Why it doesn’t matter to metaphysics what Mary learns

Cummins, Robert; Roth, Martin; Harmon, Ian

doi:10.1007/s11098-013-0110-1

Cited by 3 publications

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“…For the primary idea gives us a sort of imagistic knowledge, and this is not obviously the same thing as propositional knowledge. In contemporary terms (see Cummins et al ), this would make Locke a sort of epistemic pluralist who does think there is a type of epistemic value that is not reducible to propositional knowledge. This kind of epistemic value would also therefore hold of empathy.…”

Section: Empathy and Resembling Ideas Of Pleasure And Painmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Montague () appeals to resemblance (understood as “convey[ing] the intrinsic qualitative character” of something [2014, 45]), along with causation, in explaining how phenomenological properties, affective and otherwise, represent objective properties. Combining these proposals with the epistemic pluralism in Cummins et al would provide at least the start of a contemporary analogue of the Lockean account I have described.…”

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Lockean Empathy

Marshall¹

2016

The Southern J of Philosophy

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This paper offers an epistemic defense of empathy, drawing on John Locke's theory of ideas. Locke held that ideas of shape, unlike ideas of color, had a distinctive value: resembling qualities in their objects. I argue that the same is true of empathy, as when someone is pained by someone's pain. This means that empathy has the same epistemic value or objectivity that Locke and other early modern philosophers assigned to veridical perceptions of shape. For this to hold, pain and pleasure must be a primary quality of the mind, just as shape is a primary quality of bodies. Though Locke did not make that claim, I argue that pain and pleasure satisfy his criteria for primary qualities. I consider several objections to the analogy between empathy and shape‐perception and show how Locke's theory has resources for answering them. In addition, the claim that empathetic ideas are object‐matching sidesteps Berkeley's influential objection to Locke's theory of resemblance. I conclude by briefly considering the prospects for a similar defense of empathy in contemporary terms.

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Section: Empathy and Resembling Ideas Of Pleasure And Painmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 91%

Lockean Empathy

Marshall¹

2016

The Southern J of Philosophy

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What is a philosophical effect? Models of data in experimental philosophy

Huebner

2015

Philos Stud

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Toward a Noninferentialist, Nonreliabilist Account of Perceptual Justification

Roth¹

2019

The Southern J of Philosophy

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While it may be a datum of common sense that perceptual experiences can justify beliefs, there is no clear consensus about how they can do so. According to what I call “inferentialism,” perceptual experiences can justify beliefs because perceptual experiences have propositional contents and thus can serve as reasons for belief. A critical commitment of inferentialism is that justification requires the obtaining of a nonarbitrary or nonaccidental semantic relation between justifier and justified, a requirement that I call semantic appropriateness (SA). By contrast, reliabilists reject SA and argue that perceptual experiences can justify beliefs because perceptual experiences are part of a reliable belief‐forming process. In this paper, I explore whether a commitment to SA inevitably leads to a commitment to inferentialism. This exploration is largely motivated by doubts over whether perceptual experiences have propositional contents. If those doubts prove to be well‐founded, then it seems either that perceptual experiences cannot justify beliefs or that some form of reliabilism is true. I argue that although we should take the doubts seriously, there is a way to make sense of SA that does not require inferentialism.

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Why it doesn’t matter to metaphysics what Mary learns

Cited by 3 publications

References 12 publications

Lockean Empathy

Lockean Empathy

What is a philosophical effect? Models of data in experimental philosophy

Toward a Noninferentialist, Nonreliabilist Account of Perceptual Justification

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