This paper addresses the topic of the expressive qualities of inanimate objects. More specifically, it examines how qualities referring to psychological states, such as cheerfulness, melancholy, liveliness, and sadness, can be attributed to non-sentient things. After presenting some of the main theoretical approaches to this issue in contemporary debates-including projective, arousal, persona, and contour theories-I argue that these approaches struggle to explain how the same expressive qualities can be ascribed to diverse things, such as an atmosphere, a piece of music, a personal feeling, or a bodily expression. As a way out of this issue, I focus on the irreducibility of expressive qualities to other kinds of qualities, presenting them as global qualities of gestalts. Although grounded in things themselves, expressive qualities cannot be reduced to primary (measurable) or secondary (sensory) qualities (Locke, 1690). This allows expressive qualities to be shared by diverse entities, such as landscapes, pieces of music, and psychological states.
The usual considerations about high-level properties perception focus on contents of perceptual experiences. While different types of high-level properties are considered, such as category-related, causal, emotional, and aesthetic, they are all interpreted as elements of experiential content. This paper introduces a new category of perceptual properties-structural phenomenal properties-by utilizing the important distinction between experiential contents and experiential structures. It is argued that while these are not content-properties, some of them have characteristics typical of high-level content properties. In particular, three structural phenomenal properties related to the visual field will be considered: the boundedness of the visual field, its feature-filled character, and its oriented character. It is argued that, similarly to typical high-level properties, their experiential presence does not consist in the presence of an arrangement of low-level properties, but they do supervene on some low-level properties.
Fred Dretske made important contributions to the debate concerning how to distinguish perception from cognition, to the question of whether perceptual content is 'Rich' or 'Sparse' and to developing the thesis that perceptual experience employs a distinctively iconic format of representation. In Dretske (2015) he offered a method or criterion for determining whether or not two subjects have visual experiences with different phenomenal characters, which he dubbed the 'Goldilocks Test'. In this paper I criticize Dretske's proposal, drawing on various visual phenomena in order to argue that this 'Goldilocks Test' is not fit for purpose and that it cannot help us to arbitrate the debate between 'Rich' and 'Sparse' theories of perceptual content.
I discuss Timothy Williamson's approach to philosophical methodology in Overfitting and Heuristics in Philosophy, and its consequences for theories of belief, content, and what is said. I'll argue that a medium-grained approach to these issues, situated in-between classical intensionalism and impossible worlds hyperintensionalism, is worth taking seriously.
A history is a complete possible temporal evolution of the universe. There are two main conceptions of histories: Lewis's divergence, in which distinct histories are all disjoint, and the standard branching time (BT) conception, in which histories overlap and branch towards the future ('open future'). As Greg Restall noted, if a realist conception of histories is adopted, considerations of ontological parsimony favor the standard BT conception over Lewis's divergence. In this note, I observe that perfectly analogous considerations can be raised against the standard BT conception and in favor of a non-standard, 'open past' BT conception, in which histories are allowed to branch both towards the future and the past.
