GIULIA MARTINA 

Seeing colours in a colour-blind way.

Please note: this is a read-ahead event. The manuscript will be made available here a week before the event. To obtain a password for the page, please send us an email using the form above. 

LISA MIRACCHI (University of Pennsylvania)

Making Use of Perception

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I will argue that conceptualizing the paradigmatic proper epistemic relation between experience and belief as an evidential relationship unduly distorts our understanding of the rational role of experience and correspondingly of the nature of experience and belief. Belief is not something cognitively "inner" with respect to perception that receives deliverances and chastising from a more worldly faculty. Instead, I will argue for a novel treatment of the paradigmatic epistemic relation between perception and knowledge on which the epistemic agent uses perception in aiming to know. Knowledge is just one among many ends agents can recruit perception in the service of, for example bicycle riding or painting, or more traditionally considered "cognitive'" activities such as counting and reading. On this agential account, both perception and knowledge are purposeful engagements with the world and the agent uses the former as a (partial) means towards the latter. I explain how this account allows for more realistic and more diverse views of perceptual content, and how it helps us to better understand conceptualization as a substantive process.

FARID MASROUR (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

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 Minimal Relationalism, Structuralism and the Grasp of Spatial Properties

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Minimal relationalism is the view that perceptual experiences are constituted by three-place relations between subjects, ways of perceiving, and object-property complexes. Under minimal relationalism, although external objects and properties enter the constitution of perceptual experience, they only make a causal contribution to its phenomenal character. The phenomenal character of experience is grounded in ways of perceiving. This talk develops a specific version of minimal relationalism by providing a structuralist account of the ways of perceiving associated with spatial properties. I then show that the view can account for the role of experience in providing us with a grasp of spatial properties.  

ADAM PAUTZ (Brown University) 

The Puzzle of the Laws of Appearance

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In this talk I will present a puzzle about visual appearance. I will first develop the puzzle as it arises for representationalists about experience. Many have discussed the question "what properties do we actually experiential represent?" My puzzle concerns a different question that has not been much discussed: "what properties *could* we experientially represent?" I will argue that there are certain metaphysically necessary restrictions here. Those restrictions cry out for explanation. But it is just very hard to see how representationalists might explain them. At the end, I will explore the question of whether the puzzle equally arises for naive realists.