Valentina Martinis wird für ihre Dissertation Perceiving and Thinking: Inquiry into Two Types of Phenomenology ausgezeichnet.
There is an intuitive difference between seeing a dog in the yard and merely thinking of one, or between eating a slice of Sachertorte and merely imagining doing so. Paradigmatic conscious perceptual states and cognitive states ‘feel’ or ‘appear’ different to the subject – they exhibit different phenomenal characters. My dissertation aims to explain this difference.
In the first part of the dissertation, I argue that a certain standard theory of the nature of phenomenal properties in terms of representational properties fails to account for this ‘felt’ difference. To account for this, a theory of this sort must show that there is a single representational feature that uniquely belongs to and thus individuates perceptual states as opposed to cognitive ones, and vice versa. I argue that this cannot be achieved: there are no ‘ways of representing’ which are unique to either perceptual or cognitive states. The second part of the dissertation offers an account of this phenomenal difference in terms of the attitudinal properties of mental states; these are properties such as being a judgment that are best treated as non-representational. This strategy claims that attitudinal properties make a distinctive phenomenal contribution to the overall phenomenal character of the state, independently of what the state represents (i.e., its content).
A major outcome of the dissertation is a critique of the standard notion of mental content in terms of propositions. A key challenge for alternative, non-propositional views of mental content is to explain the epistemic role of such states: if it is plausible that all knowledge is propositional, what epistemic role could non-propositional states play? To answer this, I propose a novel epistemological account of perceptual judgments, according to which perceptual experiences can provide immediate prima facie justification in virtue of their phenomenal character and independently of their content. The plausibility of this view has far-reaching implications, challenging the standard propositionalist approach to the nature of justification, judgment, reason, and representation.
Valentina Martinis completed her BA in Philosophy at the University of Turin and her MA in Philosophy at the University of Milan-San Raffaele, both with the highest distinction. In 2018, she began her doctoral studies in Philosophy at the Central European University, under the supervision of Prof. Katalin Farkas and Prof. Tim Crane. In 2021, she was a visiting researcher at the Department of Philosophy, King’s College London, hosted by Prof. Mark Textor. After successfully defending her Ph.D. dissertation without corrections, she was awarded a three-year postdoctoral fellowship (2024-2027) at the University of Liège with the collaborative research project "MIND -The British Sources of Philosophy of Mind 1888-1949".
