The question was raised whether the Gestalt law of grouping by proximity is based on proximity of stimuli on the retina or perceived proximity in phenomenal space. To tease apart these 2 possibilities an earlier experiment of Corbin was repeated in which the stimulus array is tilted back into the 3rd dimension. By including a measure of constancy for the perceived distance between points it was...

How come we can represent Bigfoot even though Bigfoot does not exist, given that representing something involves bearing a relation to it and we cannot bear relations to what does not exist? This is the problem of intentional inexistence. This paper develops a two-step solution to this problem, involving (first) an adverbial account of conscious representation, or phenomenal intentionality, and...

Normally, when we notice a change taking place, our conscious experience has a corresponding quality of phenomenal change. Here it is argued that one’s experience can have this quality at or during a time when there is no change in which phenomenal properties one instantiates. This undermines a number of otherwise forceful arguments against leading metaphysical theories of change, but also requ...

In studying folk psychology, cognitive and developmental psychologists have mainly focused on how people conceive of non-experiential states such as beliefs and desires. As a result, we know very little about how non-philosophers (or the folk) understand the mental states that philosophers typically classify as being phenomenally conscious. In particular, it is not known whether the folk even t...

Naive observers viewed a sequence of colored Mondrian patterns, simulated on a color monitor. Each pattern was presented twice in succession, first under one daylight illuminant with a correlated color temperature of either 16,000 or 4000 K and then under the other, to test for color constancy. The observers compared the central square of the pattern across illuminants, either rating it for sam...