Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

The paper addresses the question of whether the representability of high-level properties in the content of perceptual experience is compatible with a purely sensory characterization of high-level perceptual phenomenology. Two positions are distinguished, sensory liberalism and cognitive liberalism, which respectively provide an affirmative and a negative answer to the above question. After presenting the “conceptualist argument” against sensory liberalism and the main challenges that it raises, the paper proceeds to show how sensory liberalism can be defended and why it should be preferred to its main competitor within the liberal…

This paper proposes an analysis of some possible implications of aging focusing the effects that aging may have on one’s self-knowledge. The goal of the paper is in fact to connect research on aging with different accounts of self-knowledge and put forward the following hypothesis: (i) in the late stages of our lives we adopt a different way of looking at ourselves, and (ii) there are three main factors likely causing this change: cognitive problems (episodic memory impairment), motivational factors (coherence-seeking), and loss of a forward-looking way of structuring our…

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.

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…

Most philosophers think that phenomenal consciousness is real and that it has two components: an experiential component—a state that is subjectively ‘like something’ for a subject of experience; and a cognitive component—the subject’s awareness of the experiential component and knowledge of what it’s like. Illusionists, by contrast, claim that phenomenal consciousness is an illusion. It does not exist but only seems to exist (Frankish 2016). Although illusionism is highly counterintuitive, I shall claim that it is probably true. For I shall argue that phenomenal realism—the view that phenomenal consciousness is…

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…

In this text I intend to show to what extent a certain epistemological understanding of psychoanalysis (fundamentally Freudian) finds parallels with the so-called liberalization process of epistemological naturalism. My thesis is that the sui generis epistemological modalities created by Freud not only coincide with this process, but to a significant degree were precursors of the methodological and ontological innovations that LN (liberal naturalism) proposes to defend and theorize. I begin by reviewing the process of liberalization of epistemic naturalism, from a predominantly physicalist model to a liberal version that takes…

Naïve Realism has become increasingly popular as a theory about veridical perceptions. At the heart of this view is the idea that conscious perceptions are relational events, in which mind-independent aspects of the environment are actual constituents of the experience. Despite its growing popularity, several aspects of the naïve realist proposal regarding the nature of veridical perception and its phenomenal character remain unclear. Naïve Realists sometimes disagree on some of their central claims or have yet to fully articulate their commitments on key aspects of the view. In this paper,…

This paper explores the problem of the goal of understanding, proposing that understanding may be linked to prediction. The approach taken is functional and evolutionary, and it integrates an epistemological perspective with the insights of the predictive processing models of cognition. I first consider the possible goals of understanding, taking as few epistemological assumptions as possible. I take into account the notions of ends in themselves and of explanations, and I distinguish between internally-oriented goals and externally-oriented goals. Then I present how prediction might be connected with the goal of…

This article investigates Katalyn Farkas’s notion of privileged access as a criterion to distinguish the mental from the physical. Farkas argues that a state is mental if and only if its subject has a special kind of awareness of it, that is, if it has a unique subjective dimension. I compare this notion with Rorty’s view that the mental can be characterized by incorrigibility, that is, being immune to third-person errors. I claim that the two notions are related but both have difficulties in accounting for the variety and intricacy…