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This chapter draws conclusions from the current evidence regarding lightness perception. It is argued that the twin assumptions of raw sensations and their cognitive interpretation have undermined progress and should be discarded. Three sources of motivation for theories of lightness are described: physiology, veridicality, and error. The strengths and weaknesses of each are analyzed, and the current challenges for lightness theory are addressed.

The end of the 1960s marked a new era in lightness perception. The shift from a contrast approach to a computational approach was part of a larger change taking place in psychology, a change that ended five decades of behaviorist hegemony. The shift from contrast thinking to computational thinking had a profound effect on theories of lightness. During the contrast period, theories had been driven by physiology, primarily in the form of lateral inhibition. Consistent with the behaviorist agenda, physiological validity was pursued as a means for making psychology materialistic. However, the computer provided an alternative definition of materialism. Computers made of copper and silicon store, process, and retrieve information using just code and mechanics.

This chapter interprets, develops, and defends the Content View: the thesis that visual perceptual experiences have contents. Several notions of veridicality are distinguished. It is argued the commitments of the Content View are shared across a wide range of philosophical theories of perception. The Content View is distinguished from the Strong Content View, according to which experiences are fundamentally propositional attitudes.

The chapter analyses semantic information as well-formed, meaningful and truthful data. After a brief introduction, the General Definition of semantic Information (GDI) is criticized for providing necessary but insufficient conditions for the definition of semantic information. GDI is incorrect because truth-values do not supervene on semantic information, and misinformation (that is, false semantic information) is not a kind of semantic information, but pseudo-information, that is, not semantic information at all. This is shown by arguing that none of the popular reasons for interpreting misinformation as a kind of semantic information is convincing, whilst there are compelling reasons to treat it as pseudo-information. As a consequence, GDI is revised to include a necessary truth-condition. The conclusion summarizes the main results, indicates some important implications and how the analysis of semantic information will be applied in the following chapters.

The chapter defends the view that the axiom schemata of the normal modal logic KTB (also known as B or Br or Brouwer's system) are well suited to model the relation of ‘being informed’. After having shown that information loigic (IL) can be constructed as an informational reading of KTB, four consequences of a KTB-based IL are explored: information overload; the veridicality thesis (I_ap → p); the relation between IL and EL; and the Kp → Bp principle or entailment property, according to which knowledge implies belief. Although these issues are discussed later in the chapter, they are the motivations behind the development of IL and the elaboration of this chapter at this point of the book, for they prepare the ground for an informational analysis of knowledge, developed in the following two chapters.

The distinction between strong and weak veridicality is explained, and by drawing on this distinction, it is argued that experiences have both singular and non-singular contents. The Argument from Appearing from Chapter 2 is adapted to states of seeing, yielding an argument that states of seeing have both singular and non-singular contents. It is also argued that phenomenal states are distinct from states of seeing, and that Naive Realism is probably false.

This chapter is concerned with the problems of errors in visual perception. It argues that although veridicality has been used systematically in the modelling of visual perception, the pattern of errors in visual perception has not been exploited systematically. This chapter focuses on the analysis of visual perception of surface lightness, that is, the perceived whiteness, greyness, or blackness of object surfaces in the visual world.

Pictorial space is a mental entity that coincides with experience. It is seen as controlled hallucination and is greatly related to consciousness. This chapter provides the early beginnings of pictorial space and the method by which to approach the investigation on it, i.e., by psychophysics. It also discusses the influence of the viewing mode, pictorial cue, and method on the investigation. The geometry of pictorial space is also presented.

This chapter proposes a syntactic mechanism to derive the dependency of the subjunctive. Her main idea is that the dependency of the subjunctive on the matrix predicate is the result of tense-features valuation. The features relevant for the subjunctive come as a bundle of two types of features: tt-features (which codify properties related to the morphological tense) and tev-features (related to event and Aktionsart properties). In Ambar’s view, it is through the difference in the valuation of these features that the division between the subjunctive and the indicative forms is obtained. At the same time, Ambar observes that tense valuation is not sufficient to license the subjunctive or the indicative. What is also crucial for the interpretation is the speaker’s relation with the world (veridicality). She assumes that the relation is represented in the syntactic structure through the interplay of the two speaker’s projections, EvaluativeP and AssertiveP, located in the CP-domain of the clause. EvaluativeP codifies the speaker’s attitude towards the state of affairs described in the clause, whereas AssertiveP specifies the common ground. EvaluativeP is the projection of the subjunctive, whereas AssertiveP is the projection of the indicative.

Chapter 5 argues for the validity of narrow impressionistic phonetic transcription from a position of phenomenalism, and offers counter-arguments to objections emanating from the philosophies of physicalism and rationalism. Rather than the articulations of the speaker being the objects of impressionistic analysis, which is the belief of direct realism, it is claimed that it is speech sounds as perceptual objects, or ‘secondary objects’, which are the things about which phonetic judgements are made and it is these judgements which are represented in an impressionistic transcription. This claim leads to rejection of the possibility of proper consensual agreement about an impressionistic transcription because the objects of analysis are not accessible to others.

This comment that the search for principles of sensory communication seems to call for a mixed strategy, which in turn accommodates itself to a host of tactical solutions, as is apparent from the foregoing chapters. There is ample freedom of choice regarding the aspects of sensory communication that an investigator may elect to work on—the unique properties of sense organs, the neural encoding of sensory events, or the representation of properties of sensory stimuli in neural structures. No matter how one demarcates the field of sensory communication, the investigator must sooner or later come to grips with the issue of biological veridicality. Eventually, investigators will face the question: How natural should one’s paradigms be?

Stephan Meier-Oeser discusses intellectual representation in the context of later developments in scholastic philosophy, focusing on the issue of intersubjective understanding. According to an important statement of Aristotle’s De Interpretatione, mental concepts are the same for all men. What does this mean? In what sense is it possible for concepts, as particular mental entities or acts of certain individuals, to be the same for all? Late scholastic logic explored and discussed different interpretations and justifications of this statement which are closely connected to some systematic, fundamental epistemological and truth-theoretical issues, such as the simplicity of concepts, the intellect’s infallibility regarding simple concepts or the existence of veritas simplex, i.e., truth (or even falseness; Descartes’ falsitas materialis) on the level of the so-called “first mental operation” or simple apprehension. The chapter gives a survey of the main positions and central points of these debates from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century.

Wh‐elements in Chinese (as in Japanese and Korean) can have non‐interrogative interpretations, i.e. they are the so‐called ‘wh‐indeterminates’ la Kuroda 1965. While the existential (non‐interrogative) and universal readings of wh‐indeterminates have received a lot of attention the free choice interpretation of wh‐elements, however, has been discussed only recently (Giannakidou and Cheng 2006). On the surface, there are three types of Free Choice Items (FCIs) in Mandarin Chinese, all of which involve a wh‐related element. Though all three types appear to express free choice, they are not equal in terms of distribution and interpretation. The contrasts that we observe do not follow from recent accounts of wh‐indeterminates as Hamblin indefinites that are routinely closed by sentential quantifiers at the top level (Kratzer and Shimoyama 2002; Kratzer 2006), since in these accounts the wh‐phrase merely forms the basis for creation of a Hamblin set of propositions, and polarity behaviour is not predicted. In this chapter, we discuss the non‐uniform distribution of Chinese wh‐indeterminates in their use as FCIs, and propose that the key to understanding the contrasts is intensionality: the three paradigms of wh‐indeterminates as FCIs vary depending on whether or not they contain a world variable that needs to be bound. In addition, we show that Chinese FCIs provide further evidence for Giannakidou and Cheng (2006), who propose that there are both definite and indefinite FCIs. Definite FCIs in Chinese will be shown to have the same composition as the Greek definite FCIs: maximality, core wh, and the intensional world variable.

This chapter will take up two types of bipolar items in Japanese to identify various factors that contribute to polarity sensitivity. It has been well known since Fauconnier (1975) that scalar semantics is closely related to licensing of negative polarity items. There are indeed languages like Dutch and Hindi that have negative polarity items overtly marked with a scalar focus particle. The chapter show that there are other morphological characteristics that play important roles in polarity sensitivity. Furthermore, the chapter suggest that the relation between negative concord and negative polarity must be taken into account when concord items and polarity items are morphologically very similar.

This chapter discusses the morphosyntax of French, Modern Greek, Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian complementizers equivalent to English that. From long-distance wh-extractions across complementizers in these languages, it is shown that (i) the morpheme complementizer is composed of features that are hierarchically ordered according to a functional sequence (fseq) (see Baunaz 2015, 2016a; Baunaz and Lander to appear); (ii) the complementizer morpheme lexicalizes structures of different sizes; (iii) the distribution of complementizers is governed by veridicality (see Baunaz 2015, 2016a); (iv) the complementizer morpheme is syntactically active. The basic template for complementizers that I argue for is F4 > F3 > F2 > F1. Evidence in favor of this template comes from crosslinguistic patterns of syncretism and featural Relativized Minimality (Starke 2001; Rizzi 2004; Haegeman 2010, among others). Evidence in favor of different realizations of the complementizer is provided by means of long-distance extractions across declarative embedded clauses.

In alignment with the second chapter, the objective of the third chapter is to delve deeply into the theoretical and empirical distinction for cognitive laboratory interviews. This chapter presents cognitive laboratory interview procedures aimed at collecting verbal reports of comprehension processes, including defining the object of measurement—comprehension and understanding—and how it differs from problem solving. The chapter also presents how a cognitive model of knowledge representation and organization (comprehension and learning) can guide data collection or, more often than not, is developed from the data collected. The chapter also presents instructions to elicit verbal reports, including retrospective interview probes, task materials, variables that can bias the reports, and human sample size considerations. Examples are used to illustrate concepts and ideas.

What is a ‘veridical visual experience’? This irreducibly normative notion confusingly suggests a ‘match’ between experiences and an unseen or unperceivable reality. And although the notion of an ‘optical illusion’ appears in technical discussions of the processing of sensory stimuli, it is obvious that natural science cannot supply criteria for veridicality. The Meditations seems to tell us both that all our visual experiences are radically false and that we can trust them as mostly true, but I argue that Descartes grasped the problem of understanding veridicality and provided the framework for a solution, which I develop in this chapter. Two key ideas are required: the notion of a ‘quasinormative’ animal machine whose experiences are not ‘matched’ to the world but to the behavioural outputs it needs to live, and the notion of a circumstantial ‘defeater’ of the organism’s efforts on some occasion.

The main thesis is that sensory experience is not “predicative” but rather “presentational”, and hence cannot be properly modeled by propositional attitudes to the effect that such and such is the case. Indeed, the propostional attitude model not only (i) mischaracterizes the success conditions of experience, it also (ii) occludes the very thing that makes sensory experience epistemically distinctive. Once we see just how the object-directed and “perceiving-as” states make room for the distinctive epistemic significance of perceptual experience, the newly “discovered” propositional attitude—Exing that p—will be seen to be not only an ill-fitting, but an idle, wheel, both internally to the theory of perception and more broadly within epistemology. Experiences, understood as attentive sensory episodes, provide us with awareness of the truthmakers for what we often go on to immediately judge. We are thereby often in a postion to ratify our immediate perceptual judgments on the basis of what we have experienced. This is the epistemic virtue that has been occluded by the now dominant idea that perceptual experience is a non-factive relation to a propositional content. The factive attitude model, reminiscent of John McDowell’s view, is also shown to be an inadequate account of the kind of entitlement perceptual experience delivers. Facts are pleonastic, and are “etiolated” in a way that the things we perceive are not.

So far the argument of the book has aimed to establish the claim that phenomenal properties supervene on certain relational representational properties. This raises a question which is crucial to attempts to give a physicalist reduction of phenomenal properties: do these relational representational properties all involve the same relation? Focusing on cases of perceptual binding, it is argued that the different senses, as well as different sorts of bodily sensations, all involve the same phenomenal relation, which is called ‘sensing.’ But, in Chapter 27, it is argued that a good case can be made that certain sorts of attentional shifts force us to distinguish between at least two phenomenal relations. The possibility is also raised, but not explored further here, that thinking and imagining might also involve distinct phenomenal relations.

Chapter 28 at last turns to the question of whether phenomenal and representational properties can be identified. It is suggested that there is strong reason to believe that they can be, and two different ways are discussed in which such an identification might run—one which accepts the existence of distinct but indiscriminable phenomenal properties, and one which does not. In Chapters 30–33, the notion of a ‘phenomenally sneaky’ content is introduced as a way of arguing for the former option. The arguments here turn on the possibility of certain sorts of indiscriminable experiences. These pairs of experiences are of three sorts: cases involving very small changes in representation (which it is argued can constitute a phenomenal sorites), cases involving perceptual constancies, and cases involving the representation of change.