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29Computation, representation and content in noncognitive theories of perceptionIn Stuart Silvers (ed.), ReRepresentation, Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1989.Recent discussions in the philosophy of psychology have examined the use and legitimacy of such notions as ‘representation’, ‘content’, ‘computation’, and ‘inference’ within a scientific psychology. While the resulting assessments have varied widely, ranging from outright rejection of some or all of these notions to full vindication of their use, there has been notable agreement on the considerations deemed relevant for making an assessment. The answer to the question of whether the notion of, s…Read more
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29Epilogue: Advances and open questionsIn Gary Hatfield & Sarah Allred (eds.), Visual Experience: Sensation, Cognition, and Constancy, Oxford University Press. pp. 232-241. 2012.The term “perceptual constancy” was used by the Gestalt theorists in the early part of the twentieth century (e.g., Koffka 1935, 34, 90) to refer to the tendency of perception to remain invariant over changes of viewing distance, viewing angle, and conditions of illumination. This tendency toward constancy is remarkable: every change in the viewing distance, position, and illumination is necessarily accompanied by a change in the local proximal (retinal) stimulation, and yet perception remains r…Read more
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28Force (God) in Descartes' PhysicsIn John Cottingham (ed.), Descartes, Oxford University Press. pp. 281-310. 1986.Reprint of: Gary Hatfield, Force (God) in Descartes' physics, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 10 (2):113-140 (1979) Abstract. It is difficult to evaluate the role of activity - of force or of that which has causal efficacy - in Descartes’ natural philosophy. On the one hand, Descartes claims to include in his natural philosophy only that which can be described geometrically, which amounts to matter (extended substance) in motion (where this motion is described kinematically)…Read more
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28Review of John Bickle (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Neuroscience (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2010 (5). 2010.
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27Epistemology and Cognition (review)Philosophical Review 98 (3): 386. 1989.Review of: Epistemology and Cognition. By Alvin I. Goldman. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1986. Pp. viii, 437. $27.50.
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27Psychology in Philosophy: Historical PerspectivesIn Sara Heinamaa & Martina Reuter (eds.), Psychology and Philosophy: Inquiries into the Soul from Late Scholasticism to Contemporary Thought, Springer. pp. 1-25. 2009.The chapter examines some common assumptions regarding the shape of the history of theories of mind. It questions the conception that the Scientific Revolution resulted in placing the mind “outside of nature.” During the seventeenth century, the followers of Descartes routinely placed study of the mind, or, at least, mind–body interaction, within “physics” considered as a science of nature in general (and so including physics in the narrow sense, biology, and psychology). By the end of the eight…Read more
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26Descartes and His Contemporaries: Meditations, Objections, and Replies (review)Journal of the History of Philosophy 35 (4): 624-626. 1997.Review of Roger Ariew and Marjorie Grene, editors, _Descartes and His Contemporaries: Meditations, Objections, and Replies_. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Pp. vii + 261. Cloth, $45.00. Paper, $17.95.
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26The Senses and the History of Philosophy ed. by Brian Glenney and José Filipe Silva (review)Journal of the History of Philosophy 59 (4): 696-697. 2021.This edited volume of newly commissioned papers aims to further understanding of the philosophy of perception and its history. It seeks a broad historical coverage, to include works outside the Western tradition and figures only newly prominent within the Western tradition. Its principal theme is the problem of perceptual error, which it asserts has been understudied, at least in antiquity and the middle ages, as has, allegedly, the history of theories of perception more generally. The individua…Read more
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26Reason, Nature, and God in DescartesScience in Context 3 (1): 175-201. 1989.This journal article has been superseded by a revised version, published in the collection _Essays on the Philosophy and Science of Rene Descartes_, ed. by Stephen Voss (Oxford University Press, 1993), 259–287.
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24Psychology, epistemology, and the problem of the external world : Russell and beforeIn Erich H. Reck (ed.), The Historical turn in Analytic Philosophy, Palgrave-macmillan. 2013.This chapter examines Russell’s appreciation of the relevance of psychology for the theory of knowledge, especially in connection with the problem of the external world, and the background for this appreciation in British philosophy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Russell wrote in 1914 that “the epistemological order of deduction includes both logical and psychological considerations.” Indeed, the notion of what is “psychologically derivative” played a crucial role in his epistemolog…Read more
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22Wundt and Psychology as Science: Disciplinary TransformationsPerspectives on Science 5 (3): 349-382. 1997.Challenges the revised standard historiography on Wundt as a psychologist. Considers the concept of psychology as a natural science. Examines the relations between psychology and philosophy before and after 1900. Reflects on the notion of disciplinehood as it affects historical narratives.
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20Neurophilosophy meets psychology: Reduction, autonomy, and empirical constraintsCognitive Neuropsychology 5 723-46. 1988.A commentary on Neurophilosophy: Toward a unified science of the mind/brain, by Patricia Smith Churchland. Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press/Bradford, 1986, pp. xi + 546, $27.50, ISBN 0-262-03116-7.
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19Mandelbaum's critical realismIn Ian Verstegen (ed.), Maurice Mandelbaum and American Critical Realism, Routledge. 2010.Mandelbaum adopted a middle course between physicalistic scientific realism and phenomenalistic "ordinary language" direct realism. He affirmed the relevance of scientific knowledge for epistemology, but did not attempt to reduce the content of perception to physical properties. Rather, he developed a critical direct realism, according to which we see bodies by means of having phenomenal experience. This phenomenal experience was not, however, to be equated with the sense-data of the usual rep…Read more
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18Functional Equivalence of Masking and Cue Reduction in Perception of Shape at a SlantPerception and Psychophysics 23 (2): 137-144. 1978.In a backward masking paradigm Epstein, Hatfield, and Muise (1977) found that presentation of a frontoparallel pattern mask caused the perceived shape of elliptical figures which were rotated in depth to conform to a projective shape function. The current study extended the masking function by examining the effect of a mask which was partially or wholly cotemporal with the target. The study also assessed the functional equivalence of the masking treatment and the conventional treatment for minim…Read more
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15Il dualismo da Cartesio a Leibniz: Cartesio, Cordemoy, La Forge, Malebranche, Leibniz by Salvatore Nicolosi (review)Isis 82 (1): 136-137. 1991.
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13Stephen Gaukroger, The Natural and the Human: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1739–1841. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, viii + 402 pp (review)Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 102 (4): 680-683. 2020.
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10Rationalist Theories of Sense Perception and Mind–Body RelationIn Alan Nelson (ed.), A Companion to Rationalism, Blackwell. 2005.This chapter contains sections titled: Sense Perception as a Natural Process Metaphysical, Epistemological, and Functional Aspects of Perception Sense, Mind, and Knowledge in Seventeenth‐Century Rationalism.
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9AnimalsIn Janet Broughton & John Carriero (eds.), A Companion to Descartes, Blackwell. 2007.This chapter contains section titled: Status of Animals Origins of Animals Life, Health, and Function Sense and Cognition Are Descartes's Animals Unfeeling Machines? Descartes's Legacy References and Further Reading.
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5The Prolegomena and the Critiques of Pure ReasonIn Volker Gerhardt, Rolf-Peter Horstmann & Ralph Schumacher (eds.), Kant Und Die Berliner Aufklärung: Akten des Ix Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, Walter De Gruyter. pp. 185-208. 2001.This article first refines the question of Kant's relation to Hume's skepticism, and then considers the evidence for Kant's attitude toward Hume in three contexts: the A Critique, the Prolegomena, and the B Critique. My thesis is that in the A Critique Kant viewed skepticism positively, as a necessary reaction to dogmatism and a spur toward critique. In his initial statement of the critical philosophy Kant treated Hume as an ally in curbing dogmatism, but one who stopped short of what was reall…Read more
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53. The Senses and the Fleshless Eye: The Meditations as Cognitive ExercisesIn Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (ed.), Essays on Descartes’ Meditations, University of California Press. pp. 45-80. 1986.
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3What Can the Mind Tell Us About the Brain? Psychology, Neurophysiology, and ConstraintIn Perception and Cognition: Essays in the Philosophy of Psychology, Clarendon Press. pp. 434-55. 2009.This chapter examines the relations between psychology and neuroscience. There is a strong philosophical intuition that direct study of the brain can and will constrain the development of psychological theory. When this intuition is tested against case studies from the psychology of perception and memory, it turns out that psychology has led the way toward knowledge of neurophysiology. The chapter presents an abstract argument to show that psychology can and must lead the way in neuroscientific …Read more
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37. The Sixth Meditation: Mind-Body Relation, External Objects, and Sense PerceptionIn Andreas Kemmerling (ed.), René Descartes: Meditationen Über Die Erste Philosophie, Akademie Verlag. pp. 123-146. 2009.
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1Ch. 16. The emergence of psychologyIn W. J. Mander (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century, Oxford University Press. pp. 324-344. 2014.This chapter considers the development of experimental psychology as a distinct discipline from philosophy, a result that arrived more slowly in Britain than in Germany or the United States. The chapter first considers more closely the question of what it means to chart the ‘emergence’ of psychology as a separate discipline. It finds that the usual criteria applied by historians of psychologh, that a discipline arises through institutional structures such as professorships (a specialist career p…Read more
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Geometry and visual space from antiquity to the early modernsIn Andrew Janiak (ed.), Space: a history, Oxford University Press. 2020.
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Ch. 33. Perception and sense-dataIn Michael Beaney (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of The History of Analytic Philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2013.
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Representation and rule-instantiation in connectionist systemsIn Terence E. Horgan & John L. Tienson (eds.), Connectionism and the Philosophy of Mind, Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1991.There is disagreement over the notion of representation in cognitive science. Many investigators equate representations with symbols, that is, with syntactically defined elements in an internal symbol system. In recent years there have been two challenges to this orthodoxy. First, a number of philosophers, including many outside the symbolist orthodoxy, have argued that "representation" should be understood in its classical sense, as denoting a "stands for" relation between representation and re…Read more
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Mind and psychology in DescartesIn Steven Nadler, Tad M. Schmaltz & Delphine Antoine-Mahut (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Descartes and Cartesianism, Oxford University Press. 2019.
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