Workshop on Perception, Action and Time. 2-3 June (UAB).

Workshop on Perception, Action and Time
Barcelona, June 2-3, 2011
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Department of Philosophy
Casa Convalescència
Carrer Sant Quintí and Carrer Sant Antoni M. Claret

THURSDAY JUNE 2nd
09:30 – 11:00
Susanna Schellenberg (ANU)
‘Perceptual Capacities’

Abstract
What is the metaphysical nature of perceptual experience? What evidence does
experience provide us with? These questions are typically addressed in isolation. In
order to make progress in answering both questions perceptual experience needs to be
studied in an integrated manner. The aim of this paper is to make headway in
developing a unified account of the phenomenological and epistemological role of
perceptual experience. First, I develop a modest externalist view of the phenomenal
character of perceptual experience. The view is externalist in that phenomenal
character is analyzed in terms of perceptual relations between perceivers and their
environment. The view is modestly externalist insofar as subjectively
indistinguishable perceptions and hallucinations are argued to share a common
element that grounds their common phenomenal character. Hallucinating subjects
employ discriminatory capacities, namely the very same ones that in a subjectively
indistinguishable perception are employed as a consequence of being related to
external, mind-independent objects or property-instances. Employing such
discriminatory capacities grounds the phenomenal character of experience. Then, I
show how this account of the metaphysical nature of perceptual experience can be
fruitfully exploited for a dual level account of perceptual evidence.
11:00 – 11:30 Coffee Break
11:30 – 13:00 Marta Vidal (UAB)
               ‘Control in Action’

The notion of control is becoming a key notion in the philosophy of action, since
control is presented as a possible sufficient condition for agency and action. I will
evaluate one of the recent proposals for conceptualizing control, one that Andy Clark
offers about actions that involve objects. Against what he takes to be the traditional
model of control, Clark holds that control can only be exercised over the high-level
aspects of action (reasoning, memory, planning, among others) but not over the
execution of the movements, which are carried out in a zombie way. Clark links up,
on the one hand, the distinction between systems that support consciousness and
systems that don’t with the distinction, on the other hand, between high-level aspects
of action and movements. I will present two phenomena that cannot be explained without the intervention of the conscious-supporting system in the execution of
movements. Both phenomena ask for a more complex notion of consciousness (a
more dynamic notion, capable of automatizing some processes) than the one used by
Clark. Clark’s view on consciousness, I shall argue, undermines his notion of control.
Finally I will evaluate one presupposition that both Clark’s hypothesis and the
traditional model share, i.e. that experience is the bearer of control. I will argue that a
triggering element is necessary to execute control and this element might turn out to
conceptualize control as an action. If this were so, then control could not be viewed as
an action-free element that suffices for action and agency.

13:00 – 14:30 Lunch
14:30 – 16:00 Ian Phillips and Hanna Pickard (Oxford-UCL / Oxford)
               ‘Time perception and psychopathology’

Abstract
Normal subjects sometimes report experiences in which time ‘seemed to slow down’
or ‘speed up’. In subjects with psychotic psychopathology, experiences of time
‘speeding up’ are not only common but also the cause of severe distress. Such
experiences are clinically and philosophically puzzling in their own right. They also
present an apparent counter-example to the naïve view of temporal experience
according to which there is a match between the temporal structure of our experience
itself and the temporal structure of the objects of our experience. (For a defence of the
naïve view see Phillips, I.B. ‘The temporal structure of experience’ forthcoming in D.
Lloyd and V. Arstila (eds.) Subjective Time: the Philosophy, Psychology, and
Neuroscience of Temporality MIT Press.) Our paper has two aims. First to make
sense of subject experience in cases of time ‘speeding up’ in a way which accounts
for the distress experienced by those with psychotic psychopathology. Second to
show that the naïve view is quite unthreatened by such experiences when they are
correctly understood.

16:00 – 16:30 Coffee Break
16:30 – 18:00 Christoph Hoerl (Warwick)
               ‘On temporal illusions’

Abstract
Temporal illusions play an important role in some recent debates about the nature of
temporal experience, especially debates between what are sometimes referred to as
intentionalist vs. extensionalist approaches to temporal experience. I argue that the
arguments that have been put forward in these debates have wider, and as yet largely
unrecognized, ramifications for accounts of the nature of perceptual experience in
general. I also argue that philosophers writing about temporal illusions have so far
paid insufficient attention to actual empirical work on temporal illusions, and that, as
a result, the full range of possible theoretical positions has not been fully explored.

FRIDAY JUNE 3rd
09:00 – 10:30
Conor McHugh (Jean Nicod – Southampton)
‘Judging as a free action’
Abstract
How can we be responsible for our beliefs, if we do not have voluntary control over
them? I argue that we enjoy a kind of freedom of belief, and that it is essential to this
freedom that it can be exercised in free acts of judging. This freedom should be
understood, I argue, in terms of responsiveness to reasons. Freedom of judging can
thus be incorporated under a plausible general account of free action. However,
judging has a constitutive aim that constrains the kinds of reasons to which it can be
responsive. In this respect judging differs from ordinary free bodily actions -
including, I argue, actions that are instrumentally motivated. I discuss the implications
of this account for the notion of epistemic agency and for responsibility for belief.
10:30 – 10:45 Coffee Break
10:45 – 12:00 Fabian Dorsch (Fribourg-Glasgow)
               ‘The Phenomenal Presence of Reasons’

Abstract
Some of the central features of our mental episodes determine —and thus are
reflected by— their phenomenal character (i.e. by their most determinate
introspectible property which constitutes what they are like for us from the inside).
Most notably, the presentationality of sensory episodes is phenomenologically salient.
The specific objects and features presented in perception, perceptual imagination,
episodic memory or bodily sensation make a phenomenal difference; as does the
visual, auditory, tactile or kinaesthetic manner in which they are presented. The
respective aspects of the phenomenal character of the episodes concerned may be
labelled sensory aspects, given that the kind of objectual presentation concerned is
sensory in nature.
Whether there are also non-sensory aspects of phenomenal character is more
controversial. Contemporary discussions typically focus on the question of whether
the presentationality of intellectual episodes (i.e., thoughts) is phenomenonlogically
salient —that is, whether it makes a phenomenal difference which propositions are
thought, and which concepts employed. The respective aspects of the phenomenal
character of the episodes concerned may be labelled intellectual aspects, given that
the kind of propositional presentation concerned is intellectual in nature.
In this talk, I would like to draw attention to a third class of phenomenal aspects —
and a second class of non-sensory ones— which pertain both to sensory and to
intellectual episodes. I call these aspects rational aspects because they are
determined by, and thus reflect, the rational role of the episodes concerned. The
rational role of an episode consists in its provision of and/or responsiveness to certain
epistemic, practical or other reasons. My general aim is to defend the existence of
rational aspects of phenomenal character and thus experiential rationalism -the view that the character of our mental episodes is partly a matter of their possession or lack
of a rational role.
12:00 – 12:15 Coffee Break
12:15 – 13:30 Josep Lluís Prades (Girona)
                ‘Rationalising without Reasons’

Abstract
It is a commonplace to say that intentional actions are those to which certain
paradigmatic why-questions apply. And it is no less of a commonplace to say
that, when we answer those questions, we rationalise our actions by sorting out
some of the reasons for which we act. Similarly, it seems natural to say that we
desire for reasons, at least in many common cases in which our desires are
motivated. Even if I am not going to dispute every possible way of
understanding those common assumptions, I will argue that they do not
authorise a certain dominant, rationalistic picture in contemporary discussions:
the supposition that, in those cases in which we naturally say that someone acts,
intends or desires for reasons, we can infer that the she has, or she believes she
has, reasons to act, intend or desire. On the contrary, I will defend that
rationalisation is just a way of explaining by specifying content. In the process
of arguing for this conception, I will diagnose that the three more influential
arguments in contemporary philosophy of action misunderstand the semantics
of basic cases of rationalising explanations. As a consequence, they encourage
an implausible conception of both our human nature and the mechanisms of
content-determination.

More information at:

http://www.uab.es/servlet/Satellite/la-recerca/grecc/activities-12983586...