Perception

I argue that conscious visual experience is essentially a non-representational demonstration of a skill. The explication and defense of this position depends on both phenomenological and empirical considerations. The central phenomenological claim is this: as a matter of human psychology, it is impossible to produce a conscious visual experience of a mind-independent object that is sufficiently like typical cases, without including concomitant proprioceptive sensations of the sort of extra-neural behavior that allows us to there and then competently detect such objects. (...) I then argue that this view, which is a version of enactivism, best explains the temporality of conscious experience—what is often called the specious present. (shrink)

This is volume is ambitious both with respect to the number of contributions and its scope: it contains 18 papers, which cover a wide variety of topics within metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, logic, mathematics, and aesthetics. It is divided into three parts: (i) history of philosophy, (ii) aesthetics and philosophy of mind, and (iii) philosophy of language and logic, although there is a nice overlap among these areas. Unlike other anthologies on colour (e.g., Readings on Color by Alex Byrne (...) and David Hilbert, 1996), which survey primarily empirically based philosophy of colour and colour science, this volume is all-encompassing. Various themes in this volume extend across the analytic and continental traditions. This approach makes, to quote Wittgenstein, “the riddle of colour stimulating.”. (shrink)

This micro-summary and extended overview for the Special Divine Action Project discusses the connection between divine action and religious experience.

In artificial intelligence, recent research has demonstrated the remarkable potential of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs), which seem to exceed state-of-the-art performance in new domains weekly, especially on the sorts of very difficult perceptual discrimination tasks that skeptics thought would remain beyond the reach of artificial intelligence. However, it has proven difficult to explain why DCNNs perform so well. In philosophy of mind, empiricists have long suggested that complex cognition is based on information derived from sensory experience, often appealing to (...) a faculty of abstraction. Rationalists have frequently complained, however, that empiricists never adequately explained how this faculty of abstraction actually works. In this paper, I tie these two questions together, to the mutual benefit of both disciplines. I argue that the architectural features that distinguish DCNNs from earlier neural networks allow them to implement a form of hierarchical processing that I call “transformational abstraction”. Transformational abstraction iteratively converts sensory-based representations of category exemplars into new formats that are increasingly tolerant to “nuisance variation” in input. Reflecting upon the way that DCNNs leverage a combination of linear and non-linear processing to efficiently accomplish this feat allows us to understand how the brain is capable of bi-directional travel between exemplars and abstractions, addressing longstanding problems in empiricist philosophy of mind. I end by considering the prospects for future research on DCNNs, arguing that rather than simply implementing 80s connectionism with more brute-force computation, transformational abstraction counts as a qualitatively distinct form of processing ripe with philosophical and psychological significance, because it is significantly better suited to depict the generic mechanism responsible for this important kind of psychological processing in the brain. (shrink)

This paper argues that various phenomenological considerations support a non-representational causal account of visual experience. This position claims that visual experiences serve as a non-representational causally efficacious medium for the production of beliefs concerning the external world. The arguments are centered on defending a non-representational causal account’s understanding of the cognitive significance of visual experience. Among other things, such an account can easily explain the inextricable role that background beliefs and conceptual capacities play in perceptually-based external world belief-formation processes, the (...) fact that visual mental states constrain beliefs because of their presentational phenomenology, and the phenomenon known as the transparency of visual experience. (shrink)

This book sits at the crossroads of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, taking up a topic that has become increasingly important in these fields: attention. It will offer a new theoretical stance on the concept of attention and how it intersects with other functions of the mind, such as perception, consciousness, memory, and action. In short, it presents attention as an act of mental prioritization by a subject, which is essential for perception, but not consciousness or action. Importantly, this (...) theoretical stance takes seriously the existence of a subject, which separates it from the current trend in philosophy and cognitive science of denying the existence of a subject. In this book I will offer an account of the subject and its role in attention that will both help motivate a subject-centered account and avoid some of the common criticisms regarding its existence. Chapters include: "Attention, Mental Causation, and the Self"; "Attention, Consciousness, and Memory"; "Attention, Perception, and Knowledge"; and "Attention, Action, and Responsibility." Draft chapters can be obtained by contacting the author. (under contract, Cambridge University Press) . (shrink)

Objective: Evidence suggests people experience an oral size illusion and commonly perceive oral size inaccurately; however, the nature of the illusion remains unclear. The objectives of the present study were to confirm the presence of an oral size illusion, determine the magnitude (amount) and direction (underestimation or overestimation) of the illusion, and determine whether immediately prior crossmodal perceptual experiences affected the magnitude and direction. Design: Participants (N = 27) orally assessed 9 sizes of stainless steel spheres (1/16 in to 1/2 (...) in) categorized as small, medium, or big, and matched them with digital and visual reference sets. Each participant completed 20 matching tasks in 3 assessments. For control assessments, 6 oral spheres were matched with reference sets of same-sized spheres. For primer-control assessments, similar to control, 6 matching tasks were preceded by cross-modal experiences of the same-sized sphere. For experimental assessments, 8 matching tasks were preceded by a cross-modal experience of a differently sized sphere. Results: For control assessments, small and medium spheres were consistently underestimated, and big spheres were consistently overestimated. For experimental assessments, magnitude and direction of the oral size illusion varied according to the size of the sphere used in the cross-modal experience. Conclusion: Results seemed to confirm an oral size illusion, but direction of the illusion depended on the size of the object. Immediately prior cross-modal experiences influenced magnitude and direction of the illusion, suggesting that aspects of oral perceptual experience are dependent upon factors outside of oral perceptual anatomy and the properties of the oral stimulus. (shrink)

There are two fundamental models to understanding the phenomenon of natural life. One is thecomputational model, which is based on the symbolic thinking paradigm. The other is the biologicalorganism model. The common difficulty attributed to these paradigms is that their reductive tools allowthe phenomenological aspects of experience to remain hidden behind yes/no responses (behavioraltests), or brain ‘pictures’ (neuroimaging). Hence, one of the problems regards how to overcome meth-odological difficulties towards a non-reductive investigation of conscious experience. It is our aim in (...) thispaper to show how cooperation between Eastern and Western traditions may shed light for a non-reductive study of mind and life. This study focuses on the first-person experience associated withcognitive and mental events. We studied phenomenal data as a crucial fact for the domain of livingbeings, which, we expect, can provide the ground for a subsequent third-person study. The interventionwith Jhana meditation, and its qualitative assessment, provided us with experiential profiles based uponsubjects' evaluations of their own conscious experiences. The overall results should move towards anintegrated or global perspective on mind where neither experience nor external mechanisms have thefinal word. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between perceiving and imagining on the basis of predictive processing models in neuroscience. Contrary to the received view in philosophy of mind, which holds that perceiving and imagining are essentially distinct, these models depict perceiving and imagining as deeply unified and overlapping. It is argued that there are two mutually exclusive implications of taking perception and imagination to be fundamentally unified. The view defended is what I dub the ecological–enactive view given that it does not (...) succumb to internalism about the mind-world relation, and allows one to keep a version of the received view in play. (shrink)

The olfactory system was traditionally thought to lack a thalamic relay to mediate top-down influences from memory and attention in other perceptual modalities. Olfactory perception was therefore often described as an outlier among perceptual modalities. It was argued as a result that olfaction was a canonical example of a direct perception. In this paper we review functional and anatomical evidence which demonstrates that olfaction depends on both direct pathway connecting anterior piriform cortex to orbitofrontal cortex and an indirect thalamic circuit (...) connecting posterior piriform cortex and orbitofrontal cortices to the olfactory system. We argue that the indirect corticothalamic circuit has the structure to potentially mediate mediates top-down influences of memory and attention in olfactory perception. This suggests that olfaction is not an outlier after all. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAlthough philosophers have often insisted that specular perception is illusory or erroneous in nature, few have stressed the reliability and indispensability of mirrors as optical instruments. The main goal of this paper is to explain how mirrors can contribute to knowledge and at the same time be a source of systematic errors and misleading appearances. To resolve this apparent paradox, I argue that mirrors do not generate perceptual illusions or misperceptions, by defending a view of mirrors as transparent and invisible (...) visual media. I then consider the reasons for which mirrors are said to be misleading. Contrary to the illusory account, I defend a nonperceptual approach to the errors attributable to mirrors, which analyses the kind of errors generated by the use of mirrors in terms of false judgments. I further show that a nonperceptual view of errors extends to all of the cases in which a sensorimotor adaptation is required, such as perception through magnifying or inversing lenses. (shrink)

This book offers a ground-up defense of objective morality, drawing inspiration from a wide range of philosophers, including John Locke, Arthur Schopenhauer, Iris Murdoch, Nel Noddings, and David Lewis. The core claim is compassion is our capacity to perceive other creatures' pains, pleasures, and desires. Non-compassionate people are therefore perceptually lacking, regardless of how much factual knowledge they might have. Marshall argues that people who do have this form of compassion thereby fit a familiar paradigm of moral goodness. His argument (...) involves the identification of an epistemic good which Marshall dubs "being in touch". To be in touch with some property of a thing requires experiencing it in a way that reveals that property - that is, experiencing it as it is in itself. Only compassion, Marshall argues, lets us be in touch with others' motivational mental properties. -/- This conclusion about compassion has two important metaethical consequences. First, it generates an answer to the question ";Why be moral?", which has been a central philosophical concern since Plato. Second, it provides the keystone for a novel form of moral realism. This form of moral realism has a distinctive set of virtues: it is anti-relativist, naturalist, and able to identify a necessary connection between moral representation and motivation. The view also implies that there is an epistemic asymmetry between virtuous and vicious agents, according to which only morally good people can fully face reality. (shrink)

We seem to experience a world abounding with events that exhibit dynamic temporal structure; birds flying, children laughing, rain dripping from an eave, melodies unfolding, etc. Seeing objects in motion, hearing and communicating with sound, and feeling oneself move are such common everyday experiences that one is unlikely to question whether humans are capable of perceiving temporal properties and relations. Despite appearing pre-theoretically uncontroversial, there are longstanding and contentious debates concerning the structure of such experience, how temporal perception works, and (...) even whether the perception of change, motion, and succession is possible. The overarching goal of my project is to develop a comprehensive model of temporal perception that does justice to the apparent phenomenology, explains how perception functions to represent temporally structured targets, and generates empirically-informed hypotheses for how such perception is neuro-cognitively realized. I also defend my model against the challenges of anti-realist competitors whom deny the possibility of perceiving temporal relations between non-simultaneous events. In Chapter 1, I begin with the apparent phenomenology of temporal experience, identifying and lending some plausibility to three claims about the nature and content of temporal experience: i) humans perceive dynamic events that instantiate temporal properties and stand in temporal relations, ii) humans perceive events as present, and iii) successive events of brief duration can be experienced together as present within some finite interval. This approach enables me to outline what models of present experience are supposed to represent and explain. I proceed to sketch one family of models that posit an extended perceptual present to explain how non-simultaneous events can be experienced together as present, called “Extensionalist Models”. I examine two distinct branches of extensionalism and proprietary hypotheses linking those models to the real systems they are intended to explain, and challenge the tenability of process extensionalism. Throughout the dissertation, I advocate for Content Extensionalism, the model that holds we perceive the temporal relations between non-simultaneous events in virtue of targeting and representing temporally extended content. I develop the model by pairing it with a theory of mental representation that distinguishes representation from indication, and explains how representations are source-independent isomorphs of their intended targets. In doing so, I demonstrate its comparative advantages over other extensionalist models, provide a straightforward account of claims, and equip the model with the resources to defeat an argument that offers two routes to denying the third and most contentious claim—that successive events occurring within a brief interval are experienced together as present. I conclude the chapter by taking a closer look at the “Intentionalist Models” largely based on Edmund Husserl’s seminal work on time consciousness, rehearse some common objections against it, and argue that content extensionalism is a preferable model. In Chapter 2, I turn my attention to motion perception, arguing that perceptual representations of constant motion are not reducible to mere successions of static perceptions representing what happens at a given time. My position directly opposes temporal atomists, whom deny that we perceive motion, claiming that we only perceive what happens at a given time and that putative experiences of motion reduce to a series of static perceptual “snapshots” arranged successively. In the first half of the chapter, I examine and challenge some the motivations for atomism, including its connection to the empiricism of Locke and Reid, and its mereological conception of experience, such that purported experiences of motion supervene on and are reducible to the successive atomic perceptions of which they are composed. In the second half of chapter, I argue that both the apparent phenomenology and neurocognitive research shift the burden upon atomism to provide a compelling an error theory to explain away our putative perceptions as of constant motion and make their anti-realism about extended experiences palatable. I proceed to reconstruct and criticize their standard strategy of appealing to cinematic metaphors to motivate their view that motion perception is entirely reducible to series of static perceptions presented successively. Finally, I draw analogies between Zeno’s puzzle of motion and the temporal perception debate, and argue that the atomist explanation of motion experience is analogous to Zeno’s failed solution to the original puzzle and that content extensionalism provides a preferred explanation consonant with the Russell-Salmon solution. In Chapter 3, I continue to combat skepticism about the perception of temporal properties and relations. Le Poidevin proposes an epistemological puzzle of time perception, from which he derives the claim that the order and duration of events do not causally contribute to our perceptual beliefs about them. Since his view is motivated by a causal truthmaker principle for grounding knowledge, it also holds that perceptual beliefs about temporal features must be caused by the features themselves in order to count as knowledge. Given these theoretical commitments, there is a puzzle concerning how such perceptual beliefs could constitute knowledge of temporal properties. In response to Le Poidevin, I argue for an account according to which order and duration are objects of perception, causally contribute to our perceptual beliefs about them, and such beliefs are capable of counting as knowledge. I conclude by showing that, on my alternative account, the epistemological puzzle dissolves and his own solution to it fails. In Chapter 4, I specify a target range of temporal phenomena salient to understanding perceptual cognition, and motivate the multi-scale sampling hypothesis that sensory subsystems sample information at multiple rates, i.e. shorter and longer sampling periods. I argue that both behavioral and neurophysiological data support the hypothesis that nervous systems process temporal information by sampling stimuli signals at shorter and longer durations, favoring the content extensionalist hypothesis that temporal perception is constituted by multi-scale sampling and integration, over a single-sampling rate hypothesis implied by the atomistic “snapshot” model. In the second half of Chapter 4, I defend a form of constructive realism—the view that scientific theories are best understood as families of models and hypotheses that specify the respects and degrees in which a model represents some real physical system. I conclude the dissertation with a section on philosophy of science, because I engage empirical work throughout the project and employ a model-based approach to theorizing. Furthermore, I suggest that philosophical analysis of the experimental findings may generate new hypotheses and predictions, or offer critical arguments to help rule out the plausibility of particular competing models. To illustrate this interdisciplinary upshot, I briefly make a case for possible philosophical contributions to the fertile domain of temporal processing where there remain many contenders and no consensus on the exact mechanisms that realize temporal perception. (shrink)

Attention seems to raise a problem for pure representationalism, the view that phenomenal content supervenes on representational content. The problem is that shifts of attention sometimes seem to bring about a change in phenomenal content without a change in representational content. I argue that the representationalist can meet this challenge, but that doing so requires a new view of the representational content of perception. On this new view, the representational content of perception is always relative to a way of attending. (...) I call this the attention-indexed view of perceptual content. (shrink)

A significant impediment to the study of perceptual consciousness is our dependence on simplistic ideas about what experience is like. This is a point that has been made by Wittgenstein, and by philosophers working in the Phenomenological Tradition, such as Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Importantly, it is an observation that has been brought to the fore in recent discussions of consciousness among philosophers and cognitive scientists who have come to feel the need for a more rigorous phenomenology of experience. The central (...) thought of this paper is that art can make a needed contribution to the study of perceptual consciousness. The work of some artists can teach us about perceptual consciousness by furnishing us with the opportunity to have a special kind of reflective experience. In this way, art can be a tool for phenomenological investigation. The paper has three parts. First, I present what I call the problem of the transparency of experience. This is a problem for philosophy, for art, and for cognitive science. Second, I present an alternative conception of experience as a mode of interactive engagement with the environment. Finally, against the background of this conception, I discuss, briefly, the work of the sculptors Richard Serra and Tony Smith. (shrink)

According to representationalism, phenomenal character supervenes on representational content. According to first-person reports, blindsighters have no phenomenal character in the scotoma, even though their abilities suggest that they have conscious visual representations in the scotoma. The traditional representationalist response is that the representations in the scotoma are either non-conscious or non-visual. Drawing on empirical work, I consider the interpretation that blindsighters are unable to represent—and thus lack the phenomenal character of—luminance in the scotoma. However, they maintain the capacity to represent (...) other visible properties in the scotoma, and thus retain the luminance-lacking phenomenal character of these properties. (shrink)

In this paper I consider the uses to which certain psychological phenomena—e.g. cases of seeing as, and linguistic understanding—are put in the debate about cognitive phenomenology. I argue that we need clear definitions of the terms ‘sensory phenomenology’ and ‘cognitive phenomenology’ in order to understand the import of these phenomena. I make a suggestion about the best way to define these key terms, and, in the light of it, show how one influential argument against cognitive phenomenology fails.

We perceive a world of mind-independent macroscopic material objects such as stones, tables, trees, and animals. Our experience is the joint upshot of the way these things are and our route through them, along with the various relevant circumstances of perception; and it depends on the normal operation of our perceptual systems. How should we characterise our perceptual experience so as to respect its basis and explain its role in grounding empirical thought and knowledge? I offered an answer to this (...) question in Perception and its objects. Here I aim to clarify some of my central arguments and to develop and defend the position further in the light of subsequent critical discussion. (shrink)

Do we directly perceive physical objects? What is the significance of the qualification ‘directly’ here? Austin famously denied that there was a unique interpretation by which we could make sense of the traditional debate in the philosophy of perception. I look here at Thompson Clarke’s discussion of G. E. Moore and surface perception to answer Austin’s scepticism.

It has been claimed that empirical work in psychology requires the attribution of representational content to perceptual states: that is, the attribution of veridicality conditions to those states. This is a claim that can only be evaluated by the examination of actual empirical research. In this paper I argue that talk of ‘representation’ in at least one area of research in the psychology of perception can be reinterpreted so as to avoid the attribution of veridicality conditions. This area is the (...) study of human capacities to perceive the relative numerosities of collections of objects. (shrink)

I present a novel argument against the epistemic conception of perception according to which perception either is a form of knowledge or puts the subject in a position to gain knowledge about what is perceived. ECP closes the gap between a perceptual experience that veridically presents a given state of affairs and an experience capable of yielding the knowledge that the state of affairs obtains. Against ECP, I describe a particular case of perceptual experience in which the following triad of (...) claims is true: The experience presents a given state of affairs ; The experience is veridical; The experience cannot yield the knowledge that the state of affairs obtains. This case involves an empirically well-studied phenomenon, namely perceptual hysteresis, which involves the maintenance of a perceptual experience with a relatively stable content over progressively degrading sensory stimulations. (shrink)

This article discusses how the relationship between the perceiving and the perceived can be outlined in a current philosophical and neuroscientifical understanding. The ambition is to highlight the potential relations between two processes; consciousness and interpretation particularly regarding the experience of art as invoking an immediate feeling. The article takes a philosophical standpoint inspired by Edmund Husserl’s epistemological discussions regarding intentionality and tries to combine it with art as invoking a feeling. In other words, the article tries to answer how (...) art can invoke an immediate feeling within us if we maintain the philosophical understanding of ourselves as the perceiving entity. (shrink)

Philosophers and psychologists often assume that mirror reflections are optical illusions. According to many authors, what we see in a mirror appears to be behind it. I discuss two strategies to resist this piece of dogma. As I will show, the conviction that mirror reflections are illusions is rooted in a confused conception of the relations between location, direction, and visibility. This conception is unacceptable to those who take seriously the way in which mirrors contribute to our experience of the (...) world. My argument may be read as an advertisement of the neglected field of philosophical catoptrics, the philosophical study of the optical properties of mirrors. It enables us to recast familiar issues in the philosophy of perception. (shrink)

The debate about direct perception encompasses different topics, one of which concerns the richness of the contents of perceptual experiences. Can we directly perceive only low-level properties, like edges, colors etc., or can we perceive high-level properties and entities as well? The aim of the paper is to defend the claim that the content of our perceptual experience can include emotions and also person impressions. Using these examples, an argument is developed to defend a liberal-content view for core examples of (...) social cognition. This view is developed and contrasted with accounts which claim that in the case of registering another person’s emotion while seeing them, we have to describe the relevant content not as the content of a perceptual experience, but of a perceptual belief. The paper defends the view that perceptual experiences can have a rich content yet remain separable from beliefs formed on the basis of the experience. How liberal and enriched the content of a perceptual experience is will depend upon the expertise a person has developed in the field. This is supported by the argument that perceptual experiences can be systematically enriched by perceiving affordances of objects, by pattern recognition or by top-down processes, as analyzed by processes of cognitive penetration or predictive coding. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophers of perception, even those with otherwise widely differing beliefs, often hold that universals enter into the content of perceptual experience. This doctrine can even be seen as a trivial inference from the observation that we observe properties – ways that things are – as well as things. I argue that the inference is not trivial but can and should be resisted. Ordinary property perception does not involve awareness of universals. But there are visual experiences which do involve determinate (...) universals: following Wittgenstein, I call these ‘aspect experiences’. The common view of perceptual content effectively conflates aspect experiences with mere property perceptions. Wittgenstein’s later writings on the philosophy of psychology provide an alternative way to think about both aspects and properties. It also forms a contrast with Wittgenstein’s own early treatment of perception in the Tractatus, the doctrine of which is much closer to the contemporary norm among philosophers of perception. In seeing how Wittgenstein moved away from his early view, we can see how we might move away from that norm. (shrink)

Using the results of the latest neurophysiological research on colour, the article rejects outright physicalism and dispositionalism as appropriate approaches to solving the problem of colour realism. Physicalism sees colour as a real property of objects, i.e. the reflectance profile, while dispositionalism takes subjects, objects and light as necessary elements for colour production. First, it briefly outlines the historical development of the theory of colour, pointing towards dispositionalism which, in some sense, considers colour as a real entity of the world, (...) and then introduces the problem of colour realism, focusing on objections to physicalism as well as dispositionalism. After delineating the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying the visual experience of colour, and with the help of the concrete results of practical neurophysiological experiments, the article points to why the physicalist and any dispositionalist theories of colour in the light of a new physiological objection do not present credible views on the nature of colour. (shrink)

Il y a différentes manières de penser le rôle du symbolisme et des symboles dans la vie sociale. La plus obvie consiste à partir de l’idée que certaines choses matérielles un drapeau, une église ou immatérielles un dieu grec sont des symboles dans la mesure même où le lien unissant en eux un représentant et un représenté constitue, identiquement, le lien entre les hommes qui tiennent ces choses pour...

Listening to someone from some distance in a crowded room you may experience the following phenomenon: when looking at them speak, you may both hear and see where the source of the sounds is; but when your eyes are turned elsewhere, you may no longer be able to detect exactly where the voice must be coming from. With your eyes again fixed on the speaker, and the movement of her lips a clear sense of the source of the sound will (...) return. This ‘ventriloquist’ effect reflects the ways in which visual cognition can dominate auditory perception. And this phenomenological observation is one what you can verify or disconfirm in your own case just by the slightest reflection on what it is like for you to listen to someone with or without visual contact with them. (shrink)

The aim of the present paper is to sketch a new structural version of the Representative Theory of Perception which is supported both by conceptual and empirical arguments. To this end, I will discuss, in a first step, the structural approach to representation and show how it can be applied to perceptual consciousness. This discussion will demonstrate that perceptual experiences possess representational as well as purely sensational properties. In a second step, the focus will switch to empirical cases of synaesthesia. (...) In particular, I will stress that certain synaesthetic experiences are well-suited to corroborating a structural account of the perceptual mind. The overall picture that emerges in this paper prompts a new view of perceptual consciousness that is ruthlessly structural. (shrink)

The article aims at providing a precise concept of the “object” as a being which appears in the field of perception without appearing to affection. Consequences follow: what appears to us runs the perpetual danger of appearing only to perception, and therefore of being constituted as an object; objectity belongs to most beings and is not the fruit of a constitution involving only our subjective causality; what appears to us is also what we can reduce to its being ready-to-hand: technology (...) and science begin where beings appear to us as objects; the reality of objectity proves the partial legitimacy of metaphysics, and proves as well that no access to Being is possible except through the mediation of modes of being; meanwhile, one has learnt to bypass the concept of “subject”: only “quasi-subjects” are available in the realm of experience. (shrink)

The work on the sixth Logical Investigation presents, to Husserl and moreover to transcendental phenomenology a new set of problems, questions and theoretical issues, which are deeply related to the concept of intuitive fulfilment. Here, the relation between core and halo, developed in 1908, must be integrated with the concept of horizon as a fundamental stucture of perception and every other kind of experience. The experience also became a contextual experience, essentially related and determined from a contextual situationality. More generally, (...) each appearance consists of a whole system of appearances that are empty of content but are also potential manifestations of the same type. The state of consciousness depends upon the openness to pre-traced potentialities. The horizon, which is part of the noematic dimension described in Ideen I, begins here to presents itself as this fundamental intentional structure. The transcendental fixation of the concept of horizon therefore requires the further elaboration found in §§ 33-34, texts that specifically address the notion of “empty representations.”. (shrink)

With neurons emergence, life alters itself in a remarkable way. This embodied neurons become carriers of signals, and processing devices: it begins an inexorable progression of functional complexity, from increasingly drawn behaviors to the mind and eventually to consciousness [Damasio, 2010]. In which moment has awareness arisen in the history of life? The emergence of human consciousness is associated with evolutionary developments in brain, behavior and mind, which ultimately lead to the creation of culture, a radical novelty in natural history. (...) It is in this context of biological evolution of conscious brains that we raise the question: how conscious brains connect with each other? In order to answer it, I will explore how brain states and conscious states each participate in dynamic interactive processes involving the whole organism. I will argue that a possible way to overcome the hard problem of consciousness might be based on the notion of embodiment as a process of embedding the mental in the living organism relating dynamically with the environment through the sensorymotor experience. In order to do so, I will provide an assembly between an anthropologic perspective of consciousness with contemporary Philosophy of Mind, Interaction Theory [Gallagher 2001, 2008; Zahavi 2001, 2008; Fuchs and De Jaegher 2009]. (shrink)

There is an important division in the human mind between perception and reasoning. We reason from information that we have already, but perception is a means of taking in new information. Susanna Siegel argues that these two aspects of the mind become deeply intertwined when beliefs, fears, desires, or prejudice influence what we perceive.

Six hundred three people completed a survey measuring perceptions of traditional areas of philosophical inquiry and their relationship to empirical science. The ten areas studied were: aesthetics, epistemology, ethics, history of philosophy, logic, metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and political philosophy. For each area, participants rated whether it is currently central to philosophy, whether its centrality depends on integration with science, and whether work in the area is sufficiently integrated with science. Centrality judgments tended to (...) be high. Participants viewed nine of the ten areas as central to philosophy, although they made this judgment more confidently for some areas. Dependence judgments were more varied, ranging from clear disagreement to clear agreement. Integration judgments were also varied but exhibited more uncertainty. Some areas whose centrality depended on integration were judged to be well integrated, but a central tendency for all other areas was ambivalence. Demographic factors had small but statistically significant effects on all three sorts of judgment. Higher age predicted higher centrality judgments and higher integration judgments. Higher socioeconomic status predicted lower dependence judgments and higher integration judgments. Men recorded higher integration judgments. (shrink)

It is well known that common objects in the environment can evoke possibilities of action, but what about their bi-dimensional representation? Do pictures or paintings that represent action-related objects evoke the same possibilities of actions of the objects that they represent? In contemporary cognitive science, there are two contrasting views on this issue. On the one hand, the ecological-dispositional approach to perception supports the idea that viewing depicted objects as endowed with the potential for action is nothing but an illusion. (...) On the other hand, recent findings show that our motor system is activated by the perception of both real and depicted action-related objects, and this activation plays a functional role in planning motor acts. A broad analysis reveals that the activation of the motor system during perceptual tasks plays a crucial rule in processing the practical meaning of the concrete objects and of the abstract representations of them. This evidence has consequences to our understanding of the way we experience pictures and paintings. (shrink)

Many have argued that early visual processing is encapsulated from the influence of higher-level goals, expectations, and knowledge of the world. Here we confront the main arguments offered in support of such a view, showing that they are unpersuasive. We also present evidence of top–down influences on early vision, emphasizing data from cognitive neuroscience. Our conclusion is that encapsulation is not a defining feature of visual processing. But we take this conclusion to be quite modest in scope, readily incorporated into (...) mainstream vision science. (shrink)

People in a freezer. Self-perception as an explanatory mechanism for the effectiveness of the foot-in-the-door technique According to the foot-in-the-door technique of social influence, everyone who wants to increase the likelihood of having their request fulfilled by another person should first present that person with an easier request. Granting the easier request will make that person more inclined to fulfill the subsequent escalated request. The results of numerous studies confirm this rule. In the psychological literature it is usually assumed that (...) this is possible thanks to the self-perception mechanism. People who comply with an easy request cannot find any external explanation for doing so and therefore draw the auxiliary conclusion that they are "people for whom it is normal to grant such requests". The author of this article, however, points out that the self-perception thesis implicitly assumes no impact of any other types of requests on the individual between the times they hear the two requests posed by the psychologists-researchers. Two simple studies presented here demonstrate that people are normally faced with several requests every day, of which some they fulfill and some reject. This constitutes a serious challenge for the self-perception interpretation of the foot-in-the-door technique. (shrink)

McDowell and Putnam are right to insist that objective knowledge is possible only because we are open to the world in perception, but neither of them offers an adequate account of the relationship between perception and perceptual judgments. This paper, intended as a contribution to the development of a sophisticated commonsense realism, proposes an account in terms of which perceptions acquire the status of perceptual judgments to the extent that they are imbedded in and engaged with the high-level patterns of (...) consciousness and reasoning characteristic of judgments. This in turn explains how the contents of perceptual judgments which are to be understood as refinements of contents of the relevant perceptions apply to a world that is largely independent of the perceiver and knower. (shrink)