Bence Nanay

We argue that the causal theory of memory and the simulation theory of memory are not as straightforwardly incompatible as they are usually taken to be. Following a brief review of the theories, we describe alternative normative and descriptive perspectives on memory, arguing that the causal theory aligns better with the normative perspective and the simulation theory with the descriptive perspective. Taking explanatory contextualism about perception as our starting point, we then develop a form of explanatory contextualism about memory, arguing that, depending on the context in which we find ourselves, either the normative perspective or the descriptive perspective may be appropriate. It follows that, while the causal theory and the simulation theory cannot both be right with respect to a given perspective, and while it is necessary to choose one perspective or the other in a given context, there an important sense in which we need not choose between causalism and simulationism. We conclude by differentiating our position from and critiquing a related position developed by Craver (2020) and defending our position against objections.

Here is a widespread but controversial idea: those animals who represent correctly are likely to be selected over those who misrepresent. While various versions of this claim have been traditionally endorsed by the vast majority of philosophers of mind, recently, it has been argued that this is just plainly wrong. My aim in this paper is to argue for an intermediate position: that the correctness of some but not all representations is indeed selectively advantageous. It is selectively advantageous to have correct representations that are directly involved in bringing about and guiding the organism's action. I start with the standard objection to the claim that it is selectively advantageous to represent correctly, the ‘better safe than sorry’ argument gand then generalize it with the help of Peter Godfrey Smith's distinction between Cartesian and Jamesian reliability and the trade‐off between them. This generalized argument rules out a positive answer to our question at least as far as the vast majority of our representational apparatus is concerned. But this argument fails to apply in the case of the correctness of a special kind of representation, one that is directly involved in bringing about, and in guiding, actions. We can still maintain that it is selectively advantageous to have a reliable mechanism for producing representations of this kind.

Musical frissons (or chills) have been at the forefront of both philosophical and psychological research on audience responses to music. The aim of this article is to argue that frissons also play an important role in the experience of dance performances. Following Jerrold Levinson’s distinction between sound-quality frissons and sound-structure frissons, the article zooms in on the concept of conflict-induced frissons, which feature prominently in a variety of art forms besides music, from film to literature, and it is of crucial importance for understanding the audience reaction to some dance performances. A case study of Pina Bausch’s choreographies is given to illustrate this point.

Intentionalism is the view that perceptual phenomenology depends on perceptual content. The aim of this paper is to make explicit an ambiguity in usual formulations of intentionalism, and to argue in favor of one way to disambiguate it. It concerns whether perceptual phenomenology depends on the content of one and only one representation (often construed as being identical to a certain perceptual experience), or instead depends on a collection of many different representations throughout the perceptual system. We argue in favor of the latter option. Intentionalism so conceived can make better sense of contemporary neuroscience of perception, and is better equipped to confront several influential objections to traditional intentionalism.

The aim of this paper is to argue that there is no unproblematic way of delineating perceptual beliefs from non-perceptual beliefs. The concept of perceptual belief is one of the central concepts not only of philosophy of perception but also of epistemology in a broad foundationalist tradition. Philosophers of perception talk about perceptual belief as the interface between perception and cognition and foundationalist epistemologists understand perceptual justification as a relation between perceptual states and perceptual beliefs. We consider three ways of cashing out the difference between perceptual and non-perceptual beliefs (semantic, justificatory, and etiological) and argue that none of them works. Finally, we explore the possibility of understanding perceptual justification without relying on the concept of perceptual beliefs.

When I am looking at an apple, I perceptually attribute certain properties to certain entities. Two questions arise: what are these entities (what is it that I perceptually represent as having properties) and what are these properties (what properties I perceive this entity as having)? This paper is about the former, less widely explored, question: what does our perceptual system attribute properties to? In other words, what are these ‘sensory individuals’. There have been important debates in philosophy of perception about what sensory individuals would be the most plausible candidates for which sense modalities. The aim of this paper is to ask a related question about picture perception: what is the sensory individual of picture perception? When we look at a picture and see an apple depicted in it, what kind of entity do we see? What do we perceptually attribute properties to? I argue that the most straightforward candidates (ordinary objects, sui generis sensory individuals, no sensory individuals) are all problematic and that the most plausible candidate for the sensory individuals of picture perception are spatiotemporal regions.

The symposium published here began life as a somewhat unusual ‘author meets critics’ session at the British Society of Aesthetics annual conference, at St Anne’s College, Oxford, on 16 September 2016 – unusual inasmuch as the focus was not on a single book, but on two books (Bence Nanay’s Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception and Murray Smith’s Film, Art, and the Third Culture) exploring different but related themes. In addition, rather than encompassing all the issues these two books address, the session focused on one general question that both books explore in some depth: is psychology relevant to aesthetics?

When we remember a scene, the scene’s boundaries are wider than the boundaries of the scene we saw. This phenomenon is called boundary extension. The most important philosophical question about boundary extension is whether it is a form of perceptual adjustment or adjustment during memory encoding. The aim of this paper is to propose a third explanatory scheme, according to which the extended boundary of the original scene is represented by means of mental imagery. And given the similarities between perception and mental imagery, the memory system encodes both the part of the scene that is represented perceptually and the part of the scene that is represented by means of mental imagery.

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.

This chapter explores insights concerning the relations among imagination, imagined selves, and knowledge of one’s own self that are to be found in Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. The insights are explored via close reading of the text and comparison with contemporaries of Pessoa. First, a tempting account of the importance of imagination in The Book of Disquiet is set out. On this reading, Pessoa is immersed in miasmatic boredom, but able to temporarily rise above it through the restorative powers of escapist imagination. But, it is suggested, Pessoa neither enjoys his prolific imaginings, nor returns from them restored. It is argued that Pessoa’s disquiet owes to failures of imagination; the book presents a sharp contrast between Pessoa’s keen awareness of the importance of a successful, active imaginative life, and his failure to maintain such a thing. It is further argued that these failures point us towards a better account of imagination’s importance to Pessoa, an account that both prefigures and goes beyond Sartre’s ideas about the relations between nothingness, imagination, and self-consciousness.

Amodal completion is usually characterized as the representation of those parts of the perceived object that we get no sensory stimulation from. In the case of the visual sense modality, for example, amodal completion is the representation of occluded parts of objects we see. I argue that relationalism about perception, the view that perceptual experience is constituted by the relation to the perceived object, cannot give a coherent account of amodal completion. The relationalist has two options: construe the perceptual relation as the relation to the entire perceived object or as the relation to the unoccluded parts of the perceived object. I argue that neither of these options are viable.

When we remember a scene, the scene’s boundaries are wider than the boundaries of the scene we saw. This phenomenon is called boundary extension. The most important philosophical question about boundary extension is whether it is a form of perceptual adjustment or adjustment during memory encoding. The aim of this paper is to propose a third explanatory scheme, according to which the extended boundary of the original scene is represented by means of mental imagery. And given the similarities between perception and mental imagery, the memory system encodes both the part of the scene that is represented perceptually and the part of the scene that is represented by means of mental imagery.

Jerry Fodor, the long-time proponent of the Language of Thought hypothesis has published a widely condemned book at the end of his life, criticising Darwin’s theory of natural selection. It has been argued that this is not just some kind of quirk or a result of Fodor’s idiosyncratic aging process, but a direct consequence of Fodor’s general theoretical commitments. And this is where Csaba Pléh fares much better than Fodor. Pléh’s general theoretical commitments were very similar to Fodor’s inasmuch as he also endorsed a fairly strong version of the Fodorian Language of Thought framework. But Pléh’s continuing fascination with, and use of, evolutionary arguments show how one can leave behind the Language of Thought hypothesis and opt for more dynamic evolutionary approaches to the mind.

I can imagine a banana to be a phone receiver. I can also imagine the flapping of my arms to be flying. So it is possible to imagine one thing to be another—at least for some types of ‘things’. I will argue that although it is possible to imagine an object to be another object and it is also possible to imagine an activity to be a different activity, one cannot imagine one’s present sensory experience to be a different sensory experience with different qualitative character. This claim will have some important consequences beyond the philosophy of imagination, for example, for some accounts of depiction.

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.

Philosophers of music, like Charles Swann in Proust’s novel (Proust 1913/1992, p. 360), have traditionally found it difficult to utter the word ‘profound’ unironically. But this changed with Peter Kivy’s 1990 paper ‘The profundity of music’ The problem Kivy draws our attention to is this: we do call some musical works profound. However, Kivy argues, given that a work is profound only if it is about something profound and given that music (or ‘music alone’) is not about anything, this leads to something of a paradox: how can music be profound if it is not about something profound. My aim in this paper is to argue that what makes a work profound is not that it is about something profound, but that it actively challenges any straightforward interpretative activity (while at the same time nudges you to keep on trying to interpret it). I argue that this line of argument is very much in tune with Kivy’s general theoretical commitment that “music alone isn’t about anything” (Kivy 1990, p. 245).

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.

Mental imagery is perceptual processing that is not triggered by corresponding sensory stimulation in the relevant sense modality. Temporal mental imagery is perceptual processing that is not triggered by temporally corresponding sensory stimulation in the relevant sense modality. We aim to show that temporal mental imagery plays an important role in explaining a number of diverse mental phenomena, from the thickness of temporal experience and the specious present to episodic memory and postdictive perception.

Theory of mind, the attribution of mental states to others is one form of social cognition. The aim of this paper is to highlight the importance of another, much simpler, form of social cognition, which I call vicarious representation. Vicarious representation is the attribution of other-centered properties to objects. This mental capacity is different from, and much simpler than, theory of mind as it does not imply the understanding (or representation) of the mental (or even perceptual) states of another agents. I argue that the most convincing experiments that are supposed to show that non-human primates have theory of mind in fact demonstrate that they are capable of vicarious representation. The same is true for the experiments about the theory of mind of infants under 12 months.

What is the mental representation that is responsible for implicit bias? What is this representation that mediates between the trigger and the biased behavior? My claim is that this representation is neither a propositional attitude nor a mere association. Rather, it is mental imagery: perceptual processing that is not directly triggered by sensory input. I argue that this view captures the advantages of the two standard accounts without inheriting their disadvantages. Further, this view also explains why manipulating mental imagery is among the most efficient ways of counteracting implicit bias.

It has been repeatedly suggested that synesthesia is intricately connected with unusual ways of exercising one’s mental imagery, although it is not always entirely clear what the exact connection is. My aim is to show that all forms of synesthesia are forms of (often very different kinds of) mental imagery and, further, if we consider synesthesia to be a form of mental imagery, we get significant explanatory benefits, especially concerning less central cases of synesthesia where the inducer is not sensory stimulation.

Historically, mental imagery has been defined as an experiential state - as something necessarily conscious. But most behavioural or neuroimaging experiments on mental imagery - including the most famous ones - don’t actually take the conscious experience of the subject into consideration. Further, recent research highlights that there are very few behavioural or neural differences between conscious and unconscious mental imagery. I argue that treating mental imagery as not necessarily conscious (as potentially unconscious) would bring much needed explanatory unification to mental imagery research. It would also help us to reassess some of the recent aphantasia findings inasmuch as at least some subjects with aphantasia would be best described as having unconscious mental imagery.

It has been argued recently that perception is indeterminate. But there are more than one ways of spelling out what this means. The standard line is that perceptual states attribute different probabilities to different propositions. I provide an alternative to this view, where it is not the attitude, but the content of perceptual states that is indeterminate, inasmuch as it consists of the representation of determinable properties. This view does justice to the more general claim that perception is indeterminate without appealing to probability either in the attitude or in the content.

If the sight of cortically blind people were restored, could they visually recognize a cube or a sphere? This is Molyneux’s question. I argue that the answer to this question depends on the specificities of the mental setup of these cortically blind people. Some cortically blind people have (sometimes quite vivid) visual imagery. Others don’t. The answer to Molyneux’s question depends on whether the blind subjects have had visual imagery before their sight was restored. If they did, the answer to Molyneux’s question is yes, if they didn’t, the answer is no. There is no generic answer to Molyneux’s question.

Mental imagery is early perceptual processing that is not triggered by corresponding sensory stimulation in the relevant sense modality. Multimodal mental imagery is early perceptual processing that is triggered by sensory stimulation in a different sense modality. For example, when early visual or tactile processing is triggered by auditory sensory stimulation, this amounts to multimodal mental imagery. Pulling together philosophy, psychology and neuroscience, I will argue in this paper that multimodal mental imagery plays a crucial role in our engagement with musical works. Engagement with musical works is normally a multimodal phenomenon, where we get input from a number of sense modalities. But even if we screen out any input that is not auditory, multimodal mental imagery will still play an important role that musicians and composers often actively rely on.

Jerry Fodor wrote the following assessment of Danto’s importance in 1993: “Danto has done something I’ve been very much wanting to do: namely, reconsider some hard problems in aesthetics in the light of the past 20 years or so of philosophical work on intentionality and representation” (Fodor 1993, p. 41). Fodor is absolutely right: some of Danto’s work could be thought of as the application of some influential ideas about perception that Fodor also shared. The problem is that these ideas have turned out to be false. Both Danto and 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 (see, e.g., Fodor 1983, Pylyshyn 1984). Many of Danto’s famous and influential arguments rely very directly on this modularist assumption. There is now, however, a wealth of evidence against modularism of the strong kind held to by Danto and Fodor. We now know that perceptual experience is not determined entirely by the retinal input: our visual processing is influenced at various point in a top-down manner. What we know and what kinds of visual stimuli we have encountered previously deeply influence how the retinal input is processed. The empirical literature on this is vast and conclusive (for an overview, see Teufel and Nanay 2017 but see also the references in the last section of this paper). What does this mean for Danto’s views on art and perception? While one of Danto’s premises may turn out to be false, the history and examples he gave are valuable and bear repeating. Even more importantly, 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.

Almost every facet of the experience of musical listening—from pitch, to rhythm, to the experience of emotion—is thought to be shaped by the meeting and thwarting of expectations. But it is unclear what kind of mental states these expectations are, what their format is, and whether they are conscious or unconscious. Here, we distinguish between different modes of musical listening, arguing that expectations play different roles in each, and we point to the need for increased collaboration between music psychologists and philosophers in order to arrive at a more detailed characterisation of conscious musical experience and the role of expectations therein.