Accounting for Tastes: The Epistemic Significance of Perception’s Affective Character
Under Review
This paper explores the epistemology of a particular dimension of perceptual experience—its affective character: the ‘badness’ of, for example, the smell of garbage or the pain of a stubbed toe; the ‘goodness’ of the taste of chocolate, touch of sunshine, or sound of a musical chord. I take the view that affective character is epistemically significant, putting the perceiver in touch with axiological relations in which elements (garbage, bodily harm, sunshine, chocolate, and consonance) stand to perceivers. Two representationalist approaches to accommodate the affective character of experience—cognitivist and non-cognitivist—are explained and analyzed. Considering the objections they face, I motivate a non-representationalist alternative for capturing the epistemic significance of affective character. Because affective character is ubiquitous across the senses, the view developed suggests that perception is an inherently evaluative capacity and that some empirical judgments based on affectively valenced perceptual appearances are normative judgments.
What Should We Want from a View of Ethical Perception?
In Preparation
The thesis that perception is evaluative holds that perceptual phenomenology reflects external values, and that perceptual experiences are the basis of certain value judgments. Its antithesis is that perception is purely descriptive, and that all evaluation occurs post-perceptually. The two sides of this debate have historically not engaged with each other over the core question of whether perception is evaluative in character. This paper addresses that lacuna by sharpening the terms of the debate. I contrast two very different views of ethical perception, Perceptual Intuitionism (PI) and Evaluative Relationalism (ER). PI conceives of ethical perception as a quasi-visual representation of high-level deontic moral concepts, such as rightness and wrongness. ER, in contrast, conceives of ethical perception as a function of low-level affective phenomenology that valences phenomenal states across the sense modalities—affective character is evaluative because it is a source of epistemic access to axiological relations that involve the wellbeing of the perceiver. I argue that the differences between the views should decisively favor ER for naturalist realists about ethical value.
Presentationalism and Affective Character
In Preparation
Anil Gupta’s presentationalism holds that the rational role of experience is hypothetical—it licenses transitions from views to judgments. His is opposed to the conventional view that appearances independently confer some epistemic status on perceptual judgments. Gupta further reconceives of appearances as logical entities that can vary radically from presented elements. In this paper I argue that presentationalism cannot accommodate the affective character of perceptual appearances. It makes an implausible prediction: that faultless painful experiences can relate a perceiver to benefit and faultless pleasant experiences can relate a perceiver to harm. The upshot is that appearances must be more tightly bound to their elements than on Gupta’s account.
What is Pain and Why does it Hurt?
In Preparation
Here I develop a relationalist account of pain’s unpleasantness. I argue that a certain form of relationalism can explain why pain is painful—because it is constituted by harm. The same account, coincidentally, can explain why pain is harmful. That is, pain is harmful because it is constituted by harm.
Aesthetic Experience and Perceptual Sensitivity to Relational Value
In Preparation
Aristotle on Perception’s Epistemically Significant Evaluative Dimension
Unpublished
This is an older paper about Aristotle’s conception of aesthēsis—sensation—and phantasia—the sensory imagination. It is exploratory rather than persuasive. In it, I ask how Aristotle conceives of aesthēsis and phantasia as the basis of animal motivation, specifically locomotion—purposive movement that realizes a certain aim. This is the forebear of the idea that perception is discerning of perceiver-relative value in virtue of its specifically affective phenomenal character.