Date: 5 June, 2017
Time: 2 - 5 p.m.
Location: Room S3.41 , Strand Campus, King's College London
Time: 2 - 5 p.m.
Location: Room S3.41 , Strand Campus, King's College London
The Limits of Self-Knowledge and the Scope of Rational Agency
The capacity to know one’s own mind is sometimes explained by appeal to the idea that rational propositional attitudes are transparent to higher order reflection on them. Be that as it may, I argue that transparency provides evidence for a significant limit on our capacity to know about our own inarticulate, perception-based rational attitudes: one is often not in a position to know exactly which such attitudes one has. I explore some consequences concerning the scope of bodily and mental agency: details of one’s bodily movement which are often supposed to be non-intentional may in fact be intentional actions; details of one’s propositional attitudes which are often supposed to be intentional actions are in fact non-intentional. The argument about agency takes knowledge first in a familiar way. By contrast, the argument from transparency takes non-epistemic phenomena first, and exploits them to explain and defend the conclusion that our capacity for self-knowledge is limited. I sketch some advantages of this pluralist approach to explanation and argument in knowledge-oriented philosophy of mind. |
On the Epistemic Significance of Perceptual Structure
Visual experience possesses structural features. Of these, perhaps the most discussed are the boundaries of the visual field. These boundaries do not show up as additional ‘objects’ alongside ordinary objects and their visible properties; they instead show up as relatively invariant features of our experience of the external world. Philosophers of perception have exploited these features to explain, among other things, our perception of empty space (cf. Richardson 2010; Soteriou 2013). My focus is different. I use the epistemic role of the boundaries of the visual field to cast light on the way these features encode information about the world outside the mind. I begin with an oft-overlooked epistemic asymmetry between the boundaries of the visual field and the ordinary objects of perception. I then trace some implications of this asymmetry for a right account of the way the boundaries of the visual field encode information. One eventual upshot is a new constraint on accounts of the boundary between perception and cognition. |