Jonathan Cohen

No one disputes that certain cognitive tasks involve the use of images. On the other hand, there has been substantial disagreement over whether the representations in which imaginal tasks are carried out are imaginal or propositional. The empirical literature on the topic which has accrued over the last twenty years suggests that there is a functional equivalence between mental imagery and perception: when peopIe imagine a scene or event, the mental processes that occur are functionally similar in important senses to what happens when they visually perceive an analogous scene or event. What is in dispute is not this principle of equivalence, but rather what conclusions should be drawn from it about the representational medium used in imagery.The problem to be explained is what internal cognitive events transpire when people answer questions like “What color is a bee’s head?” Most people report that they imagine a picture of the insect and then look at the head in the image to determine its color. Although there is no more reason to accept these introspective reports as a good account of cognitive processes than in any other cognitive phenomena, there are many empirical results which lend credence to the idea that there are mental images of some kind.Some theorists have taken the empirical results as evidence that there exists a special, non-symbolic representational medium for imagery. Others have insisted that the imagery data can be explained best in terms of the more general, symbolic representations which are usually taken to underly higher level cognitive tasks. In this paper I shall evaluate the arguments for both imaginal and propositional representations in the hope of assessing the status of the imagery debate. I shall conclude that imaginal theories represent the most reasonable account of imagery.

In Clark (2000), Austen Clark argues convincingly that a widespread view of perception as a complicated kind of feature-extraction is incomplete. He argues that perception has another crucial representational ingredient: it must also involve the representation of "sensory individuals" that exemplify sensorily extracted features. Moreover, he contends, the best way of understanding sensory individuals takes them to be places in space surrounding the perceiver. In this paper, I'll agree with Clark's case for sensory individuals (

Philosophy of mind today is a sprawling behemoth whose tentacles reach into virtually every area of philosophy, as well as many subjects outside of philosophy. Of course, none of us would have it any other way. Nonetheless, this state of affairs poses obvious organizational challenges for anthology editors. Brian McLaughlin and I have attempted to meet these challenges in the present volume by focusing on ten controversial and fundamental topics in philosophy of mind. ‘Controversial’ is clear enough: we have chosen topics about which there is not a settled consensus among philosophers. By ‘fundamental’, we don’t mean that the issues are easy or that the approaches taken toward them are introductory. Rather, we mean that (i) the resolution of these topics has implications for other issues inside and outside philosophy of mind, and (ii) past rounds of debate have revealed these topics as underlying broader disagreements. We asked leading philosophers of mind to defend one side or another on these topics. The result is what you now have in your hands.

In The Quest for Reality: Subjectivism and the Metaphysics of Colour [Stroud, 2000], Barry Stroud carries out an ambitious attack on various forms of irrealism and subjectivism about color. The views he targets - those that would deny a place in objective reality to the colors - have a venerable history in philosophy. Versions of them have been defended by Galileo, Descartes, Boyle, Locke, and Hume; more recently, forms of these positions have been articulated by Williams, Smart, Mackie, Ryle, and Hardin, among others. Stroud's aim is to argue not only that these writers fail to make their cases, but that no conceivable argument could ever convince us that colors are not a part of objective reality.

In “The Location Problem for Color Subjectivism,” Peter Ross argues against what he calls subjectivism — the view that “colors are not describable in physical terms,... [but are] mental processes or events of visual states” (2), 1 and in favor of physicalism — a view according to which colors are “physical properties of physical objects, such as reflectance properties” (10). He rejects an argument that has been offered in support of subjectivism, and argues that, since no form of subjectivism is able to account for our perception of color, we are better off adopting physicalism.

Many philosophers have been attracted by the view that colors are mind-independent properties of object surfaces. While this view has come in for a fair bit of criticism for failing to do justice to the facts about perceptual variation, Byrne and Hilbert have recently argued that perceptual variation involving color is no more problematic for physicalism about color than representational variation involving temperature is for physicalism about temperature. Unfortunately, the analogy on which this response rests is no less controversial than the disputed view about color, and so the response leads to a standoff rather than a resolution of the debate. However, we can appeal to facts about our inferential treatment of color and other properties as a way of resolving this impasse; doing so gives us defeasible reason for rejecting the Byrne and Hilbert response, and so for rejecting their mind-independent conception of color.

_Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind_ showcases the leading contributors to the field, debating the major questions in philosophy of mind today. Comprises 20 newly commissioned essays on hotly debated issues in the philosophy of mind Written by a cast of leading experts in their fields, essays take opposing views on 10 central contemporary debates A thorough introduction provides a comprehensive background to the issues explored Organized into three sections which explore the ontology of the mental, nature of the mental content, and the nature of consciousness.

Although philosophers have puzzled about color for millennia, the recent explosion in philosophical interest in the topic can largely be traced to C. L. Hardin’s widely-read and deservedly-praised Color for Philosophers: Unweaving the Rainbow [Hardin, 1988]. While Hardin has had no more than the usual, limited success in convincing other philosophers to adopt the substance of his views, he has been quite influential about a point of philosophical methodology: he has convinced many that responsible philosophical work on color simply must make contact with the vast body of empirical color science, and thereby has effected an enormous (and to my mind, extremely salutary) change in the terms of recent philosophical discussion of color. 1 Indeed, writers have been so eager to take Hardin’s lesson on board that one is hard-pressed to find a recent philosophical book on color that does not acknowledge it, crediting Hardin by name.

Recently, a number of writers have presented an argument to the effect that leading causal theories make available accounts of affect’s motivational role, but at the cost of failing to understand affect’s rationalizing role. Moreover, these writers have gone on to argue that these considerations support the adoption of an alternative (“evaluationist”) conception of pleasure and pain that, in their view, successfully explains both the motivational and rationalizing roles of affective experience. We believe that this argument from rationalization is ineffective in choosing between evaluationist and causal theories of affective experience, and that the impression to the contrary rests on a serious misunderstanding of the dialectic between the two views. We’ll describe general forms of causal and evaluationist theories, set out the argument that has been deployed by evaluationists against causal theorists, and then show how that argument rests on crucial and highly controversial presuppositions.

Blind tasting — tasting without knowing the wine’s producer, origin, or other details obtainable from the wine’s label— has become something of a fetish in the wine world. We are told, repeatedly and insistently, that blind tasting is the best, most neutral, least biased, and most honest evaluative procedure, and one that should be employed to the exclusion of non-blind/sighted tasting (which, in turn, is typically disparaged as confused, biased, or dishonest). Professional evaluators (e.g., the tasting panel of the Wine Spectator, the Grand Jury Europ´een, virtually every judging panel in competitive wine events) routinely advertise that they use blind tasting exclusively. Wine books and tasting manuals at all levels consistently emphasize the importance of blind tasting. Thus, Michael Broadbent, perhaps the most prolific author of tasting notes in history, writes that “It is my firm opinion... that to assess the qualities of a wine by tasting it completely blind, without any hint of what it might be, is the most useful and salutary discipline that any self-respecting taster can be given” (quoted in?, 156). Or, again, Ronald Jackson, in his industry-standard textbook on wine tasting, asserts categorically that “Tastings should always be conducted blind, usually with only the names of the wine noted in advance” (?, 334)

Brown highlights cases of “chromatic layering”—scenarios in which one perceives an opaque object through a transparent volume/film/filter with a chromatic or achromatic content of its own—as a way of reining in the argument from perceptual variation sometimes used to motivate a relationalist account of color properties. Brown urges that the argument in question does not generalize smoothly to all types of perceptual variation—in particular, that it fits poorly in layering cases in which there is either experiential fusion or scission. While he doesn’t want to reject the relationalist description of variation in all cases, he does suggest that there is an alternative, and preferable, description available for layering cases, and that the availability of this alternative puts limits on the scope of both relationalist arguments and relationalist conclusions. I claim that the obstacles for the argument from perceptual variation posed by cases of layering are merely apparent. I argue that relationalism can be extended smoothly to cases of layering, and indeed that denying this extension, as Brown proposes, contravenes ordinary and more or less universally accepted canons of rational inquiry.

Questions about the ontology of color matter because colors matter. Colors are extremely pervasive and salient features of the world. Moreover, people care about the distribution of these features: they expend money and effort to paint their houses, cars, and other possessions, and their clear preference for polychromatic over monochromatic televisions and computer monitors have consigned monochromatic models to the status of rare antiques. The apparent ubiquity of colors and their importance to our lives makes them a ripe target for ontological questions such as the following: " • What is the nature of colors? " • Are they, as they seem to be, properties of objects?

Students of perception have long known that perceptual constancy is an important aspect of our perceptual interaction with the world. Here is a simple example of the phenomenon concerning color perception: there is some ordinary sense in which an unpainted ceramic coffee cup made from a uniform material looks a uniform color when it is viewed under uneven illumination, even though the light reflected by the shaded regions to our eyes is quite different from the light reflected by the unshaded regions to our eyes (see figure 1). Or consider this example concerning size perception: there is some ordinary sense in which two telephone poles look the same size when the first is viewed from 100 meters and when the second is viewed from 1 meter, even though the visual angle subtended by the two poles on our retinae is very different (see figure 2). Or consider this example concerning shape perception: there is some ordinary sense in which a penny looks round both when viewed head on and when viewed from an acute angle, even though the area projected by the penny onto our retinae under these two conditions is very different (see figure 3). Or, finally, consider this example concerning auditory volume perception (which I cannot depict graphically): there is some ordinary sense in which a speaker’s voice sounds the same volume when heard from across the room and when heard from a distance of 1 meter, even though the energy striking our ears under these two conditions is very different.

But Hardin hasn’t contented himself with reframing traditional philosoph- ical issues about color in a way that is sensitive to relevant empirical con- straints. In addition, he has been a staunch defender of color eliminativism — the view that there are no colors, qua properties of tables, chairs, and other mind-external objects, and a vociferous critic of several varieties of re- alism about color that have been defended by others (e.g., [Hardin, 2003], [Hardin, 2005]). These other views include the so-called color physical- ism of [Hilbert, 1987], [Byrne and Hilbert, 1997a], [Byrne and Hilbert, 2003], and [Tye, 2000], 1 and, inconveniently, even the relationalist view defended in [Cohen, 2003a], [Cohen, 2004a], [Cohen, 2003b], [McLaughlin, 2003], and [Jakab and McLaughlin, 2003]

Data about perceptual variation motivate the ecumenicist view that distinct color representations are mutually compatible. On the other hand, data about agreement and disagreement motivate making distinct color representations mutually incompatible. Prima facie, these desiderata appear to conflict. I’ll lay out and assess two strategies for managing the conflict—color relationalism, and the self-locating property theory of color—with the aim of deciding how best to have your cake and eat it, too.

In earlier work we proposed an account of information grounded in counterfactual conditionals rather than probabilities, and argued that it might serve philosophical needs that more familiar probabilistic alternatives do not. Demir [2008] and Scarantino [2008] criticize the counterfactual approach by contending that its alleged advantages are illusory and that it fails to secure attractive desiderata. In this paper we defend the counterfactual account from these criticisms, and suggest that it remains a useful account of information.