Bill Brewer

Perception and its objects

Early modern empiricists thought that the nature of perceptual experience is given by citing the object presented to the mind in that experience. Hallucination and illusion suggest that this requires untenable mind-dependent objects. Current orthodoxy replaces the appeal to direct objects with the claim that perceptual experience is characterized instead by its representational content. This paper argues that the move to content is problematic, and reclaims the early modern empiricist insight as perfectly consistent, even in cases of illusion, with the realist contention that these direct objects of perception are the persisting mind-independent physical objects we all know and love.

Externalism and A Priori Knowledge of Empirical Facts

I want to discuss the possibility of combining a so-called ‘externalist’ theory of empirical content, on which the contents of a person’s beliefs are determined in part by the nature of his extra-bodily environmental embedding, with a plausible account of selfknowledge, in particular, of a person’s knowledge of the contents of his own beliefs. A difficulty for this combination is thought to be that it leads to the availability of a kind non-empirical, a priori knowledge about the mind-independent physical world which is intuitively intolerable.1 The inference which is held to create this difficulty can be put like this.

Perception and Reason

This volume presents an original view of the role of conscious experience in the acquisition of knowledge. It argues that experiences must provide reasons for beliefs if there are to be any beliefs about the mind-independent world at all

Neglect and philosophy

Abstract It is a mistake, in my view, to try to unify the wide variety of phenomena classified as manifestations of “neglect”, by appeal to a single diagnostic or explanatory model of the neglect deficit. There is no such thing. What we have here instead is a cluster of disorders interestingly grouped together by their shared spatial constraints. The unity, if any, lies in the spatial aspect of our intuitive characterisation of individual disorders, rather than anything more fundamental or genuinely explanatory. In particular, the traditional debate between mutually exclusive and supposedly exhaustive attentional and representational interpretations of neglect is a dead end. This is now a fairly familiar view within the neuropsychological community; but my reasons for it are broadly philosophical rather than experimental. Recognising the heterogeneity of neglect is also liberating and productive, not a disappointment or failure, in the project of understanding the nature of normal and abnormal spatial cog...

Material Objects and their Parts

Abstract Commonsense appears committed to enduring macroscopic material objects that exclude each other from their precise location at all times. I elaborate a specific version of the commonsense commitment and consider its merits in connection with an important line of objection concerning the relation between material objects and their parts. The central thesis is that amongst persisting macroscopic material objects there are Natural Continuants, NCs, whose unity at a time and over time is entirely independent of our concepts, which occupy their precise spatial location Exclusively at all times, and which ground Artificial Continuants, ACs, by partition, collection, and approximation. I call the position the Natural Continuants View (NCV). Section “The Natural Continuants View” offers a provisional characterization. Section “Spatial Partition” considers a familiar puzzle concerning the idea that material objects may survive the loss of a part in order to provide intuitive motivation for (NCV) and to elaborate its commitments concerning (spatial) parts. The result is an account of the way in which NCs ground ACs by spatial partition. Section “Collection and Approximation” turns to a consideration of collections and assemblages of NCs. Section “Conclusion” concludes.

The Object View

Recall once again the Inconsistent Triad of claims about the nature of perceptual experience and its objects that I set out in ch. 1. (I) Physical objects are mind-independent. (II) Physical objects are the direct objects of perception. (III) The direct objects of perception are mind-dependent. Physical objects are such things as stones, tables, trees, people and other animals: the persisting macroscopic constituents of the world that we live in. The entities of a given kind are mind-independent if and only if their nature is entirely independent of their appearance, of the way in which they do or might appear to anyone: it is not in any way a matter of how they do or might appear to anyone. More precisely, the mind-independence of physical objects consists in the individuative priority of their nature over the various appearance properties that show up in our perception of them. So an account of our perceptual experience of physical objects preserves realism if and only if it offers a characterization of the natures of physical objects themselves as the prior and independent basis on which it goes on to give a characterization of the relevant The Object View-2-appearances that such objects may present in perception. According to the early modern approach to perception that I began with, the nature of perceptual experience is to be elucidated by reference to certain direct objects that are set before the mind in such experience. Thus, the most fundamental characterization of a specific perceptual experience is to be given by citing, and/or describing, specific such entities: the experience in question is one of acquaintance with just those things, which identify any given perceptual experience as the specific modification of consciousness that it is. Thus, the direct objects of perception are those objects, if any, that provide the most fundamental characterization of our perceptual experience in this way. The arguments from illusion and hallucination seem to establish that any such direct objects of perception must be mind-dependent. Hence philosophers sympathetic to the early modern approach appear committed to (III) above and therefore obliged to choose between rejecting (I) and rejecting (II). In chs. 2 and 3 above, I considered these two options, taking off from the historical views of Berkeley and Locke respectively. I found in complete generality that neither option is acceptable. So I turned in ch. 4 to the current orthodox response of rejecting (III) by …

Self-Knowledge and Externalism

I want to discuss the possibility of combining a so-called ‘externalist’ theory of empirical content, on which the contents of a person’s beliefs are determined in part by the nature of his extra-bodily environment, with a plausible account of self-knowledge, in particular, of a person’s knowledge of the contents of his own beliefs. A difficulty for this combination is thought to be that it provides a wholly non-empirical source of knowledge about the mind-independent physical world which is intuitively intolerable.1 The inference which is held to create this difficulty can be put like this

New Essays on the A Priori

I want to discuss the possibility of combining a so-called ‘externalist’ theory of empirical content, on which the contents of a person’s beliefs are determined in part by the nature of his extra-bodily environmental embedding, with a plausible account of selfknowledge, in particular, of a person’s knowledge of the contents of his own beliefs. A difficulty for this combination is thought to be that it leads to the availability of a kind non-empirical, a priori knowledge about the mind-independent physical world which is intuitively intolerable.1 The inference which is held to create this difficulty can be put like this.