Category: NYU

Smart’s Analogy Now, the epistemology of color similarities and differences has received considerable attention from some physicalists who are aware that their theories appear unable to account for it. Because these physicalists subscribe to Russellian or identity-theoretic versions of physicalism, they are committed to the proposition that visual experience doesn’t characterize objects in terms that…

EPISTEMOLOGICAL CONSTRAINTS What do you know about colors, not as a student of physics or physiology, but simply in your capacity as a subject of visual experience? We think that you know, for example, that red and orange are properties; that they are different properties, though of the same kind-different determinants of the same determinable;…

Further Distinctions The foregoing responses to the naive objection are cogent, as far as they go; but in our opinion, they don’t go far enough. The physicalists have described a way in which microphysically constituted colors aren’t represented in visual experience-namely, under microphysical characterizations -but they haven’t yet told us how else such colors are…

Physicalist Theories of Color By Paul Boghossian With J. David Velleman. THE PROBLEM OF COLOR REALISM The dispute between realists about color and anti-realists is actually a dispute about the nature of color properties. The disputants do not disagree over what material objects are like. Rather, they disagree over whether any of the uncontroversial facts…

The Perception of Music: Comments on Peacocke I Christopher Peacocke begins his rich and fascinating paper ‘The Perception of Music: Sources of Significance’ (BJA 49, 257–275) by noting that we ‘can experience music as sad, as exuberant, as somber. We can experience it as expressing immensity, identification with the rest of humanity, or gratitude.’ This…

Introduction by Paul Boghossian and Christopher Peacocke 1. Identifying the A Priori An a priori proposition is one which can be known to be true without any justification from the character of the subject’s experience. This is a brief, pre‐theoretical characterization that needs some refinement; but it captures the core of what many philosophers have…

Tim’s recipe for generating a counterexample to understanding-assent links is interestingly different from Paolo’s. Paolo’s example turns on a disability. Tim goes in the other direction. His counterexamples consist of experts on logic and language who have allowed their linguistic behavior to be influenced by the somewhat kooky theories of logic and language that they…

Inferentialism and the Epistemology of Logic: Reflections on Casalegno and Williamson. By Paul Boghossian Paolo Casalegno’s ‘Logical Concepts and Logical Inferences’ (Casalegno 2004 ) is a searching and insightful critique of my attempt to explain how someone could be entitled to infer according to a basic logical rule. I will say a bit about what…