Sebastian Sanhueza Rodriguez | Universidad San Sebastián (original) (raw)
Papers by Sebastian Sanhueza Rodriguez
Logos: Revista de Lingüística, Literatura y Filosofía, Dec 1, 2019
Bodily and mental self-ascriptions are forms of first-person thought where a subject attributes p... more Bodily and mental self-ascriptions are forms of first-person thought where a subject attributes physical properties and psychological states to herself. The body-ownership view argues that a necessary and sufficient condition on such self-ascriptions is the existence of causal links between a spatio-temporal body and the self-ascribed properties or states. However, since P.F. Strawson's influential attack, this view has been dismissed as a bad philosophical idea. The goal of this brief piece is to outline the body-ownership view and neutralise two classic lines of objection against it: on the one hand, that the stance is incoherent; and, on the other, that it has counterintuitive implications.
According to the Priority View, benefiting the worse off matters more than benefiting the better ... more According to the Priority View, benefiting the worse off matters more than benefiting the better off, this being the case simply because the worse off are worse than how they could otherwise have been, not because they worse than others are or could have been. In recent literature, Michael Otsuka and Alex Voorhoeve have argued that the Priority View fails to capture a shift in the moral considerations that underpin our decisions on moral distribution in intra-personal and inter-personal cases, and that it fails to do so for neglecting the relational but morally significant fact known as the separateness of persons. The present piece will target this line of criticism. It is far from clear that the aforementioned shift actually exists. And even if it does, the Priority View could still accommodate the moral importance of the separateness of persons.
Aporía: revista internacional de investigaciones filosóficas, 2018
Trans/Form/Ação, 2021
State Nonconceptualism is the view that perceptual states (not perceptual content) are different ... more State Nonconceptualism is the view that perceptual states (not perceptual content) are different in kind from cognitive states (not cognitive content), insofar as a subject could be in perceptual states even if she lacked the concepts necessary to describe those states. Although this position has recently met serious criticism, this piece aims to argue on its behalf. A point I specifically want to highlight is that, thanks to State Nonconceptualism, it is possible to characterize perceptual experiences as nonconceptual or concept-independent without relying on the notion of perceptual content-a feature I term here the content independence of State Nonconceptualism. I think one should welcome this result: for, although a nonconceptualist characterization of perceptual experience is quite plausible, nonrepresentationalist approaches to perception have persuasively challenged the thought that perceptual experiences have representational content. This brief piece is divided into three parts: (i) I introduce two versions of Perceptual Nonconceptualism, namely, Content and State Nonconceptualism; (ii) I go on to stress State Nonconceptualism's content independence; and (iii), I briefly address three prominent objections against the state nonconceptualist.
In contemporary philosophy of perception, relatively little attention is paid to the fundamental ... more In contemporary philosophy of perception, relatively little attention is paid to the fundamental question what we talk about when we talk about perceptual experiences, that is, what kind of entities they are. The present dissertation addresses this ontological question, so as to outline and partially to defend a stative view of perceptual experiences, that is, a view according to which perceptual experiences are mental states as opposed to mental processes. This project is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 unpacks and critically assesses the main target of this dissertation, a processive view or a view according to which processes of a phenomenally conscious kind are essential to our understanding of perceptual awareness. Chapter 2 formulates the ontological stance I advocate, namely, a stative view. The following two chapters turn to a positive defense of this position. Chapter 3 argues that the stative conception is better suited than a processive view to account for the ident...
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly
This piece contrasts two ontological views of perceptual experience: on the one hand, Experientia... more This piece contrasts two ontological views of perceptual experience: on the one hand, Experiential Heracliteanism, a view according to which the intuitively dynamic character of experience should be described-and probably accounted for-in irreducibly dynamic terms; and, on the other, Experiential non-Heracliteanism, a stance according to which perceptual experience may at least be described-if not explained-in terms of non-dynamic constituents. I specially strive (i) to frame both proposals against the backdrop of a venerable Heraclitean metaphor and (ii) to highlight the virtues of Experiential non-Heracliteanism against its currently sexier Heraclitean counterpart.
Síntesis. Revista de Filosofía
It is widely thought that, in his later work An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, Bertrand Russell ... more It is widely thought that, in his later work An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, Bertrand Russell argued that our natural languages could in principle do away with indexicals. This brief piece, by contrast, aims to show that, instead of suggesting the potential eliminability of such expressions, Russell outlined a semantic account of indexicals according to which such expressions fundamentally depend on the perspectival way in which they refer to worldly items. If correct, this proposal would not only show that, in Russell’s later work, the meaning of expressions like indexicals is not exhaustively determined by the items they refer to: it would also show that Russell did not mean to eliminate indexicals from our natural languages at all.
Logos: Revista de Lingüística, Filosofía y Literatura
Organon F
Current philosophical debates about perception have largely ignored questions concerning the onto... more Current philosophical debates about perception have largely ignored questions concerning the ontological structure of perceptual experience, so as to focus on its intentional and phenomenological character. To illustrate and put pressure on this tendency, I revisit the controversy between doxastic views of perception and Gareth Evans's objection from over-intellectualization. I suggest that classic versions of the doxastic view are to a good extent driven by an ontological characterization of perceptual attitudes as nonfactive states or dispositions, not by a cognitively complex picture of perceptual content. Conceived along these lines, the doxastic view unveils an ontologically significant story of perceptual experience for at least two reasons: on the one hand, that characterization avoids the line of reasoning leading up to sense-datum theories of perception; and, on the other, it bears on recent discussions about the temporal structure of perceptual experience. Although I do not endorse the doxastic view, my goal is to highlight the importance of the relatively neglected ontological motivations thus driving that kind of account.
Grazer Philosophische Studien
The goal of this piece is to put some pressure on Brian O’Shaughnessy’s claim that perceptual exp... more The goal of this piece is to put some pressure on Brian O’Shaughnessy’s claim that perceptual experiences are necessarily mental processes. The author targets two motivations behind the development of that view. First, O’Shaughnessy resorts to pure conceptual analysis to argue that perceptual experiences are processes. The author argues that this line of reasoning is inconclusive. Secondly, he repeatedly invokes a thought experiment concerning the total freeze of a subject’s experiential life. Even if this case is coherent, however, it does not show that perceptual experiences are processes.
Acta Analytica, 2017
A number of contemporary philosophers of mind have brought considerations from the study of aspec... more A number of contemporary philosophers of mind have brought considerations from the study of aspect to bear on the ontological question how perceptual experiences persist over time. But, apart from rare exceptions, relatively little attention has been devoted to assess whether the way we talk about perceptual occurrences is of any relevance for discussions of ontological matters in general, let alone discussions about the ontological nature of perception. This piece examines whether considerations derived from the study of lexical aspect have a significant bearing on what ontological views of perception we should endorse: I shall argue that such aspectual considerations are in fact of very little use for settling the relevant ontological issue.
Filozofia Nauki
According to the Content View (CV), visual perceptual experiences represent the subject's surroun... more According to the Content View (CV), visual perceptual experiences represent the subject's surroundings or have representational content. A critical question posed by Charles Travis against CV is how the subject of experiences could index or introspectively ascribe a specific representational content of a given (occurring) visual experience: if her visual experiences incorporate representational contents, how could she ascribe a particular content to any given visual experience of hers? According to Travis, while visual representation is supposed to be "a familiar phenomenon; something we can tell is happening" (Travis 2004: 86), there is no good available evidence that our visual experiences represent our surroundings; and he thinks so because there seems to be no method of visual contents' indexation or self-ascription. The aim of this paper is to show how CV could meet what I shall call the Indexing Problem for perceptual-more specifically, visual-content. My main positive suggestion turns on the thought that the contents of visual experiences could be indexed by the way things demonstrably look to the subject of experiences.
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 2021
This piece contrasts two ontological views of perceptual experience: on the one hand, Experientia... more This piece contrasts two ontological views of perceptual experience: on the one hand, Experiential Heracliteanism, a view according to which the intuitively dynamic character of experience should be described-and probably accounted for-in irreducibly dynamic terms; and, on the other, Experiential non-Heracliteanism, a stance according to which perceptual experience may at least be described-if not explained-in terms of non-dynamic constituents. I specially strive (i) to frame both proposals against the backdrop of a venerable Heraclitean metaphor and (ii) to highlight the virtues of Experiential non-Heracliteanism against its currently sexier Heraclitean counterpart.
Síntesis. Revista de Filosofía, 2020
It is widely thought that, in his later work "An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth", Bertrand Russel... more It is widely thought that, in his later work "An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth", Bertrand Russell argued that our natural languages could in principle do away with indexicals. This brief piece, by contrast, aims to show that, instead of suggesting the potential eliminability of such expressions, Russell outlined a semantic account of indexicals according to which such expressions fundamentally depend on the perspectival way in which they refer to worldly items. If correct, this proposal would not only show that, in Russell's later work, the meaning of expressions like indexicals is not exhaustively determined by the items they refer to: it would also show that Russell did not mean to eliminate indexicals from our natural languages at all.
Discusiones Contemporáneas en Filosofía de la Mente (ed. Pablo López Silva), 2019
El problema mente-cuerpo —esto es, la pregunta sobre cómo la mente existe en la naturaleza espaci... more El problema mente-cuerpo —esto es, la pregunta sobre cómo la
mente existe en la naturaleza espacio-temporal— ha dominado
buena parte de la filosofía de la mente del siglo XX. El objetivo de
esta contribución es sugerir que esta tradición filosófica ha sufrido
de cierta indiferencia hacia importantes preguntas sobre la estructura
ontológica de nuestros fenómenos mentales. Para concluir,
esbozaré cómo un renovado interés en la ontología de la mente
está replanteando el hasta ahora estancado problema mente-cuerpo.
Logos: Revista de Lingüística, Filosofía y Literatura, 2019
Bodily and mental self-ascriptions are forms of first-person thought where a subject attributes p... more Bodily and mental self-ascriptions are forms of first-person thought where a subject attributes physical properties and psychological states to herself. The body-ownership view argues that a necessary and sufficient condition on such self-ascriptions is the existence of causal links between a spatio-temporal body and the self-ascribed properties or states. However, since P.F. Strawson's influential attack, this view has been dismissed as a bad philosophical idea. The goal of this brief piece is to outline the body-ownership view and neutralise two classic lines of objection against it: on the one hand, that the stance is incoherent; and, on the other, that it has counterintuitive implications.
Filozofia Nauki, 2019
According to the Content View-(CV) for short-visual perceptual experiences represent the subject'... more According to the Content View-(CV) for short-visual perceptual experiences represent the subject's surroundings or have representational content. A critical question posed by Charles Travis against this stance is how the subject of experiences could index or introspectively ascribe the representational content of any given (occurring) visual experience: that is, if her visual experiences incorporate representational contents, how could she ascribe a particular content C to any given visual experience E of hers? According to him, while visual representation is supposed to be 'a familiar phenomenon; something we can tell is happening' (Travis 2004, 86), there is no good available evidence that our visual experiences represent our surroundings; and he thinks so because there seems to be no method of visual contents' indexation or self-ascription. The goal of this piece is to show how (CV) could meet what I shall thus term the Indexing Problem for perceptual-more specifically , visual-content. My main positive suggestion turns on the thought that the contents of visual experiences could be indexed by the way things demonstrably look to the subject of experiences.
Logos: Revista de Lingüística, Literatura y Filosofía, Dec 1, 2019
Bodily and mental self-ascriptions are forms of first-person thought where a subject attributes p... more Bodily and mental self-ascriptions are forms of first-person thought where a subject attributes physical properties and psychological states to herself. The body-ownership view argues that a necessary and sufficient condition on such self-ascriptions is the existence of causal links between a spatio-temporal body and the self-ascribed properties or states. However, since P.F. Strawson's influential attack, this view has been dismissed as a bad philosophical idea. The goal of this brief piece is to outline the body-ownership view and neutralise two classic lines of objection against it: on the one hand, that the stance is incoherent; and, on the other, that it has counterintuitive implications.
According to the Priority View, benefiting the worse off matters more than benefiting the better ... more According to the Priority View, benefiting the worse off matters more than benefiting the better off, this being the case simply because the worse off are worse than how they could otherwise have been, not because they worse than others are or could have been. In recent literature, Michael Otsuka and Alex Voorhoeve have argued that the Priority View fails to capture a shift in the moral considerations that underpin our decisions on moral distribution in intra-personal and inter-personal cases, and that it fails to do so for neglecting the relational but morally significant fact known as the separateness of persons. The present piece will target this line of criticism. It is far from clear that the aforementioned shift actually exists. And even if it does, the Priority View could still accommodate the moral importance of the separateness of persons.
Aporía: revista internacional de investigaciones filosóficas, 2018
Trans/Form/Ação, 2021
State Nonconceptualism is the view that perceptual states (not perceptual content) are different ... more State Nonconceptualism is the view that perceptual states (not perceptual content) are different in kind from cognitive states (not cognitive content), insofar as a subject could be in perceptual states even if she lacked the concepts necessary to describe those states. Although this position has recently met serious criticism, this piece aims to argue on its behalf. A point I specifically want to highlight is that, thanks to State Nonconceptualism, it is possible to characterize perceptual experiences as nonconceptual or concept-independent without relying on the notion of perceptual content-a feature I term here the content independence of State Nonconceptualism. I think one should welcome this result: for, although a nonconceptualist characterization of perceptual experience is quite plausible, nonrepresentationalist approaches to perception have persuasively challenged the thought that perceptual experiences have representational content. This brief piece is divided into three parts: (i) I introduce two versions of Perceptual Nonconceptualism, namely, Content and State Nonconceptualism; (ii) I go on to stress State Nonconceptualism's content independence; and (iii), I briefly address three prominent objections against the state nonconceptualist.
In contemporary philosophy of perception, relatively little attention is paid to the fundamental ... more In contemporary philosophy of perception, relatively little attention is paid to the fundamental question what we talk about when we talk about perceptual experiences, that is, what kind of entities they are. The present dissertation addresses this ontological question, so as to outline and partially to defend a stative view of perceptual experiences, that is, a view according to which perceptual experiences are mental states as opposed to mental processes. This project is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 unpacks and critically assesses the main target of this dissertation, a processive view or a view according to which processes of a phenomenally conscious kind are essential to our understanding of perceptual awareness. Chapter 2 formulates the ontological stance I advocate, namely, a stative view. The following two chapters turn to a positive defense of this position. Chapter 3 argues that the stative conception is better suited than a processive view to account for the ident...
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly
This piece contrasts two ontological views of perceptual experience: on the one hand, Experientia... more This piece contrasts two ontological views of perceptual experience: on the one hand, Experiential Heracliteanism, a view according to which the intuitively dynamic character of experience should be described-and probably accounted for-in irreducibly dynamic terms; and, on the other, Experiential non-Heracliteanism, a stance according to which perceptual experience may at least be described-if not explained-in terms of non-dynamic constituents. I specially strive (i) to frame both proposals against the backdrop of a venerable Heraclitean metaphor and (ii) to highlight the virtues of Experiential non-Heracliteanism against its currently sexier Heraclitean counterpart.
Síntesis. Revista de Filosofía
It is widely thought that, in his later work An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, Bertrand Russell ... more It is widely thought that, in his later work An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, Bertrand Russell argued that our natural languages could in principle do away with indexicals. This brief piece, by contrast, aims to show that, instead of suggesting the potential eliminability of such expressions, Russell outlined a semantic account of indexicals according to which such expressions fundamentally depend on the perspectival way in which they refer to worldly items. If correct, this proposal would not only show that, in Russell’s later work, the meaning of expressions like indexicals is not exhaustively determined by the items they refer to: it would also show that Russell did not mean to eliminate indexicals from our natural languages at all.
Logos: Revista de Lingüística, Filosofía y Literatura
Organon F
Current philosophical debates about perception have largely ignored questions concerning the onto... more Current philosophical debates about perception have largely ignored questions concerning the ontological structure of perceptual experience, so as to focus on its intentional and phenomenological character. To illustrate and put pressure on this tendency, I revisit the controversy between doxastic views of perception and Gareth Evans's objection from over-intellectualization. I suggest that classic versions of the doxastic view are to a good extent driven by an ontological characterization of perceptual attitudes as nonfactive states or dispositions, not by a cognitively complex picture of perceptual content. Conceived along these lines, the doxastic view unveils an ontologically significant story of perceptual experience for at least two reasons: on the one hand, that characterization avoids the line of reasoning leading up to sense-datum theories of perception; and, on the other, it bears on recent discussions about the temporal structure of perceptual experience. Although I do not endorse the doxastic view, my goal is to highlight the importance of the relatively neglected ontological motivations thus driving that kind of account.
Grazer Philosophische Studien
The goal of this piece is to put some pressure on Brian O’Shaughnessy’s claim that perceptual exp... more The goal of this piece is to put some pressure on Brian O’Shaughnessy’s claim that perceptual experiences are necessarily mental processes. The author targets two motivations behind the development of that view. First, O’Shaughnessy resorts to pure conceptual analysis to argue that perceptual experiences are processes. The author argues that this line of reasoning is inconclusive. Secondly, he repeatedly invokes a thought experiment concerning the total freeze of a subject’s experiential life. Even if this case is coherent, however, it does not show that perceptual experiences are processes.
Acta Analytica, 2017
A number of contemporary philosophers of mind have brought considerations from the study of aspec... more A number of contemporary philosophers of mind have brought considerations from the study of aspect to bear on the ontological question how perceptual experiences persist over time. But, apart from rare exceptions, relatively little attention has been devoted to assess whether the way we talk about perceptual occurrences is of any relevance for discussions of ontological matters in general, let alone discussions about the ontological nature of perception. This piece examines whether considerations derived from the study of lexical aspect have a significant bearing on what ontological views of perception we should endorse: I shall argue that such aspectual considerations are in fact of very little use for settling the relevant ontological issue.
Filozofia Nauki
According to the Content View (CV), visual perceptual experiences represent the subject's surroun... more According to the Content View (CV), visual perceptual experiences represent the subject's surroundings or have representational content. A critical question posed by Charles Travis against CV is how the subject of experiences could index or introspectively ascribe a specific representational content of a given (occurring) visual experience: if her visual experiences incorporate representational contents, how could she ascribe a particular content to any given visual experience of hers? According to Travis, while visual representation is supposed to be "a familiar phenomenon; something we can tell is happening" (Travis 2004: 86), there is no good available evidence that our visual experiences represent our surroundings; and he thinks so because there seems to be no method of visual contents' indexation or self-ascription. The aim of this paper is to show how CV could meet what I shall call the Indexing Problem for perceptual-more specifically, visual-content. My main positive suggestion turns on the thought that the contents of visual experiences could be indexed by the way things demonstrably look to the subject of experiences.
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 2021
This piece contrasts two ontological views of perceptual experience: on the one hand, Experientia... more This piece contrasts two ontological views of perceptual experience: on the one hand, Experiential Heracliteanism, a view according to which the intuitively dynamic character of experience should be described-and probably accounted for-in irreducibly dynamic terms; and, on the other, Experiential non-Heracliteanism, a stance according to which perceptual experience may at least be described-if not explained-in terms of non-dynamic constituents. I specially strive (i) to frame both proposals against the backdrop of a venerable Heraclitean metaphor and (ii) to highlight the virtues of Experiential non-Heracliteanism against its currently sexier Heraclitean counterpart.
Síntesis. Revista de Filosofía, 2020
It is widely thought that, in his later work "An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth", Bertrand Russel... more It is widely thought that, in his later work "An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth", Bertrand Russell argued that our natural languages could in principle do away with indexicals. This brief piece, by contrast, aims to show that, instead of suggesting the potential eliminability of such expressions, Russell outlined a semantic account of indexicals according to which such expressions fundamentally depend on the perspectival way in which they refer to worldly items. If correct, this proposal would not only show that, in Russell's later work, the meaning of expressions like indexicals is not exhaustively determined by the items they refer to: it would also show that Russell did not mean to eliminate indexicals from our natural languages at all.
Discusiones Contemporáneas en Filosofía de la Mente (ed. Pablo López Silva), 2019
El problema mente-cuerpo —esto es, la pregunta sobre cómo la mente existe en la naturaleza espaci... more El problema mente-cuerpo —esto es, la pregunta sobre cómo la
mente existe en la naturaleza espacio-temporal— ha dominado
buena parte de la filosofía de la mente del siglo XX. El objetivo de
esta contribución es sugerir que esta tradición filosófica ha sufrido
de cierta indiferencia hacia importantes preguntas sobre la estructura
ontológica de nuestros fenómenos mentales. Para concluir,
esbozaré cómo un renovado interés en la ontología de la mente
está replanteando el hasta ahora estancado problema mente-cuerpo.
Logos: Revista de Lingüística, Filosofía y Literatura, 2019
Bodily and mental self-ascriptions are forms of first-person thought where a subject attributes p... more Bodily and mental self-ascriptions are forms of first-person thought where a subject attributes physical properties and psychological states to herself. The body-ownership view argues that a necessary and sufficient condition on such self-ascriptions is the existence of causal links between a spatio-temporal body and the self-ascribed properties or states. However, since P.F. Strawson's influential attack, this view has been dismissed as a bad philosophical idea. The goal of this brief piece is to outline the body-ownership view and neutralise two classic lines of objection against it: on the one hand, that the stance is incoherent; and, on the other, that it has counterintuitive implications.
Filozofia Nauki, 2019
According to the Content View-(CV) for short-visual perceptual experiences represent the subject'... more According to the Content View-(CV) for short-visual perceptual experiences represent the subject's surroundings or have representational content. A critical question posed by Charles Travis against this stance is how the subject of experiences could index or introspectively ascribe the representational content of any given (occurring) visual experience: that is, if her visual experiences incorporate representational contents, how could she ascribe a particular content C to any given visual experience E of hers? According to him, while visual representation is supposed to be 'a familiar phenomenon; something we can tell is happening' (Travis 2004, 86), there is no good available evidence that our visual experiences represent our surroundings; and he thinks so because there seems to be no method of visual contents' indexation or self-ascription. The goal of this piece is to show how (CV) could meet what I shall thus term the Indexing Problem for perceptual-more specifically , visual-content. My main positive suggestion turns on the thought that the contents of visual experiences could be indexed by the way things demonstrably look to the subject of experiences.