Papers by Michael Arsenault
Objectivism about perceptible qualities like colors and sounds is the view that perceptible quali... more Objectivism about perceptible qualities like colors and sounds is the view that perceptible qualities are ontologically and conceptually independent from perception. We ordinarily think of Aristotle as an objectivist about perceptible qualities–even the arch-objectivist. Yet this consensus has long been threatened by various thorny passages, including especially De anima III.2, 425b26-426a28, which appear to suggest that Aristotle is no objectivist, but a subjectivist. I show that recent attempts to make sense of these passages by appeal to Aristotle's three-stage distinction between first potentiality, second potentiality/first actuality, and second actuality commit Aristotle to a subjectivism that he cannot consistently endorse. I argue for an alternative that vindicates Aristotle's objectivism.
We present a family of counter-examples to David Christensen's Independence Criterion, which is c... more We present a family of counter-examples to David Christensen's Independence Criterion, which is central to the epistemology of disagreement. Roughly, Independence requires that, when you assess whether to revise your credence in P upon discovering that someone disagrees with you, you shouldn't rely on the reasoning that lead you to your initial credence in P. To do so would beg the question against your interlocutor. Our counter-examples involve questions where, in the course of your reasoning, you almost fall for an easy-to-miss trick. We argue that you can use the step in your reasoning where you (barely) caught the trick as evidence that someone of your general competence level (your interlocutor) likely fell for it. Our cases show that it's permissible to use your reasoning about disputed matters to disregard an interlocutor's disagreement, so long as that reasoning is embedded in the right sort of explanation of why she finds the disputed conclusion plausible, even though it's false.
Talks by Michael Arsenault
Representationalism is the view that the phenomenal character of a perceptual experience is deter... more Representationalism is the view that the phenomenal character of a perceptual experience is determined by its content. It seems to follow from representationalism that visual and tactile experiences of an object's shape have the same phenomenal characterthat there's no difference between what it's like to visually experience the shape and what it's like to tactilely experience the shape. But this seems false. After all, one can introspectively notice the difference between a visual experience of an object's shape and a tactile one even when one is both seeing and feeling that shape at the same time. Thus the representationalist lacks an account of the distinctiveness of the phenomenology of experiences of "common sensibles" in different sense modalities. My goal is to provide the representationalist with just such an account, drawing on recent empirical work on intramodal attention (e.g., Talsma 2006, 2008 and Macaluso 2002.
Uploads
Papers by Michael Arsenault
Talks by Michael Arsenault