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This thesis offers a fresh interpretation and defense of epistemological disjunctivism about perceptual knowledge. I adopt a multilevel approach according to which perceptual knowledge on one level can enjoy factive rational support provided by perceptual knowledge of the same proposition on a different level. Here I invoke a distinction Ernest Sosa draws between 'judgmental' and 'merely functional' belief to articulate what I call the bifurcated conception of perceptual knowledge. The view that results is a form of epistemological disjunctivism about perceptual knowledge specifically at the higher judgmental level, layered over a straightforward externalism about perceptual knowledge at the lower merely functional level. The first chapter orients the reader to epistemological disjunctivism- with particular emphasis on the 'reflective epistemological disjunctivism' defended by Duncan Pritchard with inspiration from John McDowell. Here I review the arguments for thinking such a proposal true, as well as highlight some problems and three emerging challenges for the view: what I call the internalist challenge, the new access challenge(s), and the 'new evil genius' challenge. These challenges largely inspire the chapters to follow. In the second chapter I present the positive proposal: a fresh interpretation of epistemological disjunctivism in terms of perceptual knowledge at the specifically judgmental level. I argue that this is a modification that epistemological disjunctivists should adopt since it inoculates their view against the internalist challenge: the challenge of explaining why perception should provide one with knowledge by providing one with motivating reasons for belief. In the third chapter I motivate the view further in connection with the more familiar 'basis problem' for epistemological disjunctivism. I argue that this approach supports a unique strategy for solving that problem: one that is consistent both with what is known as 'the entailment' thesis and the thought that we can reduce perceptual knowledge to a kind of rationally supported belief. In the fourth chapter I move to playing defense. I defend the proposal against the so-called 'new evil genius' challenge. This is the challenge to explain why subjects in pairs of 'good' and 'bad' cases can seem equally justified for sustaining their perceptual beliefs. I argue that what we are being sensitive to here, rather, is the fact that both subjects can be equally epistemically responsible and/or reasonable for believing what they do. Before concluding this chapter I also offer an error theory. In the fifth chapter I defend the proposal against the new access challenges raised in chapter one. These alleged challenges for epistemological disjunctivism arise specifically for versions of reflective epistemological disjunctivism that hold that one's rational support for perceptual beliefs is not only factive but reflectively accessible as well. Rather than address the challenges head on, I try to dislodge the thought they depend upon-viz., that one's factive rational support for perceptual beliefs is reflectively accessible to the subject. Here I argue that the reflective accessibility of one's factive rational support is actually a wheel turning idly in the debate with the underdetermination-based radical sceptic-so that we can simply drop it without consequence. The result is an epistemological disjunctivism that is immune to access problems. I then offer a final summary and conclude. At the end of this thesis I have attached an appendix, which is an excursion into religious epistemology and an exploration of a form of religious epistemological disjunctivism. Here I apply the epistemological disjunctivist insight to the case of religious perception in order to defend the idea that one can offer independent rational support for theistic belief by appealing to religious beliefs that are justified on the basis of religious experiences. This appendix chapter is in keeping with the general spirit of the thesis insofar as it seeks to developed epistemological disjunctivism in new and fruitful directions.

One of the most immediately compelling arguments against the disjunctivist position within the philosophy of perception points to the well-accepted fact that hallucinations can have the same neural cause as veridical perceptions; this is known as the causal argument. Since the main motivation for disjunctivism is to preserve naive realism, critics claim that naive realism is then incompatible with certain, well-accepted claims of neuropsychology, and, thus, disjunctivism is false. After surveying the general arguments for disjunctivism offered by Hinton, Snowden, and Martin, the causal argument is split into a stronger version and a weaker version. The strong argument relies on a narrow conception of the ‘same cause, same effect’ principle and this narrow conception is extremely controversial, ultimately entailing that mental events supervene only on the total brain state of an individual. The weak argument, which embraces a wider conception of the ‘same cause, same effect’ principle finds the disjunctivist position explanatorily redundant. The two major camps within disjunctivism, positive disjunctivism and negative disjunctivism, offer different approaches to the weak argument, and what emerges from the discussion of these two theories is that negative disjunctivism has a major dialectical advantage against positive disjunctivism, and that negative disjunctivism offers a satisfying response to the weak causal argument. M. G. F. Martin offers an insightful analysis of ‘indistinguishability’ and in doing so clarifies the disjunctivist thesis, sets limits to our understanding of our own mental states, and places the burden with the common-kind theorist.

The focus of this thesis is a certain family of ontological positions. These positions say that there is some class of objects and properties, to which both physical objects and properties reduce and which are the kinds of things we confront in perceptual experience. Though largely absent from contemporary discussions of ontology, there are various reasons to think they deserve consideration. Species of this family, and similar views, have a prominent role in early analytic philosophy. Though endorsement of these views has been systematically de-emphasized in historical work on the period, Ernst Mach, William James, and Bertrand Russell are among philosophers who endorse such views in their work. Their views were motivated by a number of different considerations. Here, I set to the side the issue of what has motivated these views in the past. I bring them up only for the purpose of giving attribution. I make no claim to ontological novelty nor will I be giving them an all-out defense. Accordingly, many considerations relevant to choice of ontology are bracketed. Instead of an all-out defense, what I offer here is an explanation of how adopting such a view allows us to solve two related problems. This amounts to two related reasons for taking a view like this seriously. One is for those who think that intuitions of a certain sort are a guide to what we should believe is ontologically the case. The other is for those who find merit in a disjunctive theory of perception. / Master of Arts

O presente trabalho visa motivar e defender o disjuntivismo epistemológico, a tese de que a percepção é estado factivo e racionalmente fundado. Essa variação de disjuntivismo é apresentada como uma dissolução do paradoxo cético da subdeterminação. Diante do problema cético do sonho, o disjuntivismo epistemológico é tomado conjuntamente com uma concepção enactivista da percepção, cuja tese central é que estados perceptuais são constituídos pelas ações do agente no ambiente. A conjunção dessas duas teses promove uma concepção corporificada da racionalidade, segundo a qual estados percpetuais racionalmente fundados são obtidos pelo exercício de habilidades do indivíduo no ambiente. Essa tese é ameaçada pela intuição supostamente plausível de que indivíduos em cenários céticos poderiam ser racionais, ainda que não possuíssem meios corpóreos para interação com seu em torno. Argumenta-se contra essa intuição pela crítica à maneira como cenários céticos são concebidos. Por fim, aplica-se o enactivismo radical ao autoconhecimento, promovendo um meio termo entre um modelo perceptual de autoconhecimento e um modelo racionalista. / This work is intended to motivate and defend epistemological disjunctivism, the view that perception is a factive and rationally grounded state. This version of disjunctivism is presented as a dissolution of the underdetermination skeptical paradox. Facing the dream skeptical problem, epistemological disjunctivism is taken in conjunction with an enactive conception of perception, whose core thesis is that perceptual states are constituted by one’s actions in the environment. The conjunction of these two theses promotes an embodied notion of rationality, according to which rationally grounded perceptual states are achieved by the exercise of one’s abilities in the environment. That view is threatened by the apparently plausible intuition that individuals in skeptical scenarios could be rational even if they lacked the bodily means to interact with their surroundings. This intuition is defeated by a critique to the way skeptical scenarios are conceived. Lastly, radical enactivism is applied to self-knowledge, attaining a middle ground between the perceptual and the rationalist models of self-knowledge.

O presente trabalho visa motivar e defender o disjuntivismo epistemológico, a tese de que a percepção é estado factivo e racionalmente fundado. Essa variação de disjuntivismo é apresentada como uma dissolução do paradoxo cético da subdeterminação. Diante do problema cético do sonho, o disjuntivismo epistemológico é tomado conjuntamente com uma concepção enactivista da percepção, cuja tese central é que estados perceptuais são constituídos pelas ações do agente no ambiente. A conjunção dessas duas teses promove uma concepção corporificada da racionalidade, segundo a qual estados percpetuais racionalmente fundados são obtidos pelo exercício de habilidades do indivíduo no ambiente. Essa tese é ameaçada pela intuição supostamente plausível de que indivíduos em cenários céticos poderiam ser racionais, ainda que não possuíssem meios corpóreos para interação com seu em torno. Argumenta-se contra essa intuição pela crítica à maneira como cenários céticos são concebidos. Por fim, aplica-se o enactivismo radical ao autoconhecimento, promovendo um meio termo entre um modelo perceptual de autoconhecimento e um modelo racionalista. / This work is intended to motivate and defend epistemological disjunctivism, the view that perception is a factive and rationally grounded state. This version of disjunctivism is presented as a dissolution of the underdetermination skeptical paradox. Facing the dream skeptical problem, epistemological disjunctivism is taken in conjunction with an enactive conception of perception, whose core thesis is that perceptual states are constituted by one’s actions in the environment. The conjunction of these two theses promotes an embodied notion of rationality, according to which rationally grounded perceptual states are achieved by the exercise of one’s abilities in the environment. That view is threatened by the apparently plausible intuition that individuals in skeptical scenarios could be rational even if they lacked the bodily means to interact with their surroundings. This intuition is defeated by a critique to the way skeptical scenarios are conceived. Lastly, radical enactivism is applied to self-knowledge, attaining a middle ground between the perceptual and the rationalist models of self-knowledge.

O presente trabalho visa motivar e defender o disjuntivismo epistemológico, a tese de que a percepção é estado factivo e racionalmente fundado. Essa variação de disjuntivismo é apresentada como uma dissolução do paradoxo cético da subdeterminação. Diante do problema cético do sonho, o disjuntivismo epistemológico é tomado conjuntamente com uma concepção enactivista da percepção, cuja tese central é que estados perceptuais são constituídos pelas ações do agente no ambiente. A conjunção dessas duas teses promove uma concepção corporificada da racionalidade, segundo a qual estados percpetuais racionalmente fundados são obtidos pelo exercício de habilidades do indivíduo no ambiente. Essa tese é ameaçada pela intuição supostamente plausível de que indivíduos em cenários céticos poderiam ser racionais, ainda que não possuíssem meios corpóreos para interação com seu em torno. Argumenta-se contra essa intuição pela crítica à maneira como cenários céticos são concebidos. Por fim, aplica-se o enactivismo radical ao autoconhecimento, promovendo um meio termo entre um modelo perceptual de autoconhecimento e um modelo racionalista. / This work is intended to motivate and defend epistemological disjunctivism, the view that perception is a factive and rationally grounded state. This version of disjunctivism is presented as a dissolution of the underdetermination skeptical paradox. Facing the dream skeptical problem, epistemological disjunctivism is taken in conjunction with an enactive conception of perception, whose core thesis is that perceptual states are constituted by one’s actions in the environment. The conjunction of these two theses promotes an embodied notion of rationality, according to which rationally grounded perceptual states are achieved by the exercise of one’s abilities in the environment. That view is threatened by the apparently plausible intuition that individuals in skeptical scenarios could be rational even if they lacked the bodily means to interact with their surroundings. This intuition is defeated by a critique to the way skeptical scenarios are conceived. Lastly, radical enactivism is applied to self-knowledge, attaining a middle ground between the perceptual and the rationalist models of self-knowledge.

This thesis develops a disjunctivist approach to action as an alternative to the standard causal theory, or 'causalism'. The standard theory promotes a concept of action as constituted by a bodily event joined to certain mental conditions by a bond of causation. A disjunctivist approach, in contrast, claims that action must be distinguished by more than merely its etiology: action and mere movement are fundamentally different kinds. Recent objections to the causal theory of action are first surveyed, and the common causalist assumption claiming Aristotle as the progenitor of the causal theory is examined and dismissed. More refined interpretations of Aristotle's thought on action yield two different concepts: action as change, and action as a unified psychophysical process. The latter in particular is argued to hold promise as a basis for developing the disjunctivist approach to action. The remainder of the thesis therefore considers a contemporary account of psychophysicality, known as 'embodiment theory' (Hanna and Maiese 2009), with the conclusion that the intelligibility of the account depends on appeal to a recent variant of top-down causation (Steward 2012). The thesis also concludes that consideration of the concept of an animal agent makes it entirely unsurprising that the mental and physical are always found together in voluntary movement, and that the embodiment theory's central notion of ‘property fusion' potentially complements a naturalistic variant of top-down causation in explanations of agency.

This thesis is broadly about the structure of propositional knowledge and the ways in which an individual knower can have such knowledge. More specifically, it is about the epistemology of factive psychological attitudes and the view that knowing is a purely mental state. I take such a view as being not so much a theory of knowledge, but rather an accounting of how we know, or the ways in which we know. In arguing for this view I offer a different interpretation of certain epistemic conditions, like seeing and remembering and try to show how understanding the metaphysics of mental states and events clarifies the relation between such conditions and the factive psychological attitudes implicit in them. Part one of the thesis is occupied with a discussion about a form of externalism popular in contemporary philosophy of mind, content externalism and a form of externalism popularized by Timothy Williamson which I refer to in the thesis as attitude externalism. I argue that content externalism in the style of Tyler Burge, arguably one of its most prominent advocates, faces a rather serious dilemma when it comes to the role that mental states and specific mental events are meant to play in psychological explanation. The view endorsed by Timothy Williamson, which says that some psychological attitudes, factive attitudes like ‘seeing that’, can be thought of as broad prime conditions is offered as a way in which the content externalist can avoid this dilemma and retain a causal-psychological explanatory thesis about mental states and events. The second part of the thesis is concerned with the epistemology of factive psychological attitudes and I focus carefully on two paradigmatic cases – seeing and remembering. I dedicate a chapter to each and offer a series of arguments to the effect that seeing and remembering though they may be thought of as ways of having propositional knowledge, it is not necessary that they entail knowing nor that they be stative to do so. In this sense, there is a strong and important divergence in the dialectic of the thesis from the view offered by Timothy Williamson, on which many points in this thesis there is agreement. I conclude the thesis with a discussion on what I take to be a fundamental epistemological principle, which I call the multiformity principle. The argument there is that when a subject knows that p, there is always a specific way in which that subject knows. I further take this principle to reveal the fact that propositional knowledge is an intrinsically disjunctive phenomenon.