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One debate the Pyrrhonian skeptics had with the Epicureans concerned the relation between sense perceptions and beliefs. The debate centers on the Epicurean claim that all perceptions are true, a claim rejected by the Skeptics, who proceed on the assumption that there is no judgment component in perception, and it echoes widely through today’s philosophy of perception. In the past the author has defended a non-standard version of intentionalism, according to which (visual) experiences indeed are beliefs, but have contents—so-called looks-contents—that, if ever, very rarely are false. This chapter works out how this view can nevertheless account for non-veridical experience. It harnesses the rational role of experience to work out a precise way of characterizing non-veridical experience in terms of misleadingness.

In the debate on demonstrative reference it is taken for granted that there is such a thing as the semantic instance of determinacy for demonstratives. I argue that the interpretive interaction between the speaker and the hearer suggests that the notion of objective semantic reference in the case of demonstratives is dispensable. Either the speaker and the hearer do not have recourse to any such notion or, at least, there are no reasons for them to have recourse to any such notion. Looking at reactions and interactions does not of course settle the issue whether there is objective demonstrative reference. But it strongly suggests that the issue rather be dismissed.

Philosophers of language and theoretical linguists disagree about whether the meaning of an utterance is determined by the speaker’s more or less constrained communicative intention or by public features available to the hearer such as conventional linguistic meaning and diverse contextual cues. In this paper I question the common presupposition that there is such a thing as the correct interpretation of an utterance. I set out to show that, from the viewpoint of the three options at stake in the interpretive interaction between the speaker and the hearer, the notion of correct interpretation is dispensable. If the hearer takes an interest in the speaker’s intended meaning, as she most frequently does, she has no reason to be concerned with the actual meaning of the utterance. If the hearer wants to hold the speaker responsible for the normative consequences of the utterance, what is at issue is whether the hearer had the best reasons to take the utterance the way she did, i.e. the hearer opts for the most reasonable interpretation of the utterance, irrespective of the speaker’s intention and also of the objective meaning of the utterance. Finally, the hearer may opt for a merely imagined meaning of the utterance, which accounts for the remaining purposes a hearer can have with respect to an utterance, e.g. merriment. If there is no use for the notion of the correct interpretation of an utterance in interpretive practice, it seems that there are good reasons to dispense with this notion also in the theory about language and communication.

It is commonly taken for granted that an important task of a theory of meaning is to tell what determines the meaning of an utterance. The two basic positions are intentionalism and anti-intentionalism, the former situating the instance of determinacy in the speaker S’s intention and the latter in features accessible to the hearer H. In this paper I argue that the interpretive practice of S and H lends support to neither intentionalism nor anti-intentionalism, but rather suggests that the notion of utterance meaning is dispensable. I outline what I take to be the three options at stake in utterance interpretation and show that none of them presupposes recourse to the objectively correct interpretation of the utterance.

According to intentionalism, perceptual experience is a mental state with representational content. When it comes to the epistemology of perception, it is only natural for the intentionalist to hold that the justificatory role of experience is at least in part a function of its content. In this paper, I argue that standard versions of intentionalism trying to hold on to this natural principle face what I call the “defeasibility problem”. This problem arises from the combination of standard intentionalism with further plausible principles governing the epistemology of perception: that experience provides defeasible justification for empirical belief, and that such justification is best construed as probabilification. After exploring some ways in which the standard intentionalist could deal with the defeasibility problem, I argue that the best option is to replace standard intentionalism by what I call “phenomenal intentionalism”. Where standard intentionalism construes experiences as of p as having the content p, phenomenal intentionalism construes (visual) experiences as of p as having “phenomenal” or “looks contents”: contents of the form Lp (it looks as if p)., The Nature of Belief

In previous work, I have defended a non-standard version of intentionalism about perceptual experience. According to the doxastic account, visual experience is a peculiar kind of belief: belief with phenomenal or looks-content. In this paper, I investigate what happens if this account of experience is combined with another idea I find very plausible: That the colors are to be understood in terms of color experience. I argue that the resulting phenomenal account of color experience captures everything essential to what has been called the natural concept of color. And I show that circularity worries are not aggravated by adopting this account instead of more standard forms of intentionalism-rather, they can be dispelled along the same lines.