Rene Magritte, The muscles of the sky (Les muscles celestes), 1927

Rene Magritte, The muscles of the sky (Les muscles celestes), 1927

My research is situated at the intersection of the philosophy of mind, metaphysics and early modern philosophy. My guiding thought is that a satisfactory understanding of sensory experience hinges on an accurate conception of the metaphysics of sensible qualities; and, furthermore, that informing our metaphysics with historical discussions of the manifest world can only benefit the scope of our investigation. In a current book project,  I develop a new metaphysical framework, according to which sensible qualities are an ontologically flexible kind, in order to dissolve a central puzzle in the philosophy of mind—namely, how veridical perception can make us constitutively aware of the mind-independent world, if phenomenologically identical delusive experiences are possible. You can read a short overview of the project here

Publications

Forthcoming. “Defining Sensory Representation.Inquiry. 

In the paper, I argue that the notion of sensory representation that Pautz defines (via the Ramsey method) has incompatible features. The notion is defined in terms of its ability to explain both the phenomenal character of experience and its ability to give us cognitive access to perceptible properties, all while being existence neutral. I argue that there is strong reason to conclude that no worldly relation could play all three roles simultaneously.

Forthcoming. “A (Qualified) Defense of Diaphaneity.” To appear in Farid Masrour & Ori Beck (Eds.), The Relational View of Perception: New Essays. Routledge.

Forthcoming. “Diaphaneity and the Ways Things Appear.” To appear in Otavio Bueno & Jan Voshoolz (Eds). Essays on Markus Gabriel’s New Realism. Synthese Library, Springer.

In this pair of papers,  I engage with recent attempts by Ori Beck and French & Phillips to formulate versions of naïve realism that give up a contested thesis called Diaphaneity. In its strongest form, Diaphaneity is the thesis that two experiences can differ in phenomenal character if and only if they differ in which items the subject is presented with. I argue that the naïve realist must hold on to at least a qualified version of the thesis if they want to remain committed to some of the key phenomenological and epistemic motivations for naïve realism.

Forthcoming. “Must Epistemic Values Conflict?” To appear in Miloš Vuletić & Ori Beck (Eds.) Empirical Reason and Sensory Experience. Springer.

This is a short commentary on a paper by Crispin Wright titled “Two Conceptions of Perceptual Justification”. Wright argues that skeptical scenarios like the New Evil Demon Scenario fail to move the needle towards internalist or externalist accounts of perceptual justification because these accounts disagree about how to weigh different epistemic values (rational coherence vs. knowledge). Crucially, Wright seems to presuppose that an internalist (or externalist) view of justification goes hand in hand with an internalist (or externalist) view of perceptual experience. I argue that we ought to understand the disjunctivist as combining an externalist view of perceptual experience with an internalist account of perceptual justification. This makes them uniquely poised to secure both epistemic values of rational coherence and the pursuit of knowledge.

2023. Sensible Individuation. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 107: 168-191. 

There is a straightforward view of perception that has not received adequate consideration because it requires us to rethink basic assumptions about the objects of perception. In this paper, I develop a novel account of these objects—the sensible qualities—which makes room for the straightforward view. I defend two primary claims. First, I argue that qualities like color and shape are “ontologically flexible” kinds. That is, their real definitions allow for both physical objects and mental entities to be colored or shaped. Second, a single instance of these qualities can be attributed to more than one entity. Just as we attribute the same instance of a material property to a statue and to the clay that constitutes it, single instances of sensible qualities should be attributed both to the physical objects perceived and to the perceptual states that have those instances as their objects.

2021. Mind-Dependence in Berkeley and the Problem of Perception. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 99 (4):648-668.

On the traditional picture, accidents must inhere in substances in order to exist. Berkeley famously argues that a particular class of accidents—the sensible qualities—are mere ideas; entities that depend for their existence on minds. To defend this view, Berkeley provides us with an elegant alternative to the traditional framework: sensible qualities depend on a mind, not in virtue of inhering in it, but in virtue of being perceived by it. This metaphysical insight, once correctly understood, gives us the resources to solve a central problem that still plagues the philosophy of perception: the problem of how, given the power of the mind to create phenomenally rich experiences, ordinary perception can nonetheless be said to acquaint us with the mind-independent world.

2021. The Varieties of Instantiation. Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 7 (3):417-437.

Working with the assumption that properties depend for their instantiation on substances, I argue against a unitary analysis of instantiation. On the standard view, a property is instantiated just in case there is a substance that serves as the bearer of the property. But this view cannot make sense of how properties that are mind-dependent depend for their instantiation on minds. I consider two classes of properties that philosophers often take to be mind-dependent: sensible qualities like color, and bodily sensations like itches. Given that the mind is never itself literally red or itchy, we cannot explain the instantiation of these qualities as a matter of their having a mental bearer. Appealing to insights from Berkeley, I defend a view on which a property can be instantiated not in virtue of having a bearer—mental or material—but rather in virtue of being the object of a conscious act of perception. In the second half of the paper, I suggest that the best account of sensible qualities and bodily sensations ultimately makes use of both varieties of instantiation.

2021. Conscious Experience: A Logical Inquiry. The Philosophical Review, 130 (4): 609–614.

2020. “Sensible Over-Determination”. Philosophical Quarterly, 70/280: 588-616.

I develop a view of perception that does justice to Price's intuition that all sensory experience acquaints us with sensible qualities like colour and shape. Contrary to the received opinion, I argue that we can respect this intuition while insisting that ordinary perception puts us in direct contact with the mind-independent world. In other words, Price's intuition is compatible with naïve realism. Both hallucinations and ordinary perceptions acquaint us with instances of the same kinds of sensible qualities. While the instances in hallucination are mind-dependent, those in veridical perception are not. The latter are ontologically over-determined—they have their existence guaranteed both in virtue of having a material bearer and in virtue of being perceived by a mind. Such over-determined instances are mind-independent—they can continue to exist unperceived, because, in addition to the minds that perceive them, their existence is guaranteed by the material objects that are their bearers.

Smith, E.E., Myers, N., Sethi, U., Pantazatos, S., Yanagihara, T., Hirsch, J. (2012). “Conceptual Representations of Perceptual Knowledge.” Cognitive Neuropsychology, 29(3), 237-248.

Many neuroimaging studies of semantic memory have argued that knowledge of an object's perceptual properties are represented in a modality-specific manner. These studies often base their argument on finding activation in the left-hemisphere fusiform gyrus — a region assumed to be involved in perceptual processing—when the participant is verifying verbal statements about objects and properties. In this paper, we report an extension of one of these influential papers—Kan, Barsalou, Solomon, Minor, and Thompson-Schill (2003 )—and present evidence for an amodal component in the representation and processing of perceptual knowledge. Participants were required to verify object-property statements (e.g., "cat-whiskers?"; "bear-wings?") while they were being scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We replicated Kan et al.'s activation in the left fusiform gyrus, but also found activation in regions of left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and middle temporal gyrus, areas known to reflect amodal processes or representations. Further, only activations in the left IFG, an amodal area, were correlated with measures of behavioural performance.