Anti-individualism and Phenomenal Content

Anti-Individualism, Content Preservation, and Discursive Justification

Most explorations of the epistemic implications of Semantic AntiIndividualism (SAI) focus on issues of self-knowledge (first-person authority) and/or external-world skepticism. Less explored has been SAI’s implications for the epistemology of reasoning. In this paper I argue that SAI has some nontrivial implications on this score. I bring these out by reflecting on a problem first raised by Bog...

Shoemaker on Phenomenal Content

In a series of papers and lectures, Sydney Shoemaker has developed a sophisticated Russellian theory of phenomenal content (1994, 2000, 2001, 2003). It has as its central motivation two considerations. One is the possibility of spectrum-inversion without illusion. The other is the transparency of experience. Consider the possibility of spectrum inversion. It might be that the color experience J...

Fregean Sense and Anti-Individualism

The Phenomenal Content of Experience

We discuss in some length evidence from the cognitive science suggesting that the representations of objects based on spatiotemporal information and featural information retrieved bottom-up from a visual scene precede representations of objects that include conceptual information. We argue that a distinction can be drawn between representations with conceptual and nonconceptual content. The dis...

The Content and Epistemology of Phenomenal Belief

Experiences and beliefs are different sorts of mental states, and are often taken to belong to very different domains. Experiences are paradigmatically phenomenal, characterized by what it is like to have them. Beliefs are paradigmatically intentional, characterized by their propositional content. But there are a number of crucial points where these domains intersect. One central locus of inter...