Thanks to John Schwenkler and The Brains Blog for giving me this space to write about the new, revised edition of my book, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, co-authored with neuroscientist Francisco J. Varela (1946-2001) and psychologist Eleanor Rosch. The MIT Press first published the book in …
How should we explain ‘what it is like’ to perceive colour? One of the reasons why naïve realist theories of colour are interesting is that they promise to contribute towards a solution to the problem of consciousness. There is something puzzling about the way that problems about consciousness and conscious …
One of the reasons why philosophical discussions of colour are interesting and important is that they bear on a number of wider philosophical questions. In today’s post I want to introduce some meta-philosophical questions about the nature of philosophical inquiry that philosophical discussions of colour help to bring into focus. …
The second main claim made by the naïve realist is that colours are distinct from the physical properties of objects. In saying that colours are distinct from the physical properties of objects, the naïve realist is not necessarily saying that are ‘perfectly simple’ properties whose nature cannot be described further; …
According to the naïve realist, colours are mind-independent properties of objects that are distinct from their physical properties. In today’s post I outline the argument for the first part of the view: the claim that colours are mind-independent. To say that colours are mind-independent properties is to say that their …
Thanks to John Schwenkler for the invitation to write about my book, A Naïve Realist Theory of Colour (Oxford University Press, 2016). Colours are a prominent feature of the perceived world. They are important for us as perceivers, both because they allow us to distinguish and identify objects in our …
The extent and interest of third-personal self-knowledge notwithstanding, first-personal self-knowledge too deserves attention. In The Varieties of Self-Knowledge three chapters are devoted to a critique of contemporary accounts of it. In particular, I consider Armstrong’s reliabilist model, Peacocke’s and Burge’s different kinds of rationalism, Evans’s transparency method and its two …
