Consciousness, Attention, and Justification

Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 2022

This paper controverts the ability of intentionalism about perception to account for unique epistemic significance of phenomenal consciousness. More specifically, the intentionalist cannot explain the latter without denying two well-founded claims: the transparency of experience, and the possibility of unconscious perception. If they are true, intentionality of perception entails that phenomenal consciousness has no special epistemic role to play. Although some intentionalists are ready to bite this bullet, by doing so they effectively undermine one of the standard motivations of their view, i.e. the claim that perceptual experiences justify beliefs. Consequently, whatever reason might there be to think that phenomenal consciousness has unique epistemic import, it is also a reason to reject intentionalism. I recommend replacing the latter with an unorthodox formulation of relationalism about perception.

Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion Volume 3, 2011

Illusionism is the thesis that phenomenal consciousness is an introspective illusion. The illusion problem (Frankish 2016) is to explain the cause of the illusion, or why it so powerfully seems to us that we are phenomenally conscious. Here, I propose a theory to solve the illusion problem, the ‘False Inference Theory’ or ‘FIT’. I argue that by considering three plausible hypotheses about our minds—which I call introspective opacity, the infallibility intuition, and the justification constraint—we can explain our powerful disposition to draw a specific set of false inferences about our sensory states. I argue that being subject to the illusion of phenomenal consciousness consists in having this disposition. I also explain the intuitive ineffability, intrinsicality, and subjectivity of phenomenal properties and propose a solution to the illusion meta-problem (Kammerer 2016, 2018, 2019), which challenges us to explain why illusionism strikes us as a deeply counterintuitive view.

Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 1996

Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 1998

1 We focus on the visual case, leaving it to the reader to consider how the discussion generalizes to other modalities. 2 concerned how the transition from introspective beliefs to external--world beliefs could be rational. 2 In this entry, we assume without argument these positions are mistaken. We begin from the assumption that experiences (such as the one you have when you see the mustard) can justify external world beliefs about the things you see, such as beliefs that the mustard jar is in the fridge, and that the justification experience provides does not have to rely on justification for introspective beliefs. From now on, we often let it remain implicit that we are talking about external world beliefs, when we talk about the kind of beliefs that experiences justify. 3 Our main question is this: what features of experiences explain how they justify external world beliefs? The grammar of the question might suggest that experiences suffice all by themselves to provide justification for external world beliefs. But don't read this into the grammar of the phrase "experiences justify beliefs". We can distinguish between the claim that an experience can justify a belief that P, and the claim that an experience can justify a belief that P without help from other features it only contingently has. We clarify our question further in Part I, where we explain why we have chosen this point of departure, and highlight a range of theses about the role of experience in providing different types of justification. In Parts II and III, we consider the role of features of experience falling into two broad categories: constitutive features of experience, including its phenomenal character, its contents, its status as attentive or inattentive (sections 3--7); and causal features of experience such as its reliability, and the impact of other mental states on its formation (sections 8--10). Along the way, we discuss the relationships between visual experience and seeing (sections 1 and 8), and we contrast perceptual justification and perceptual knowledge (section 9).

Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 2002

A belief must have justification if it is to count as knowledge. And it is a commonplace thought that in certain circumstances experiences can serve as justifications for beliefs. Moreover, many have thought that there is something distinctive about the wayin which experiences justify beliefs, and that there is something distinctive about experiences which accounts for the distinctive way in which they justify beliefs. In this paper, I seek to elucidate views about experience and justification that can make sense of these thoughts and that can show us why so many have been attracted to them.I think it is important to try to make sense of these thoughts concerning the justificatory role of experiences, for I suspect that we are losing the ability to see why philosophers have traditionally been attracted to such thoughts. Coherentism and reliabilism, perhaps the two most currently popular theories of epistemic justification, appear simply to reject the idea that experiences can justif...