An inferentialist semantics — one that claims that the meaning of a judgement is determined by its role in reasoning — faces the problem of how to account for the seemingly noninferential transition from the perceptual to the conceptual. Robert Brandom characterises his response to this problem as ‘strong inferentialism’, claiming that in certain contexts the meaning of a judgement can be determined noninferentially, such as when a perceptual judgement is formed in response to an observation. Brandom contrasts strong inferentialism with ‘hyperinferentialism’ which has no role for these kinds of noninferential transitions. This would entail that perceptual judgements are somehow premises and conclusions of inferences, which Brandom argues would be a more consistent though ultimately unsustainable position. However, that perceptual experiences are premises and conclusions of inferences is a central claim of the recently developed active inference framework in neuroscience. Moreover, the semiotics that Charles Sanders Peirce developed late in his life can be understood as hyperinferentialist. In this paper, I argue for a reading of Peirce that emphasises the ways in which he anticipates the insights of active inference. In turn, this reading gives a naturalistically plausible account of how an inferentialist can accommodate perceptual judgements.
I am a PhD candidate at the Monash Centre for Consciousness and Contemplative Studies (M3CS). My research focuses on the philosophy of predictive processing and active inference theories. My current work engages with the classical pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce to argue for... Read More →
Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST MSB1.05
Lucretius thought of his teaching as being "of high matters". The same can be said of Plato's, whose dialogues, as J. N. Findlay said, "point beyond themselves [and] if one does not go beyond, one cannot understand them." Beyond Plato's dialogues we find a deep epistemological fabric that weaves the intellect (the mind) into a complex architecture of knowledge. Plato's luminescent column is, as we understand it, his metaphor for that which binds the intellect with its subsequent ontological categories, first and foremost its daimōn, i.e. the human being's "divine power" according to Plato. In the column, light colligates all the mental categories and also holds the "entire celestial revolution", both bound by the doctrine of Necessity. Plato's poetic, metaphoric, analogic and allegoric writing style - his solution to language's inability to convey the ineffable - shouldn't mislead us into a reductive understanding based on mysticism, whether religious, pagan, or allegorical. What we are confronted with is the first non-fragmented attempt in the West to map out the entire ontological cognitive process, a precise description of the path of "knowing", the path of a science that leads to the "perfect end".
When we try to imagine something and we form a mental image, there is indeed something that we imagine. But what settles the issue of what we are imagining? One possibility is that we imagine whatever we were trying to imagine by forming our mental image. This view respects the intuition that we have privileged access to the contents of our mental states. But it is in tension with the possibility of misidentification errors in the imagination: Sometimes, we try to imagine some object, and we end up forming a mental image of a different object because we have a false belief about what the intended object of our imagination looks like. This possibility has prompted some to claim that, sometimes, the causal origin of the mental images that we form while trying to imagine something is what determines the contents of our imaginings. This view accommodates misidentification errors, but it does so at the cost of giving up the idea that we have privileged access to the contents of our mental states. I offer a view about the source of the contents of our imaginings that accommodates misidentification errors while preserving privileged access to the contents of our imaginings.
The question of how dreams can offer personal guidance and solutions has ignited the interest of humankind for thousands of years. Nonetheless, dreams have often been considered epistemically irrelevant or even deceptive, becoming the target of sceptical debates. Burgeoning research on the function of dreaming for memory integration as well as the development of dream engineering techniques aimed at harnessing dreams for creativity and learning call for a reassessment of the role of dreaming in epistemology. This work addresses unresolved questions concerning the potential use of sleep experiences for knowledge generation. By focusing on the concept of insight and how it is employed in the scientific literature on dreaming to implicitly uphold epistemic goals, I argue that at least a subset of dream uses, when adequately constrained, disclose opportunities for epistemic exploration and expansion. I will proceed by examining three cases and the conditions under which dreams can give rise to knowledge: lucid dreaming, creative ideation at sleep onset, and waking insight following dream discussion. My goal is to show how empirical work on dream consciousness carries tacit assumptions that have far-reaching implications for the epistemology of dreaming and the use of dreams for therapeutic purposes, thus warranting conceptual analysis.
Many philosophers claim that a special inner awareness persists in the background of all our conscious states. However, various attempts to gather phenomenological evidence for this view have yielded conflicting results. The dominant alternative strategy involves considerations of a more theoretical nature, such as appealing to inner awareness as the best explanation for things like memory, attention, self-knowledge, and disorders of consciousness. But this theoretical strategy has failed to convince the sceptics since they always find alternative (and in their view, better) explanations of the target phenomena. The result is a dialectically deadlocked debate over what is supposed to be a central dimension of consciousness. This talk motivates a return to the phenomenological strategy and makes an initial case for a hitherto underutilized technique in the contemporary debate—meditation—as a way to establish the ubiquity of inner awareness.
I am a fourth year PhD student and Associate Lecturer at ANU, where I am supervised by Victoria McGeer, Frank Jackson, and Daniel Stoljar. My main area of specialization is the philosophy of mind, and more specifically on various issues about consciousness and self-consciousness... Read More →
