Noga Gratvol - Research

Research

Publications

Primitive Governance. Noûs. 2025. [penultimate]

Laws of nature are sometimes said to govern their instances. Spelling out what governance is, however, is an important task that has only recently received sustained philosophical attention. In the first part of this paper, I argue against the two prominent reductive views of governance—modal views and grounding views. Ruling out the promising candidates for reduction supports the claim that governance is sui generis. In the second part of this paper, I argue that governance is subject to a contingency requirement. Laws govern their instances only if those instances are metaphysically contingent. I end by defending the resulting account of governance from two potential objections.

Essence and Explanation: A Logical Mismatch. Inquiry. 2021. (with Aaron Segal) [journal]

Let Essentialism be the view that at least some object has at least some property essentially. And let Relative Essentialism be the view that Essentialism is true, but that for any object that has any property essentially, it has it essentially only relative to the value of some parameter. Meghan Sullivan has recently put forward a promising new version of Relative Essentialism, according to which the relevant parameter is an explanatory framework. We argue that despite its promise, Sullivan's version unfortunately fails, due to the mismatch between the logic of essentiality and the logic of explanation.

In Progress

A paper about the rationality of perceptual experiences.

Perceptual experiences have traditionally been taken to justify belief without themselves being justified. Recently, philosophers have challenged this assumption. Proponents of what I will call 'Inferentialism' argue that some perceptual experiences are the result of an inference from other mental states, and just like inferred beliefs, that these perceptual experiences are inferentially rationally assessable. They justify beliefs only if they themselves are justified, and they are justified only if they are based on good epistemic reasons by a good inferential process. In this paper, I argue that the relevant perceptual experiences should not be understood as a result of an inference. Some perceptual experiences are rationally assessable, but we should not understand their rationality in terms of inferential norms. Instead, I propose that the rationality of perceptual experiences is accounted for by the rationality of attention.

A paper arguing that we cannot take perceptual experiences at face value.

It is an intuitive and widely held idea that perceptual beliefs take the contents of perceptual experiences at face value. I argue that even a modest version of this claim is problematic. More specifically, I address the claim that typically, a perceptual belief of an individual represents (some of) the same properties as a perceptual experience of that individual. Call this thesis Face Value. My argument against Face Value relies on two other claims. First, I argue that there is empirical evidence for individual differences in perceptual categorization, which suggest that typically, different individuals’ perceptual experiences do not represent (any of) the same properties. Second, I argue that the possibility of communication and testimonial justification supports the claim that typically, different individuals’ perceptual belief do represent (some of) the same properties. Together, these entail the negation of Face Value.

Dissertation

The Rationality of Attention

My dissertation is concerned with the role attention plays in our epistemic lives. We are generally presented with much more information than we can reason with. Our perceptual experiences seem to contain more information than the beliefs we form on their basis, and when we make abductive inferences, we cannot consider all the possible explanations. A central function of attention is to prioritize information and select some of it for further processing. So, attention partly determines which perceptual beliefs we form, which explanations we consider, and which inferences we draw.

In many cases, attention is epistemically beneficial. Part of what makes birders experts in their field is the way they attend. However, attention can also go awry. A doctor who is interested in blood analysis, and therefore attends to her patient’s bloodwork at the expense of other test results, seems to be committing an epistemic error. In my dissertation, I argue that attention does not only have epistemic consequences, but is a distinct epistemic phenomenon in itself. I propose that the rational norms on attention are norms about how one should prioritize one’s information and select from it. Given the ubiquity of perceptual and cognitive attention, attention is not some isolated domain of epistemic concern, but part of the process epistemic agents go through when they form beliefs. Having an account of the rationality of attention is therefore vital to epistemology.