Experiences such as cooking and eating together or participating in a wine tasting suggest that we can attend together to the flavours of foods and drinks. But is joint attention to flavour really possible? This paper focuses on two challenges from the case of flavour that existing accounts of joint attention do not address. First, the object question. How can we have the same object of attention if, as in most cases of tasting together, we are not literally tasting the same particular object? Second, the attention coordination question. Since the things we taste may not be public objects we can point to and follow with our gaze, how can we monitor and affect how the other attends to the object? I will argue that a form of joint attention can be established independently of vision, and that communication-based accounts of joint attention are especially well-suited to explain this.

Aphantasia, a cognitive norm variant characterized by the reduced or absent ability to form visual mental imagery, has been a recent topic of interest in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. A thus far little discussed finding is that the affected often report having been unaware of their own imagery inability for decades of their life, a phenomenon which is here referred to as aphantasia nescience (the lack of knowledge about one’s own aphantasia). This paper presents a possible solution for the puzzle of how aphantasics (people with aphantasia) can remain in a state of aphantasia nescience. It is argued that aphantasic children learn how to play the language game of visualization, that is, to use the term visualization (and related terms) in socially desirable ways, leading both them and their visualizing peers to remain unaware of the aphantasics’ deviant phenomenology. It is suggested that the presented analysis can function as a template for exploring other cases (e.g., anendophasia) where deviant phenomenology remains undiscovered due to the behavioral abilities of the affected.

Phenomenal structuralism claims that each phenomenal character is fully individuated in terms of its relations to other phenomenal characters. This conflicts with the widely held view that phenomenal character is an intrinsic affair, i.e., that what it is like to undergo a particular experience is solely a matter of that experience’s intrinsic properties. Rather than offering another direct argument for phenomenal structuralism, the aim of this talk is to develop an error theory about intrinsicalism that explains how we come to believe that phenomenal character is intrinsic, why we hold onto this belief, and why it is nevertheless mistaken.

To this end, I will appeal to several considerations and point out how they account for the persistence of intrinsicalist intuitions: First, introspection and memory suggest that experiences are independent and self-contained, fostering the impression that what it is like to undergo a particular experience is wholly independent of other experiences. Second, it is cognitively more efficient to treat phenomenal properties as non-relational properties. Third, linguistic behavior further reinforces the impression that phenomenal character is intrinsic. The upshot is that phenomenal intrinsicalism is much less plausible than it is commonly taken to be, thereby making room for phenomenal structuralism.

Various philosophers claim that emotions are best understood as specific evaluative attitudes or properties thereof taken towards non-evaluative representational contents (Ben-Ze’ev 2001, 2010; Berninger 2016, 2017; Deonna and Teroni 2012, 2015, 2020; Döring 2014; Teroni 2007, 2016). I call this branch of theories the Attitudinal Approach to the Metaphysics of Emotions (henceforth also merely “attitudinal approach”. The talk discusses three of the major motivations underlying this branch of theories, explores three basic metaphysical directions in which this approach could be developed and argues that a view I call “relationalism” can best do justice to these motivations.