Naive Introspection in the Philosophy of Perception

In this paper I critically examine uses of introspection in present-day philosophy of perception. First, I introduce a distinction between two different meanings of the term ‘introspection’: introspective access and introspective method. I show that they are both at work in the philosophy of perception but not adequately distinguished. I then lay out some concerns about the use of introspection to collect data about consciousness that were raised in over a hundred years ago, by some early experimentalist psychologists, part of so-called ‘Introspectionist Psychology’. As I argue, these concerns apply to current philosophical uses of introspection but they are not acknowledged, much less addressed. I explain this by applying the distinction between introspective access and introspective method. As a result, extant arguments relying on introspection-based phenomenal descriptions are methodologically problematic. These problems do not call into question the use of introspection in theorising altogether. But we need to take more care in how we use it.

Adapting Yorùbá Epistemology in Educational Theory and Practice in Nigeria

What is the value of Yoruba epistemology, theory of knowledge, particularly its philosophy of perception, to humanity in general, and to contemporary Nigeria, in particular? How does Yorùbá epistemology connect with educational theory and practice in Nigeria? This essay recognizes but goes beyond the more general overviews on classical Yoruba education and its contemporary significance represented in works of Yorùbá and Africanist scholars. I demonstrate the significance of Yoruba philosophy of education beyond its cultural context, by projecting its universal and timeless value, foregrounding its distinctive concepts in dialogue with ideas from other cultures. In its engagement with Nigerian educational dynamics, the essay concentrates, first, on Yoruba epistemology in its intersection with ethical and metaphysical perspectives from Yoruba thought. Second, the essay deploys the African art-centered investigations of the role of the senses in relating with art, understood as paradigmatic of navigating the world.

Constitutivity in Flavour Perception

Within contemporary philosophy of perception, it is commonly claimed that flavour experiences are paradigmatic examples of multimodal perceptual experiences. In fact, virtually any sensory system, including vision and audition, is believed to influence how we experience flavours. However, there is a strong intuition, often expressed in these works, that not all of these sensory systems make an equal contribution to the phenomenology of flavour experiences. More specifically, it seems that the activities of some sensory systems are constitutive for flavour perception while others merely influence how we experience flavours. This paper aims to answer the question regarding the constitutive factors of flavour perception in a twofold way. First, a theoretical framework is developed, relying on debates regarding constitutivity in analytic metaphysics and philosophy of science, which defines the stronger and weaker senses in which the activities of sensory systems may be constitutive for flavour perception. Second, relying on empirical results in flavour science, the constitutive status of activities related to distinct sensory systems in the context of flavour perception is investigated.

Externalists Should Be Sense-Datum Theorists

One increasingly popular view in the philosophy of perception is externalism about sensible qualities, according to which sensible qualities such as colors, smells, tastes, and textures are features, not of our minds, but of mind-independent, external objects in the world. The primary motivation for this view is that perceptual experience seems to be transparent—that is, when we attend to sensible qualities, it seems like what we are attending to are features of external objects, not our own minds. Most (if not all) externalists are either naïve realists or externalist representationalists. However, in this article, I argue that those who are moved by the primary motivation for externalism should instead be sense-datum theorists, for externalists’ primary motivation supports the sense-datum theory, not their actually favored views. I argue that externalists should focus on different motivations, get new ones, or become sense-datum theorists.

The metaphysics of perception: enactivism, phenomenology and information.

Enactivism is a major research programme in the philosophy of perception. Yet its metaphysical status is unclear, since it is claimed to avoid both idealism and realism yet still has aspects of both within it. One attempt to solve this conundrum is based on the fusion of enactivism with phenomenology and the mathematical concept of symmetry breaking (Moss Brender, 2013). I suggest this is not entirely successful and propose it needs the addition of a multi-level, non-reductive metaphysics (for example, Informational Structural Realism). The processes we commonly call ‘perception’ are causal transfers of information at certain levels in the hierarchy of meaningful structures that comprise physical reality. Phenomenologists could use the word ‘perception’ metaphorically across all levels, although realists need not do so.

Parables for the Virtual

Since its publication twenty years ago, Brian Massumi's pioneering Parables for the Virtual has become an essential text for interdisciplinary scholars across the humanities. Massumi views the body and media such as television, film, and the internet as cultural formations that operate on multiple registers of sensation. Renewing and assessing William James's radical empiricism and Henri Bergson's philosophy of perception through the filter of the postwar French philosophy of Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault, Massumi links a cultural logic of variation to questions of movement, affect, and sensation. Replacing the traditional opposition of literal and figural with distinctions between stasis and motion and between actual and virtual, Massumi tackles related theoretical issues by applying them to cultural mediums as diverse as architecture, body art, the digital art of Stelarc, and Ronald Reagan's acting career. The result is an intriguing combination of cultural theory, science, and philosophy that asserts itself in a crystalline and multifaceted argument. This twentieth anniversary edition includes a new preface in which Massumi situates the book in relation to developments since its publication and outlines the evolution of its main concepts. It also includes two short texts, “Keywords for Affect” and “Missed Conceptions about Affect,” in which Massumi explicates his approach to affect in ways that emphasize the book's political and philosophical stakes.

Memory and perception, insights at the interface: editors’ introduction

The recent development of specialized research fields in philosophy of memory and philosophy of perception invites a dialogue about the relationship between these mental capacities. Following a brief review of some of the key issues that can be raised at the interface of memory and perception, this introduction provides an overview of the contributions to the special issue, and outlines possible directions for further research.

What is the myth of the given?

The idea of ‘the given’ and its alleged problematic status as most famously articulated by Sellars (1956, 1981) continues to be at the center of heated controversies about foundationalism in epistemology, about ‘conceptualism’ and nonconceptual content in the philosophy of perception, and about the nature of the experiential given in phenomenology and in the cognitive sciences. I argue that the question of just what the myth of the given is supposed to be in the first place is more complex than has typically been supposed in these debates, and that clarification of this prior question has surprising consequences. Foundationalism was only one of Sellars’s targets, and this not only in the familiar sense that the more fundamental issues at stake concern the very ‘objective purport’ or intentionality of our empirical thinking in general. When pushed further still, Sellars’s critique in fact hinged on his diagnoses of implicit framework-relative or ‘categorial’ metaphysical presuppositions he exposes in givenist views. Furthermore, the key to his critique accordingly turns out to rest on implicit assumptions concerning the in principle revisability or replaceability of any such presuppositions, whether ‘innate’ or acquired, and including Sellars’s own. Another key result is that widespread assumptions that Sellars’s famous critique is simply inapplicable or irrelevant to either ‘thin’ nonconceptualist views of the given (such as C. I. Lewis’s), since they are ‘non-epistemic’; or alternatively, irrelevant to ‘thick’ conceptualist and phenomenological analyses (since they, too, reject ‘sense-data’ or the ‘bare given’)–both turn out to be mistaken.

Perceptual Paradigms

Everyone would agree that contemporary philosophical thinking and theorizing about perception should both be aware of, and consistent with, the findings of visual science. Yet despite this consensus, there is little discussion—and even less agreement—about how this should work in practice. This chapter proposes that we can gain useful insights by bringing some tools from the philosophy of science to bear on this question. Focusing on the disagreement between Burge and McDowell as to whether or not disjunctivism in the philosophy of perception is ‘directly at odds with scientific knowledge’ (Burge 2005, 29), the chapter suggests that interesting insights can be gained by seeing this debate through a Kuhnian lens—as a clash of paradigms (or, more strictly, Lakatosian research programmes)—and then investigate the methodological consequences that flow from this. It contends that looking at this debate through this lens not only sheds light on why it can seem so intractable, but also provides us with reassurance that this might be a good thing.