Online research in philosophy

Vision has been the primary focus of naturalistic philosophical research concerning perception and perceptual experience. Guided by visual experience and vision science, many philosophers have focused upon theoretical issues dealing with the perception of objects. Recently, however, hearing researchers have discussed auditory objects. I present the case for object perception in vision, and argue that an analog of object perception occurs in auditory perception. I propose a notion of an auditory object that is stronger than just that of an intentional object of audition, but that does not identify auditory objects with the ordinary material objects we see.

correct insofar as he thinks Humeanism is committed to object transubstantia- tion. If the individual essences of objects are constituted only by intrinsic categorical properties, and it is possible for their dispositional properties to change without accompanying changes in their intrinsic categorical properties, then it would be possible for a particular object to remain the very same object even if its dispositions to behave changed radically. It is not clear, however, that scientific essentialism per se is not also committed to object transubstantiation. Scientific essentialism would preclude object transubstantiation if the kinds instantiated by an object were part of the individual essence of the object; for instance, if being a member of the substance kind human were essential to the individual Nixon. But Ellis specifically denies this claim; he asserts that “individual essences would seem to have very little to do with kind essences” (238–39). So once object transubstantiation is distinguished from kind transubstantiation, it is not clear how embarrassed the Humean should be. Neither scientific essentialism nor Humeanism per se is committed to kind transubstantiation. And though Humeanism is committed to object transubstantiation, scientific essentialism per se does not preclude object transubstantiation.

The concept of a physical object has figured prominently in the history of philosophy, and is probably more important now than it has ever been before. Yet the question What are physical objects?, i.e., What is the correct analysis of the concept of a physical object?, has received surprisingly little attention. The purpose of this paper is to address this question. I consider several attempts at answering the question, and give my reasons for preferring one of them over its rivals. The account of physical objects that I recommend – the Spatial Location Account – defines physical objects as objects with spatial locations. The intuitive idea behind the Spatial Location Account is this. Objects from all of the different ontological categories – physical objects; non-physical objects like souls, if there are any; propositions; universals; etc. – have this much in common: they all exist in time. But not all of them exist in space. The ones that exist in time and space, i.e., the ones that have spatial locations, are the ones that count as physical objects.

Three experiments investigated changes from 15 to 30 months of age in children’s (N = 114) mastery of relations between an object and an aperture, supporting surface, or form. When choosing between objects to insert into an aperture, older children selected objects of an appropriate size and shape, but younger children showed little selectivity. Further experiments probed the sources of younger children’s difficulty by comparing children’s performance placing a target object in a hole, on a 2-dimensional form, or atop another solid object. Together, the findings suggest that some factors limiting adults’ object representations, including the difficulty of comparing the shapes of positive and negative spaces and of representing shapes in 3 dimensions, contribute to young children’s errors in manipulating objects.

More than a decade of experimental research confirms that external linguistic information provided in the form of word labels can induce a "mutually exclusive" bias against double naming and lead children to infer the name of novel objects and parts (Markman, 1989). Linguistic labels have also been shown to encourage more sophisticated reasoning, particularly with respect to superordinate and atypical object categorization (Gelman & Coley, 1990; Waxman & Markow, 1995). By contrast, however, the inverse possibility that the linguistic labeling of basic-level objects may also developmentally support the kind of "phonological reorganization" (Werker & Tees, 1984) observed within infant speech categorization has yet to be theoretically isolated and experimentally explored. Yet the dynamic of relying on labels to inform object categorization clearly presupposes that potential word labels themselves have already been classified into language-specific phonemic categories. However, a two-staged strategy of first relying on basic-level object categories to refine speech categorization, and then exploiting such learned speech categories to fine tune object categorization would reveal a cyclically opportunistic learner. A uniform assumption of a one to one pairing between (types of) words and (types of) objects allows bootstrapping not only from language to object classification, but also from basic object categorization to phonemic speech classification.

In this paper we examine the pattern of conceptual change during scientific revolutions by using methods from cognitive psychology. We show that the changes characteristic of scientific revolutions, especially taxonomic changes, can occur in a continuous manner. Using the frame model of concept representation to capture structural relations within concepts and the direct links between concept and taxonomy, we develop an account of conceptual change in science that more adequately reflects the current understanding that episodes like the Copernican revolution are not always abrupt. When concepts are represented by frames, the transformation from one taxonomy to another can be achieved in a piecemeal fashion not preconditioned by a crisis stage, and a new taxonomy can arise naturally out of the old frame instead of emerging separately from the existing conceptual system. This cognitive mechanism of continuous change demonstrates the constructive roles of anomaly and incommensurability in promoting the progress of science.

Adults value certain unique individuals—such as artwork, sentimental possessions, and memorabilia—more than perfect duplicates. Here we explore the origins of this bias in young children, by using a conjurer’s illusion where we appear to produce identical copies of realworld objects. In Study 1, young children were less likely to accept an identical replacement for an attachment object than for a favorite toy. In Study 2, children often valued a personal possession of Queen Elizabeth II more than an identical copy, but showed no such bias for another sort of valuable object. These findings suggest that young children develop attachments to individuals that are independent of any perceptible properties that the individuals possess. Ó 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Physical objects are the most familiar of all objects, and yet the concept of a physical object remains elusive. Any six-year-old can give you a dozen examples of physical objects, and most people with at least one undergraduate course in philosophy can also give examples of non-physical objects. But if asked to produce a definition of ‘physical object’ that adequately captures the distinction between the physical and the nonphysical, the average person can offer little more than hand-waving.

Children tend to extend object names on the basis of sameness of shape, rather than size, color, or materialFa tendency that has been dubbed the ‘‘shape bias.’’ Is the shape bias the result of well-learned associations between words and objects? Or does it exist because of a general belief that shape is a good indicator of object category membership? The present three studies addressed this debate by exploring whether the shape bias is specific to naming. In Study 1, 3-year-olds showed the shape bias both when asked to extend a novel name and when asked to select an object of the same kind as a target object. Study 2 found the same shape bias when children were asked to generalize properties relevant to category membership. Study 3 replicated the findings from Study 1 with 2-year-olds. These findings suggest that the shape bias derives from children’s beliefs about object kinds and is not the product of associative learning.

Because the visual system cannot process all of the objects, colors, and features present in a visual scene, visual attention allows some visual stimuli to be selected and processed over others. Most research on visual attention has focused on spatial or location-based attention, in which the locations occupied by stimuli are selected for further processing. Recent research, however, has demonstrated the importance of objects in organizing (or segregating) visual scenes and guiding attentional selection. Because of the long history of spatial attention research, theories of spatial attention are more mature than theories of other visual processes, such as object segregation and object attention. In the present paper, I outline a biased competition account of object segregation and attention, following similar accounts that have been developed for spatial attention (Desimone and Duncan, 1995). In my biased competition account, I seek to understand how some objects can be segregated and selected over other objects in a complex visual scene. Under this account, there are two sources of visual information that allow an object to be processed over other objects: bottom-up information carried by the physical stimulus and top-down information based on an observer's goals. I use the biased competition account to combine many diverse findings from the object segregation and attention literatures into a common framework.