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McDowell has offered a particular epistemological argument in favour of one version of disjunctivism about perception. This argument has been prominently criticized by Crispin Wright, and the conclusion of the argument has been prominently criticized by Mark Johnston. This chapter rebuts both of those criticisms.

Chapter 7 considers two sources of doubt about the coherence of the robust first-person perspective. The first concerns the role of first-person perspectives as persistence conditions: you, essentially a person, continue to exist as long as your first-person perspective is exemplified. This seems circular. The rebuttal is to show that the irreducibility of personhood precludes there being informative sufficient conditions for personal identity over time. A second source of doubt concerns the suggestion that the robust first-person perspective turns out to be a substantial object. If it is putatively a substantial object, then it seems to go the way of Johnston’s “self”: it is a merely intentional object, a notional object, a virtual object—not a real object—that cannot exist except in our own minds. The rebuttal is to show that the first-person perspective is not an object at all, but a property.

A standard philosophical approach to defining colour associates it with a ‘colour look‘ in standard circumstances. All extant plausible versions of this theory violate the condition that we should possess instinctive knowledge of colour. A more promising approach is a ‘semantic‘specification of the meaning of colour experiences, elaborated along the lines of Tarski=s semantic theory of truth: something is a particular colour if it really is the colour something looks to be when it presents the associated look. The semantic theory is elaborated by means of an analogy between sensory systems and measuring instruments. The proposal is that sensory systems provide measurements in an ‘auto-calibrated‘ scale: in terms, that is, of something like a re-identifiable pointer position that is not specified by reference to an independently defined scale.

This chapter presents a response to Mark Johnston’s ‘Subjectivism and Unmasking’, which was directed at the author’s book, The Quest for Reality. Johnston defends an ontological account of what colours are and explains how, on that view, it could be true that no colours belong to the everyday objects we perceive in the world. The author’s resistance to the subjectivity of colour perceptions and beliefs turns rather on the proper understanding of colour terms as predicates ascribing colours to objects, and not as names or terms referring to the colours. The chapter explains the main assumptions of the ‘Ramsey/Lewis’ theory of colour. It also considers how the complex relations we understand to hold among the contents of perception, thought, and belief stand as a challenge to all forms of dispositionalism.

This chapter starts by restating the causal-hallucinatory argument against naive realism. This argument depends on the possibility of “philosophers' hallucinations.” It draws attention to the role of what the chapter refers to as the nonarbitrariness of philosophers' hallucinations in supporting this argument. The chapter then discusses three attempts to refute the argument. Two of them, those associated with John McDowell and with Michael Martin, are explicitly forms of disjunctivism. The third, exemplified by Mark Johnston, has, the chapter claims, disjunctivist features. None of these responses to the argument is plausible

The preceding discussions have tried to show that there are no plausible examples of [A&~P] dissociations, and that most suggested categories of [P&~A] dissociations are also implausible. In both cases the implausibility derives from problems with the judgements regarding ourselves, either that we are absent from or are present in the imagined scenarios. However, the candidate dissociations which have had most influence on the philosophical imagination are so-called Shrinkage Cases. The specific version that has seemed plausible to many is that of brain transplants. It is argued that the standard brain transplant story rests on four main assumptions, one of which normally is presented as an intuition about such cases that the person goes with the brain. It is then argued that the other premises are rather convincing but it is open to deny the intuitive claim. It is further argued that Mark Johnston’s famous argument in favour of the intuition is based on unconvincing grounds.

This chapter discusses several theses that are part of the commonsense conception of color as articulated by Mark Johnston, including paradigms, explanation, unity, perceptual availability, and revelation. It focuses on the last doctrine, which contends that the intrinsic nature of canary yellow is fully revealed by a standard visual experience as of a canary yellow thing. Science delivers a variety of relational facts about colors. These physical, psychophysical, neuropsychological, and semantic facts are interesting and important, but are entirely beside the point of knowing what the colors are in and of themselves. What redness is in itself can only be learned in an experience as of a red thing. What is thus learned, what the quality is intrinsically, leaves nothing for a scientific theory to complete, revise, or even enhance.

This chapter asks whether there are further reasons for being doubtful about the judgement that the subject or person goes with the brain in brain transplant cases. Some have argued that a case can be made for thinking that intuitions about brain transplants are not reliable, which, if true, would strengthen the response to the transplant argument. This chapter explores two attempts to generate scepticism about these kinds of intuitions—by Kathy Wilkes and Mark Johnston. It is argued that both these attempts, although interesting, are not persuasive. However, there are aspects of the judgement about the brain taking the person which indicate that we are entitled to be sceptical about its soundness. The chapter discusses why, despite this, people tend to have the intuition that the person goes with the brain. It is finally argued that when presented in a slightly different way the idea that minds are being swapped between people in such cases is not outrageous.

This chapter addresses a serious problem for animalism, and shows that it has no really satisfying solution. Mark Johnston has argued that animalism, the view that we are animals, implies that removing your brain from your head and enabling it to continue functioning would create a “remnant person” constituted by the naked brain. If this is so, then putting the brain into a new head would destroy this remnant person. These implications look absurd. The problem has no really satisfying solution. This chapter argues that the problem, though serious, has nothing to do with animalism as such, and afflicts virtually all other views about what we are in equal measure.

Numerous authors have claimed that color relationism is simply not compatible with the deliverances of introspectible experience. But is the non-relationality of color as easily recovered from experience as has been claimed? This chapter addresses this major objection to relationism, and tackles the implications for color adverbialism in particular. It is argued that the objectors to relationism have yet to demonstrate that experiences of color per se—and not experiences of objects with color, shape, size, and numerous other properties—are the source of their intuition that colors are out there in the world, and perceiver independent. Phenomenology, it is argued, is uncommitted about the ontological issues. Moreover, the objectors have yet to show that their supposed phenomenological facts are independent of theoretical views about the nature of color. Color adverbialism is no more vulnerable to phenomenological objections than other versions of relationism. Finally, the material presented suggests new ways to think about the phenomena of color constancy.

This chapter offers an introduction to the debate on alternative conceptions of God. It first briefly sketches the general commitments of the pantheistic and panentheistic conceptions of God, which are the most prominent alternatives to the classical conceptions of God, glossing over the fine-grained distinctions between the several variants of each. It then discusses how examining such perspectives may help bridge the gap in the dialectic between conceptions of divinity that have emerged in the West with non-theistic conceptions that have been developed elsewhere. The penultimate section considers why such conceptions of the divine have been marginalized in analytic philosophy of religion and how considering alternative conceptions of God could contribute to widening the scope of the field. The final section summarizes the contents of the chapters in this volume.

This chapter presents a metaphysics-first treatment of subjects and the first-person way of representing subjects. It develops a new explanation of the metaphysical principle that it is in the nature of mental events that they have subjects. It advocates the view that the identity of a subject over time involves the identity of a subpersonal integration apparatus, and contrasts the resulting position with Johnston’s conception of personites. A new treatment of the first person is developed that gives a greater role for agency than in previous accounts. Only by doing so can we explain how the first person brings a subject, rather than something else, into the contents of the states and events in which it is involved. Some of the consequences of the resulting agency-involving account of the first person are traced out.

We can begin to unravel the enigma of heteronymy if we note that a rather similar puzzle arises in the context of dreaming. I may certainly figure within my own dream, and there is therefore a conceptual distinction between the dreaming subject and the subject-within-a-dream. But is it possible for me to have a dream such that, within the dream, I am a subject other than the subject I am? The puzzle is to know what makes it the case that in the dream I am X and not JG: on what grounds should we answer the question ‘Which one is me?’ J. J. Valberg’s proposal is to call attention to what he calls a ‘positional use’ of the first person, distinct from its mundane use as an indexical, and a corresponding positional conception of self. Using ‘I’ positionally, I am the one to whom all this is presented, the one to whom every phenomenal property is directed, or, as Valberg puts it, the one who is ‘at the centre’ of the manifold of presentation which he calls the experiential horizon. The positional conception of self is one which Pessoa quite explicitly puts at the heart of his philosophy. With the positional conception of self to hand, a solution to the enigma of heteronymy is available.