PHIL GROTH
pgroth@ucsc.edu
I am a PhD candidate in the philosophy department at UC Santa Cruz. Before coming to Santa Cruz I received my BA in philosophy from George Fox University in 2018.
My primary interests are in philosophy of mind & perception, epistemology, and philosophy of psychology. My dissertation explores the relationship between perception and cognition. The main questions I aim to answer are 1. how is thinking related to seeing? and 2. how do perceptual experiences result in and justify perceptual beliefs? I answer these questions by appealing to representationalist accounts of the mind and argue that perception is a non-cognitive mental attitude with non-propositional contents (you can read a recent paper on this here). Further, I argue that the power of imagination plays an important role in transforming (or translating) the content of perception into propositional form, making it available to cognition for belief formation.