm of understanding the observer-observed distinction as well as the part-whole relation. This, together with other quantum features, has been taken to suggest that quantum theory can help one understand the mind-body relation in a unique way, in particular to solve the hard problem of consciousness along the lines of panpsychism. In this chapter, after having briefly presented panpsychism, Valia Allori discusses the main features of quantum theories and the way in which the main quantum theories of consciousness use them to account for conscious experience.


Mind ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 129 (514) ◽  
pp. 429-460 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alix Cohen

Abstract The aim of this paper is to extract from Kant's writings an account of the nature of the emotions and their function – and to do so despite the fact that Kant neither uses the term ‘emotion’ nor offers a systematic treatment of it. Kant's position, as I interpret it, challenges the contemporary trends that define emotions in terms of other mental states and defines them instead first and foremost as ‘feelings’. Although Kant's views on the nature of feelings have drawn surprisingly little attention, I argue that the faculty of feeling has the distinct role of making us aware of the way our faculties relate to each other and to the world. As I show, feelings are affective appraisals of our activity, and as such they play an indispensable orientational function in the Kantian mind. After spelling out Kant's distinction between feeling and desire (§2), I turn to the distinction between feeling and cognition (§3) and show that while feelings are non-cognitive states, they have a form of derived-intentionality. §4 argues that what feelings are about, in this derived sense, is our relationship to ourselves and the world: they function as affective appraisals of the state of our agency. §5 shows that this function is necessary to the activity of the mind insofar as it is orientational. Finally, §6 discusses the examples of epistemic pleasure and moral contentment and argues that they manifest the conditions of cognitive and moral agency respectively.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 93-100
Author(s):  
Gisa Jähnichen

The Sri Lankan Ministry of National Coexistence, Dialogue, and Official Languages published the work “People of Sri Lanka” in 2017. In this comprehensive publication, 21 invited Sri Lankan scholars introduced 19 different people’s groups to public readers in English, mainly targeted at a growing number of foreign visitors in need of understanding the cultural diversity Sri Lanka has to offer. This paper will observe the presentation of these different groups of people, the role music and allied arts play in this context. Considering the non-scholarly design of the publication, a discussion of the role of music and allied arts has to be supplemented through additional analyses based on sources mentioned by the 21 participating scholars and their fragmented application of available knowledge. In result, this paper might help improve the way facts about groups of people, the way of grouping people, and the way of presenting these groupings are displayed to the world beyond South Asia. This fieldwork and literature guided investigation should also lead to suggestions for ethical principles in teaching and presenting of culturally different music practices within Sri Lanka, thus adding an example for other case studies.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-32
Author(s):  
Işık Sarıhan

Pure representationalism or intentionalism for phenomenal experience is the theory that all introspectible qualitative aspects of a conscious experience can be analyzed as qualities that the experience non-conceptually represents the world to have. Some philosophers have argued that experiences such as afterimages, phosphenes and double vision are counterexamples to the representationalist theory, claiming that they are non- representational states or have non-representational aspects, and they are better explained in a qualia-theoretical framework. I argue that these states are fully representational states of a certain kind, which I call “automatically non-endorsed representations”, experiential states the veridicality of which we are almost never committed to, and which do not trigger explicit belief or disbelief in the mind of the subject. By investigating descriptive accounts of afterimages by two qualia theorists, I speculate that the mistaken claims of some anti-representationalists might be rooted in confusing two senses of the term “seeming”.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-88
Author(s):  
Enrique Orduña-Malea ◽  
Cristina I. Font-Julian ◽  
José Antonio Ontalba-Ruipérez ◽  
Raúl Compés-López

Globalisation, the Internet and social media have changed the kind of actors with influence in the wine industry and the way these actors create signals to communicate credible information about experience and trust attributes. Among the most prestigious experts in the world of wine are the Masters of Wine (MW). Although initially devoted to international trade, they have spread their activities and their opinion is more and more appreciated by producers and consumers. The main objective of this article is to determine this community of experts’ behaviour on Twitter. In order to do so, four factors (presence, activity, impact and community) have been considered. All Twitter profiles belonging to users awarded with the MW qualification were identified and analysed. In addition, a set of 35,653 tweets published by the MWs were retrieved and analysed through descriptive statistics. The results show MWs on Twitter as high attractors (number of followers), moderate publishers (original contents published), moderate influencers (number of likes and retweets), and low interactors (number of friends and mentions to other users). These findings reveal that the MW community is not using Twitter to gain or reinforce their reputation as an accredited expert in the wine industry, giving more influential space on Twitter to consumers and amateurs.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (36) ◽  
pp. 01-20
Author(s):  
Adriana Hoffmann Fernandes ◽  
Helenice Mirabelli Cassino

This article combines thoughts about childhood, visual culture and education. It is known that we live among multiple images that shape the way we see our reality, and researchers in the visual culture field investigate how this role is played out in our culture. The goal is to make some applications those ideas, to think about the relationship between the images and education. This article tries to grasp what visual culture is and in what ways presumptions about childhood generate and are generated by this association. It also discusses the genesis of these presumptions and the images they generate through a philosophical approach, questioning the role of education in a culture tied to the media, and about how children, who are familiar with multiple screens, presage a new visual literacy. We see how images play a fundamental role in the way children give meaning to the world around them and to themselves, in the context of their local culture. Given this context, it is necessary to consider how visual culture is tied to the elementary school, and what challenges confront the generation of wider and more creative ways to approach visual framing in children’s education.


Author(s):  
Julia S. Kharitonova ◽  
◽  
Larisa V. Sannikova ◽  

Nowadays, the law is being transformed as a regulator of relations. The idea of strengthe-ning the regulatory role of technologies in the field of streamlining public relations is making much headway in the world. This trend is most pronounced in the area of regulation of private relations. The way of such access to the market as crowdfunding is becoming increasingly widespread. The issuing of the so-called secured tokens is becoming popular for both small businesses and private investors. The trust in new ways of attracting investments is condi-tioned by the applied technology - the use of blockchain as a decentralized transparent data-base management system. Under these conditions, there is such a phenomenon as the democ-ratization of property relations. Every individual receives unlimited opportunities to invest via technologies. Thus, legal scholars all over the world face the question about the role of the law and law in these relations? We believe that we are dealing with such a worldwide trend of regulating public relations as the socialization of the law. Specific examples of issuing tokens in Russia and abroad show the main global trends in the transformation of private law. The platformization of economics leads to the tokenization and democratization of property relations. In this aspect, the aim of lawyers should be to create a comfortable legal environment for the implementation of projects aimed at democratizing property relations in Russia. The socialization of private law is aimed at achieving social jus-tice and is manifested in the creation of mechanisms to protect the rights of the weak party and rules to protect private investors. Globalization requires the study of both Russian and foreign law. To confirm their hypothesis, the authors conducted a detailed analysis of the legislation of Russia, Europe and the United States to identify the norms allowing to see the process of socialization of law in the above field. The generalization of Russian and foreign experience showed that when searching for proper legal regulation, the states elect one of the policies. In some countries, direct regulation of ICOs and related emission relations are being created, in others, it is about the extension of the existing legislation to a new changing tokenization relationship. The European Union countries are seeking to develop common rules to create a regulatory environment to attract investors to the crypto industry and protect them. Asian countries are predominantly developing national legislation in isolation from one another, but most of them are following a unified course to encourage investment in crypto assets while introducing strict rules against fraud on financial markets. The emphasis on the protection of the rights of investors or shareholders, token holders by setting a framework, including private law mechanisms, can be called common to all approaches. This is the aim of private law on the way to social justice.


Author(s):  
Andrew Inkpin

This chapter clarifies the sense of world disclosure implied by a phenomenological conception of language. It takes the two main lessons of Heidegger’s discussion of realism and idealism in Being and Time to be that traditional debates are based on mistaken ontological presuppositions, and that there is no gap between the way the world appears ‘for us’ and the way it is ‘in itself’. Applying the second lesson to language, it shows how the mediation and constitutive role of language can be understood as genuinely disclosing the world without introducing a potentially refractive or distortive loss of contact with referents. Applying the first lesson, it contrasts the phenomenological conception of language developed here with some familiar forms of realism and nonrealism, arguing that by rejecting an inside-outside opposition it moves beyond such conventional alternatives.


Author(s):  
Simon Blackburn

‘Projectivism’ is used of philosophies that agree with Hume that ‘the mind has a great propensity to spread itself on the world’, that what is in fact an aspect of our own experience or of our own mental organization is treated as a feature of the objective order of things. Such philosophies distinguish between nature as it really is, and nature as we experience it as being. The way we experience it as being is thought of as partly a reflection or projection of our own natures. The projectivist might take as a motto the saying that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, and seeks to develop the idea and explore its implications. The theme is a constant in the arguments of the Greek sceptics, and becomes almost orthodox in the modern era. In Hume it is not only beauty that lies in the eye (or mind) of the beholder, but also virtue, and causation. In Kant the entire spatio-temporal order is not read from nature, but read into it as a reflection of the organization of our minds. In the twentieth century it has been especially non-cognitive and expressivist theories of ethics that have adopted the metaphor, it being fairly easy to see how we might externalize or project various sentiments and attitudes onto their objects. But causation, probability, necessity, the stances we take towards each other as persons, even the temporal order of events and the simplicity of scientific theory have also been candidates for projective treatment.


Author(s):  
Heike Peckruhn

Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the scope of the work, situates it in the scholarly field, and defines terms repeatedly used throughout the book, such as bodily experience, difference, constructive theology, and body theology. The chapter notes that the important question regarding bodily experience is not whether but how it will be valued. All experience is essentially bodily experience, and theology as a critical inquiry into our being in the world needs to consider experience as a resource by attending to bodily experience and the way it situates us in the world. The chapter previews the book’s aim to provide a robust and complex notion of “body theology” and demonstrate what kinds of analyses this re-envisioned approach can do, and to offer an integrated view of the role of perception in bodily experience.


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