Ivan V Ivanov

The main focus of acquaintance theorists has been the nature and mechanism of perceptual acquaintance with particulars. Generally, one’s view of perceptual  acquaintance with general features has taken its bearings from one’s view of perceptual acquaintance with particulars. This has led to the glossing over of significant differences in the mechanisms of perceptual acquaintance with particulars and with general features. The difference in mechanisms suggests a difference in the sort of epistemic state at play in the two kinds of cases. While the existence of such a difference might initially seem to spell trouble for acquaintance theorists, it can be made palatable by being traced back to the distinct basic functions concepts of particulars and of general features serve in thought.

How could perceptual experiences reveal matters of essentiality? Answering this question is crucial for vindicating a thesis about the epistemic import of experience, commonly known as Revelation. The thesis comes in a weak and a strong version. Only on the strong one could it make up an authoritative piece of common sense. But this version also seems to demand too much of our experiences, namely that they can reveal essentiality. However, the impression that our experiences are not suited for this turns out to be due to a non-mandatory assumption about how the revelation of essentiality would work.

Berkeley’s Puzzle concerns whether and how phenomenally conscious perception could provide a basis for objective thought. The present chapter is intended to shed light on this issue. Recent discussions of the Puzzle and of similar issues concerning objectivity get surveyed, and based on this the main assumptions behind the Puzzle get enumerated. Consequently, the available responses get mapped and weighed out. It is concluded that while the Puzzle turns out to be more tractable than may appear initially, the most satisfying response to it hinges on the nature of perception and on what sorts of properties get perceived without the aid of concepts.

Is property-awareness constituted by representation or not? If it were, merely being aware of the qualities of physical objects would involve being in a representational state. This would have considerable implications for a prominent view of the nature of successful perceptual experiences. According to naive realism, any such experience-or more specifically its character-is fundamentally a relation of awareness to concrete items in the environment. Naive realists take their view to be a genuine alternative to representationalism, the view on which the character of such experiences is constituted by representation. But naive realists must admit qualities or property instances as items of awareness if they are to remain wedded to common sense, and the nature of property-awareness may smuggle constitutive representation into the naive realist account of character. I argue that whether property-awareness involves representation, and consequently whether naive realism is distinct from representationalism or not, depends on what
qualities are fundamentally. On universalist and nominalist accounts, property-awareness turns out to involve representation. Not so under tropism.

I argue that an analogy between pains and sounds suggests
a way to give an objective account of pain which fits well with a naïve perceptualist account of feeling pain. According to the proposed metaphysical account, pains are relational physical events with shared qualitative nature, each of which is constituted by tissue damage and the activation of nociceptors. I proceed to show that the metaphysical proposal is compatible with platitudes about pains being animate, private, and self-intimating states.

The recent discussion of Molyneux's Question has brought to light two fundamentally different ways of understanding our perceptual-recognitional concepts. On the first such concepts would be reducible to recognitional dispositions, while on the second the dispositions would be grounded in a more basic knowledge of the property picked out by the respective concept. As placeholders, we can call the first type opaque, and the second—transparent recognitional concepts. The two views set out different requirements for the rationality of the cross-modal transfer of a recognitional concept. Whether an analog of the experiment designed by Molyneux can determine the cross-modality of our recognitional shape concepts thus depends on which of the two views happens to describe them accurately. But how should we decide this in the first place? I argue that each construal faces a serious challenge, but end up endorsing the transparent one. To that effect, I examine Janet Levin's criticisms of John Campbell's account of recognitional shape concepts.

I defend two controversial claims: 1) that the so called screening-off problem is practically insoluble for naïve realists clinging on to an internalist view of causally matching hallucinations, and 2) that there is a straightforward way for naïve realists to justify externalism about causally matching hallucinations. The key to securing naïve realism lies in adopting a thoroughgoing externalism about perceptual consciousness.

Nanay (2012) has proposed a new form of representationalism, on which perceptual contents represent abstract particulars or tropes. The view has putative advantages over standard versions of representationalism: it accommodates the so called Particularity of experience while keeping perceptual contents simple. In this paper, I show that trope representationalism in its simple form cannot be extended to cases of perceptual illusion and hallucination. Once perceptual contents get enriched with the relevant semantic machinery to handle such cases, the view turns to be a form of standard representationalism. Thus, on the original version, trope representationalism is untenable, while, on the regimented version, it is not even a distinctive view.

Is property-awareness constituted by representation or not? If it were, merely being aware of the qualities of physical objects would involve being in a representational state. This would have considerable implications for a prominent view of the nature of successful perceptual experiences. According to naive realism, any such experience-or more specifically its character-is fundamentally a relation of awareness to concrete items in the environment. Naive realists take their view to be a genuine alternative to representationalism, the view on which the character of such experiences is constituted by representation. But naive realists must admit qualities or property-instances as items of awareness if they are to remain wedded to common sense, and the nature of property-awareness may smuggle constitutive representation into the naive realist account of character. I argue that whether property-awareness involves representation, and consequently whether naive realism is distinct from representationalism or not, depends on what qualities are fundamentally. On unversalist and nominalist accounts, property-awareness turns out to involve representation. Not so under tropism.