Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

Fred Dretske made important contributions to the debate concerning how to distinguish perception from cognition, to the question of whether perceptual content is ‘Rich’ or ‘Sparse’ and to developing the thesis that perceptual experience employs a distinctively iconic format of representation. In Dretske (2015) he offered a method or criterion for determining whether or not two subjects have visual experiences with different phenomenal characters, which he dubbed the ‘Goldilocks Test’. In this paper I criticize Dretske’s proposal, drawing on various visual phenomena in order to argue that this ‘Goldilocks Test’…

This paper argues that naïve realism has an epistemic advantage over other rival views. The argument consists of two steps. First, I argue that the phenomenology of veridical visual experience plays an indispensable role in explaining how we can refer to the experience as a justificatory reason for a demonstrative judgment. Second, I argue that only naïve realism can coherently allow a veridical visual experience to be used as a factive reason.