The Epistemic Value of Perceptual Experience

2020 ◽  
pp. 83-108
Author(s):  
Hamid Vahid
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Epistemic Value

Skepticism and the Liberal/Conservative Conceptions of Perceptual Justification

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-61
Author(s):  
Hamid Vahid
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Epistemic Value ◽  
Perceptual Justification ◽  
Recent Debate

Although it is widely recognized that perceptual experience confers justification on the beliefs it gives rise to, it is unclear how its epistemic value should be properly characterized. Liberals hold, and conservatives deny, that the justification conditions of perceptual beliefs merely involve experiences with the same content. The recent debate on this question has, however, seen further fragmentations of the positions involved with the disputants seeking to identify intermediate positions between liberalism and conservatism. In this paper, I suggest a framework to account for the differences and similarities of the positions within the liberalism/conservatism debate. More importantly, I suggest that, instead of focusing on one particular species of conservatism, we should recognize varieties of conservatism. My conclusion is that no theory of justification need be conservative or liberal tout court. Whether a theory of justification is liberal or conservative depends on which dimension of evaluation is taken to be salient. The implications of this finding for the liberalism/conservatism debate are then investigated.

Numerical symbols as explanations of human perceptual experience

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Barner
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Number Words ◽  
The World ◽  
Symbolic Systems ◽  
Perceptual Systems

Why did humans develop precise systems for measuring experience, like numbers, clocks, andcalendars? I argue that precise representational systems were constructed by earlier generationsof humans because they recognized that their noisy perceptual systems were not capturingdistinctions that existed in the world. Abstract symbolic systems did not arise from perceptualrepresentations, but instead were constructed to describe and explain perceptual experience. Byanalogy, I argue that when children learn number words, they do not rely on noisy perceptualsystems, but instead acquire these words as units in a broader system of procedures, whosemeanings are ultimately defined by logical relations to one another, not perception.

Getting Outside of Ourselves

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher McCarroll
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
The Self ◽  
Sources Of Information

This chapter provides an account of the spatial perspectival characteristics and the self-presence of remembering from-the-outside. The chapter develops the Constructive Encoding approach, according to which the context of encoding may play a role in the construction of observer perspectives. The Constructive Encoding approach recognizes the multiple and multiperspectival sources of information available during perception, and suggests that observer perspectives may be constructed from non-egocentric information available during perceptual experience. This chapter provides a way of understanding the idea that one need not see oneself from-the-outside in order to have a memory that is recalled from-the-outside. This chapter not only provides a better understanding of observer perspectives but also sheds light on the perspectival mind.

Attentional Engines

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
William P. Seeley
Keyword(s):  
Interdisciplinary Research ◽  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Abstract Objects ◽  
Cognitive Systems ◽  
Musical Expression ◽  
Broad Base ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Perceptual Psychology ◽  
Unique Source ◽  
Philosophical Understanding

What is it about art that can be so captivating? How is it that we find value in these often odd and abstract objects and events that we call artworks? My proposal is that artworks are attentional engines. They are artifacts that have been intentionally designed to direct attention to critical stylistic features that reveal their point, purpose, or meaning. My suggestion is that there is a lot that we can learn about art from interdisciplinary research focused on our perceptual engagement with artworks. These kinds of studies can reveal how we recognize artworks, how we differentiate them from other, more quotidian artifacts. In doing so they reveal how artworks function as a unique source of value. Our interactions with artworks draw on a broad base of shared artistic and cultural constitutive of different categories of art. Cognitive systems integrate this information into our experience of art, guiding attention, and shaping what we perceive. Our understanding and appreciation of artworks is therefore carried in our perceptual experience of them. Teasing out how this works can contribute valuable information to our philosophical understanding of art. Attentional Engines explores this interdisciplinary strategy for understanding art. It articulates a cognitivist theory of art grounded in perceptual psychology and the neuroscience attention and demonstrates its application to a range of puzzles in the philosophy of the arts, including questions about the nature of depiction, the role played by metakinesis in dance appreciation, the nature of musical expression, and the power of movies.

Direct Realism and Illusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Christopher Maloney
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Direct Realism ◽  
Perceptual Representation ◽  
Perceptual Error ◽  
Standard Response ◽  
Perceptual Representations ◽  
Ambiguous Stimuli ◽  
Physical Objects ◽  
Apparent Problem

The supposed problem of perceptual error, including illusion and hallucination, has led most theories of perception to deny formulations of direct realism. The standard response to this apparent problem adopts the mistaken presupposition that perception is indeed liable to error. However, the prevailing conditions of observation are themselves elements of perceptual representation, functioning in the manner of predicate modifiers. They ensure that the predicates applied in perceptual representations do indeed correctly attribute properties that perceived physical objects actually instantiate. Thus, perceptual representations are immune to misrepresentation of the sort misguidedly supposed by the spurious problem of perceptual misrepresentation. Granted the possibility that perceptual attribution admits of predicate modification, it is quite possible that perceptual experience permits both rudimentary and sophisticated conceptualization. Moreover, such treatment of perceptual predication rewards by providing an account of aspect alteration exemplified by perception of ambiguous stimuli.

Reply to Keith A. Wilson

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Representational Content ◽  
The Senses

In my essay, ‘The Silence of the Senses’ (2004, revised 2013) I argued that perceptual experience has no representational content, or at least none if you exclude the content of a perceiver’s, or experiencer’s responses to his experience, e.g., in a case of perceiving, recognizing...

Making Things Right

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Pettigrew
Keyword(s):  
Error Theory ◽  
Epistemic Value ◽  
Healthy Patient ◽  
Trade Off ◽  
Epistemic Consequentialism ◽  
Wrong Action

Pettigrew focuses on trade-off objections to epistemic consequentialism. Such objections are similar to familiar objections from ethics where an intuitively wrong action (e.g., killing a healthy patient) leads to a net gain in value (e.g., saving five other patients). The objection to the epistemic consequentialist concerns cases where adopting an intuitively wrong belief leads to a net gain in epistemic value. Pettigrew defends the epistemic consequentialist against such objections by accepting that the unintuitive verdicts of consequentialism are unintuitive, but offering an error theory for why these intuitions do not show the view to be false.

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