Harmen Ghijsen

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at Radboud University

What attitude does someone manifesting implicit bias really have? According to the default representationalist picture, implicit bias involves having conflicting attitudes (explicit versus implicit) with respect to the topic at hand. In opposition to this orthodoxy, dispositionalists argue that attitudes should be understood as higher-level disposi...

According to pluralistic folk psychology (PFP) we make use of a variety of methods to predict and explain each other, only one of which makes use of attributing propositional attitudes. I discuss three related problems for this view: first, the prediction problem, according to which (some of) PFP’s methods of prediction only work if they also assum...

Predictive processing accounts of perception (PP) assume that perception does not work in a purely bottom-up fashion but also uses acquired knowledge to make top-down predictions about the incoming sensory signals. This provides a challenge for foundationalist accounts of perception according to which perceptual beliefs are epistemically basic, tha...

This paper critically assesses Sosa’s normative framework for performances as well as its application to epistemology. We first develop a problem for one of Sosa’s central theses in the general theory of performance normativity according to which performances attain fully desirable status if and only if they are fully apt. More specifically, we arg...

Many philosophers take experience to be an essential aspect of perceptual justification. I argue against a specific variety of such an experientialist view, namely, the Looks View of perceptual justification, according to which our visual beliefs are mediately justified by beliefs about the way things look. I describe three types of cases that put...

When in the business of offering an account of the epistemic normativity of belief, one is faced with the following dilemma: strongly externalist norms fail to account for the intuition of justification in radical deception scenarios, while milder norms are incapable to explain what is epistemically wrong with false beliefs. This paper has two main...

This book provides an accessible and up-to-date discussion of contemporary theories of perceptual justification that each highlight different factors related to perception, i.e., conscious experience, higher-order beliefs, and reliable processes. The book’s discussion starts from the viewpoint that perception is not only one of our fundamental sour...

In this first chapter, I briefly introduce the three main theories of perceptual justification to be discussed in the following chapters: experientialism, epistemological disjunctivism, and process reliabilism. In Sect. 1.2, I start by considering our ordinary take on perception as one of our fundamental sources of justification, and the way this o...

In the last chapter we saw that process reliabilism was confronted with several problems, at the foremost of which were the lack of a good answer to the New Evil Demon Problem and the Clairvoyance Problem. If reliability is indeed necessary and sufficient for the justification of a specific class of beliefs, then subjects misled by an evil demon ar...

In this chapter we look at the prospects for the first in a family of views that will be labeled as experientialism. According to these experientialist views, perceptual justification has to do with having sufficient experiential evidence for one’s beliefs. To put it in terms that will be introduced in this chapter: experientialism holds that exper...

So far we have looked at versions of experientialism and versions of epistemological disjunctivism that agree in their analysis of perceptual justification as being importantly connected to evidence. Where experientialism takes perceptual beliefs to be evidentially justified by experience, epistemological disjunctivism takes perceptual beliefs to b...

In the previous chapter I introduced experientialism as the view that perceptual experience evidentially justifies beliefs. Although this view was motivated by the New Evil Demon Intuition and Blindsight Intuition, it faced a dilemma in how it construed perceptual experience. Either experience is non-propositional, but then it is entirely unclear h...

In this chapter we look at the prospects for the first in a family of views that will be labeled as experientialism. According to these experientialist views, perceptual justification has to do with having sufficient experiential evidence for one’s beliefs. To put it in terms that will be introduced in this chapter: experientialism holds that exper...

The cases of Norman the Clairvoyant and Mr. Truetemp form classic counterexamples to the process reliabilist's claim that reliability is sufficient for prima facie justification. I discuss several ways in which contemporary reliabilists have tried to deal with these counterexamples, and argue that they are all unsuccessful. Instead, I propose that...

Two different versions of epistemological disjunctivism have recently been upheld in the literature: a traditional, Justified True Belief Epistemological Disjunctivism (JTBED) and a Knowledge First Epistemological Disjunctivism (KFED). JTBED holds that factive reasons of the form “S sees that p” provide the rational support in virtue of which one h...

The phenomenon of cognitive penetration has received a lot of attention in recent epistemology, as it seems to make perceptual justification too easy to come by for experientialist theories of justification. Some have tried to respond to this challenge by arguing that cognitive penetration downgrades the epistemic status of perceptual experience, t...

Perceptual Dogmatism (PD) holds that if it perceptually seems to S that p, then S has immediate prima facie justification for the belief that p. Various philosophers have made the notion of a perceptual seeming more precise by distinguishing perceptual seemings from both sensations and beliefs to accommodate a) the epistemic difference between perc...

Duncan Pritchard has defended a version of epistemological disjunctivism which holds that in a paradigmatic case of perceptual knowledge, one knows that p in virtue of having the reflectively accessible reason that one sees that p . This view faces what is known as the basis problem: if seeing that p just is a way of knowing that p , then that one...

Most internalist views hold that experience provides evidential justification for perceptual belief, although there are different ideas about how experience is able to provide this justification. Evidentialism holds that experiences can act as evidence for belief without having propositional content, while dogmatism holds that only an experience wi...

Phenomenalist dogmatist experientialism (PDE) holds the following thesis: if $S$ has a perceptual experience that $p$ , then $S$ has immediate prima facie evidential justification for the belief that $p$ in virtue of the experience’s phenomenology. The benefits of PDE are that it (a) provides an undemanding view of perceptual justificat...