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Assaf Weksler
Current interests
For prospective post-docs, here are some issues I am interested in. Broadly, anything related to the metaphysics of perception is great, especially if involves empirical perceptual psychology.
Psychophysics and the metaphysics of perception. What can we learn from Weber's Law, Fechner's Law, Stevens' Law, etc., about the metaphysics of perception (e.g., naive realism, representationalism, mental paint, capacitism, etc.), and vice versa?
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Do 'mental paint' views conflict with intuition/introspection? It seems clear that the phenomenal character of my experience as of a triangle is essentially linked somehow to triangularity (see Adam Pautz). The mental paint view denies it. How can one make sense if it? Does the approach Papineau developes in his 'the metaphysics of sensory experience' helps?
Perspectivality of perception. How can we tell whether a titled coin really looks elliptical? I have argued (with Ben Henke) that a recent experiment about the matter fails to advance the debate (on its own). I would like to examine whether a recent neuro study could advance it.
Liberal/conservative criterion and phenomenology. How could we determine whether the liberal criterion effects, such as the 'inflation' found in Hakwan Lau's and colleagues studies, is experiential (as they claim) rather than post experiential? Can the metaphysics of perception help?
Similarly, how can we determine whether the conservative criterion attributed to blindsight patients is post-experiential (as Phillips claims) or experiential (as Michel and Lau claim).
Iconic format, Analogue format. One recent issue is: suppose the new account of analog representations by Lee, Myers & Rabin (2023) is true. It places new necessary conditions on being an analog representation. How does this affect older discussions of the matter? Specifically, is it still the case that we can infer the analog format of perception from Weber's Law (as Jake Beck claimed)?
General interests in the metaphysics of experience. I'm interesting in developments (and in developing) capacitism, naive realism, representationalism, and specific versions thereof. One issue is the issue is the prospects of non-reductive, grounding physicalism, with respect to experiential representations (as Adam Pautz proposes).
Another issue is the prospects of using 'ways of perceiving' to account for the perspectivality of perception within a naive realist framework, while denying diaphaneity (as Phillips and French do).
Schellenberg holds that employment of discriminatory capacities somehow constitutes representational content. Can this move avoid problems of more familiar naturalistic theories of content (e.g., informational teleosemantics)?
Capacitism account for phenomenal character in terms of discrimination, and the Quality-Space view of qualia accounts for them in terms of discriminability. So how (if at all) is capacitism related to Quality-Space theory?
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