Mind And World

The mind-world question is an old and repeatedly discussed problem. In the broad sense, it includes all the problems concerning mind and world. This dissertation focuses on the perceptual relation and the rational relation between them. Here, perceptual relation refers to the relation any cognizer has between him and his environment in virtue of his possession of perceptual experience, and rational relation is the relation in virtue of which thoughts, conceived by mind and directed to world, receive rational constraints imposed by world. The first question involves the object of perception and perceptual consciousness. The second one is to investigate the nature of perceptual experience so far as it can serve justificatory role for knowledge.As to the first problem, the most famous reply to it is indirect realism. This dissertation sorts out five main arguments for indirect realism and counters them piecemeal. It also makes clear that indirect realism inevitably leads to the "veil of perception" problem. The dissertation then turns to the discussion of intentionalism and disjunctivism. Intentionalism well explains the nonexistence of the object of hallucination, but it cannot coherently account for the relationship of intentional state and intentional object. This inconsistency leads us to disjunctivism. Disjunctivism takes hallucination and verdict perception as two fundamentally different kind of mental state. Therefore, perceptual experience is a disjunction of hallucinatory and verdict perceptual experience. Disjunctivism solves the "veil of perception" problem completely, and makes straightway the passage between mind and world. Based on disjunctivism, this dissertation proposes a holistic version of argument against "evidential skepticism".The next chapter is about to discuss perceptual consciousness. The first two sections argue against the belief theory of perception and the judgment theory of perception. Then varieties of seeing are analyzed in the name of perceptual consciousness, and the results are applied to clarify some theses in philosophy of science. This dissertation argues that the thesis that observation is "theory-laden" is tenable only in very limited cases, and that it does not have enough supportive force for Kuhn to draw his phenomenalistic conclusions from it. It is also shown that there are not only particular features but also universal features about environment in perceptual consciousness. This helps us to understand why knowledge is universal. So contexrualism about knowledge is challenged.The second problem is actually about the relationship between perceptual experience and perceptual belief. Traditional empiricism cannot give an adequate account for this point, and therein falls into "the myth of the given". While coherentism as an alternative just cuts off the rational relation between experience and belief. Minimal empiricism insists on the rational relation. It has been famously argued that if minimal is possible, then experience must has conceptual content. Call this conceptualism. Conceptualism cannot give adequate account for the fine-grainedness of experience and animal's perception. The dissertation proposes coexist thesis, which states that conceptual content and nonconceptual content can coexist in a perceptual experience. Coexist thesis can be well understood in light of prototype theory in psychology. Our commitment to nonconceptual content will not lead to "the myth of the given", because it can play justificatory role in virtue of its being in "space of justification", though it is out of "space of reasons". Therefore, there is no problem lies in rational relation between mind and world.