The Apparent Factive Attitude View

Chapter 5 takes up the question of which way of developing a non-factive answer to what evidence perceptual experiences provide about the external world is most promising. Two forms of the apparent defeasibility of knowledge are introduced: objective defeat and subjective defeat. Each view’s resources for accounting for both objective and subjective defeat are compared, and it is argued that the non-factive content view fails to account for both objective and subjective defeat. In contrast, the apparent factive attitude view, because of its closer relationship to disjunctivist alternatives, is argued to offer clean treatments of both objective and subjective defeat—even better than the disjunctivist alternatives from which it borrows. The distinctive commitments of the apparent factive attitude view are defended, its distinctive treatment of the bootstrapping problem for dogmatism is introduced, and the resulting view is contrasted with Matthew McGrath’s objective looks theory.

Free-agency experience and belief

Accumulating evidence indicates that (1) people tend to presuppose indeterminism as required for free will, and (2) people’s free-agency experiences suggest that they have indeterministic free will. However, most deny that (3) people’s presupposition of indeterminism has its source in their experience. This chapter explains how (3) might be true. It does so by appeal to the phenomenon of prospection, which is the mental simulation of future possibilities for the purpose of guiding action. The resulting view fills in at least some of the details of the HPC natural-kind view defended in Chapters 2 and 3, and also some details of the dual-content view about free-agency phenomenology defended in Chapters 4 and 5. It also links this view about phenomenology to the natural-kind view.

Engineering what? On concepts in conceptual engineering

Conceptual engineers aim to revise rather than describe our concepts. But what are concepts? And how does one engineer them? Answering these questions is of central importance for implementing and theorizing about conceptual engineering. This paper discusses and criticizes two influential views of this issue: semanticism, according to which conceptual engineers aim to change linguistic meanings, and psychologism, according to which conceptual engineers aim to change psychological structures. I argue that neither of these accounts can give us the full story. Instead, I propose and defend the Dual Content View of Conceptual Engineering. On this view, conceptual engineering targets concepts, where concepts are understood as having two (interrelated) kinds of contents: referential content and cognitive content. I show that this view is independently plausible and that it gives us a comprehensive account of conceptual engineering that helps to make progress on some of the most difficult problems surrounding conceptual engineering.

Belief-First Epistemology

Chapter 9 discusses two strategies for reducing credence to belief. One grounds credence in the transition of belief, the other grounds credence in the content of belief. Since the former elides the important distinction between being in a state and changing a state, the view is rejected. It is argued, though, that the latter strategy is more robust than one might suppose, e.g. the view makes good sense of reasoning with states of credence. But in clarifying its explanatory resources, the view must either reference the signature function of credence or fail to do so. In the former case the approach fails to reduce credence to belief after all. In the latter case the approach entails that credal states do not function normally. The strength-as-content view also conflicts with the manner in which belief and credence march-in-step when producing action.

The Representational View of Experience

In chapter 3, the author presents two arguments for the view that visual experience is representational. The first shows that phenomenal ‘look’ and ‘seem’ reflect phenomenal, representational properties of visual perception. It follows that experience is representational. This conclusion is consistent with some versions of naive realism, but considerably stronger than the minimal content view that takes content to be a description of what it is like for the subject to have the experience. The second argument establishes that the perceptual relation that obtains between experience and its object in core cases cannot fully explain the phenomenology of experience. In order to explain its phenomenology, we will need to appeal to the experience’s representational nature. The second argument thus shows that visual experience is fundamentally representational and not fundamentally relational, which is the central claim of the representational view.

Other Arguments from ‘Look’

The notion of phenomenal look has been invoked in various contexts to argue for a range of philosophical positions. Chisholm appealed to his non-comparative looks to argue for the theory of appearing. Jackson made appeal to this notion in an argument for the sense-datum theory. More recently, Susanna Siegel and Susanna Schellenberg have provided arguments that rest on the notion of phenomenal looks to argue for the view that visual experience has content. And Kathrin Glüer has invoked this notion to argue for the view that visual experiences are beliefs with phenomenal-look contents. In this chapter, the author provides an overview of these arguments and offers some reasons for thinking that only the arguments in favor of what Siegel has called ‘the weak content view’ succeed.

The Singular Relational plus Relativistic Content View

My aim is to defend a peculiar epistemic version of the particularity thesis, which results from a sui generis combination of what I call the ‘singular relational view’ and what I call the ‘relativistic content view.’ Particulars are not represented as part of putative singular content. Instead, we are perceptually acquainted with them in the relevant sense that experience puts us in direct perceptual contact with them. And the content of experience is best modelled as a propositional function, that is, the content of a complex predicate that is true or false only relative to some circumstances of evaluation.