William Fish

Perception, hallucination, and illusion

1. Naive Realism: The Theory and its Motivations 2. Naive Realism: Past and Future 3. Perception 4. Hallucination 5. Consciousness and the Brain 6. Illusion

Direct Realism, Disjunctivism, and Screening Off

Abstract In this paper, I begin by developing a philosophically substantive conception of the key notions of direct and indirect access in terms of phenomenal mediation. I then explore the constraints this understanding of the direct/indirect distinction places on theories that aspire to qualify as versions of direct realism and argue that any theory that qualifies as a form of direct realism must also be a form of negative disjunctivism.

Internal security and statebuilding : aligning agencies and functions

1. Introduction 2. The Evolution of Internal Security 3. Manufacturing Internal Security 4. Afghanistan 5. Timor-Leste 6. Solomon Islands 7. Prioritising Internal Security 8. Fit for Function

'New Essays on Singular Thought', edited by Robin Jeshion

on Others, Sanford Goldberg presents a first sketch of what a (reliabilist) epistemology might look like, if it were to be fundamentally reoriented in a way that puts our epistemic dependence on others at the heart of the epistemological project. Much of the book takes aim at ‘orthodox reliabilism’: that is, any version of process reliabilism that views the epistemic status of a belief as entirely dependent on the reliability of belief-forming processes that occur within the mind/brain of the believing subject. Such ‘process individualism’, Goldberg argues (Chs 1 and 2), does not reflect the depth of our epistemic dependence on others, even in basic cases of testimonial knowledge. For, while it might seem that gaining testimonial knowledge is merely a matter of the hearer’s reliable uptake of reliable testimonies, any explanation of what makes some testimonies reliable (as opposed to others) would be incomplete without reference to the reliability of the cognitive processes that were involved in the production of the testimonies on the part of the informant. The core of the book (Chs 3 and 4) develops a broader ‘extendedness hypothesis’, according to which testimonial belief-fixation should be recognised ‘as an interpersonally extended process’—a recognition that is forced upon the process reliabilist by her prior commitments regarding any belief formation based ‘on a representation-deploying information source’ [105]. Goldberg is keen to defend his epistemological ‘extendedness hypothesis’ against a variety of objections (Ch. 5), as well as against conflation with the ‘extended cognition’ hypothesis discussed in the philosophy of mind. The final part (Chs 6 and 7) broadens the scope significantly by considering the systemic aspects of our epistemic reliance on others, notably in cases where we depend on our social environment for coverage (e.g., about newsworthy developments). Goldberg introduces the novel idea of ‘coverage-supported’ beliefs: beliefs we are justified in holding simply because we have good reason to believe that, if things were different from what we take them to be, we would have heard about it by now. The book’s subtitle, An Essay in Epistemology, is both too general and too modest. Perhaps a more accurate subtitle would have been ‘The Programme of Socializing Process Reliabilism’. Yet such a narrow description would not do justice to Goldberg’s book, which, despite its relative brevity, is brimming with ideas and opens up new avenues of research at the intersection of reliabilism, the epistemology of testimony, and systems-oriented social epistemology.

Book Notes: Adams, Frederick and Kenneth Aizawa, The Bounds of Cognition, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008, pp. xiii + 197, AU

In The Bounds of Cognition, Adams and Aizawa defend an orthodox ‘brainbound’ conception of mind and cognition against the increasingly popular claim that the mind is ‘extended’. Although there are different ways in which this general idea can be developed, the unifying theme is that certain aspects of the mind/cognitive processes extend ‘beyond the boundaries of the brain into the body and environment’ [22]. In the opening two chapters, the authors make the plausible claim that in order to assess this hypothesis, we need a theory of what cognition is. Their orthodox theory is then presented in chapters 3 and 4. They contend that ‘cognition involves non-derived representations’ [31], where non-derived representations have ‘naturalistic’ content (an idea borrowed from 1980s/1990s philosophy of mind), and that ‘the cognitive differs from the non-cognitive in virtue of the kinds of mechanisms that are involved’ [57]. Yet I failed to see how these considerations proved that, ‘as a matter of contingent empirical fact’ [55], cognition is brain-bound, since, even if the brain is the only consumer of non-derived representations, a process that spanned brain and environment could still ‘involve’ non-derived representations. Chapter 5 then criticizes the theories of cognition presented by extended mind theorists as too liberal before chapters 6 and 7 charge these theorists with fallacious reasoning: of moving from the observation that cognitive processes are causally-coupled with the environment to the conclusion that these cognitive processes are part-constituted by the environment (chapter 6) and/or from the observation that cognitive systems are extended to the conclusion that cognitive processes are (chapter 7). Although I didn’t feel this charge was made to stick, these chapters are nonetheless valuable for highlighting the importance of getting clear about these issues. Chapter 8 then discusses arguments for the extended mind hypothesis, focusing on the claim that environment-involving processes can be cognitively equivalent to orthodox cognitive processes—a chapter that also includes useful discussion of specific cases that have been advanced in favour of the hypothesis—and chapter 9 considers Alva Noë’s enactive theory of perception, which allegedly views perceptual processes as extended, and argues that ‘the current weight of evidence tells against [it]’ [153]. Australasian Journal of Philosophy Vol. 87, No. 2, pp. 355–356; June 2009