Vol.:(0123456789) Asian Journal of Philosophy (2022) 1:9 https://doi.org/10.1007/s44204-022-00012-8 1 3 BOOK SYMPOSIUM On Smithies’ Argument from Blindsight Kengo Miyazono 1 Received: 12 January 2022 / Accepted: 14 February 2022 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2022 Abstract Declan Smithies’ The Epistemic Role of Consciousness (2019) is a defense of “Phe‑ nomenal Mentalism” according to which, necessarily, which propositions X has epistemic justifcation to believe at any given time is determined solely by X’s phe‑ nomenally individuated mental states at that time. Smithies ofers two kinds of argu‑ ments for Phenomenal Mentalism: the ones that appeal to particular cases such as blindsight (the “arguments from below”) and the ones that appeal to general epis‑ temic 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 Chap‑ ter 3, which I call “Argument from Blindsight”. According to this argument, the cases of blindsight show that consciousness is necessary for perceptual justifcation. In response, I raise two worries about Argument from Blindsight: frst, it is difcult to fnd a plausible interpretation of “full rationality” according to which the prem‑ ises are true (Section 2) and, second, the argument oscillates between empirical and stipulative discussions of blindsight in a potentially problematic manner (Section 3). Keywords Consciousness · Blindsight · Perception · Perceptual justifcation 1 Introduction Declan Smithies’ The Epistemic Role of Consciousness (2019) is a defense of “Phe‑ nomenal Mentalism” according to which, necessarily, which propositions X has epistemic justifcation to believe at any given time is determined solely by X’s phe‑ nomenally individuated mental states at that time. Smithies ofers two kinds of argu‑ ments for Phenomenal Mentalism: the ones that appeal to particular cases such as blindsight (the “arguments from below”) and the ones that appeal to general epis‑ temic 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 * Kengo Miyazono miyazono@let.hokudai.ac.jp 1 Faculty of Humanities and Human Sciences, Hokkaido University, Nishi 7 Chome, Kita 10 Jo, Kita‑ku, Sapporo, Hokkaido 060‑0810, Japan