This chapter interprets, develops, and defends the Content View: the thesis that visual perceptual experiences have contents. Several notions of veridicality are distinguished. It is argued the commitments of the Content View are shared across a wide range of philosophical theories of perception. The Content View is distinguished from the Strong Content View, according to which experiences are fundamentally propositional attitudes.

The Strong Content View is re-evaluated in this chapter in light of earlier conclusions. It is found that the previous conclusions defended in the book do not warrant endorsing it.

The debate about direct perception encompasses different topics, one of which concerns the richness of the contents of perceptual experiences. Can we directly perceive only low-level properties, like edges, colors etc., or can we perceive high-level properties and entities as well? The aim of the paper is to defend the claim that the content of our perceptual experience can include emotions and also person impressions. Using these examples, an argument is developed to defend a liberal-content view for (...) core examples of social cognition. This view is developed and contrasted with accounts which claim that in the case of registering another person’s emotion while seeing them, we have to describe the relevant content not as the content of a perceptual experience, but of a perceptual belief. The paper defends the view that perceptual experiences can have a rich content yet remain separable from beliefs formed on the basis of the experience. How liberal and enriched the content of a perceptual experience is will depend upon the expertise a person has developed in the field. This is supported by the argument that perceptual experiences can be systematically enriched by perceiving affordances of objects, by pattern recognition or by top-down processes, as analyzed by processes of cognitive penetration or predictive coding. (shrink)

This thesis is a defense of the Content View on perceptual experience, of the idea that our perceptual experiences represent the world as being a certain way and so have representational content. Three main issues are addressed in this work. Firstly, I try to show that the Content View fits very well both with the logical behaviour of ordinary ascriptions of seeing-episodes and related experiential episodes, and with our pretheoretical intuitions about what perceiving and experiencing (...) ultimately are: that preliminary analysis speaks for the prima facie plausibility of such a view. Secondly, I put forward a detailed account of perceptual episodes in semantic terms, by articulating and arguing for a specific version of the Content View. I provide arguments for the following theses: Perceptual content is two-layered so it involves an iconic level and a discrete or proto-propositional level. Perceptual content is singular and object-dependent or de re, so it includes environmental objects as its semantic constituents. The phenomenal character of perceptual experience is co-determined by the represented properties together with the Mode, but not by the perceived objects: that is what I call an impure representationalism. Perceptual content is 'Russellian': it consists of worldly objects, properties and relations. Both perceptual content and phenomenal character are 'wide' or determined by environmental factors, thus there is no Fregean, narrow perceptual content. Thirdly, I show that such a version of the Content View can cope with the objections which are typically moved against the Content View as such by the advocates of disjunctivism. I myself put forward a moderately disjunctivist version of the Content View, according to which perceptual relations must be told apart from hallucinations as mental states of a different kind. Such a disjunctivism is 'moderate' insofar as it allows genuinely relational perceptual experiences and hallucinations to share a positive phenomenal character, contrary to what Radical Disjunctivism cum Naïve Realism holds. Showing that the Content View vindicates our pre-theoretical intuitions and does justice of our ordinary ascriptive practices, articulating a detailed and argued version of the Content View, and showing that such a version is not vulnerable to the standard objections recently moved to the Content View by the disjunctive part, all that can be considered as a big, multifaceted Argument for the Content View. (shrink)

There was little disagreement among commentators about whether speech production involves a frame/content mode of organization, but there was some disagreement with the contention that frames evolved from ingestive cyclicities and were mediated via a medial “intrinsic” system.

Does it matter whether we perceptually represent tomato-hood?

The idea that what we perceive are tropes (abstract particulars) is anything but new. In fact, it was one of the reasons why the ontology of tropes was postulated in the first place. Still, the claim that we perceive tropes is invariably and purely based on pre-philosophical intuitions or, indirectly, as a supporting argument for the advantages of the content view when compared to the relational view of experience. In this paper, I take the content (...) class='Hi'>view for granted and argue in favor of what is herein referred to as the trope-content view of experience. My defense is a case of inference to the best explanation. The trope-content view can meet all reasonable desiderata on the experience and its content without assuming gaps or making the ad hoc assumption that there are different layers of content, or so shall I argue. (shrink)

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 modeled as (...) a propositional function, that is, the content of a complex predicate that is true or false only relative to some circumstances of evaluation. (shrink)

The idea that what we perceive are tropes is anything but new. In fact, it was one of the reasons why the ontology of tropes was postulated in the first place. Still, the claim that we perceive tropes is invariably and purely based on pre-philosophical intuitions or, indirectly, either as a supporting argument for the advantages of content view when compared to the relational view of experience, or as a supporting argument in favor of the irreducible subjective (...) character of experience. In this paper, I take the content view for granted and argue in favor of what is herein referred to as the trope-content view of experience. My defense is a case of inference to the best explanation. The trope-content view can meet all reasonable desiderata on the experience and its content without assuming gaps or making the ad hoc assumption that there are different layers of content, or so shall I argue. (shrink)

Visual perception is widely taken to present properties such as redness, roundness, and so on. This in turn might be thought to give rise to accuracy conditions for experience, and so content, regardless of which metaphysical view of perception one endorses. An influential version of this argument—Susanna Siegel’s ’Argument from Appearing’—aims to establish the existence of content as common ground between representational and relational views of perception. This goes against proponents of ‘austere’ relationalism who deny that (...) class='Hi'>content plays a substantive role in philosophical explanations of conscious perceptual experience. Though Siegel’s argument purports to be neutral with respect to the metaphysics of perception, it relies upon an equivocation between the presentation of property-types and property-instances. Consequently, the argument begs the question against the austere relational view, and so fails to establish the desired conclusion. So while relationalists can and should allow that experiences have accuracy conditions, it does not follow from this that they have contents of any philosophically interesting or significant kind. (shrink)

The idea that what we perceive are tropes (abstract particulars) is anything but new. In fact, it was one of the reasons why the ontology of tropes was postulated in the first place. Still, the claim that we perceive tropes is invariably and purely based on pre-philosophical intuitions or, indirectly, either as a supporting argument for the advantages of content view when compared to the relational view of experience, or as a supporting argument in favor of the (...) irreducible subjective character of experience. In this paper, I take the content view for granted and argue in favor of what is herein referred to as the trope-content view of experience. My defense is a case of inference to the best explanation. The trope-content view can meet all reasonable desiderata on the experience and its content without assuming gaps or making the ad hoc assumption that there are different layers of content, or so shall I argue. (shrink)

ABSTRACTGiven the ethical controversies concerning HIV vaccine trials , we aimed to understand through an exploratory study how members of institutional review boards in the United States and research ethics committees in South Africa view issues concerning the process and content of reviews of these studies. We mailed packets of 20 questionnaires to 12 US IRB chairs and administrators and seven REC chairs to distribute to their members. We received 113 questionnaires . In both countries, members tended to (...) be white males with advanced academic degrees. Compared to the US, SA members called for ‘major changes’ in HVT protocols more frequently , and were less likely to think that HVT participants understood risks and benefits or informed consent forms . In both countries, members were divided on several critical issues , but agreed that they needed more training. Of the SA respondents, 40% reported that they were ‘self‐taught’ in ethics. This study, the first we know of to offer quantitative data comparing US vs. non‐US IRBs/RECs, thus suggests key similarities and differences , along with needs for education. These initial exploratory data in this area have important implications for IRBs, RECs, policy‐makers and scholars concerning future practice, training, policy, and investigations in research ethics, and prevention and treatment of HIV and other diseases in the developing world and elsewhere. (shrink)

This paper aims to offer a new metaphysical view of both the representational content and the phenomenal or conscious character of visual experience inspired by Kaplan’s semantics of demonstratives. In Kaplan’s famous account, the character or meaning of a demonstrative type is understood as the function of a particular token of that type (vehicle of content) in the context of the demonstration of the singular content in the context in question. By way of analogy, I want (...) to suggest that the phenomenal character of experience can be best modeled as a function from tokens of experience in the context of experiential contact to their singular contents: that is, the instantiation of properties with which the subject is in experiential contact in those contexts. Since the meaning of demonstratives can also be described by its token-reflexive rule (the object demonstrated by this token demonstrative in this context of demonstration), we can also think of the phenomenal character as a token-reflexive property of representing whatever is normally causally responsible for this token experience in the context of experiential contact. This is what I call Reflexionism, inspired by Tye’s Kaplanianism (Tye 2009, 113-4, 2014). For example, phenomenal yellowness is the token-reflexive property of representing whatever is causally responsible for the relevant brain pattern in the context of experiential contact under normal conditions. (shrink)

The mind is, for Kant, a functional system whereby bare sensations are combined into representations of objects and unified within a single consciousness. I argue that this picture allows for realistic mental content and provides a useful explanation of the nature of consciousness. ;However, despite its insights, a Kantian view of mind has two significant difficulties: the first concerns the relationship between mental concepts and objects in the world while the second concerns the relationship of concepts to the (...) consciousness which makes use of them. ;The source of the problem surrounding the relationship of concepts and objects lies in Kant's emphasis on the apriori aspects of cognitive synthesis. Kant's concern is not with the empirical content of cognition, and as a result, he has difficulty explaining how thought can be about the world. Kant's emphasis on the apriori is turned upside down in Wittgenstein's explication of language as a public, rule-governed activity grounded in human practices. I maintain that this Wittgensteinian view of language serves as an external model for several important aspects of Kantian synthesis and that language provides insights into cognitive capacities that Kant maintains are inaccessible. In short, language-games are capable of illuminating the relationship between concepts and objects in a way that allows one to retain Kant's concern for realistically grounded cognitive content. ;The second problem surrounding a Kantian view of mind concerns the relationship of concepts and consciousness. For Kant concepts are entirely dependent upon mental unity, but this mental unity only results from the actual use of concepts in synthesizing representations. In other words, Kant's account of mind is circular, but I argue that it is not viciously so. In fact, Kant's account of consciousness not only avoids vicious circularity but also provides a useful model for contemporary investigations into consciousness insofar as it accounts for both mental unity and personal consciousness within a functionalist view of mind. (shrink)

Recently, the thesis that experience is fundamentally a matter of representing the world as being a certain way has been questioned by austere relationalists. I defend this thesis by developing a view of perceptual content that avoids their objections. I will argue that on a relational understanding of perceptual content, the fundamental insights of austere relationalism do not compete with perceptual experience being representational. As it will show that most objections to the thesis that experience has (...) class='Hi'>content apply only to accounts of perceptual content on which perceptual relations to the world play no explanatory role. With austere relationalists, I will argue that perceptual experience is fundamentally relational. But against austere relationalists, I will argue that it is fundamentally both relational and representational. (shrink)

Beliefs have what I will call ‘propositional content’. A belief is always a belief that so-and-so: a belief that grass is green, or a belief that snow is white, or whatever. Other things have propositional content too, such as sentences, judgments and assertions. The Standard View amongst philosophers is that what it is to have a propositional content is to stand in an appropriate relation to a proposition. Moreover, on this view, propositions are objects, i.e. (...) the kind of thing you can refer to with singular terms. For example, on the Standard View, we should parse the sentence ‘Simon believes that Sharon is funny’ as: [Simon] believes [that Sharon is funny]; ‘Simon’ is a term referring to a thinking subject, ‘that Sharon is funny’ is a term referring to a proposition, and ‘x believes y’ is a dyadic predicate expressing the believing relation. In this paper, I argue against the Standard View. This is how I think we should parse ‘Simon believes that Sharon is funny’: [Simon] believes that [Sharon is funny]; here we have a singular term, ‘Simon’, a sentence ‘Sharon is funny’, and a ‘prenective’ joining them together, ‘x believes that p’. On this Prenective View, we do not get at the propositional content of someone’s belief by referring to a reified proposition with a singular term; we simply use the sentence ‘Sharon is funny’ to express that content for ourselves. I argue for the Prenective View in large part by showing that an initially attractive version of the Standard View is actually vulnerable to the same objection that Wittgenstein used against Russell’s multiple-relation theory of judgment. (shrink)

São dois os objetivos desse artigo: considerar em detalhe as objeções contra a concepção existencial do conteúdo da percepção e desenvolver e defender uma versão alternativa da mesma que possa contornar os problemas levantados, em particular, o assim chamado “problema da particularidade”. A tese central a ser defendida aqui é a de que o conteúdo existencial da percepção deve ser compreendido nos termos de uma proposição relativizada que tem por modelo uma função de mundos com o sujeito, o tempo da (...) experiência e outros parâmetros relevantes marcados ao centro a valores de verdade. (shrink)

In order to resolve the controversial discussion regarding content effects in deductive reasoning, we propose distinguishing between two inferential sources—an argument's form , and additional relations people associate with the argument's content —and analysing their interplay. Both sources are equally necessary in order to understand the role content plays in deductive reasoning. People make valid deductions from the content relations ( content competence ), but in thematic reasoning tasks, these deductions lead to the intriguing phenomenon (...) known as content effects . Focusing on the interplay of both sources of inferences, the dual source distinction enables a novel class of predictions to be made, namely the correct mastery of the logical connectors ( form competence ) in tasks that require the individual to think about an argument's form in relation to its content. To illustrate the dual source approach and its implications, the selection task paradigm of conditional reasoning with a point of view is used in combination with two content domains: conditional promises with cheating and non-cheating perspectives and technical systems with causal perspectives. Experimental findings corroborate all three phenomena: content competence, content effects, and form competence. The dual source distinction is discussed with regard to current theories of reasoning. (shrink)

Advancements in scientific research and technological development influence the practice of organ donation and organ transplantation. Many SRTD governance discourses put forward the need for multi-stakeholder engagements. We posit that staff employed by organ procurement organizations have a stake in the discussions around SRTD applicable to ODOT because SRTD is one factor that shapes ODOT and because staff are involved in ODOT education and awareness raising while acting as a nexus between donors and the public. Therefore, we performed a (...) class='Hi'>content analysis of eight semi-structured in-depth interviews with staff of one Canadian organ procurement organization to ascertain the views that staff had on the use of SRTD in ODOT in general; specific SRTD envisioned to be used in the future in ODOT namely xenotransplantation, embryonic and non-embryonic stem cells, cloning, bionic/artificial organs, and 3-D printed organs; and the emerging ability of SRTD applicable in ODOT to enhance bodily abilities beyond the normal. We found that staff had views on the topics covered in this study, and staff acknowledged that they do not possess sufficient knowledge to be able to engage meaningfully in governance discussions of the SRTD covered and to educate others on these SRTDs. We recommend implementing continuous education for the staff on SRTD envisioned to be applied in ODOT as a capacity-building measure to enable their participation in the governance discussions of these SRTDs and to enhance their ability to educate others on ODOT applicable SRTD. (shrink)

This essay lays out a view of linguistic content in which discourse context plays an essential role. It provides a role for sentential content by using underspecification but argues that discourse level phenomena are essential not only to determining content but even grammaticality judgments in certain cases. It is thus argued that the traditional view which separates very strictly the areas of semantics — a context insensitive notion of meaning — and pragmatics — a non (...) linguistic notion of speaker meaning — is inaccurate. In this line of thought, the paper pays a particular attention to hidden indexicals, anaphora and tense. The necessity of taking into account discursive parameters in order to solve semantic indeterminacy in such cases is argued for. (shrink)

This essay lays out a view of linguistic content in which discourse context plays an essential role. It provides a role for sentential content by using underspecification but argues that discourse level phenomena are essential not only to determining content but even grammaticality judgments in certain cases. It is thus argued that the traditional view which separates very strictly the areas of semantics — a context insensitive notion of meaning — and pragmatics — a non (...) linguistic notion of speaker meaning — is inaccurate. In this line of thought, the paper pays a particular attention to hidden indexicals, anaphora and tense. The necessity of taking into account discursive parameters in order to solve semantic indeterminacy in such cases is argued for. (shrink)

This article presents a dual purpose: to carefully consider objections against the existentialist conception of the content of visual experience and to develop and defend a version of it that avoids such objections, specifically addressing the so-called "problem of particularity." The main thesis is that the existential content of visual experience should be understood as relativized, being incomplete content (rather than classical, complete propositions), modeled as a function of the sextuple of the object, agent, time, place, causal (...) relation, and world to absolute values. (shrink)

The view that perceptual experience has representational content, or the content view, has recently been criticized by the defenders of the so-called object view. Part of the dispute, I claim here, is based on a lack of grasp of the notion of content. There is, however, a core of substantial disagreement. Once the substantial core is revealed, I aim to: (1) reject the arguments raised against the content view by Campbell (2002), Travis (...) (2004), and Brewer (2006); (2) criticize Brewer’s (2006, 2007, 2008, 2011) attempts to defend the object view; (3) refine Pautz’ (2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011) arguments against the object view, which mainly resort to the fact that it cannot account for the grounding role of hallucinatory experiences; (4) and finally adjudicate in favor of the content view and against the overestimation of the naïve intuition. (shrink)

Much contemporary philosophy of emotion has been in broad agreement about the claim that emotional experiences have evaluative content. This paper assesses a relatively neglected alternative, which I call the content-priority view, according to which emotions are responses to a form of pre-emotional value awareness, as what we are aware of in having certain non-emotional evaluative states which are temporally prior to emotion. I argue that the central motivations of the view require a personal level conscious (...) state of pre-emotional value awareness. However, consideration of extant suggestions for the relevant type of evaluative state shows them all to be problematic. As such, I conclude that at present we do not have a persuasive formulation of the content-priority view, and that to get one defenders of the view need to specify which version they are committed to and defend it against the criticisms raised. (shrink)

In addition to the Frege point, Frege also argued for the force-content distinction from the fact that an affirmative answer to a yes-no question constitutes an assertion. I argue that this fact more readily supports the view that questions operate on and present assertions and other forceful acts themselves. Force is neither added to propositions as on the traditional view, nor is it cancelled as has recently been proposed. Rather higher level acts such as questioning, but also (...) e.g. conditionalizing, embed assertive or directive acts that are forceful and committal, while suspending commitment to them. The Frege point confounds different varieties of force and the question whether something is merely presented for consideration with the question what is so presented. Force is representational: through assertoric and directive force indicators subjects non-conceptually present positions of theoretical or practical knowledge, while interrogative acts indicate positions of wondering which strive for such knowledge. (shrink)

This paper is about a substitution-failure in attitude ascriptions, but not the one you think. A standard view about the semantic shape of ‘that’-clause attitude ascriptions is that they are fundamentally relational. The attitude verb expresses a binary relation whose extension, if not empty, is a collection of pairs each of which consists in an individual and a proposition, while the ‘that’-clause is a term for a proposition. One interesting problem this view faces is that, within the scope (...) of many attitude verbs, ‘that’-clauses are not interchange able with certain other terms which stand for the same propositions as the clauses are supposed to. For example, (1a) below may be true, but (1c) is probably not: (1) a. Holmes {fears/suspects} that Moriarty has returned. b. That Moriarty has returned is the proposition that Moriarty has re turned. c. Holmes {fears/suspects} the proposition that Moriarty has returned. For only the exceptionally timorous fear propositions, and, excluding contexts in which we speak of a ‘suspect premise’, only the unusually paranoid suspect them. The truth-conditional change eVected by substituting propositional descrip tion for ‘that’- clause illustrated in (1) occurs with a wide range of attitude verbs. If you understand that the window of opportunity is closing, perhaps you should act before it is too late, but if you mere-. (shrink)

Collection with articles of different disciplines on Metaphor as a "Figure of Thought". Summary of contents: 1. A HIstory of Philosophy Perspective 2. A SEmantic Perspective 3. A COgnitive Science Perspective 4. A PHilosphy of Science Perspective 5. A THeological, Sociological and Political Perspective.

In the first section of this paper, after briefly arguing for the assumption that experiential content is propositional, I’ll distinguish three interpretations of the claim that experience has content (the Mild, Medium, and Spicy Content Views). In the second section, I’ll flesh out Naïve Realism in greater detail, and I’ll reconstruct what I take to be the main argument for its incompatibility with the Content Views. The third section will be devoted to evaluation of existing arguments (...) for the Mild Content View (the arguments from accuracy and appearing), and the development of what I take to be a stronger argument (the argument from belief generation). In the final section, I’ll identify a flaw in the argument for the incompatibility of Naïve Realism with the Content Views, which opens the door to a reconciliation. (shrink)

The 'content view', in slogan form, is 'Perceptual experiences have representational content'. I explain why the content view should be reformulated to remove any reference to 'experiences'. I then argue, against Bill Brewer, Charles Travis and others, that the content view is true. One corollary of the discussion is that the content of perception is relatively thin (confined, in the visual case, to roughly the output of 'mid-level' vision). Finally, I argue (briefly) (...) that the opponents of the content view are partially vindicated, because perceptual error is due to false belief. (shrink)

How does perceptual experience disclose the world to us? According to the content view (CV), visual perceptual consciousness entails representational content. According to pure relationalism, perception is a non‐representational relation between a subject and an object. In this article, I argue that CV‐theorists are implicitly committed to the claim that there is an element of generality in perception, and I show how pure relationalists would emphasize the particularity of perception, instead of its generality. But I also argue (...) that there are good epistemological and phenomenological reasons for thinking that there is generality in perception. In particular, I focus on Brewer's purely relationalist account and I argue that it either fails to satisfy important phenomenological and epistemological requirements, or it introduces generality in a way that makes it collapse into CV. I contend that construing the debate between CV and pure relationalism in light of particularity and generality advances our understanding of how perceptual experience discloses the world to us, as well as strengthening the standing of CV. (shrink)

According to Sparse views of perceptual content, the phenomenal character of perceptual experience is exhausted by the experiential presentation of ‘low-level’ properties such as (in the case of vision) shapes, colors, and textures Whereas, according to Rich views of perceptual content, the phenomenal character of perceptual experience can also sometimes involve experiencing ‘high-level’ properties such as natural kinds, artefactual kinds, causal relations, linguistic meanings, and moral properties. An important dialectical tool in the debate between Rich and Sparse theorists (...) is the so-called ‘method of phenomenal contrast’. I explore how this method of phenomenal contrast interacts with the sort of content-externalism made familiar by Putnam. I show that the possibility of Twin Earth style cases places important restrictions on the range of properties that the method of phenomenal contrast could plausibly apply to. Moreover, these restrictions would apply to some paradigmatically low-level properties as well as to some of the frequently advanced high-level properties. I also draw some general lessons about the different ways one might conceive of the relation between phenomenal character and representational content. (shrink)

David Papineau’s _The Metaphysics of Sensory Experience_ is deep, insightful, refreshingly brisk, and very readable. In it, Papineau argues that sensory experiences are intrinsic and non-relational states of subjects; that they do not essentially involve relations to worldly facts, properties, or other items (though they do happen to correlate with worldly items); and that they do not have truth conditions simply in virtue of their conscious (i.e., phenomenal) features. I am in enthusiastic agreement with the picture as described so far. (...) But Papineau also argues that sensory experiences are in no interesting sense essentially representational and that what is responsible for their truth conditions is their correlations with the environment. Here, I disagree. Indeed, I think Papineau does not follow his arguments to their proper conclusions. For if sensory experiences are intrinsic, non-relational, and only contingently correlated with worldly conditions (as Papineau and I agree they are), then the phenomenal features of sensory states are representational in an important sense: they constitute what we think, perceptually experience, or otherwise entertain, making up how things seem to us from a first-person perspective. Because of this, the truth conditions of perceptual experiences cannot be entirely independent of their phenomenal features. They cannot merely be a matter of environmental correlations. If we follow Papineau’s arguments to their proper conclusions, we end up with a view much closer to a version of representationalism that Papineau dismisses, a view he calls “pure phenomenal intentionalism”. (shrink)

Recent philosophy of psychology has seen the rise of so-called "dual-component" and "two-dimensional" theories of mental content as what I call a "Middle Way" between internalism (the view that contents of states like belief are "narrow") and externalism (the view that by and large, such contents are "wide"). On these Middle Way views, mental states are supposed to have two kinds of content: the "folk-psychological" kind, which we ordinarily talk about and which is wide; and some (...) non-folk-psychological kind which is narrow. Jerry Fodor is responsible for one of the most influential arguments that we need to believe in some such non-folk-psychological kind of content. In this paper I argue that the ideas behind Fodor's premises are mutually inconsistent - so it would be irrational to believe in a Middle Way theory of mental content no matter how many of Fodor's premises you find plausible. Common opinion notwithstanding, we have to choose between internalism and externalism, full-stop. (shrink)

In this paper I propose three steps to overcome the force-content dichotomy and dispel the Frege point. First, we should ascribe content to force indicators. Through basic assertoric and directive force indicators such as intonation, word order and mood, a subject presents its position of theoretical or practical knowledge of a state of affairs as a fact, as something that is the case, or as a goal, as something to do. Force indicators do not operate on truth- or (...) satisfaction evaluable entities as on the traditional view, but complete and unify them. Second, higher-level acts such as interrogative, logical and fictional acts create higher-level unities that may suspend commitment to the assertions and directions they operate on. But they do not cancel their force, but transfer the meaning of force indicators into the new unities they create. For example, in the context of asking a theoretical or practical question, the assertoric or directive force indicator now presents the kind of knowledge the subject is seeking. Third, the Frege point conflates different varieties of force. We neither need Frege’s assertion sign, nor Hare’s neustic, nor Hanks’s cancellation sign, but only ordinary force indicators and interrogative, logical and fictional markers. Propositions are not forceless contents to which a subject commits by forceful acts, but forceful acts put forward by higher-level acts which may suspend commitment to them. (shrink)

It is close to current orthodoxy that perceptual experience is to be characterized, at least in part, by its representational content, roughly, by the way it represents things as being in the world around the perceiver. Call this basic idea the content view.

In Mind and World, John McDowell argues against the view that perceptual representation is non-conceptual. The central worry is that this view cannot offer any reasonable account of how perception bears rationally upon belief. I argue that this worry, though sensible, can be met, if we are clear that perceptual representation is, though non-conceptual, still in some sense 'assertoric': Perception, like belief, represents things as being thus and so.

The ‘content view’, in slogan form, is ‘Perceptual experiences have representational content’. I explain why the content view should be reformulated to remove any reference to ‘experiences’. I then argue, against Bill Brewer, Charles Travis and others, that the content view is true. One corollary of the discussion is that the content of perception is relatively thin (confined, in the visual case, to roughly the output of ‘mid‐level’ vision). Finally, I argue (briefly) (...) that the opponents of the content view are partially vindicated, because perceptual error is due to false belief. (shrink)

Radical enactivism, an increasingly influential approach to cognition in general, has recently been applied to memory in particular, with Hutto and Peeters New directions in the philosophy of memory, Routledge, New York, 2018) providing the first systematic discussion of the implications of the approach for mainstream philosophical theories of memory. Hutto and Peeters argue that radical enactivism, which entails a conception of memory traces as contentless, is fundamentally at odds with current causal and postcausal theories, which remain committed to a (...) conception of traces as contentful: on their view, if radical enactivism is right, then the relevant theories are wrong. Partisans of the theories in question might respond to Hutto and Peeters’ argument in two ways. First, they might challenge radical enactivism itself. Second, they might challenge the conditional claim that, if radical enactivism is right, then their theories are wrong. In this paper, we develop the latter response, arguing that, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, radical enactivism in fact aligns neatly with an emerging tendency in the philosophy of memory: radical enactivists and causal and postcausal theorists of memory have begun to converge, for distinct but compatible reasons, on a contentless conception of memory traces. (shrink)

Philosophers have often argued that ascriptions of content are appropriate only to the personal level states of folk psychology. Against this, this paper defends the view that the familiar propositional attitudes and states defined over them are part of a larger set of cognitive proceses that do not make constitutive reference to concept possession. It does this by showing that states with nonconceptual content exist both in perceptual experience and in subpersonal information-processing systems. What makes these states (...) content-involving is their satisfaction of certain basic conditions deriving from a general account of representation-driven behaviour that is neutral on the question of concept possession. It is also argued that creatures can be in states with nonconceptual content even though they possess no conceptual abilities at all. (shrink)