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152Seeing as a Non-Experiental Mental State: The Case from Synesthesia and Visual ImageryIn Richard Brown (ed.), Consciousness Inside and Out: Phenomenology, Neuroscience, and the Nature of Experience, Neuroscience Series, Synthese Library. 2012.The paper argues that the English verb ‘to see’ can denote three different kinds of conscious states of seeing, involving visual experiences, visual seeming states and introspective seeming states, respectively. The case for the claim that there are three kinds of seeing comes from synesthesia and visual imagery. Synesthesia is a relatively rare neurological condition in which stimulation in one sensory or cognitive stream involuntarily leads to associated experiences in a second unstimulated st…Read more
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150The Long-Term Potentiation Model for Grapheme-Color Binding in SynesthesiaIn David Bennett & Chris Hill (eds.), Sensory Integration and the Unity of Consciousness, Mit Press. 2015.The phenomenon of synesthesia has undergone an invigoration of research interest and empirical progress over the past decade. Studies investigating the cognitive mechanisms underlying synesthesia have yielded insight into neural processes behind such cognitive operations as attention, memory, spatial phenomenology and inter-modal processes. However, the structural and functional mechanisms underlying synesthesia still remain contentious and hypothetical. The first section of the present paper re…Read more
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149Review of Nicholas Griffin, Dale Jacquette (eds.), Russell Vs. Meinong: The Legacy of "on Denoting" (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2009 (4). 2009.
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146Perceptual variation in object perception: A defence of perceptual pluralismIn Aleksandra Mroczko-Wąsowicz & Rick Grush (eds.), Sensory individuals: unimodal and multimodal perspectives, Oxford University Press. 2023.The basis of perception is the processing and categorization of perceptual stimuli from the environment. Much progress has been made in the science of perceptual categorization. Yet there is still no consensus on how the brain generates sensory individuals, from sensory input and perceptual categories in memory. This chapter argues that perceptual categorization is highly variable across perceivers due to their use of different perceptual strategies for solving perceptual problems they encounter…Read more
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146Female MisogynyThe Philosophers' Magazine 91 53-59. 2020.Misogyny is a particular kind of unjustified hatred or contempt for women in a man’s world. By “a man’s world,” I mean a society where men have more power and privileges than women. The United States is a man’s world, or “patriarchal society,” as it’s also called. A few pieces of evidence: In 2019, 127 women held seats in the United States Congress, comprising only 23.7 percent of the 535 members. We, the American people, have never elected a female president. Although some women are legally ent…Read more
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143Unconscious influences on decision making in blindsightBehavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (1): 22-23. 2014.
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141Predictive Processing and Object RecognitionIn Tony Cheng, Ryoji Sato & Jakob Hohwy (eds.), Expected Experiences: The Predictive Mind in an Uncertain World, Routledge. 2023.Predictive processing models of perception take issue with standard models of perception as hierarchical bottom-up processing modulated by memory and attention. The predictive framework posits that the brain generates predictions about stimuli, which are matched to the incoming signal. Mismatches between predictions and the incoming signal – so-called prediction errors – are then used to generate new and better predictions until the prediction errors have been minimized, at which point a percept…Read more
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140FoundationalismIn Sven Bernecker & Kourken Michaelian (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Memory, Routledge. pp. 296-309. 2017.Memory has eluded a unified philosophical analysis for millennia because memory isn’t a single type of mental state. On a standard classification, procedural memory is memory of how to do things, semantic memory is memory of facts or fact-like propositions and episodic memory is memory of events in which you partook. Autobiographical memory is memory of what happened in your past in real-life cases. Empirical studies suggest that autobiographical memory is a construction of pieces of past experi…Read more
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137Varieties of Synesthetic ExperienceIn Richard Brown (ed.), Consciousness Inside and Out: Phenomenology, Neuroscience, and the Nature of Experience, Neuroscience Series, Synthese Library. forthcoming.In her response to my "Seeing as a Non-Experiental Mental State: The Case from Synesthesia and Visual Imagery" Ophelia Deroy presents an argument for an interesting new account of synesthesia. On this account, synesthesia can be thought of as "a perceptual state (e.g. of a letter)" that is "changed or enriched by the incorporation of a conscious mental image (e.g. a color)." I reply that while this is a plausible account of some types of synesthesia, some forms cannot be accounted for this way.
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133Seeing Mathematics: Perception and Brain Activity in a Case of Acquired SynesthesiaNeurocase. forthcoming.We studied the patient JP who has exceptional abilities to draw complex geometrical images by hand and a form of acquired synesthesia for mathematical formulas and objects, which he perceives as geometrical figures. JP sees all smooth curvatures as discrete lines, similarly regardless of scale. We carried out two preliminary investigations to establish the perceptual nature of synesthetic experience and to investigate the neural basis of this phenomenon. In a functional magnetic resonance imaging…Read more
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133Psilocybin, LSD, Mescaline and drug-induced synesthesiaIn Victor R. Preedy (ed.), The Neuropathology Of Drug Addictions And Substance Misuse, Elsevier. 2016.Studies have shown that both serotonin and glutamate receptor systems play a crucial role in the mechanisms underlying drug-induced synesthesia. The specific nature of these mechanisms, however, continues to remain elusive. Here we propose two distinct hypotheses for how synesthesia triggered by hallucinogens in the serotonin-agonist family may occur. One hypothesis is that the drug-induced destabilization of thalamic projections via GABAergic neuronal circuits from sensory areas leads to a disr…Read more
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132Andy Clark,mindware: An introduction to the philosophy of cognitive science, oxford/new York: Oxford university press, 2001, VII + 210 pp., $18.95 (paper), ISBN 0-19-513857- (review)Minds and Machines 12 (1): 151-156. 2002.
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127A Peircean theory of decisionSynthese 118 (3): 383-401. 1999.It is sometimes argued that the fact that possession of perfect knowledge about the future is impossible, means that it is impossible for decisions to be rational. This reasoning is fallacious. If rationality is given a new interpretation, then decisions can be considered rational. A theory of decision that has as its basis Peirce’s theory of abduction can provide a new way of understanding decisions as rational processes. The Peircean theory of decision (i) considers decisions as part of a comp…Read more
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125The Self-Locating Property Theory of ColorMinds and Machines 25 (2): 133-147. 2015.The paper reviews the empirical evidence for highly significant variation across perceivers in hue perception and argues that color physicalism cannot accommodate this variability. Two views that can accommodate the individual differences in hue perception are considered: the self-locating property theory, according to which colors are self-locating properties, and color relationalism, according to which colors are relations to perceivers and viewing conditions. It is subsequently argued that on…Read more
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116Template Tuning and Graded ConsciousnessIn Michal Polák, Tomáš Marvan & Juraj Hvorecký (eds.), Conscious and Unconscious Mentality: Examining Their Nature, Similarities and Differences, Routledge. 2023.Whether visual perceptual consciousness is gradable or dichotomous has been the subject of fierce debate in recent years. If perceptual consciousness is gradable, perceivers may have less than full access to—and thus be less than fully phenomenally aware of—perceptual information that is represented in working memory. This raises the question: In virtue of what can a subject be less than fully perceptually conscious? In this chapter, we provide an answer to this question, according to which inex…Read more
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103Cognitive dissonance and the logic of racismIn Berit Brogaard & Dimitria Electra Gatzia (eds.), The Philosophy and Psychology of Ambivalence: Being of Two Minds, Routledge. 2020.There is no abstract for this chapter. The following is a summary. We distinguish between, explicit, inadvertent, and habitual racist actions. We argue that while inadvertent bigots and habitual racists are inclined to (sincerely) deny that they committed a racially motivated action, they have different reasons for their denial. Inadvertent bigots are denying it because, however deeply they search, they are not going to find any such motive. Habitual racists, by contrast, may hold explicit egali…Read more
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102Dogmatism, Seemings, and Non-Deductive Inferential JustificationIn Kevin McCain, Scott Stapleford & Matthias Steup (eds.), Seemings: New Arguments, New Angles, Routledge. 2023.Dogmatism holds that an experience or seeming that p can provide prima facie immediate justification for believing p in virtue of its phenomenology. Dogmatism about perceptual justification has appealed primarily to proponents of representational theories of perceptual experience. Call dogmatism that takes perceptual experience to be representational "representational phenomenal dogmatism." As we show, phenomenal seemings play a crucial role in dogmatism of this kind. Despite its conventional ap…Read more
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98The Center Must Not Hold: White Women Philosophers on the Whiteness of PhilosophyLexington Books. 2010.In this collection, white women philosophers engage boldly in critical acts of exploring ways of naming and disrupting whiteness in terms of how it has defined the conceptual field of philosophy. Focuses on the whiteness of the epistemic and value-laden norms within philosophy itself, the text dares to identify the proverbial elephant in the room known as white supremacy and how that supremacy functions as the measure of reason, knowledge, and philosophical intelligibility.
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98Do Synesthetic Colors Grab Attention in Visual Search?Review of Philosophy and Psychology 7 (4): 701-714. 2016.Recent research on synesthesia has focused on how the condition may depend on selective attention, but there is a lack of consensus on whether selective attention is required to bind colors to their grapheme inducers. In the present study, we used a novel change detection paradigm to examine whether synesthetic colors guide the subject’s attention to the location of the inducer or whether selective attention is required to act as a unique feature during visual search. If synesthetic experiences …Read more
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97The Epistemology of Non-visual Perception (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2020.This is an anthology of new papers by top researchers in epistemology and philosophy of mind focused on the epistemology of non-visual perception. The focus of the volume is to highlight the many different domains in which non-visual sensory experience, broadly construed to include multimodal experience associated with emotional and agential perception, plays a rational role, for instance, as an immediate justifier of belief.
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96Are conscious states conscious in virtue of representing themselves?: On Uriah Kriegel’s Subjective consciousness: a self-representational theory (review)Philosophical Studies 159 (3): 467-474. 2012.
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95Is the Auditory System Cognitively Penetrable?Multisensory Integration: Brain, Body, and the World. 2015.While much has been written about whether visual perception is cognitively penetrable, the analogous question with respect to auditory perception has received very little attention. Here we argue that instances of top-down modulation of auditory processing, although extensive, do not constitute cases of cognitive penetration of auditory perception since the changes in the phenomenology of auditory perception caused by top-down influences cannot plausibly be attributed to the listeners’ discursiv…Read more
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88Synesthetic Binding and the Reactivation Model of MemoryIn Ophelia Deroy (ed.), Sensory Blending: On Synaesthesia and Related Phenomena, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.Despite the recent surge in research on, and interest in, synesthesia, the mechanism underlying this condition is still unknown. Feedforward mechanisms involving overlapping receptive fields of sensory neurons as well as feedback mechanisms involving a lack of signal disinhibition have been proposed. Here I show that a broad range of studies of developmental synesthesia indicate that the mechanism underlying the phenomenon may involve reinstatement of brain activity in different sensory or cogni…Read more
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86Reply to Critics: Josh Dever and John HawthorneInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 58 (6): 625-632. 2015.‘Time brings all things to pass.’—AeschylusJosh Dever argues that there is no real choice to make between semantic eternalism and temporalism, as they are semantically equivalent. He calls this pos...
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84What Can Neuroscience Tell Us about the Hard Problem of Consciousness?Frontiers in Neuroscience 10 395. 2016.Rapid advances in the field of neuroimaging techniques including magnetoencephalography (MEG), electroencephalography (EEG), functional MRI (fMRI), diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), voxel based morphomentry (VBM), and optical imaging, have allowed neuroscientists to investigate neural processes in ways that have not been possible until recently. Combining these techniques with advanced analysis procedures during different conditions such as hypnosis, psychiatric and neurological conditions, sublim…Read more
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84Is the auditory system cognitively penetrable?Frontiers in Psychology 6. 2015.According to the hierarchical model of sensory information processing, sensory inputs are transmitted to cortical areas, which are crucial for complex auditory and speech processing, only after being processed in subcortical areas (Hickok and Poeppel, 2007; Rauschecker and Scott, 2009). However, studies using electroencephalography (EEG) indicate that distinguishing simultaneous auditory inputs involves a widely distributed neural network, including the medial temporal lobe, which is essential f…Read more
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83Clues to the paradoxes of knowability: reply to Dummett and TennantAnalysis 62 (2): 143-150. 2002.
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82Adhoccery in EpistemologyPhilosophical Papers 32 (1): 65-82. 2003.Abstract Ernest Sosa has argued that the relevant alternatives theory of knowledge has yet to overcome serious difficulties. The most serious difficulty is that of providing criteria for when a rival alternative to a claim is relevant. Without such criteria, the theory is ad hoc. I argue that most other externalist theories of knowledge, including Sosa's own, fall victim to this criticism. At the end of the paper I make a suggestion as to why Sosa's objection might not be as damaging as it at fi…Read more
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