Tetralog on Perception and Reason

“The Uneasy Heirs of Acquaintance” is my contribution to a four-way exchange about perception and reason with Bill Brewer, Aniil Gupta, and John McDowell. In this tetralog, we have each written a piece responding to the other three on the topic “Empirical Reason.” My piece locates all of our views in relation to the attempts by Gareth Evans and others he influenced to refigure Russell’s notion of acquaintance in perception. I invite my interlocutors to explain how they would reconcile the primary role of the perceived objects in shaping perceptual experience with the highly constructive nature of perceptual processing. This issue also turns up in my exchange with Christopher Peacocke in “Perception as Guessing vs. Perception as Knowing.”

I’ve also written a reply to my three interlocutors’ comments on me, called “Replies to Brewer, Gupta, and McDowell.”

All eight essays (each of our four original contributions, and each of our replies) will be published shortly in Philosophical Issues.

New Papers

“The Problem of Culturally Normal Belief” will be published in a volume edited by Robin Celikates, with a reply by Sally Haslanger. This paper focuses on the interface between a person’s cultural milieu and their mind, and makes the case that epistemic irrationality can be transferred “Inward” to a person’s mind from their milieu. Similar issues are discussed in my exchange with Endre Begby in a symposium on The Rationality of Perception in Analysis Reviews.

"Inferencia Sin Estimación” (translated by Álvaro Pelaez) has been published in I. Cervieri & A. Peláez (eds.) Contenido y Fenomenología de la Percepción. Aproximaciones Filosóficas. Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Unidad Cuajimalpa-Gedisa. This paper is a Spanish translation of “Inference Without Reckoning”, which was published this year in New Essays in Reasoning, eds. M. Balcerak-Jackson and J. Balcerak-Jackson, Oxford University Press.