Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

This paper has two objectives. The first is to critically analyze the illusionist-realist debate about the existence of phenomenal consciousness. The second objective is to show that refuting illusionism is not as easy as most realists suppose. Many realists argue that illusionism is incoherent because it entails the falsity of a thesis that they take to be irrefutably true: when it comes to phenomenal properties, their appearance and their reality are indistinguishable. I label this thesis “No-Gap”. I explain that illusionists can oppose No-Gap, and accordingly conceive of introspection as…

Analyses of action-perception matching mechanisms, such as the Mirror Neuron System (MNS), have been prominent in evolutionary accounts of human cognition. Some scholars have interpreted data on the MNS to suggest that the human capacity to acquire and transmit cultural information is a learned product of cultural evolution (the Culture not Biology Account of cultural learning). Others have interpreted results related to the MNS to suggest that cultural learning in humans result from both cultural and biological evolution (the Culture per biology Account of cultural learning). In this paper, we…

In this paper, first of all, I want to give a criterion for the perceivability of higher-level properties, i.e., the properties that depend for their own instantiation on the instantiation of low-level properties (colors, shapes, sounds, textures …); namely, conditions that are necessary and jointly sufficient in order for such a property to be perceivable. Here it is: the higher-level property is given i) immediately; ii) via a grouping operation that involves a perceptual form of attention. Moreover, I want to show why some candidate higher-level properties fulfill it and…

In the debate about the reach of perceptual content, some philosophers have appealed to empirical effects as a test for the existence of high-level perception (HLP). Among these effects, perceptual adaptation and perceptual learning have played a major role. In this paper, I will discuss two skeptical challenges to relying on these effects as tests for HLP. The first challenge interrogates their nature as a perceptual process. The second challenge raises doubts regarding their usefulness in specifying the target high-level property.

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’…

The usual considerations about high-level properties perception focus on contents of perceptual experiences. While different types of high-level properties are considered, such as category-related, causal, emotional, and aesthetic, they are all interpreted as elements of experiential content. This paper introduces a new category of perceptual properties—structural phenomenal properties—by utilizing the important distinction between experiential contents and experiential structures. It is argued that while these are not content-properties, some of them have characteristics typical of high-level content properties. In particular, three structural phenomenal properties related to the visual field will be…

This paper addresses the topic of the expressive qualities of inanimate objects. More specifically, it examines how qualities referring to psychological states, such as cheerfulness, melancholy, liveliness, and sadness, can be attributed to non-sentient things. After presenting some of the main theoretical approaches to this issue in contemporary debates—including projective, arousal, persona, and contour theories—I argue that these approaches struggle to explain how the same expressive qualities can be ascribed to diverse things, such as an atmosphere, a piece of music, a personal feeling, or a bodily expression. As a…

This paper investigates the perceptual nature of affective properties—qualities such as sadness, excitement, boredom, or comfort—that we experience as belonging to objects, environments, or events. I propose a taxonomy that distinguishes three classes of affective properties: arousal properties, expressive properties, and affective affordances, each characterized by different relations to perception, affectivity, and response dependence. Drawing on philosophical accounts of high-level perception and ecological psychology, I argue that these properties can be considered at least partly perceptual insofar as they contribute to the phenomenal character of experience. I then explore how…

Tyler Burge (2010) provided a scathing critique of all programs for naturalizing concepts of representation, especially teleological naturalizing programs. He intended to demonstrate that “representational content” is a concept that cannot be reduced to more fundamental biological or physical ideas. According to him, since the 1970s, the concept of representational content has been firmly established in cognitive psychology as a mature science and utilized in adequate explanations. Since Dretske’s program is Burge’s primary objective, this paper concentrates on Dretske’s perspective. Following Burge’s criticisms, I concur that Dretske’s naturalizing program trivializes…