Online research in philosophy

Representationalism emerges unscathed from Pessoa et al.'s attack. They fail to undermine a key reason for its influence: it has the theoretical resources to explain many illusory visual experiences such as illusory contours and features. Furthermore, in attempting to undermine representationalism, the authors seem to erect an unduly inflated distinction between neural accounts of perception and personal-level accounts of perception.

Representational theories of mind cannot individuate the sense modalities in a principled manner. According to representationalism, the phenomenal character of experiences is determined by their contents. The usual objection is that inverted qualia are possible, so the phenomenal character of experiences may vary independently of their contents. But the objection is inconclusive. It raises difficult questions about the metaphysics of secondary qualities and it is difficult to see whether or not inverted qualia are possible. This paper proposes an alternative test of representationalism. Do experiences in different sense modalities have the same phenomenal character when they share content? Psychological work on the perception of shape through vision and spatial hearing is discussed. This work shows that visual and auditory experiences differ in phenomenal character even in so far as they represent similar properties. This objection to representationalism does not invite questions about secondary qualities or depend on establishing metaphysical possibilities.

This encyclopedia entry provides an extended review of scientific work on synesthesia and reviews the philosophical literature that has drawn on synesthesia in order to arbitrate various disputes pertaining to topics such as the nature of consciousness, color, mental architecture, and perceptual representation, as well as several other topics.

Synesthesia is a condition in which stimulation in one modality also gives rise to a perceptual experience in a second modality. In two recent studies we found that the condition is more common than previously reported; up to 5% of the population may experience at least one type of synesthesia. Although the condition has been traditionally viewed as an anomaly (e.g., breakdown in modularity), it seems that at least some of the mechanisms underlying synesthesia do reflect universal cross-modal mechanisms. We review here a number of examples of cross-modal correspondences found in both synesthetes and non-synesthetes including pitch-lightness and vision-touch interaction, as well as cross-domain spatial- numeric interactions. Additionally, we discuss the common role of spatial attention in binding shape and color surface features (whether ordinary or synesthetic color). Consistently with behavioral and neuroimaging data showing that chromatic-graphemic (colored-letter) synesthesia is a genuine perceptual phenomenon implicating extrastriate cortex, we also present electrophysiological data showing modulation of visual evoked potentials by synesthetic color congruency.

In this paper, I defend a representationalist account of the phenomenal character of color experiences. Representationalism, the thesis that phenomenal character supervenes on a certain kind of representational content, so-called phenomenal content, has been developed primarily in two different ways, as Russellian and Fregean representationalism. While the proponents of Russellian and Fregean representationalism differ with respect to what they take the contents of color experiences to be, they typically agree that colors are exhaustively characterized by the three dimensions of the color solid: hue, saturation, and lightness. I argue that a viable version of representationalism needs to renounce this restriction to three dimensions and consider illumination to be a genuine phenomenal dimension of color. My argument for this thesis falls into two parts. I first consider the phenomenon of color constancy in order to show that neither Russellian nor Fregean representationalism can do justice to the phenomenal significance of local illumination. I subsequently formulate a version of representationalism that accounts for illumination by taking it as a phenomenal dimension of color.

Synesthetes are people who report having perceptual experiences that are very unusual, such as ?seeing? sounds as colors or ?smelling? colors as odors. It is commonly assumed these days that such synesthetic experiences must be instances of misperceptions. Against this widespread assumption, I will highlight that there is reason to think that at least some synesthetic experiences can be viewed as truly veridical perceptions, and not as illusions or hallucinations. On this view, which I will back up by conceptual arguments and empirical data, synesthesia does sometimes enable the individual to truly pick up on worldly features. In failing to take this possibility on board, the participants in this debate have thus unduly restricted the scope of dialectical options. Finally, the reassessment of synesthetic experiences that I defend in this paper will turn out to have important ramifications not just for synesthesia research, but also for perception theories more generally.

Synesthesia is a condition in which stimulation of one sensory modality causes unusual experiences in a second, unstimulated modality. Although long treated as a curiosity, recent research with a combination of phenomenological, behavioral, and neuroimaging methods has begun to identify the cognitive and neural basis of synesthesia. Here, we review this literature with an emphasis on grapheme-color synesthesia, in which viewing letters and numbers induces the perception of colors. We discuss both the substantial progress that has been made in the past fifteen years and some open questions. In particular, we focus on debates in the field relating to the neural basis of synesthesia, including the relationship between synesthesia and attention and the role of meaning in synesthetic colors. We propose that some, but probably not all, of these differences can be accounted for by differences in the synesthetes studied and discuss some methodological implications of these individual differences.

This paper proposes a subjectivist approach to color within the framework of an externalist form of representationalism about phenomenal consciousness. Motivations are presented for accepting both representationalism and color subjectivism, and an argument is offered against the case made by Michael Tye on behalf of the claim that colors are objective, physical properties of objects. In the face of the considerable difficulties associated with finding a workable realist theory of color, the alternative account of color experience set out, projectivist representationalism, claims that the color properties we encounter in experience exist only in the representational contents of our experiences. Color experiences are caused by the physical structure of objects, but objects are never actually colored and color experiences systematically misrepresent objects as colored. However, despite being an error theory of color, projectivist representationalism does not do violence to our everyday use and understanding of color concepts and terms, nor does it undermine the role of color experience in aiding the perceiving subject in navigating through the world.