CFP: Pacific Philosophical Quarterly: Is Perceptual Experience Disunified?

*Pacific Philosophical Quarterly*
Special Issue on * Is Perceptual Experience Disunified?*

Guest Editors: Jack Lyons (University of Arkansas) and Indrek Reiland (USC)

Deadline: June 1st, 2014

Submission Process: submit to [email protected], and Cc: [email protected]

Questions: [email protected]

Perceptual experiences of a single modality (e.g. visual experiences) are
phenomenologically unified. According to the commonly assumed, Unified
view, this shows that such experiences have a unified metaphysics and don’t
consist of further, more fundamental types of mental states or events. This
gives rise to debates over whether perceptual experiences are exclusively
Naïve Realist or Representationalist, whether they present us with only
low-level or with both low- and high-level properties, and whether they’re
exclusively non-conceptual or conceptual.

In contrast, according to the recently emerging Disunified view, such
experiences have a disunified metaphysics. For example, take a visual
experience of a white knight from a particular point of view. On the
historically most prominent version of such a disunified view, associated
with Thomas Reid, this experience consists of a non-intentional sensation
which determines its phenomenal character, and something like a judgment
that this is a white knight. On another, more recent version, the
experience consists of a non-conceptual and non-propositional event of
awareness of an object, property, or a cluster of properties and a
conceptual and propositional event that represents the knight as being
white (Bengson et. al. 2011, Bengson 2013). On yet another emerging
version, experiences consist of non-conceptual events that present us with
only low-level properties, and conceptual events which present us also with
high-level properties (e.g. Brogaard 2013a, 2013b, Lyons 2005, 2009,
Reiland 2013, Tucker 2011). Such views open up the possibility of
dissolving the aforementioned debates by taking perceptual experiences to
be partly Naïve Realist and partly Representationalist, allowing that a
part of them presents us with only low-level properties while another part
presents us both with low- and high-level properties, and taking them to be
partly non-conceptual, and partly conceptual.

We invite submissions for a special issue on unified vs. disunified views
of perceptual experience. The issue will include invited contributions by
John Bengson and Berit Brogaard. Possible topics include, but are not
limited to:

- Arguments for Unified vs. Disunified views

- Relation between views on which experiences have many contents and
Disunified views

- Development and defense of particular Disunified views (What are the two
events like? What roles do they play? What’s the relation between them?)

- Unified vs. Disunified views and:

* cognitive science
* the metaphysics of experience
* experience of high-level properties
* non-conceptualism/conceptualism* cognitive penetrability* cognitive phenomenology* perceptual justification

- Historical precedents of Disunified views in Descartes, Locke, Reid,
Kant, Sellars and others


References

*Bengson*, J., *Grube*, E., & *Korman*, D. 2011. “A New Framework for
Conceptualism”. *Nous*, 45, pp.157-189

*Bengson*, J. 2013. “Presentation and Content”. Forthcoming in* Nous*

*Brogaard*, B. 2013a. “Phenomenal Seemings and Sensible Dogmatism”.
Forthcoming in *Seemings and Justification: New Essays on Dogmatism and
Phenomenal Conservatism*. Ed. C. Tucker

*Brogaard*, B. 2013b. “Seeing as a Non-Experiential Mental State: The Case
from Synesthesia and Visual Imagery”. Forthcoming in*Consciousness Inside
and Out: Phenomenology, Neuroscience, and the Nature of Experience*. Ed. R.
Brown

*Lyons*, J. 2005. “Perceptual Belief and Nonexperiential Looks”. *Philosophical
Perspectives*, 19, pp. 237-256

*Lyons*, J. 2009. *Perception and Basic Beliefs:* *Zombies, Modules and the
Problem of the External World*. Oxford: Oxford University Press

*Reiland*, I. 2013. “On Experiencing High-Level Properties”.
Forthcoming in *American Philosophical Quarterly*

*Tucker*, C. 2010. “Why Open-Minded People Should Endorse Dogmatism”.
*Philosophical Perspectives*, 24, 529-45.