On Smithies’ Argument from Blindsight

Abstract

Declan Smithies’ The Epistemic Role of Consciousness (2019) is a defense of “Phenomenal Mentalism” according to which, necessarily, which propositions X has epistemic justification to believe at any given time is determined solely by X’s phenomenally individuated mental states at that time. Smithies offers two kinds of arguments for Phenomenal Mentalism: the ones that appeal to particular cases such as blindsight (the “arguments from below”) and the ones that appeal to general epistemic principles such as the JJ principle (the “arguments from above”). My focus is on the former. More precisely, I focus on a particular argument from below in Chapter 3, which I call “Argument from Blindsight”. According to this argument, the cases of blindsight show that consciousness is necessary for perceptual justification. In response, I raise two worries about Argument from Blindsight: first, it is difficult to find a plausible interpretation of “full rationality” according to which the premises are true (Section 2) and, second, the argument oscillates between empirical and stipulative discussions of blindsight in a potentially problematic manner (Section 3).