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Experiences, Seeings, and Seemings| old_uid | 12620 |
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| title | Experiences, Seeings, and Seemings |
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| start_date | 2013/06/17 |
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| schedule | 16h-18h |
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| online | no |
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| summary | 1) Perceptual experiences are events that are individuated by their phenomenal character, what it’s like to have them, and their presentational character, which objects and properties they seem to present us with. Let’s restrict our focus to experiences of a single modality, for example, the visual experience of a white knight on a black square. On a common view such events are indivisible in that they don’t consist of further events. Debates can then be had over whether they have a Naïve Realist or Representationalist metaphysics, whether they present us with only low-level or also with high-level properties, and whether they’re non-conceptual or conceptual. Let’scall this view the One-Event view.
On an alternative view, experiences like the visual experience of a white knight on a black square consist of further events that belong to different mental kinds in having different natures and playing different roles. For example, on a classic version of this view, associated with Thomas Reid, a visual experience of a white knight on a black square consists of a non-intentional sensation which determines its phenomenology and something like a judgment or a series of judgments to the effect that this is a white knight on a black square which determines its world-presenting character (Smith 2002). For another example, both externalist epistemologists like Jack Lyons and internalists like Berit Brogaard and Chris Tucker have recently advocated taking experiences to consist of a non-conceptual event which presents us with low-level properties and a conceptual event which presents us with high-level properties (Brogaard 2013a, 2013b, Lyons 2005, 2009, Tucker 2011). Call any such view a Many-Event
view.
My aim in this talk will be to present and defend what is to my mind the most plausible version of the Many-Event view. On this view, the Sensing-Seeming view, experiences of normal perceivers consist of (at least) relational and non-conceptual sensings of objects and their maximally determinate low-level properties and representational and conceptual seemings to the effect that they have determinable low- or high-level properties. In order to get an initial grip on it, consider first a visual experience of somebody who’s never heard of chess and therefore lacks the concept of a knight, but who looks at a white knight on a black square from a particular point of view (“novice”).Consider next a visual experience of somebody who has the concept and looks at the same white knight from the same point of view (“expert”). Intuitively, there’s at least a part of the two
experiences that is phenomenally exactly the same. However, the object seems to be a knight only to the expert and one might think that only the expert has therefore evidence or reason for the belief that it’s a knight. On the Sensing-Seeming view the experiences of the novice and expert consist of sensings which are phenomenally the same, but only the expert's experience features a seeming to the effect that the object is a knight |
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| responsibles | Kriegel |
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