Abstract: An overview of the epistemology of perception, covering the nature of justification, immediate justification, the relationship between the metaphysics of perceptual experience and its rational role, the rational role of attention, and cognitive penetrability. The published version will contain a smaller bibliography, due to space constraints in the volume.
Affordances and the Contents of Perception
Summary: The author questions the centrality of representation in perceptual experience that comes from a specific class of experience, namely, those experiences of the environment that compels you to act in a certain way.
Do Visual Experiences have contents?
Abstract: This paper argues that despite the differences between perception and belief, perception involves states that are importantly similar to beliefs: conscious visual experiences. According to the Content View, these experiences have contents in the form of accuracy conditions. The paper develops and defends the Content View, discusses its significance, and argues that contrary to what is often supposed, the Content View is compatible with Naive Realist disjunctivism.
Phenomenal Evidence and Factive Evidence
Summary: In this paper, the author presents the so-called capacity view, namely, the view that “that perceptual states are systematically linked to what they are of in the good case, that is, the case of a successful perception, and thereby provide evidence for what they are of in the good case”. The author discusses the main committments of the view and the implications it has when it comes to the justification of our beliefs and the transparency of our mental states.
Justification by Imagination
Summary: The author argues that experience constraints the nature of imagination in such a way that this results having a justificatory role.
Denying Relationality: Epistemology and Ethics and Ignorance
Summary: In this chapter, the author argues that epistemological and ethical practices of ignorance are strategic and involve a strategic denial of relationality, namely, of the way in which subjects are formed through relation with each other.
On the Epistemic Value of Imagining, Supposing and Conceiving
Abstract. Philosophers frequently invoke our ability to imagine, conceive or suppose various thing in order to explain how we achieve our cognitive goals when we make decisions about future actions, when we perform thought experiments, and when we engage in games of pretense. But what is the relationship between imaginings, conceivings, and supposings? And what exactly are the epistemic roles they play in the cognitive projects in which they are involved? This chapter provides answers to these questions by first bringing out a contrast between what we do when we imagine and what we do when we suppose, and then by showing how to fit conceivings into the emerging systematic picture of the ways we use different forms of hypothetical thinking to acquire knowledge.
A Foundherentist Theory of Empirical Justification
Summary: In the debate over the structure of epistemic justification, epistemologists have opposed foundationalism to coherentism. In this paper, the author argues for “Foundherentism”.
Scepticism Aside
Summary: The author presents an argument for disregarding scepticism. Although she does not commit herself to saying that scepticism is false, she argues that it is, not only practicaly, yet epistemologically responsible to assume scepticism to be false.
Non-foundationalist epistemology: Holism, coherence, and tenability
Summary: In this paper, the author argues that epistemic justification is explained out by coherentism. Although coherence is not the ground of truth, it is the source of epistemic justification.