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	<title>BrainPains</title>
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	<description>A Group Blog in the Philosophy of Mind</description>
	<pubDate>Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:58:46 +0000</pubDate>
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		<title>Seeing Armadillos (phenomenally!!)</title>
		<link>http://brainpains.com/wordpress/?p=122</link>
		<comments>http://brainpains.com/wordpress/?p=122#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 07 Jul 2009 05:11:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Philippe Chuard</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://brainpains.com/wordpress/?p=122</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Continuing through our summer reading, we’ve just looked at Tim Bayne’s “Perception &#38; the Reach of Phenomenal Content”, forthcoming in Phil. Q., where Tim attempts to defend the idea that so-called “higher-level” properties figure in the phenomenal content of perceptual experience. A few remarks/worries about the issue and Tim’s argument.
 
THE ISSUE: Conservatives think that [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://brainpains.com/wordpress/?feed=rss2&amp;p=122</wfw:commentRss>
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		<item>
		<title>Much Ado about Realization</title>
		<link>http://brainpains.com/wordpress/?p=111</link>
		<comments>http://brainpains.com/wordpress/?p=111#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 18 Jun 2009 16:52:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>JFisher</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://brainpains.com/wordpress/?p=111</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[ This week we read Tom Polger and Larry Shapiro’s &#8220;Understanding the Dimensions of Realization&#8221; (forthcoming in JPhil) which is a critical response to Carl Gillett’s earlier paper on realization.  I will argue that two central issues in this debate are merely terminological.  This teapot is brimming with tempest but sadly lacking in substance.
One central issue [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://brainpains.com/wordpress/?feed=rss2&amp;p=111</wfw:commentRss>
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		<item>
		<title>Voodoo Correlations in Neuroscience?</title>
		<link>http://brainpains.com/wordpress/?p=105</link>
		<comments>http://brainpains.com/wordpress/?p=105#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 23 Mar 2009 19:57:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>JFisher</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://brainpains.com/wordpress/?p=105</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[We recently read an interesting paper by Vul, Harris, Winkielman, and Pashler which effectively accuses many researchers of having used laughably poor statistical methodology in using brain-imaging to establish conclusions about where in the brain the processing occurs for many psychological states including emotion, personality, and social cognition.  If this accusation is correct, it calls into [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://brainpains.com/wordpress/?feed=rss2&amp;p=105</wfw:commentRss>
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		<item>
		<title>Tye on Phenomenal Concepts</title>
		<link>http://brainpains.com/wordpress/?p=97</link>
		<comments>http://brainpains.com/wordpress/?p=97#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 20 Feb 2009 15:48:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Torin Alter</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[]]></category>

		<category><![CDATA[Burge]]></category>

		<category><![CDATA[Consciousness]]></category>

		<category><![CDATA[Knowledge Argument]]></category>

		<category><![CDATA[phenomenal concept]]></category>

		<category><![CDATA[Tye]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://brainpains.com/wordpress/?p=97</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[
In chapter 3 of Consciousness Revisited, Michael Tye argues that
·      There are no special phenomenal concepts of the sort required by the phenomenal concept strategy for defending physicalism
·      Accounts of phenomenal concepts developed by Block, Papineau, Balog, Loar, Perry, and Tye all have serious problems
·      Although there are concepts of consciousness that are not a [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://brainpains.com/wordpress/?feed=rss2&amp;p=97</wfw:commentRss>
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		<item>
		<title>Online Consciousness Conference&#8211;Online Now!</title>
		<link>http://brainpains.com/wordpress/?p=95</link>
		<comments>http://brainpains.com/wordpress/?p=95#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 20 Feb 2009 15:18:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Robert Howell</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[Announcements]]></category>

		<category><![CDATA[Conference]]></category>

		<category><![CDATA[Consciousness]]></category>

		<category><![CDATA[Philosophy]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://brainpains.com/wordpress/?p=95</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[&#8220;Consciousness Online&#8221; is a web-based philosophy conference organized by Richard Brown from LaGuardia College, CUNY.  Richard has done a great job bringing together some great papers presented by excellent philosophers around the globe. Papers are presented by video and by narrated powerpoint, and comments and discussion will also be handled online.  It&#8217;s an interesting format, [...]]]></description>
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		<title>Congratulations, Clayton!</title>
		<link>http://brainpains.com/wordpress/?p=93</link>
		<comments>http://brainpains.com/wordpress/?p=93#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 15 Feb 2009 17:51:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Robert Howell</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[Announcements]]></category>

		<category><![CDATA[Clayton Littlejohn]]></category>

		<category><![CDATA[Job Market]]></category>

		<category><![CDATA[UTSA]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://brainpains.com/wordpress/?p=93</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Clayton Littlejohn has accepted a tenure track position at U. Texas San Antonio!  It&#8217;s an excellent job and well deserved&#8211;in my opinion Clayton is a top notch philosopher who has already made excellent contributions to the field and is one of the best teachers we&#8217;ve had at SMU.  We&#8217;ll be terribly sorry to see him [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://brainpains.com/wordpress/?feed=rss2&amp;p=93</wfw:commentRss>
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		<item>
		<title>New Baby!</title>
		<link>http://brainpains.com/wordpress/?p=79</link>
		<comments>http://brainpains.com/wordpress/?p=79#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 17 Jan 2009 21:03:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Philippe Chuard</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://brainpains.com/wordpress/?p=79</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A bit of product placement on Brainpains: our colleague Robert just got a book out with OUP, co-authored with Torin Alter. (open the post to see the beautiful cover!)

I haven&#8217;t quite finished reading it, but it&#8217;s a very good intro to the mind-body problem&#8211; clear, clever, entertaining, and a  good survey of recent debates about [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://brainpains.com/wordpress/?feed=rss2&amp;p=79</wfw:commentRss>
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		<item>
		<title>Call for Applications for X-Phi Summer Institute</title>
		<link>http://brainpains.com/wordpress/?p=77</link>
		<comments>http://brainpains.com/wordpress/?p=77#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 17 Jan 2009 17:23:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>JFisher</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://brainpains.com/wordpress/?p=77</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Shaun Nichols asked that I post the following information about the the NEH summer institute he&#8217;s helping to organize.  It looks like a good opportunity for people interested in experimental philosophy.

Experimental Philosophy is a new movement that uses experiments to address traditional philosophical questions.  Although the movement is only a few years old, it has [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://brainpains.com/wordpress/?feed=rss2&amp;p=77</wfw:commentRss>
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		<item>
		<title>Is Physicalism Contingent?</title>
		<link>http://brainpains.com/wordpress/?p=75</link>
		<comments>http://brainpains.com/wordpress/?p=75#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 12 Dec 2008 19:43:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Philippe Chuard</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://brainpains.com/wordpress/?p=75</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The other week, we read an interesting and intriguing paper by Joe Levine and Kelly Trogdon on “The Modal Status of Materialism” (Phil.Studies), arguing that the contingency of physicalism clashes with the necessity of realization and physicalist supervenience. The upshot isn’t that such a clash can be avoided, but that we shouldn’t think of physicalism [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://brainpains.com/wordpress/?feed=rss2&amp;p=75</wfw:commentRss>
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		<title>Perceptual Demonstratives and Indirect Realism</title>
		<link>http://brainpains.com/wordpress/?p=69</link>
		<comments>http://brainpains.com/wordpress/?p=69#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 25 Nov 2008 16:53:07 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Brad Thompson</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[]]></category>

		<category><![CDATA[perception]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://brainpains.com/wordpress/?p=69</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[We recently read Derek Brown's "Indirect perceptual realism and demonstratives" (Philosophical Studies, forthcoming [click on post title for link]).  I'm currently writing up a paper on perceptual demonstratives, and have some sympathies to views in the ballpark of Indirect Realism, so I was especially interested in Brown's paper.  Brown's task in the paper is to defend Indirect Realism from two related arguments he finds in Snowdon (1992, Crane volume) and A.D. Smith (2002, The Problem of Perception).  Smith argues that Indirect Realism is incoherent (there is no genuinely Realist view once we abandon the idea that we directly perceive the external world), and Snowdon argues that perceptual demonstrative judgments are fundamental to our belief-acquisition and knowledge of the external world but that Indirect Realism fails to render those judgments true, and thus undermines our knowledge of the external world.  Both arguments rely on some claims about the status of demonstrative judgments about external objects on the Indirect Realist view.  Brown defends Indirect Realism by arguing that there is nothing problematic about those judgments according to Indirect Realism.

Without going into too much detail on the particulars of Snowdon or Smith (although I will reconstruct Smith's argument or something like it, below), I might simply note that Brown finds both arguments to rely on an ungrounded assumption that demonstrative judgments such as "That is a violin" would be false under Indirect Realism.  Brown thinks that both authors might be confusing the epistemic dependence of such judgments (on the ability to perceive a perceptual intermediary) with a kind of semantic dependence.  Brown's notion of semantic dependence is that such judgments, in the case of indirect perception, are about propositions that include the dependence relation as a constituent.  He suggests that both Smith and Snowdon might mistakenly be assuming that perceptual demonstrative judgments include the fact that we are non-dependently perceiving as part of their content.  If they did, then such judgments would come out as false on the Indirect Realist view.

Now I certainly agree with Brown that it is implausible to suppose that perceptual dependence has a semantic status in his sense.  But I also think it is unlikely that either Snowdon or Smith had such a view in mind.  Perhaps Smith comes closest to such a view, since he puts weight on the claim that we take ourselves to be referring with a demonstrative to an item that is directly perceived (p. 16).  But perhaps these claims are meant to motivate something like my premise 1 below, rather than a claim about the content of demonstrative judgments.  

I find two problems with Brown's response to these arguments.  First, his positive support for the claim that a demonstrative can refer to an item that is only indirectly perceived is based on the use of demonstratives in a public language.  His primary example is of a person viewing a violin on television and saying "That is a violin".  I share the intuition that this sentence can be true, and that the demonstrative here plausibly refers to a violin and not to something more directly perceived (such as a region of the television screen).  But the opponent of Indirect Realism might concede that the use of demonstratives in a public language have this feature while denying that a certain sort of demonstrative thought is possible toward items that are only indirectly perceived.  

This leads to my second worry.  I think a more plausible version of the "semantic dependence" view would be precisely one that insists that items that are indirectly perceived can only be referred to in thought descriptively, whereas items that are directly perceived have a special status as items toward which we can directly refer via a demonstrative.  Direct perception puts us into cognitive contact with externalia in a way that is not possible otherwise.  This strikes me as a view that many Direct Realists appear to hold, and as part of the explanation for why they think defending Direct Realism is so important.  

Right or wrong, the above suggestion allows for us to make sense of Smith's argument in a way that makes it more plausible.  Smith appears to argue as follows:

1.  To be a Realist about the external world, one must hold that the items we can perceive and thereby demonstratively refer to in thought are "public objects of common reference".  The subject matter for which the question of Realism arises is precisely that which we demonstratively refer to in this way.  

2.  We can only demonstratively refer in thought to items that are directly perceived.

3.  According to Indirect Realism, that which we directly perceive is never a "public object of common reference".

4.  If Indirect Realism is true, then we cannot demonstratively refer in thought to "public objects of common reference". 

5.  Therefore, "Indirect Realism" is not a genuine form of Realism.

Obviously premises 1 and 2 deserve scrutiny.  But they each have some plausibility.  In defense of 2, it does seem that for items that we only perceive indirectly, they are in some sense thought about or known only via a description.  They are in a sense theoretical entities, items posited on the basis of what we perceive directly.  Smith's defense of something like premise 1 is that the world for which the question of Realism arises is the world we take ourselves to directly perceive.  We ask ourselves, "Is this book a public object?"  But if on the Indirect Realist view genuine demonstrative reference (in thought) can only be toward sensory intermediaries, then the answer to such questions must always be "no".

I find this point about the subject matter of Realism somewhat compelling.  On the other hand, it is worth noting that this argument does not show that Indirect Realism is incompatible with the claim that there exists a mind-independent external world of "ordinary objects".  I think many would find that Smith's notion of Realism is overly restrictive, and that the existence of a mind-independent external world that each of us inhabits and causally interacts with is sufficient for Realism.  
]]></description>
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