Bence Nanay

Perceptual experiences justify beliefs. A perceptual experience of a dog justifies the belief that there is a dog present. But there is much evidence that perceptual states can occur without being conscious, as in experiments involving masked priming. Do unconscious perceptual states provide justification as well? The answer depends on one’s theory of justification. While most varieties of externalism seem compatible with unconscious perceptual justification, several theories have recently afforded to consciousness a special role in perceptual justification. We argue that such views face a dilemma: either consciousness should be understood in functionalist terms, in which case our best current theories of consciousness do not seem to imbue consciousness with any special epistemic features, or it should not, in which case it is mysterious why only conscious states are justificatory. We conclude that unconscious perceptual justification is quite plausible.

I aim to show that the content of our perceptual states depends counterfactually on the action we want to perform. Most philosophical and psychological theories of perception claim or at least assume the opposite: they conceive of perception as allpurpose: what we want to do does not influence what we see. I will argue that the content of one's perceptual state does vary as the action one is inclined to perform varies. To put it very simply, what we see does indeed depend on what we want to do. After clarifying what counterfactual dependence means in my claim, I will give a two step argument. (a) one's visual attention (sometimes) depends counterfactually on one's intention to perform an action (everything else being equal) and (b) one's perceptual content (always) depends counterfactually on one's visual attention (everything else being equal). If we put these claims together, what we get is that one's perceptual content depends counterfactually on one's intention to perform an action (everything else being equal).

My endeavor in this paper is to examine the ways in which exactly the general structure of perception is modified in the case of the reception of theatre performances. First, perception in general is examined and it is argued that a basic characteristic of perception is that it is sometimes interdependent with action. After the analysis of perception in general, I turn to the special case of the perception of a theatre performance (or, theatre-perception, for short) and examine the role of the perception of the possibility of action in the case of watching a performance. I try to point out that theatre-perception cannot be sufficiently analyzed without taking into consideration the action-oriented character of perception. If we perceive a gun on stage we perceive it as the possibility of an action, that is, as affording certain actions.

We are aware of those parts of a cat that are occluded behind a fence. The question is how we represent these occluded parts of perceived objects: this is the problem of amodal perception. I will consider four theories and compare their explanatory power: (i) we see them, (ii) we have nonperceptual beliefs about them, (iii) we have immediate perceptual access to them and (iv) we visualize them. I point out that the first three of these views face both empirical and conceptual objections. I argue for the fourth account, according to which we visualize the occluded parts of perceived objects. Finally, I consider some important consequences of this view with regards to the content and the evolution of visualization.

Simulation, if used as a way of becoming aware of other people’s mental states, is the joint exercise of imagination and attribution. If A simulates B, then (i) A attributes to B the mental state in which A finds herself at the end of a process in which (ii) A has imagined being in B’s situation. Although necessary, imagination and attribution are not sufficient for simulation: the latter occurs only if (iii) the imagination process grounds or justifies the attribution. Depending on the notion of justification we use to make sense of the idea that an episode of imagining serves as a reason for attributing a mental state, the shape of the debate and the options it offers look very different. Reconfiguring the discussion in this way, we claim, shifts the focus of the simulation vs. theory-theory debate to a question located in epistemology.

Over the last fifteen years, communication has become pictorial in a manner that it never was before. Billions of people have smart phones that enable them to take, edit, and share pictures easily whenever they choose to do so. This has created expressive niches within which new activities, with their own norms, continue to develop. Ready availability of these pictorial modes of communication, we claim, not only constitutes a change in the range of our communicative practices, but also changes the world about which we communicate. Increasingly, we are making a world that’s worth depicting, using the tools we now possess. This paper will unpack one example of this phenomenon, trompe l’oeil street art. More and more of this seems to be produced with the intention that it is seen primarily in pictures. It makes sense that anything someone makes, and wants to be seen, would be made with decent photography potential in mind. You want photos to be able to, as they say, do justice to your work no matter what kind of visual work you make. In these cases, however, the pictures of the work are reliably more interesting than the pieces seen in the flesh.

The aim of this paper is to explore what could be meant by modernist portraiture. On the face of it, there is a real tension about the very idea of modernist portraiture inasmuch as one key idea of modernism is negativity and self-negation, whereas portraiture is, in some very obvious sense, not negation. It is the depiction of the sitter. So there are reasons to think that modernist portraiture, in the strong sense of the term, is a contradiction in terms. Nonetheless, I argue that there is such a thing as genuine modernist portraiture – modernist portraiture in the strong sense. But it is not easy to pull it off. And the modernist act of creating portraits of people not present also reveals something important about the nature of depiction and the importance of mental imagery in picture perception.

There has been a lot of discussion about how the cognitive penetrability of perception may or may not have important implications for understanding perceptual justification. The aim of this paper is to argue that a different set of findings in perceptual psychology poses an even more serious challenge to the very idea of perceptual justification. These findings are about the importance of perceptual processing that is not driven by corresponding sensory stimulation in the relevant sense modality (such as amodal completion and multimodal completion). I argue that these findings show that everyday perception is in fact a mixture of sensory stimulation-driven perceptual processing and perceptual processing that is not driven by corresponding sensory stimulation in the relevant sense modality and we have strong reasons to doubt the epistemic pedigree of the latter process. The implication of this is not that we should become skeptics or deny the possibility of perceptual justification. It is, rather, that the only way in which we can understand when and whether a perceptual state justifies beliefs is by paying close attention to empirical facts about the reliability of perceptual processing that is not driven by corresponding sensory stimulation in the relevant sense modality. In this sense (a very narrow sense) epistemology needs to be naturalized.

An important recent distinction in the empirical literature about self-control is between resisting and avoiding temptations. While we have evidence that avoiding temptations is the more efficient method of the two, philosophers have focused almost exclusively on resisting temptations. The aim of this paper is to examine what the ability to avoid temptations depends on and argue that it depends primarily on how fragmented one’s mind is: on the inconsistencies in one’s mental setup. The fragmentation of mind requires a significant amount of mental effort to conceal from oneself and this leads to a weakened ability to resist temptations.

What triggers the execution of actions? What happens in that moment when an action is triggered? What mental state is there at the moment of action-execution that was not there a second before? My aim is to highlight the importance of a thus far largely ignored kind of mental state in the discussion of these old and much-debated questions: motor imagery. While there have been a fair amount of research in psychology and neuroscience on motor imagery in the last 30 years or so, it is only recently that we start to understand the important role motor imagery plays in action initiation. And if, as these findings suggest, motor imagery plays an important role in action initiation, we can make progress not only in understanding action initiation in general but also in understanding what goes wrong in akratic actions and in relapse actions. Finally, this new picture of action-initiation also has far-reaching consequences for the relation between motivation and causation in naturalistic action-explanations.

Many philosophers use findings about sensory substitution devices in the grand debate about how we should individuate the senses. The big question is this: Is “vision” assisted by (tactile) sensory substitution really vision? Or is it tactile perception? Or some sui generis novel form of perception? My claim is that sensory substitution assisted “vision” is neither vision nor tactile perception, because it is not perception at all. It is mental imagery: visual mental imagery triggered by tactile sensory stimulation. But it is a special form of mental imagery that is triggered by corresponding sensory stimulation in a different sense modality, which I call “multimodal mental imagery.”

A distinctive feature of Russian formalism, something we do not see in Bell and Fry or in Wölfflin and Riegl (or see it more rarely, see Section IV below), is this emphasis on the analysis of everyday perception and the ways in which art encourages us to perceive differently. But it is difficult not to read the concept of defamiliarization as a naïve early statement of what art historians and aestheticians of the second half of the 20th century criticized as the “Innocent Eye” tradition. As talking about the Innocent Eye is now universally frowned upon, defamiliarization has not been taken as seriously as it should have been. The aim of this paper is to revive the concept of defamiliarization by showing that it has nothing to do with the “Innocent Eye” tradition and to propose a new interpretation of it in terms of distributed attention. I conclude that this reinterpreted concept of defamiliarization can be very useful for contemporary post-formalist accounts of the history of vision (and imagination as well as visual attention).

When I am looking at my coffee machine that makes funny noises, this is an instance of multisensory perception – I perceive this event by means of both vision and audition. But very often we only receive sensory stimulation from a multisensory event by means of one sense modality, for example, when I hear the noisy coffee machine in the next room, that is, without seeing it. The aim of this paper is to bring together empirical findings about multimodal perception and empirical findings about (visual, auditory, tactile) mental imagery and argue that on occasions like this, we have multimodal mental imagery: perceptual processing in one sense modality (here: vision) that is triggered by sensory stimulation in another sense modality (here: audition). Multimodal mental imagery is not a rare and obscure phenomenon. The vast majority of what we perceive are multisensory events: events that can be perceived in more than one sense modality – like the noisy coffee machine. And most of the time we are only acquainted with these multisensory events via a subset of the sense modalities involved – all the other aspects of these multisensory events are represented by means of multisensory mental imagery. This means that multisensory mental imagery is a crucial element of almost all instances of everyday perception.