Abstract
This paper defends and develops the capacity view against insightful critiques from Matt McGrath, Adam Pautz, and Ram Neta. In response to Matt McGrath, I show why capacities are essential and cannot simply be replaced with representational content. I argue moreover, that the asymmetry between the employment of perceptual capacities in the good and the bad case is sufficient to account for the epistemic force of perceptual states yielded by the employment of such capacities. In response to Adam Pautz, I show why a perceiver’s belief is better justified than the belief of someone who suffers a subjectively indistinguishable hallucination. I show, moreover, why the capacity view is compatible with standard Bayesian principles and how it accounts for degrees of justification. In response to Ram Neta, I discuss the relationship between evidence and rational confidence, as well as the notion of evidence in light of an externalism about perceptual content.
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Notes
Jeshion (2010), Sainsbury (2010) and Crane (2011) have recently argued in different ways against the view that singular thought is object dependent. They argue that what makes a thought singular is its form rather than its content. When I argue that a gappy content is singular in form though not in content this would qualify as a singular thought on such a view. Thanks to James Genone and David Chalmers for helpful discussions on this issue.
I am not saying that recognitional concepts never enter into the content of perception. For present purposes, I remain neutral on that matter. I am, however, arguing that they need not enter into the content of perception.
See, Joyce (2005) for a helpful discussion on these issues.
Thanks to Branden Fitelson for a helpful email exchange on these issues.
For an argument that we have no good grip on what counts as evidence for p that does not enter into determining one’s rational level of confidence that p, see Neta (2008).
See also the comparison of Williamson and my views in Pautz’s contribution to this volume.
For example, Lehrer’s (1990) Truetemp counterexample: Mr. Truetemp has, unbeknownst to him, a temperature-detecting device implanted in his head that regularly produces accurate beliefs about the ambient temperature.
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Schellenberg, S. Phenomenal evidence and factive evidence defended: replies to McGrath, Pautz, and Neta. Philos Stud 173, 929–946 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0534-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0534-x