The sociomotor framework outlines a possible role of social action effects on human action control, suggesting that anticipated partner reactions are a major cue to represent, select, and initiate own body movements. Here, we review studies that elucidate the actual content of social action representations and that explore factors that can distinguish action control processes involving social and inanimate action effects. Specifically, we address two hypotheses on how the social context can influence effect-based action control: first, by providing unique social (...) features such as body-related, anatomical codes, and second, by orienting attention towards any relevant feature dimensions of the action effects. The reviewed empirical work presents a surprisingly mixed picture: while there is indirect evidence for both accounts, previous studies that directly addressed the anatomical account showed no signs of the involvement of genuinely social features in sociomotor action control. Furthermore, several studies show evidence against the differentiation of social and non-social action effect processing, portraying sociomotor action representations as remarkably non-social. A focus on enhancing the social experience in future studies should, therefore, complement the current database to establish whether such settings give rise to the hypothesized influence of social context. (shrink)

Dual process models of higher cognition have become very influential in the cognitive sciences. The popular Default-Interventionist model has long favoured a serial view on the interaction between...

Influential work on reasoning and decision-making has popularised the idea that sound reasoning requires correction of fast, intuitive thought processes by slower and more demanding deliberation. We present seven studies that question this corrective view of human thinking. We focused on the very problem that has been widely featured as the paradigmatic illustration of the corrective view, the well-known bat-and-ball problem. A two-response paradigm in which people were required to give an initial response under time pressure and cognitive load allowed (...) us to identify the presumed intuitive response that preceded the final response given after deliberation. Across our studies, we observe that correct final responses are often non-corrective in nature. Many reasoners who manage to answer the bat-and-ball problem correctly after deliberation already solved it correctly when they reasoned under conditions that minimised deliberation in the initial response phase. This suggests that sound bat-and-ball reasoners do not necessarily need to deliberate to correct their intuitions; their intuitions are often already correct. Pace the corrective view, findings suggest that in these cases, they deliberate to verify correct intuitive insights. (shrink)

Philosophy of perception has recently become one of the most important and most central sub-fields of philosophical research. The aim of this volume is to give a representative sample of the new approaches in philosophy of perception that are responsible for this explosion of philosophical interest. Perceiving the World contains eleven original essays, written specially for this book by some of the leading contemporary philosophers of perception: Jonathan Cohen, JTr(me Dokic, Fred Dretske, Andy Egan, Benj Hellie, Sean D. Kelly, M.G.F. (...) Martin, Mohan Matthen, Adam Pautz, Jesse J. Prinz, and Susanna Siegel." "Bence Nanay is BOF Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Antwerp and Senior Research Associate at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge. He received his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2006. He has published articles in various journals on philosophy of mind, philosophy of biology, and aesthetics."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

The psychological mechanism of decision-making has traditionally been modeled with the help of belief-desire psychology: the agent has some desires (or other pro-attitudes) and some background beliefs and deciding between two possible actions is a matter of comparing the probability of the satisfaction of these desires given the background beliefs in the case of the performance of each action. There is a wealth of recent empirical findings about how we actually make decisions that seems to be in conflict with this (...) picture. My aim is to outline an alternative model that is consistent with these empirical findings. This alternative model emphasizes the role imagination plays in our decisions: when we decide between two possible actions, we imagine ourselves in the situation that we imagine to be the outcome of these two actions and then compare these two imaginings. (shrink)

Philosophy of perception is one of the most robust and flourishing fields within contemporary philosophy. This volume casts a spotlight on the subject’s most dynamic conversations, with pairs of philosophers debating six key questions: 1. Are perceptual states representations? 2. How can perception be unconscious? 3. Is attention necessary for perception? 4. In what sense is perception multimodal? 5. How is vision different from other sense modalities? 6. Does perception include both low-level and high-level properties? Preliminary descriptions of each side (...) in each debate, annotated bibliographies for each question, and a supplemental guide to further controversies in the field are included. These student-friendly features make the volume is_ _an ideal resource for any advanced student wishing to understand live debates in this active field. (shrink)

It has been widely assumed that we do not perceive dispositional properties. I argue that there are two ways of interpreting this assumption. On the first, extensional, interpretation whether we perceive dispositions depends on a complex set of metaphysical commitments. But if we interpret the claim in the second, intensional, way, then we have no reason to suppose that we do not perceive dispositional properties. The two most important and influential arguments to the contrary fail.

Long before Wittgenstein drew attention to its complexities, the concept of play had captured the interest of theorists for millennia. How do games contribute to our knowledge of the world? Wherein lies their universal appeal? Play is usually associated with a certain blitheness and buoyancy - could it nevertheless be argued that playfulness is not quite as innocent as it might seem? Bence Kun draws on Adorno's writings to explore the relation between philosophical play (understood here as imaginative thought (...) as well as experimental expression) and an experience of dread Adorno links to children's first encounter with death. By investigating his less familiar works, some of which have not yet been translated, Kun challenges the received view on Adorno's approach to metaphysics, the role of systematic inquiry and the modern condition. As he has Adorno say, the originary impression of shock at the heart of philosophical reflection can only be fully apprehended through an open-ended and defiantly creative intellectual practice. (shrink)

Relationalism holds that perceptual experiences are relations between subjects and perceived objects. But much evidence suggests that perceptual states can be unconscious. We argue here that unconscious perception raises difficulties for relationalism. Relationalists would seem to have three options. First, they may deny that there is unconscious perception or question whether we have sufficient evidence to posit it. Second, they may allow for unconscious perception but deny that the relationalist analysis applies to it. Third, they may offer a relationalist explanation (...) of unconscious perception. We argue that each of these strategies is questionable. (shrink)

In this article, we endeavour to lay the theoretical fundaments of a phenomenologically based project regarding the origins of conscious experience in the natural world. We assume that a phenomenological analysis (based upon Edmund Husserl’s philosophy) of first-person experience could substantially contribute to related empirical research. In this regard, two phenomenological conceptions provided by Husserl are of fundamental importance. The first relates to the essential and necessary _embodiment_ of every subjective experience; the second concerns the intrinsically _holistic and concrete character (...) of consciousness_. These considerations have two crucial implications. First, every mental content and capability ultimately refers to a bodily basis as its carrier and realizer (‘embodied manifestation thesis’). Second, there is a minimal set of bodily structures that carries and realizes the minimal mind (‘minimal context thesis’). Based upon these assumptions, _we can use phenomenology to select from the empirical theories of consciousness_. We argue that currently, Bjorn Merker’s _subcortical theory of consciousness_ appears to be the best candidate for a phenomenological approach. In phenomenological regard, however, it is highly challenging to test a subcortical theory; therefore, we suggest that certain experiments based upon emergence from general anaesthesia might help test such a theory in a phenomenologically legitimate way. (shrink)

Danto's Gallery of Indiscernibles thought experiment only works if we make assumptions about the cognitive impenetrability of perception, which we have strong empirical reasons to reject.

In this paper, I am clarifying and defending my argument in favor of the claim that cumulative selection can explain adaptation provided that the environmental resources are limited. Further, elaborate on what this limitation of environmental resources means and why it is relevant for the explanatory power of natural selection.

The question of whether cognition can influence perception has a long history in neuroscience and philosophy. Here, we outline a novel approach to this issue, arguing that it should be viewed within the framework of top-down information-processing. This approach leads to a reversal of the standard explanatory order of the cognitive penetration debate: we suggest studying top-down processing at various levels without preconceptions of perception or cognition. Once a clear picture has emerged about which processes have influences on those at (...) lower levels, we can re-address the extent to which they should be considered perceptual or cognitive. Using top-down processing within the visual system as a model for higher-level influences, we argue that the current evidence indicates clear constraints on top-down influences at all stages of information processing; it does, however, not support the notion of a boundary between specific types of information-processing as proposed by the cognitive impenetrability hypothesis. (shrink)

We argue that recent empirical findings and theoretical models shed new light on the nature of attention. According to the resulting amplification view, attentional phenomena can be unified at the neural level as the consequence of the amplification of certain input signals of attention-independent perceptual computations. This way of identifying the core realizer of attention evades standard criticisms often raised against sub-personal accounts of attention. Moreover, this approach also reframes our thinking about the function of attention by shifting the focus (...) from the function of selection to the function of amplification. (shrink)

This paper deals with the concept and meaning of apodicticity or apodictic self-evidence from a phenomenological point of view. The foremost aim of phenomenology is to return to original intuitions, that is, to bring everything to original intuitive givenness and to provide an intuitive basis for philosophical theories. Phenomenology gives a broad interpretation of the concept of intuition. The notion of apodicticity for Husserl is closely related to this conception of self-givenness of objects in intuition. This paper deals partly with (...) the Husserlian concept of apodicticity and also tries to discover the opportunities and possibilities of apodictic self-evidence in phenomenological philosophy, in it’s own right, as a phenomenological analysis of the concept. Furthermore, this paper will also set out to address how and to what extent phenomenology can transgress, in an apodictic manner, the immediate sphere of the present and hence gain insights through subjective consciousness about the fields of other minds, historicity, worldhood and psychology. (shrink)

The main theme of the essay is the bodily nature of human existence according to Sartre. I will try to place Sartre’s account of bodily existence into the special context of phenomenological reduction. Though Sartre was rather skeptical toward this methodological operation as it was presented by Edmund Husserl, I have in mind the wider interpretation of reductions that was given by Jean-Luc Marion. According to Marion the phenomenological reduction means the focusing of the philosophical regard onto a special field (...) of phenomena, an operation that could be radicalized. In Marion’s interpretation the philosophy of Husserl and Heidegger belonged to the very same movement of philosophy, as two different phases, which involved a third phase.. I tried to show that Sartre’s phenomenology could be shown in this perspective, as a reduction to the bodily human existence. With this reduction Sartre opened a field of phenomena that had a fundamental importance to the French phenomenological tradition. (shrink)

You have a complex and detailed aesthetic life. You make aesthetic decisions every day. You wake up, shower, and dress. When you decide what to wear, you think about how it feels and fits. You have aesthetic feelings and reactions every day. The sunset swings into view as you turn a corner and you think, “That’s beautiful.” A wave of calm and pleasure wash over you. You take a bite of cake and you think, “Wow, that’s sweet.” Maybe too sweet. (...) Almost everything you do has an aesthetic dimension—from the way you make your bed, prepare your coffee, and tie your shoes, to the way you speak to others and edit photos to post on social media. You have a complex and detailed aesthetic life that you orchestrate every day through your aesthetic decisions, reactions, feelings, and actions. But why live this way? What exactly is aesthetic life and why, if at all, does it matter? In Aesthetic Life and Why It Matters, three philosophers present their different answers to this question and discuss the many challenging and fascinating philosophical issues that arise in our aesthetic lives. (shrink)

This book provides an up-to-date and accessible overview of the hottest and most influential contemporary debates in philosophy of perception, written especially for this volume by many of the most important philosophers of the field. The book addresses the following key questions: Can perception be unconscious? What is the relation between perception and attention? What properties can we perceive? Are perceptual states representations? How is vision different from the other sense modalities? How do these sense modalities interact with one another? (...) Contributors are Ned Block, Berit Brogaard, Alex Byrne, Robert Kentridge, John Kulvicki, Heather Logue, Mohan Matthen, Bence Nanay, Matt Nudds, Casey O’Callaghan, Adam Pautz, Ian Phillips, Susanna Siegel and Wayne Wu. (shrink)

The main aim of this article is to offer a systematic reconstruction of Husserl’s theory of minimal mind and his ideas pertaining to the lowest level of consciousness in living beings. In this context, the term ‘minimal mind’ refers to the mental sphere and capacities of the simplest conceivable subject. This topic is of significant contemporary interest for philosophy of mind and empirical research into the origins of consciousness. I contend that Husserl’s reflections on minimal mind offer a fruitful contribution (...) to this ongoing debate. For Husserl, the embodied character of subjectivity, or consciousness, is essential for understanding minimal mind. In his view, there is an a priori necessary constitutive connection between the subjective and objective aspects of the body, between _Leib_ and _Körper_, and this connection is especially important for exploring minimal mind from a phenomenological perspective. Thematically, the essay has three main parts. In Sect. 2, I present an overview of how minimal mind is framed in contemporary philosophy of mind and empirical research. I then analyse Husserl’s conception of embodiment with regard to the problem of minimal mind in Sect. 3. Finally, I present a more detailed investigation into Husserl’s account of minimal mind, highlighting features from his descriptions of animal mind and consciousness in early infancy (Sects. 4 and 5 ). (shrink)

It has been argued that the attribution of intentional actions is sensitive to our moral judgment. I will examine these arguments and Suggest an alternative explanation for the experiments they are based on.Joshua Knobe conducted the following experiment to support this claim. Subjects were given two vignettes that differed only in one small detail and this difference influenced their attribution of intentionality. The first vignette was the following:The vice-president of a company went to the chairman of the board and said, (...) ‘We are thinking of starting a new program. It will help us increase profits, but it will also harm the environment.’The chairman of the board answered, ‘I don't care at all about harming the environment. I jus)t want to make as much profit as I can. Let's start the new program.’They started the new program. Sure enough, the environment was harmed. (shrink)

Whistleblowing can be defined as the internal or external reporting of violations and abuses of law. The protection and promotion of whistleblowing is extremely important both in the level of the European Union and the Member States. It is also well demonstrated by the fact, that the European Union has adopted a Directive in 2019 on the protection of persons who report breaches of Union law which the Member States also has to implement to their national legal system. Although whistleblowing (...) can be analyses from several points of view, this paper only focuses on its legal aspects. The objective of the article is to present the legal requirements of the European Union and the Hungarian regulation. In this context, the paper aims to analyse how successful was the implementation of the Directive into the Hungarian legal system. (shrink)

This chapter has four parts. I distinguishes some types of perceptual skills and highlights their importance in everyday perception. II identifies a well-studied class of perceptual skills: cases of perceptual expertise. III discusses a less studied possible instance of perceptual skill: picture perception. Finally, IV outlines some important mechanisms underlying perceptual skills, with special emphasis on attention and mental imagery.

The aim of this paper is to argue that there has been some mismatch between the naturalist rhetoric of experimental philosophy and its actual practice: experimental philosophy is not necessarily, and not even paradigmatically, a naturalistic enterprise. To substantiate this claim, a case study is given for what genuinely naturalist experimental philosophy would look like.

Instead of using only one notion of selection I argue for a broader typology of different types of selection. Three such types are differentiated, namely simple one-step selection, iterated one-step selection, and multi-step selection. It is argued that this more general and more inclusive typology might face more effectively the possible challenges of a general account of selection.

What mediates between sensory input and motor output? What makes it possible to act on what you perceive? Bence Nanay argues that pragmatic representations provide the perceptual guidance for performing actions. They play a key role in our mental lives, and help explain why the majority of our mental processes are very similar to those of animals.

Amodal completion is the representation of those parts of the perceived object that we get no sensory stimulation from. While amodal completion is rife and plays an essential role in all sense modalities, philosophical discussions of this phenomenon have almost entirely been limited to vision. The aim of this paper is to examine in what sense we can talk about amodal completion in olfaction. We distinguish three different senses of amodal completion – spatial, temporal and feature-based completion – and argue (...) that all three are present and play a significant role in olfaction. (shrink)

There is systematic epistemic asymmetry between different centers of art production: we know far more about some (e.g. fifteenth-century Italian paintings) than about others (e.g. fifteenth-century Inca textiles). As long as we are focusing on the social context of the artworks or the artist’s intention, this epistemic asymmetry remains, given that we have vastly more information about the social context of the artworks or the artist’s intention when it comes to ‘Western’ art—again, because of the historically contingent differences in record-keeping (...) and the survival rate of such records. If we want to overcome the epistemic asymmetry between ‘Western’ and ‘Non-Western’ art, we need to look elsewhere. I will argue, using Franz Boas’s work, that we should look for formal features. In order to avoid the epistemic asymmetry that follows from the historically contingent fact that we have more information about some cultures than about others, we need to start our analysis with formal categories. (shrink)

Paper on Robert Musil's philosophical system.

Experiences that are self-generated and independent of sensory stimulations permeate our whole life. This theme issue examines their similarities and differences, systematizes the literature from an integrative perspective, critically discusses state-of-the-art empirical findings and proposes new theoretical approaches. The aim of the theme issue is to foster interaction between the different disciplines and research directions involved and to explore the prospects of a unificatory account of offline perception in general.

Misinformation is a serious concern for societies across the globe. To design effective interventions to combat the belief in and spread of misinformation, we must understand which psychological processes influence susceptibility to misinformation. This paper tests the widely assumed – but largely untested – claim that emotionally provocative headlines are associated with worse ability to identify true versus false headlines. Consistent with this proposal, we found correlational evidence that overall emotional response at the headline level is associated with diminished truth (...) discernment, except for experienced anger which was associated with increased truth discernment. The second set of studies tested a popular emotion regulation intervention where people were asked to apply either emotional suppression or emotion reappraisal techniques when considering the veracity of several headlines. In contrast to the correlation results, we found no evidence that emotion regulation helped people distinguish false from true news headlines. (shrink)

Both Arthur Danto and Jerry Fodor are modularist: they both think that perception is an encapsulated process that is in no way influenced by any kind of non‐perceptual processing. Danto's aesthetics can in part be separated out from his modularism, leading us to draw slightly different but arguably even more interesting conclusions from famous thought experiments such as the Gallery of Indiscernibles. Danto firmly rejects this post‐Wittgensteinian turn, offering evidence for his position that perception is neutral to language and cognition (...) of three connected kinds. These are optical illusions, cultural and historical variation in pictorial representation, and the perception and cognition of animals. Despite his avowed rejection of perceptual plasticity, some doubts might arise about the actual extent of Danto's modularism. Extended perception involves “associations” that “have reference to things that lie outside the minimal visual experience.”. (shrink)

Amodal completion is the representation of occluded parts of perceived objects. We argue for the following three claims: First, at least some amodal completion-involved experiences can ground knowledge about the occluded portions of perceived objects. Second, at least some instances of amodal completion-grounded knowledge are not sensitive, that is, it is not the case that in the nearest worlds in which the relevant claim is false, that claim is not believed true. Third, at least some instances of amodal completion-grounded knowledge (...) are not safe, that is, it is not the case that in all or nearly all near worlds where the relevant claim is believed true, that claim is in fact true. Thus, certain instances of amodal completion-grounded knowledge refute both the view that knowledge is necessarily sensitive and the view that knowledge is necessarily safe. (shrink)

The focus of this commentary is what Andy Clark takes to be the most groundbreaking of the philosophical import of the ‘bidirectional hierarchical model of brain functions’, namely, the claim that perceptual representations represent probabilities. This is what makes his account Bayesian and this is a philosophical or theoretical conclusion that neuroscientists and psychologists are also quick and happy to draw. My claim is that nothing in the ‘bidirectional hierarchical models of brain functions’ implies that perceptual representations are probabilistic, or (...) that they represent or ‘encode probability density distributions’. There is a much more parsimonious way of describing the representations in the bidirectional hierarchical model of brain functions: they attribute properties to objects (or to the perceived scene) that are not fully determinate. (shrink)

Bency Nanay brings the discussion of aesthetics and perception together, to explore how many influential debates in aesthetics look very different, and may be easier to tackle, if we clarify the assumptions they make about perception and about experiences in general. He focuses on the concept of attention and the ways in which the distinction between distributed and focused attention can help us re-evaluate various key concepts and debates in aesthetics. Sometimes our attention is distributed in an unusual way: we (...) are attending to one perceptual object but our attention is distributed across its various properties. But in other aesthetic contexts our attention is not at all distributed but very much focused. The book closes with an analysis of some paradigmatic aesthetic phenomena in which this is the case: identification and engagement with fictional characters. It argues that the conflict and interplay between distributed and focused attention is an important feature of many artworks. (shrink)

We argue that pre-cueing studies show that perception is cognitively penetrated via mental imagery. It is important to be clear about the relation between attention and mental imagery here. We do not want to question the role of attention in pre-cueing studies. After all, it is attention that is being pre-cued. The pre-cue draws attention to certain features, which via top-down connections induces mental imagery for the pre-cued properties, which, then, after stimulus-presentation, interacts with and influences the online computations that (...) process stimulus features. That is, what mediates the cognitive penetration of perceptual processing is not pre-cued attention, but cue-induced mental imagery. (shrink)

What are the sensory individuals of audition? What are the entities our auditory system attributes properties to? We examine various proposals about the nature of the sensory individuals of audition, and show that while each can account for some aspects of auditory perception, each also faces certain difficulties. We then put forward a new conception of sensory individuals according to which auditory sensory individuals are composite individuals. A feature shared by all existing accounts of sounds and sources is that they (...) postulate sensory individuals that are non-composite. They identify the sensory individual of sound hearing or source hearing with one type of entity in the environment, be they sound waves, vibrations, or interactions. We question this assumption and argue that our perceptual systems represent two or more aspects of the environment as a single sensory individual. Finally, we show that taking auditory individuals to be composite sensory individuals allows for an account of audition that is less problematic than its existing alternatives. (shrink)

The explanatory gap—the apparently ineliminable chasm between physical, bodily processes and states on the one hand, and subjective, lived experience on the other—belongs among the greatest problems of contemporary philosophy of mind and empirical research concerning consciousness. According to some scholars—such as eliminativist philosophers like Paul and Patricia Churchland—it is a pseudo-question. However, in our interpretation, an accurate phenomenological reflection on one’s own consciousness convinces the attentive and careful philosopher that it is very much a real question—and in fact a (...) crucial one. The present paper endeavours to show how Husserl’s theory of the bodily self-constitution of the ego could help us, not to close the explanatory gap in a reductionist manner, but rather to bridge this gap by rendering apparent the necessary connection between the subjective, phenomenal side of experience and its bodily basis. In this interpretation, Husserl’s conception of embodiment could even provide a more rigorous and firmer theoretical foundation than any which currently undergirds empirically related research regarding the origins of consciousness in the natural world. In the first half of the study, I outline Todd Feinberg and Jon Mallatt’s attempt to bridge and, in a further step, to eliminate the explanatory gap, in which they proceed from the external world to the interiority of mind. The second part of the paper presents a phenomenological analysis that aims to demonstrate that a Husserlian attempt would follow the opposite direction: from the inside proceeding outwards towards the external, physical reality. (shrink)

“Pero la cuestión que quiero plantear es la siguiente: ¿no es suficiente con tener este yo psíquico y psicofísico? ¿Necesitamos añadirle un yo trascendental, como una estructura de la conciencia absoluta?” Sartre planteó esta cuestión en su célebre ensayo La trascendencia del ego. Ella enuncia la concepción básica de la fenomenología no-egológica, la cual no niega la existencia misma del ego o del sujeto, sino más bien lo concibe como un ser constituido y mundano, como trascendente respecto del ámbito de (...) la conciencia. En la presente ponencia me gustaría mostrar por qué la fenomenología no puede prescindir de la noción del ego trascendental. Con tal propósito, consideraré de cerca la noción husserliana del “yo puro” del primer y del segundo libro de Ideas y, a grandes rasgos, el concepto general que Husserl se hace sobre el yo “fenomenológico” y “yo trascendental”. Tal concepto se puede encontrar en los manuscritos de este periodo, así como en algunos textos más tardíos. Intentaré demostrar que la noción husserliana del ego trascendental propia de este periodo podría articularse como una respuesta satisfactoria o al menos plausible, al desafío no-egológico con el que se ve confrontada la fenomenología egológica de Husserl.“But the question I would like to raise is the following: is this psychical and psycho-physical me not sufficient? Do we need to add to it a transcendental I, as a structure of absolute consciousness?” – Sartre raised this question in his famous essay, The transcen-dence of the ego. This is the basic conception of non-egological phenomenology, which latter does not deny the very existence of ego or subject, but regards it as a constituted, worldly being, something which is transcendent concerning the domain of consciousness. In this lecture I would like to demonstrate the thesis, why phenomenology cannot get along without the concept of a transcendental ego. I will have a closer look on Husserl’s notion of “pure I” in the first and second book of Ideas, and more generally on Husserl’s overall concept of “phenomenological” or “transcendental I” that could be found in the manuscripts of this period and little after. I will try to show that Husserl’s conception of transcendental ego that one could find in this period could be articulated as successful or at least plausible answer to the non-egological challenge of Husserl’s egological phenomenology. (shrink)