Here is the schedule for the next two weeks of readings. Please note the schedule change.

• Oct 9: Berit Brogaard (2012) “Vision for Action and the Contents of Perception” Journal of Philosophy 569–587
• Oct 16: Alva Noe (2009) “Conscious Reference” Philosophical Quarterly 470-482

Update 10/17: For our next meeting, October 23, we’ll be reading the prelude and chapter 1 of:

• Oct 23: Mohan Matthen (2005) Seeing, Doing, and Knowing: A Philosophical Theory of Sense Perception, Oxford University Press
• Oct 30: off, no reading
• Nov 6: week of the The Senses workshop.

As the list indicates, after that we’ll have a week off before the week of the The Senses workshop. We won’t have any reading group meeting that week either.

The reading group has agreed on the following schedule for the next few meetings:

• Sept. 18: Bennett and Hacker (2003) Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, chapter 3.
• Sept. 25: Andy Clark (2013) “Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science”, BBS. pp. 181–204
• Oct 2: Berit Brogaard (2011) “Conscious Vision for Action Vs. Unconscious Vision for Action” Cognitive Science 1076–1104
• Oct 9: Alva Noe (2009) “Conscious Reference” Philosophical Quarterly 470-482
• Oct 16: Alva Noe (2012) Varieties of Presence (selections)

We need to workout the details on some of the later readings, but this is a pretty good idea of what’s coming up. As always, we will be meeting 12:00–1:30pm in the philosophy department lounge.

The first meeting of the fall 2013 Mind and Perception Reading Group went great! Thanks to everyone who came.

The next meeting will be Wednesday, September 11 from 12:00 until 1:00pm in the philosophy department lounge. We will be reading Fiona Macpherson’s 2011 paper “Cross-Modal Experiences”. Links to the paper can be found at Phil papers.

The Mind and Perception reading group will be meeting again next Wednesday on July 3, from 10:30 to 12:00 in the lounge. We’ll be reading James Genone’s paper “Appearance and Illusion”, which is forthcoming in Mind. A manuscript version can be got from philpapers: http://philpapers.org/rec/GENAAI
Abstract: Recent debates between representational and relational theories of perceptual experience sometimes fail to clarify in what respect the two views differ. In this essay, I explain that the relational view rejects two related claims endorsed by most representationalists: the claim that perceptual experiences can be erroneous, and the claim that having the same representational content is what explains the indiscriminability of veridical perceptions and phenomenally matching illusions or hallucinations. I then show how the relational view can claim that errors associated with perception should be explained in terms of false judgments, and develop a theory of illusions based on the idea that appearances are properties of objects in the surrounding environment. I provide an account of why appearances are sometimes misleading, and conclude by showing how the availability of this view undermines one of the most common ways of motivating representationalist theories of perception.

Date: Wednesday, June 12, 2013
Time: 10:30 am to 12:00 pm
Location: Philosophy Department Lounge
Reading: Susanna Schellenberg, “Experience and Evidence” (2006) Philpapers
About: We will be convening again this summer for at least a few meetings of the Mind and Perception Reading Group, usually on Wednesdays at 10:30 am. Probable topics for read papers include phenomenal content, naive realism (relationalism) and hallucination, neo-empiricism, and demonstrative thought. But, the final list of papers and meeting dates have not been set.

Date: Monday, November 12, 2012
Time: 12:00 pm to 1:30 pm
Location: Philosophy Department Lounge
Reading: Benj Hellie, “On which perceptual phenomena have content and why they have it” (forthcoming)