Unconscious Perceptual Justification

Consciousness Inside and Out: Phenomenology, Neuroscience, and the Nature of Experience, 2013

In his (2011) paper “There It Is” and his (2014) précis “There It Was,” Benj Hellie develops a sophisticated semantics for perceptual justification according to which perceptions in good cases can be explained by intentional psychology and can justify beliefs, whereas bad cases of perception are defective and so cannot justify beliefs. Importantly, Hellie also affords consciousness a central role in rationality insofar as only those good cases of perception within consciousness can play a justificatory function. In this commentary, I reserve judgment regarding Hellie’s treatment of the rational difference between good and bad cases, but I argue there can be what he views as good cases of perceptual justification outside of consciousness.

Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 2002

A belief must have justification if it is to count as knowledge. And it is a commonplace thought that in certain circumstances experiences can serve as justifications for beliefs. Moreover, many have thought that there is something distinctive about the wayin which experiences justify beliefs, and that there is something distinctive about experiences which accounts for the distinctive way in which they justify beliefs. In this paper, I seek to elucidate views about experience and justification that can make sense of these thoughts and that can show us why so many have been attracted to them.I think it is important to try to make sense of these thoughts concerning the justificatory role of experiences, for I suspect that we are losing the ability to see why philosophers have traditionally been attracted to such thoughts. Coherentism and reliabilism, perhaps the two most currently popular theories of epistemic justification, appear simply to reject the idea that experiences can justif...

Philosophical Issues, 2020

It is often assumed that perceptual experience provides evidence about the external world. But much perception can occur unconsciously, as in cases of masked priming or blindsight. Does unconscious perception provide evidence as well? Many theorists maintain that it cannot, holding that perceptual experience provides evidence in virtue of its conscious character. Against such views, I challenge here both the necessity and, perhaps more controversially, the sufficiency of consciousness for perception to provide evidence about the external world. In addition to motivating and defending the idea that unconscious perception can and does often provide evidence, I observe that whether or not perceptual phenomenology is relevant to the evidentiary status of perception depends on the nature of consciousness. And I argue that a well-supported theory of consciousness-higher-order thought theory-invites a striking conclusion: that perceptual phenomenology is not on its own sufficient to provide for evidence of the external world.

Contemporary Perspectives on Scepticism and Perceptual Justification (OUP)

Phenomenal Intentionality, 2013

Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion Volume 3, 2011

If I gave this book the justice it deserves, this review would never be completed. Dodd and Zardini have brought together a fine collection of essays, each of which reward careful study. After Dodd and Zardini's introductory essay, there are fifteen essays coming in at over three-hundred pages built around questions about perceptual justification. Ernest Sosa provides an excellent opening essay on Descartes's epistemology and its relation to Sosa's own virtue epistemology. Sosa argues that Descartes's epistemology aims for reflective knowledge of the puzzles that arise from animal knowledge. Descartes's goal is best understood as achieving a secure second-order perspective on the first-order animal knowledge. Descartes is not attempting to rebut a radical skepticism about natural, prereflective beliefs. The goal is to find a perspective at which we can reflectively endorse these beliefs from a stable and secure perspective.

Perceptual experiences justify. When I look at the black laptop in front of me and my perceptual experience presents me with a black laptop placed on my desk, my perceptual experience has justificatory force with respect to the proposition that there is black laptop on the desk. The present paper addresses the question of why perceptual experiences are a source of immediate justification: What gives them their justificatory force? I shall argue that the most plausible and the most straightforward answer to this question consists in what I call the phenomenological conception of perceptual justification. Perceptual experiences justify by virtue of their distinctive presentive phenomenology. This is a truly internalist conception that enjoys significant advantages over rival conceptions. In the course of his paper, I demonstrate the advantages of the phenomenological conception and defend it against a recent objection.

Illusionism is the thesis that phenomenal consciousness is an introspective illusion. The illusion problem (Frankish 2016) is to explain the cause of the illusion, or why it so powerfully seems to us that we are phenomenally conscious. Here, I propose a theory to solve the illusion problem, the ‘False Inference Theory’ or ‘FIT’. I argue that by considering three plausible hypotheses about our minds—which I call introspective opacity, the infallibility intuition, and the justification constraint—we can explain our powerful disposition to draw a specific set of false inferences about our sensory states. I argue that being subject to the illusion of phenomenal consciousness consists in having this disposition. I also explain the intuitive ineffability, intrinsicality, and subjectivity of phenomenal properties and propose a solution to the illusion meta-problem (Kammerer 2016, 2018, 2019), which challenges us to explain why illusionism strikes us as a deeply counterintuitive view.

Journal of Consciousness Studies , 2019

While there seems to be much evidence that perceptual states can occur without being conscious, some theorists recently express skepticism about unconscious perception. We explore here two kinds of such skepticism: Megan Peters and Hakwan Lau's experimental work regarding the well-known problem of the criterion-which seems to show that many purported instances of unconscious perception go unreported but are weakly conscious-and Ian Phillips' theoretical consideration, which he calls the 'problem of attribution'-the worry that many purported examples of unconscious perception are not perceptual, but rather merely informational and subpersonal. We argue that these concerns do not undermine the evidence for unconscious perception and that this skeptical approach results in a dilemma for the skeptic, who must either deny that there is unconscious mentality generally or explain why perceptual states are unique in the mind such that they cannot occur unconsciously. Both options, we argue, are problematic.