Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Closing The Representational Gap: An Embodied-Enactive View Of Narcissistic Representational Systems, Victor Parchment

2016 Undergraduate Awards

According to tracking theories of mental content, the world we conceive is determined by the world we perceive, and the world we perceive is determined by the mind-independent world as it is. This view is challenged by Kathleen Akins on the grounds that our sensory systems are narcissistic, i.e., they have narrow operational interests and are largely unconcerned with representing objective reality. Yet, if what we conceive is not a veridical representation of the world, how is object-guided action in the world possible? This disconnect is the “representational gap”. This paper will close this gap by arguing that Akins’ concept …

Skepticism As Epistemic Naturalization, Dylan Vallance

2016 Undergraduate Awards

Responses to radical philosophical skepticism often interpret skeptical arguments as conceptual challenges that must be overcome if common epistemic practices are to remain justifiably practicable. Such responses treat skeptical arguments as attacks on our ability to justifiably make knowledge claims, wherein the skeptic attempts to isolate conceptual problems embedded in common epistemic processes that debar those processes from the potential to produce knowledge. In this framework, the successful skeptic reveals our constitutional epistemic blindness while the successful response defangs the skeptic’s attack on our capacity for knowledge.

This paper argues that this interpretation is predicated on a fundamental misunderstanding of …