Phenomenal evidence and factive evidence
Date
2015
Authors
Schellenberg, Susanna
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Publisher
Kluwer Academic Publishers
Abstract
Perceptions guide our actions and provide us with evidence of the world
around us. Illusions and hallucinations can mislead us: they may prompt as to act in
ways that do not mesh with the world around us and they may lead us to form false
beliefs about that world. The capacity view provides an account of evidence that
does justice to these two facts. It shows in virtue of what illusions and hallucinations
mislead us and prompt us to act. Moreover, it shows in virtue of what we are in a
better epistemic position when we perceive than when we hallucination. In this
paper, I develop the capacity view, that is, the view that perceptual experience has
epistemic force in virtue of the epistemic and metaphysical primacy of the perceptual
capacities employed in perception. By grounding the epistemic force of
experience in facts about the metaphysical structure of experience, the capacity
view is not only an externalist view, but moreover a naturalistic view of the epistemology
of perceptual experience. So it is an externalist and naturalistic alternative
to reliabilism. I discuss the repercussions of this view for the justification of beliefs
and the epistemic transparency of mental states, as well as, familiar problem cases.
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Philosophical Studies
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Journal article
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2037-12-31