Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
August 2, 2019
Declan Smithies
257 citations
Consciousness plays an essential role in explaining how we acquire knowledge and epistemically justified belief about ourselves and our surroundings. Unconscious creatures who behave just as we do—zombies—cannot know anything about the world, since they have no epistemic justification to believe anything. All epistemic justification depends ultimately on consciousness. The argument draws on considerations in the philosophy of mind about the role of consciousness in mental representation, perception, cognition, and introspection, as well as general principles in epistemology about the nature of epistemic justification. These mutually reinforcing arguments form the basis for a unified theory bridging epistemology and the philosophy of mind.
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
January 18, 2019
Keith Allen
14 citations
This paper argues that naive realism—the view that veridical perceptions are essentially relational—should be understood as a transcendental project rather than an ordinary theory to be tested by cost-benefit analysis. Drawing on Strawson's account of reactive attitudes, the author proposes that naive realism occupies a special foundational role in explaining how perceptual experience is possible. This transcendental status would make naive realism, in a certain sense, immune to falsification by empirical evidence or competing theories. The paper develops a modest version of this transcendental naive realism.
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
July 9, 2026
Vivian Mizrahi
The article argues that light itself is invisible and serves only as the medium for sight, not its object. This view, traced to Aristotle and Alhazen, holds that colors are independent of light, which merely enables their visibility. The author contends that this invisibility resolves problems with color constancy—the perception of stable object colors despite changing illumination. Traditional theories explain constancy by the visual system discounting the illuminant's chromatic component, but if light is colorless, no such component exists. Drawing on Husserl's perspectivism, the author proposes that color variations under different lights are perspectival presentations of a single color, analogous to spatial shape variations. This approach avoids difficulties faced by color relationalism, reflectance physicalism, and enactivism.
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
November 21, 2025
Peter Fisher Epstein, Umrao Sethi
Empirical arguments in the philosophy of perception, such as the Argument from Structure, aim to settle debates between internalism and externalism about visual experience. This paper argues that the same empirical evidence used to support internalism about color experience also supports externalism about shape experience. Because a unified metaphysical account of visual experience is required, these opposing arguments cancel each other out, leading to a dialectical stalemate. Thus, empirical arguments do not overcome the limitations of armchair theorizing but instead reinforce the existing impasse.