Here are some papers I have been working on recently.  Click on the Bibliography tab (above) for links to published papers, as well as Lecture Notes for presentations to my undergraduate courses.

How Things Look Explores the semantic structure of visual phenomenology.  Reinterprets the phenomenon of perceptual constancy, and argues that sensory features available in a scene are attributed to multiple overlapping objects.

On the Diversity of Auditory Objects  This paper is as it will appear in the Review of Phllosophy and Psychology.  (This journal was formerly known as the European Review of Philosophy.)

Five Ways Perceptual Content Can Be Conceptual (or Non-Conceptual) is a Powerpoint presentation of a talk I have been trying out.

Is Memory Preservation?  What’s right and what’s wrong about the thesis that memory is preserved content.

Feeling of Presence  Argues for a category of “cognitive feelings”, which are representationally significant, but are not part of the content of the states they accompany.  The feeling of pastness in episodic memory, of familiarity (missing in Capgras syndrome), and of motivation (that accompanies desire) are examples.  The feeling of presence that accompanies normal visual states is due to such a cognitive feeling; the “two visual systems” are partially responsible for this feeling.

The Sensory Representation of Color argues that our knowledge of colour properties arises analytically from an internal representation scheme for the colours.  There is a strong parallel between this thesis and Kant’s theory of the synthetic a priori in the Transcendental Aesthetic -- but since the paper is due for publication as is, I will need to postpone the exploration of that parallel until a future date.

Selection and Causation (written jointly with Andre Ariew responds to criticisms of our 2002 paper, “Two Ways of Thinking about Fitness and Natural Selection”.  (A link to the 2002 paper can be found under the Bibliography tab above.)  This paper has now been published in Philosophy of Science April 2009, and I shall soon move it to the Bibliography page.

Drift and “Statistically Abstractive Explanation” Argues that “statistically abstractive explanation” mandates the omission of probabilitistically relevant factors in certain contexts of theoretical explanation.  This is why these explanations admit of a certain variability of outcome.  This variability is what some call random genetic drift: drift is not a cause of deviation from outcomes predicted by selection alone.  (This paper will appear in Philosophy of Science in the October 2009 issue.  It has undergone many revisions in response to helpful referee reports: most recently, the title changed.)