¿BEL o Bypass? Dos teorías de la transparencia del autoconocimiento

Alex Byrne y Jordi Fernández proponen dos diferentes versiones de la teoría de la transparencia del autoconocimiento. Según Byrne, para autoatribuir creencias inferimos qué es lo que creemos a partir lo que tomamos como hechos sobre el mundo (siguiendo una regla que Byrne llama Bel). Según Fernández, autoatribuimos la creencia de que p con base en un estado anterior a esta creencia, un estado que fundamenta la creencia de que p (realizando un procedimiento que él llama Bypass). En este artículo expongo las dos teorías y discuto objeciones que conciernen su aspecto normativo (¿puede el procedimiento darnos conocimiento?) y metafísico (¿es funcional el procedimiento?). Concluyo que en especial las objeciones metafísicas son más graves en el caso de Bypass que en el de Bel y que las modificaciones requeridas de la teoría de Fernández la asemejan mucho a la de Byrne.

The consciousness of visual experience

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] "This monograph mainly concerns two distinctive features of visual experience. First, visual experience has its own phenomenal dimension. Following the familiar terminology in the literature, I refer to this unique experiential feature as phenomenal character. The phenomenal character of a visual experience is typically taken to be the sui generis property that it has in virtue of being a particular kind of conscious mental state. As Thomas Nagel once put it, 'ocean organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism--something it is like for the organism' (1974, p. 436). Since then, the phenomenal character of an experience has often been construed as a subjective feel of some sort that manifests itself to the subject when he undergoes the experience that carries it. Alex Byrne thus proposes that 'the phenomenal character of an experience e is a property, specifically a property of e: that property that types e according to what it's like to undergo e' (2002)."--Chapter 1.

Primitive Colors

This book is both an account of the nature of color and color perception, and an exercise in neo-pragmatist theorizing. Neo-pragmatism rejects representationalism, which is the standard strategy for solving “placement problems” in philosophy. Instead, it makes use of deflationary accounts of truth and reference. In the domain of color, the result is color primitivism: a view of color according to which colors are sui generis properties of objects, irreducible to physical or dispositional properties. Objective colors are also—contrary to current dogma—insufficiently determinate in their nature to allow them to be associated with precise points in standard color spaces. Rather, standard color spaces are appropriate for the description of color appearances, which are to be understood in line with a moderate form of adverbialism. A central analogy here is between the perceptible three-dimensional shape of an object and the various ways in which that shape appears from various perspectives. The book also offers an account of color constancy, a moderated version of representationalism about visual experience, and a criticism of the thesis of the transparency of experience. Also included are detailed discussions of rival views, including those of Alex Byrne and David Hilbert, C. L. Hardin, Jonathan Cohen, Mark Kalderon, Keith Allen, and Derek Brown.

Self-Knowledge, “Transparency,” and the Forms of Activity

This paper begins by setting out in very general terms some considerations that would link self-knowledge to a certain form of agency, and then considers two recent studies (one by Nishi Shah and David Velleman, and another by Alex Byrne) which argue in their different ways that an account of self-knowledge which appeals to the “transparency” of belief must be divorced from any appeal to rational agency. The paper argues that in both cases the account that emerges from this divorce ends up with a kind of agency in the picture after all, only of the wrong kind. The paper aims to characterize the sense of “activity” or “agency” that is relevant to a central class of cases of self-knowledge, and distinguish this sense of activity from the sense of activity indicating a process of production, or acting upon oneself so as to produce a belief.