Annotated Bibliographies
This page is a collection of notes I have made on philosophy journal papers. If the notes are unclear––sorry––they’re meant for me. But I thought it might be useful to have them online.
A. J. Ayer (1973) Construction of Our Theory of the Physical World. In Philosophy As It Is (eds. Ted Honderich, Myles Burnyeat), 1984; 311-345.
Summary: Ayer’s paper, written at the convergence of metaphysics, philosophy of mind and epistemology, concerns two fundamental questions: What is it that we perceive? How do we construct our common-sense knowledge of the physical world? The first question concerns how it is that we characterise sense-data. The second question concerns the connection between sense-data, and our beliefs about the world––this is the problem of reality. It was David Hume who claimed that the knowledge that we have of sense-experience does not give us reason to believe the things we believe about the workings of the world. Ayer’s answer to the problem of reality is different to Hume’s. It must be mentioned that the problem of reality in general does not concern the nature of the physical world; rather, the problem is about the nature of experience itself. The realist view about the nature of experience is that, when sensing an object, we are in direct contact with it; it is the object itself which manifests as the thing being seen, or the thing being felt. As such, the problem of reality does not figure for the realist, since according to them objects are not private, but publicly observable entities. That objects are publicly observable entities for the realist also means that, through sensation, objects are not replaced by an intermediary: sense-data (the data of the senses which transmit sensible information about physical objects). This is where Ayer takes up Hume’s problem. When we look at an object, say a cigarette packet or book, Ayer says that we do not see or otherwise sense that the object is publicly observable or that we can access the object by a different sense. Moreover, we do not sense that an object continues existing when we step out of sight of it. Instead, Ayer argues that any claims we make about sense-experience and its relation to the physical world, we must get straight off from the world. So what is it that we perceive? Sense experience is characterised by Ayer as being made up of qualia, or sensible qualities. In the case of visual sense-experience, this includes qualities like blueness, roundness and largeness. Visual qualia also include patterns; for example, the quality of a cat-pattern when one sees a cat. This is to say that, in seeing a cat, visual qualities are arranged in such a pattern that they lead to a person constructing the belief that they see a cat. Collections of different kinds of qualia––e.g. colours like blueness and shapes like roundness––constitute the visual field. The different qualities, and the relations they enter into and their combinations, make up objects in the visual field. Turning collections of qualia into particular objects represents the step of turning qualia into ‘percepts’. There is in addition to the qualia of colour, following Nelson Goodman in The Structure of Appearance, the qualia of place and the qualia of time. Qualia of place refers to a place in the visual field. Qualia of time does not concern when physical events happen, but the order of sense experience. We notice when an experience ends, and a new one begins––we construct our understanding of sense experience on the basis that following an experience of a blue object, we might then have an experience of something red. It is in this conjunction, much like Hume’s thought, that we notice the flow, or contiguity, of the senses by their habitual movement. Such a method of outlining sense experience gives a framework for the description of what appears in vision. Still, Ayer’s aim is not to organise the appearance of the visual field, but to see how appearances can act as the foundation of our interpretations. There is an objection, the ‘private language argument’, which was raised by Wittgenstein. The argument is this: an observer recognises the patterns which he sees, including things like pains that he only can characterise. But how can they be sure that they recognise qualia correctly? Since a private language requires rules, and the rules involve an independent check to make sure that they are being used correctly. So there can be no private language if qualia are private to observers.
Author’s views: While Ayer thinks that qualia are not private, he considers an analogy based on Flaherty’s film about the lives of eskimos. On seeing the film, the eskimo rushes to harpoon the seal shown on the screen. The analogy, much like Plato’s analogy of the cave, demonstrates the difficulty that no experience could determine that we are constantly mistaken in taking sensible qualities as having physical objects behind them. In this difficulty, Hume took the apparent stability in ‘perception’ as having constancy and coherence, which he treats as the explanation for how it is that we are deceived into taking perception as evidence for a persisting world. Whereas Ayer takes the relations of perception as “justifying an acceptable theory”. Namely, we come to this justification not through logic, but in the same way as Hume, that we employ our imagination in forming our belief that there is a persisting world. Here Ayer creates a demarcation: the world of sense provides the primary system from which we draw purely factual statements. Any further statements, for instance the stripped-down properties of matter which physical science describes, can take the position in a secondary system––the entities described by the physical sciences are therefore “a creature of theory”. This secondary system has the purpose “of conceptual tools which served for the arrangement of the primary facts”. What is Ayer’s main claim, then, about how we construct our common-sense views about physical reality? Ayer uses the pragmatist notion of the ‘central body’: we associate qualia from a central point of view, namely the observer’s body, and the observer over time begins to make correlations about the way his experience works, and the apparent origin of the causes of his qualia (actual physical objects). The observer moreover distances himself from his perceptions, and in communicating with other observers, gains some corroboration about the structure of the world. At the end of the paper, Ayer invokes John Locke’s views of empiricism. Qualia could be transferred to the observer, leaving pure ‘matter’ as the objects described by physical science. The difficulty here is that since spatial relations are said to exist, when qualia are transferred to the interior of the observer, how can spatial relations continue to exist without their content? Secondly, Locke considered that ‘particles’ are the building blocks of perceptible objects. Despite being colourless, when enough of them are collected, they produce coloured objects. But this latter avenue seems to go against common sense. Nevertheless, Ayer thinks the view is not strictly untenable. His conclusion is that, ultimately, in order for us to determine what there is––what it is that we perceive and the probable causes behind perceptions––this determination must be treated as being empirical only if we have a framework for answering the questions that constitute what is arguably the central problem in all of human thought: the problem of reality.
Evaluation: Arguably this is one of the best papers in the whole of contemporary analytic philosophy, especially since it concerns a central problem of philosophy that unites metaphysics, philosophy of mind and epistemology. Despite Ayer’s dense prose, a careful reading of this paper is time well spent.
Reflection: Ayer’s demarcation between the primary and secondary system is useful, and requires further thought. Moreover, the idea that we can only have justification for an acceptable theory about the relation between our beliefs about the world, and sense experience, is backed up by how we commonly think of our development, and the knowledge that we form about the world-mind relation. How else are we to solve that grand question––what is it that we see?
Tyler Burge (2014) Perception: Where Mind Begins. Philosophy, 89(3):385-403.
Summary: What is mind? Where does mind begin? Which animals have minds? These are some of the questions that Tyler Burge aims to address in “Perception: Where Mind Begins”. Burge is interested in what we know about minds in humans, and other terrestrial animals. He casts aside epistemic questions about whether we could know that others have minds, or how it is that we know that they have minds. Certain mammals have eyes that express willingness, intelligence, and empathy. Spiders, bees, and ants on one hand do not express the same attributes through their eyes. Yet, Burge argues that arthropods cooperate, act in each other’s interests, and convey knowledge through their actions. Spiders spin webs. Bees communicate with one-another. Knowledge about how to spin webs and communicate are things that only minds possess. Thus: which marks, or characteristics of the mind, are common to arthropods and humans? Burge outlines two specific marks: representational psychological states, and states of consciousness. As part of their intrinsic nature, representational psychological states possess aspects such as truth and accuracy. These aspects ground explanations in the perceptual sciences. ‘Truth’ is about the veridicality of propositions; beliefs can be true or false dependent on the truth of the proposition that underlies a belief. ‘Accuracy’ concerns symbols; maps or drawings can be be accurate or inaccurate. Perceptual states are non-propositional, but they can be accurate or inaccurate––such as whether one perceives a subject matter in the environment accurately or inaccurately (visual illusions are an example of inaccurate perception). Burge claims that a modern, mature science like perceptual psychology invokes accuracy or inaccuracy in explanations of perception. Bacterial movement is not explained in terms of psychological states; since bacteria do not perceive. Whereas perceptual states in humans and other animals are invoked in explanations through veridicality conditions, since such perceptual states are real aspects of the psychologies. Burge uses ‘representation’ in a novel way. Philosophical notions of ‘representation’ in perception might often refer to ‘information-registration’––where a state X provides information about a state Y if X is correlated with Y. ‘Causal’ notions of representations are another type of invocation; instances of state X must be causally dependent on instances of state Y. A third type of ‘representation’ might also be invoked in the perceptual sciences, that of biological function; for some state X to represent Y, X must correlate, be causally dependent on and be functionally correlated with Y. This latter, causal-informational-biological notion considers what biological structures are for and what they do for an organism in order to aid its survival. Burge is clear that these representational notions are not sufficient since they fail to capture the real aspect of psychological perception, and are likely to lead to mechanistic views, or to rendering the “whole living world as purely psychological”. Burge’s preferred method of grounding perception is through perceptual constancies.
Author’s views: Mind begins with perception; perception is the most primitive kind of psychological state. Burge’s main question, what is mind?, builds on the idea that perception is a fundamental state in some organisms. Thus he follows with a question that has more scope: how are perceptual states formed? Perceptual processing generates objectification of the physical environment by means of representational states. Objectification of individual items in the physical environment involves the sidelining of local or idiosyncratic features of individuals. An individual item in the environment is differentiated from the environment itself. For Burge, perceptual states are those which register proximal stimulations. These are stimulations which are closest to sensory receptors––and only those states which have perceptual constancies. What is a perceptual constancy? Some examples of perceptual constancies are shape, location, and luminance. Shape constancy is to see a square pattern as being square irrespective of whether it is viewed directly or viewed from an angled position. Location constancy refers to the perceptual capacity of perceiving an individual at a given distance and location. Luminance constancy refers to the capacity to represent a given lightness of the environment as being the same under different conditions. The primary claim of the paper is this: “the central aspect of perceptual systems that makes it necessary to explain formation of their states in terms of representational contents with veridicality conditions is the presence of perspectival capacities inherent in perceptual constancies.” Perceptual constancy explains the formation of psychological states which we can understand through perceptual science by invoking representational terms.
Evaluation: The paper starts off simply, but unfolds into complexity––the good kind. It’s nicely written, with a structure that has placed value on narrative and clarity. Burge’s conclusion that we employ representation in the perceptual sciences in order to understand psychological states through the necessary aspect of perspective changes, is extremely insightful.
Reflection: Burge has done a really nice job in this paper explaining his views, particularly in explicating perceptual constancy. It is an aspect of mind that is worth remembering at all times.
Aida Roige, Peter Carruthers (2019) Cognitive instincts versus cognitive gadgets: A fallacy. Mind & Language, 34, 540– 550.
Summary: Roige and Carruthers present some of Cecilia Heyes’ arguments from her 2018 book Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking. They argue against her main thesis, that capacities which distinguish humans from others animals are culturally acquired and created cognitive gadgets. Heyes distinguishes between cognitive grist and cognitive mills. Grist constitutes behaviour, information acquired over a lifetime, as well as specific skills, for example learning to play tennis. Whereas mills are the cognitive systems which allow one to acquire such skills. Heyes is interested in mills and according to Roige and Carruthers, her predominant question is as follows: what are the origins of learning, reasoning and skill acquisition which differentiates us from other animals? One paradigmatic example of a cognitive gadget is reading. Construed as such, reading is a cultural invention, acquired only in the last few thousand years. Other cognitive gadgets include capacities for selective social learning, imitation, mind reading (theory of mind) and language. Heyes compares cognitive gadgets with cognitive instincts. Cognitive instincts as such are fully specified and innate systems. In their critique against Heyes, Roige and Carruthers primarily focus on two items from Heyes’ book: social imitation and mind-reading. Heyes argues that both social imitation and mind-reading are cultural inventions, and are only acquired slowly and with effort during childhood, and such gadgets depend only on general-learning mechanisms. I’ll talk about some of the evidence Heyes uses in support of her view. Then in the “Author’s views” section I’ll talk about how Roige and Carruthers respond. Heyes argues that imitation is learned via the ‘Hebbian’ principle of learning that “neurons that fire together wire together”. The idea is that as infants move their hands or feet into their visual field, visual representations of body-movement are then wired together with the motor representations responsible for generating those movements. One criticism is that animals are general associative learners, so why don’t we see imitation on a massive scale in the animal kingdom? Yes, there are exceptions, but it is not widespread. Some exceptions: Yawning is also contagious in dogs. Moreover, baboons have three yawns (teeth covered, teeth uncovered and gums uncovered), and such yawns are imitated by other baboons despite not being able to observe their own actions. These appear to be instances of innate characteristics, as opposed to culturally derived “cognitive gadgets”. Heyes is silent on this criticism. Turning to mind-reading, the capacity for humans and primates to effectively model and intuit the thoughts and feelings of others, Heyes believes this is also an instance of a culturally acquired cognitive gadget on the basis of experience and general learning mechanisms. But how does one go from the bodily representations of others in one’s visual field to mentalistic concepts about the thoughts and feelings of others?
Author’s views: In the case of cultural group activities like ritual dancing or the marching of soldiers in step, Heyes argues that when people participate in such activities, they can see what they are doing, and simultaneously see the actions one is generating. Roige and Carruthers argue that Heyes’ reply begs the question, as it doesn’t explain why people participate in such activities in the first place. Roige and Carruthers prefer the view that there is at least some innate capacity for imitation, which is opposed to Heyes’ cognitive gadget view. In the case of mind-reading, Roige and Carruthers prefer the view that the starting state of a mind-reading system constitute a few basic primitives such as THINKS, WANTS, INTENDS AND SEES, along with “initial attribution rules”, like “when someone sees something, they come to think it”, and “when something happens in someone’s line of sight, they see it”. Such a system is an innately structured domain-specific system which responds to experience and input from culture and continues to improve well past adolescence. Citing numerous studies, Roige and Carruthers argue that Heyes’ view of culturally acquired “gadgets” and “mills” is too strong, and that she overlooks an intermediate theory. Such an intermediate theory “would postulate an innate imitation-learning mechanism, which may start with some crude mappings between action and perception, but whose functioning needs to be trained by experience” (p.5). Moreover, Roige and Carruthers believe that “an adapted special-purpose mechanism can re-deploy computational processes that are utilized elsewhere for very different purposes”. They lend support to this view on the basis that “relatively small genetic changes enabled a novel capacity to emerge”. So while humans and other mammals share a hefty amount of overlap in DNA, the smallest of changes can ramp and scale up. This leads to radically new behavioural and cognitive changes.
Evaluation: Roige and Carruthers have written a rich paper that I immensely enjoyed. I agree with their view that Heyes’ position is basically too strong and insufficiently argued for. Roige and Carruthers present strong arguments for their position that the human mind, and culture by extension, is “undergirded by a set of domain-specific and weakly innately-specified learning mechanisms”. The mind is a collection of in-built specialised tools that can be affected by experience and culture.
Reflection: Not much to say here, because this paper isn’t directly relevant for my research, but it is packed with psychologically important facts and observations.
Laura Gow (2021) Are sensory experiences contingently representational? A critical notice of David Papineau’s *The Metaphysics of Sensory Experience, Mind & Language, 36, 627-635.*
Summary: Representation is the power of something (ink on paper or neural process or paint marks on canvas) to stand for something else that has meaningful content (like a sentence, or a perception or a landscape in the case of a painting). Papineau believes that sensory experiences are only contingently representational, but not essentially representational. To draw out the difference, Papineau uses an analogy with words. Take the sentence, ‘Elvis Presley once visited Paris’. According to Papineau, that sentence contains a worldly condition; if Elvis did visit Paris, then the wordly condition is true. It’s false if he did not visit Paris. The words of the sentence are marks on a medium, in this instance a computer screen, but they can also be represented on paper, clay tablet, etc. The words represent something. But they only represent in virtue of the workings of the English language, not in virtue of the written marks themselves. If our languaged worked differently, then the sentence ‘Evlis Presley once visited Paris’ would stand for something else entirely. While Papineau believes that conscious sensory experiences do in fact represent, they do so contingently, because representations depend on how they are related or correlated to objects in the environment. Papineau’s position is influenced by the question: “how is it possible for the conscious features of a subject’s mind to bear a necessary connection to conditions involving wordly objects and properties?”. In other words, how can objects that are out there, distant from us––in the world––determine what is in my mind, in the here-and-now? Papineau argues against two versions of representationalism: “naturalist representationalism” and “phenomenal intentionalism”. Naturalist representationalism is the view that representational content is fixed by correlations with the environment and not by the intrinsic nature of people or the vehicles of representation in our bodies, i.e neural processes. Phenomenal intentionalists believe the reverse view, that conscious experience is internally constituted and essentially determines the representational content of the experience. Both views are essentially representationalist, as on these views it seems evident that, on experiencing a yellow ball (whether or not there really is a yellow ball present), yellowness and roundness form part of the experience. But we know that the current view in the science of vision is that when in the vicinity of particular objects, humans have evolved to have a particular colour experience, and other organisms have evolved to have different colour experiences when in the vicinity of those same objects. So colour exists only in experience, not in the world. Thus Papineau’s positive stance, the qualitative view, loosens the relationship between sensory experience and representation.
Author’s view: Laura Gow argues that one of the consequences of Papineau’s qualitative view is that perhaps we ought to stop thinking about sensory experience being accurate or truthful, in that sensory experience truly, and really, captures the external world. Instead, Gow argues that perhaps we ought to assess our representational mental states in terms of success––that certain representational states are able to track behaviours through space, and through later times, and they help us distinguish environmental features over our lifespans.
Evaluation: This paper is written for someone that has extensive familiarity with the topic and the current debate in the field. Some terms have not been clarified, i.e what is meant by “representational content”. It should not be taken as a given.
Reflection: Gow does a wonderful job of explaining Papineau’s position. Furthermore, she extends his view, arguing that if what Papineau says is true, that sensory experiences are strictly intrinsic properties experienced by people and only contingently related to the environment, then we ought to assess experience by its success rather than its truth.
Pär Sundström (2008) Is the mystery an illusion? Papineau on the problem of consciousness, Synthese, 163, 133-43.
Summary: We tend to believe that the properties of consciousness, qualities such as self-awareness, the qualities associated with seeing colours or hearing sounds, present us with a dilemma. There’s good reason to believe that consciousness properties just are material properties, but it appears mysterious as to how that can be the case. Consciousness properties are subjective or qualitative properties, unlike material properties. Sundstrom’s paper examines Papineau’s claim that while consciousness properties are identical with material properties, we think there’s a puzzle due to an instance of the illusion hypothesis. The illusion hypothesis holds that such a puzzle is easily explained away, as it arises out of superficial features of our thinking. By unraveling our confusions, Papineau claims we can get clearer about consciousness and its material nature. Specifically, Papineau believes that we suffer from an “intuition of mind-brain distinctness”, a “use-mention feature” of our phenomenal concepts of consciousness properties. Papineau states that when we have perceptual encounters with our environments, we acquire “sensory templates”, or “patterns” or “moulds” in the brain. When a sensory template is activated, we are having a conscious experience. But we use experiences to think about experiences. So when we think of pain = nociceptive neural activity, the left contains a qualitative concept whereas the right contains a material concept, and if we think using a material concept, we’ve left out the qualitative concept. This is dubbed the “anti-pathetic fallacy”, and it is this fallacy which leads to the intuition of mind-brain distinctness.
Author’s view: The author argues that the illusion hypothesis is only one way of looking at our displeasure of the apparent mind-brain distinctness. Another view is that current concepts or theories don’t capture the phenomena we need to understand in order to fully comprehend consciousness (as proposed by Nagel (1974), et al).
Evaluation: The paper nicely draws out the fine-grained distinctions between Papineau’s version of the illusion hypothesis and Nagel’s, et al, the lack of understanding hypothesis. Moreover, I think the author succeeds in derailing Papineau’s main claim that the puzzling link between the material properties of the brain and consciousness properties is due to a confusion about whether concepts like “pain” and “nociceptive neural activity” can co-refer––he highlights a difference between a “lack of conviction” that terms can co-refer and an instinctive convinction that they definitely don’t. The author also nicely draws on the idea of “sensory templates”. Some aspects of the paper were vague and lacking in clarity (latter part of section 3 primarily).
Reflection: The paper has helped me understand the illusion hypothesis, sensory templates and the formulation of the mind-brain distinctness intuition, more generally. I will aim to draw on these concepts. There’s also some nice quotes by David Papineau, Michael Tye and Brian Loar, though the latter two aren’t as clear as Papineau in formulating the problem.
Walter Veit (2020) Dennett and Spinoza, Australasian Philosophical Review, 4:3, 259-265.
Summary: Spinoza had a rich view of the world. Spinoza held that the mind and body are different modes of the same substance. Veit argues this line of thought is also evident in the conclusions that Ginsburg and Jablonka (2019) draw in their book, The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul. One conclusion is that the “evolution of consciousness constitutes a new mode of being”. This new mode of being is still very much part of nature. This thinking is also evident in Spinoza’s view of reason; that reason is not something that’s reflected from a rational world. Spinoza’s view is nuanced and naturalistic. For Genevieve Lloyd, Spinoza likely held the belief that human reason is “a flickering candle in immense darkness––a mere speck, whose laws have no significance for anything beyond itself” (Lloyd 2021, 203). Human reason, therefore, cannot provide a unified account of the world. A further consequence of this conclusion is that we can take a pluralistic approach to explanations of phenomena, but without buying into the idea that truth is simply subjective opinion. Such a consequence links to Dennett’s idea that we can apply different ‘stances’ or ‘lenses’ onto the world. While not mentioned in the paper, Dennett’s view is that we can take either a physical stance (the domain of physics and chemistry), a design stance (the domain of biology and engineering) or an intentional stance (the domain of software and minds) on the world. Accordingly, all stances are rendered equal. Beyond Spinoza’s and Dennett’s opposition to Cartesian dualism, Veit also draws a comparison between Dennett and Spinoza, that both have employed a ‘strange inversion of reasoning’. Spinoza writes: “…all final causes are nothing but human fictions. I shall, however, add this: this doctrine concerning the end turns Nature completely upside down. For what is really a cause, it considers as an effect. What is by nature prior, it makes posterior” (1677, in Schliesser (1994), 111-2). Moreover, both Dennett and Spinoza value metaphors and the imagination. Spinoza called the imagination the eyes of the soul. Dennett holds that “metaphors are the tools of thought” and that no one can think about consciousness without metaphors.
Author’s view: Veit agrees that Spinoza anticipated the predominant views in philosophy and neuroscience, particularly the idea of naturalistic pluralism and the notion that consciousness is self-reflection on body processes and body-world interaction (262). Dennett has similarly advocated a naturalistic stance on the evolution of consciousness, and I think Veit brings this out nicely.
Evaluation: Traditional scholarship holds that Spinoza may have held that reason is found in nature rather than human minds. This seems to contradict Lloyd’s and Veit’s reading of Spinoza, and at this stage it is unclear to me which is the more appropriate reading. Although Veit acknowledges that he was constrained by the tight word limit, I think the article can benefit from further expansion. Or at the very least for the sources to be clarified.
Reflection: Overall this is a very nice paper. Besides the squashed content, I think it’s a bit much for Veit to say that “Spinoza anticipated Dennett’s views”. The real nature of the situation is that Dennett was influenced by Spinoza. But otherwise there’s lots of good content and depth to this paper, and I think the views of Lloyd, Spinoza and Dennett were nicely brought out. I anticipate that I will be quoting from this paper.