Nicholas Silins
Biographic Data
| ID | 1131869 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nicholas Silins |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nicholas |
| FAMILY NAME | Silins |
| SIGNATURE | SILINS N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Cornell University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3779-5850 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 8 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 12 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 8 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Speak, Memory
When someone is in a conscious state, must they be aware of it? The Buddhist philosopher Dignāga offers a brilliant route to answering this question by leveraging the role awareness might play as a constraint on memory. I begin by clarifying his strategy and what conclusions it might be used to establish, and then turn to explain why it fails. The first main problem is that, contrary to his contemporary defenders, there is no good way to use it t…
Blindsight, blandsight, and blingsight
The evil demon in the lab
The Evil Demon Inside
This paper examines how new evil demon problems could arise for our access to the internal world of our own minds. I start by arguing that the internalist/externalist debate in epistemology has been widely misconstrued—we need to reconfigure the debate in order to see how it can arise about our access to the internal world. I then argue for the coherence of scenarios of radical deception about our own minds, and I use them to defend a properly fo…
Cognitive Penetration and the Epistemology of Perception
If our experiences are cognitively penetrable, they can be influenced by our antecedent expectations, beliefs, or other cognitive states. Theorists such as Churchland, Fodor, Macpherson, and Siegel have debated whether and how our cognitive states might influence our perceptual experiences, as well as how any such influences might affect the ability of our experiences to justify our beliefs about the external world. This article surveys views abo…
Consciousness, Attention, and Justification
Compare a subject who enjoys conscious visual experience of a ball, and a hypothetical blindsighted subject who does not have conscious visual experience of a ball, but who nevertheless registers the presence of a ball in unconscious perceptual processing. Across a range of cases, both subjects reliably form accurate judgments about whether a ball is present. Does the
The Agony of Defeat
Deception and Evidence 1
Deception and Evidence 1
Cognitive Penetration and the Epistemology of Perception
If our experiences are cognitively penetrable, they can be influenced by our antecedent expectations, beliefs, or other cognitive states. Theorists such as Churchland, Fodor, Macpherson, and Siegel have debated whether and how our cognitive states might influence our perceptual experiences, as well as how any such influences might affect the ability of our experiences to justify our beliefs about the external world. This article surveys views abo…
The Agony of Defeat
The Evil Demon Inside
This paper examines how new evil demon problems could arise for our access to the internal world of our own minds. I start by arguing that the internalist/externalist debate in epistemology has been widely misconstrued—we need to reconfigure the debate in order to see how it can arise about our access to the internal world. I then argue for the coherence of scenarios of radical deception about our own minds, and I use them to defend a properly fo…
Deception and Evidence 1
Consciousness, Attention, and Justification
Compare a subject who enjoys conscious visual experience of a ball, and a hypothetical blindsighted subject who does not have conscious visual experience of a ball, but who nevertheless registers the presence of a ball in unconscious perceptual processing. Across a range of cases, both subjects reliably form accurate judgments about whether a ball is present. Does the
The Agony of Defeat
Cognitive Penetration and the Epistemology of Perception
If our experiences are cognitively penetrable, they can be influenced by our antecedent expectations, beliefs, or other cognitive states. Theorists such as Churchland, Fodor, Macpherson, and Siegel have debated whether and how our cognitive states might influence our perceptual experiences, as well as how any such influences might affect the ability of our experiences to justify our beliefs about the external world. This article surveys views abo…
The Evil Demon Inside
This paper examines how new evil demon problems could arise for our access to the internal world of our own minds. I start by arguing that the internalist/externalist debate in epistemology has been widely misconstrued—we need to reconfigure the debate in order to see how it can arise about our access to the internal world. I then argue for the coherence of scenarios of radical deception about our own minds, and I use them to defend a properly fo…
The evil demon in the lab
Blindsight, blandsight, and blingsight
Speak, Memory
When someone is in a conscious state, must they be aware of it? The Buddhist philosopher Dignāga offers a brilliant route to answering this question by leveraging the role awareness might play as a constraint on memory. I begin by clarifying his strategy and what conclusions it might be used to establish, and then turn to explain why it fails. The first main problem is that, contrary to his contemporary defenders, there is no good way to use it t…
Philosophy (7 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Epistemology (6 works) · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics (6 works) · Cognitive science (4 works) · Philosophy and Theoretical Science (4 works) · Social Psychology (4 works) · Cognitive psychology (3 works) · Computer Science (3 works) · Deception (3 works)