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1626Cognitive Penetration and the Perception of Art (Winner of 2012 Dialectica Essay Prize)Dialectica 68 (1): 1-34. 2014.There are good, even if inconclusive, reasons to think that cognitive penetration of perception occurs: that cognitive states like belief causally affect, in a relatively direct way, the contents of perceptual experience. The supposed importance of – indeed as it is suggested here, what is definitive of – this possible phenomenon is that it would result in important epistemic and scientific consequences. One interesting and intuitive consequence entirely unremarked in the extant literature conce…Read more
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45Schellekens, Elisabeth and Peter Goldie, eds. The Aesthetic Mind: Philosophy and Psychology. Oxford University Press, 2011, 455 pp., $99.00 cloth (review)Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 72 (2): 206-209. 2014.
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2520Aesthetics and cognitive sciencePhilosophy Compass 4 (5): 715-733. 2009.Experiences of art involve exercise of ordinary cognitive and perceptual capacities but in unique ways. These two features of experiences of art imply the mutual importance of aesthetics and cognitive science. Cognitive science provides empirical and theoretical analysis of the relevant cognitive capacities. Aesthetics thus does well to incorporate cognitive scientific research. Aesthetics also offers philosophical analysis of the uniqueness of the experience of art. Thus, cognitive science does…Read more
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1383Rich perceptual content and aesthetic propertiesIn Anna Bergqvist & Robert Cowan (eds.), Evaluative Perception, Oxford University Press. 2018.Both common sense and dominant traditions in art criticism and philosophical aesthetics have it that aesthetic features or properties are perceived. However, there is a cast of reasons to be sceptical of the thesis. This paper defends the thesis—that aesthetic properties are sometimes represented in perceptual experience—against one of those sceptical opponents. That opponent maintains that perception represents only low-level properties, and since all theorists agree that aesthetic properties a…Read more
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388Review of Bence Nanay-Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 8 00. 2016.
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953Incubated cognition and creativityJournal of Consciousness Studies 14 (3): 83-100. 2007.Many traditional theories of creativity put heavy emphasis on an incubation stage in creative cognitive processes. The basic phenomenon is a familiar one: we are working on a task or problem, we leave it aside for some period of time, and when we return attention to the task we have some new insight that services completion of the task. This feature, combined with other ostensibly mysterious features of creativity, has discouraged naturalists from theorizing creativity. This avoidance is misguid…Read more
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360Perception and Its Modalities (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2014.This volume is about the many ways we perceive. Contributors explore the nature of the individual senses, how and what they tell us about the world, and how they interrelate. They consider how the senses extract perceptual content from receptoral information. They consider what kinds of objects we perceive and whether multiple senses ever perceive a single event. They consider how many senses we have, what makes one sense distinct from another, and whether and why distinguishing senses may be us…Read more
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3244Cognitive Penetrability of PerceptionPhilosophy Compass 8 (7): 646-663. 2013.Perception is typically distinguished from cognition. For example, seeing is importantly different from believing. And while what one sees clearly influences what one thinks, it is debatable whether what one believes and otherwise thinks can influence, in some direct and non-trivial way, what one sees. The latter possible relation is the cognitive penetration of perception. Cognitive penetration, if it occurs, has implications for philosophy of science, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and cogn…Read more
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1007The evaluative character of imaginative resistanceBritish Journal of Aesthetics 46 (4): 287-405. 2006.A fiction may prescribe imagining that a pig can talk or tell the future. A fiction may prescribe imagining that torturing innocent persons is a good thing. We generally comply with imaginative prescriptions like the former, but not always with prescriptions like the latter: we imagine non-evaluative fictions without difficulty but sometimes resist imagining value-rich fictions. Thus arises the puzzle of imaginative resistance. Most analyses of the phenomenon focus on the content of the relevant…Read more
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502Art and Modal KnowledgeIn Dominic Lopes & Matthew Kieran (eds.), Knowing Art: Essays in Epistemology and Aesthetics, Springer. 2006.
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1042Towards a consequentialist understanding of cognitive penetrationIn A. Raftopoulos & J. Ziembekis (eds.), Cognitive Effects on Perception: New Philosophical Perspectives, . 2015.Philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists have recently taken renewed interest in cognitive penetration, in particular, in the cognitive penetration of perceptual experience. The question is whether cognitive states like belief influence perceptual experience in some important way. Since the possible phenomenon is an empirical one, the strategy for analysis has, predictably, proceeded as follows: define the phenomenon and then, definition in hand, interpret various psychological data. Howeve…Read more
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1509Attention and the Cognitive Penetrability of PerceptionAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 96 (2): 303-318. 2018.One sceptical rejoinder to those who claim that sensory perception is cognitively penetrable is to appeal to the involvement of attention. So, while a phenomenon might initially look like one where, say, a perceiver’s beliefs are influencing her visual experience, another interpretation is that because the perceiver believes and desires as she does, she consequently shifts her spatial attention so as to change what she senses visually. But, the sceptic will urge, this is an entirely familiar phe…Read more
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1569Minimally Creative ThoughtMetaphilosophy 42 (5): 658-681. 2011.Creativity has received, and continues to receive, comparatively little analysis in philosophy and the brain and behavioural sciences. This is in spite of the importance of creative thought and action, and the many and varied resources of theories of mind. Here an alternative approach to analyzing creativity is suggested: start from the bottom up with minimally creative thought. Minimally creative thought depends non-accidentally upon agency, is novel relative to the acting agent, and could not …Read more
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353Review of Mohan Matthen-Seeing, Doing, and Knowing: A Philosophical Theory of Sense Perception (review)British Journal of Aesthetics 46 (3): 323-325. 2006.
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1542Imagination and CreativityIn Amy Kind (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Imagination, Routledge. 2016.This paper surveys historical and recent philosophical discussions of the relations between imagination and creativity. In the first two sections, it covers two insufficiently studied analyses of the creative imagination, that of Kant and Sartre, respectively. The next section discusses imagination and its role in scientific discovery, with particular emphasis on the writings of Michael Polanyi, and on thought experiments and experimental design. The final section offers a brief discussion of so…Read more
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682Sorting the SensesIn Dustin Stokes, Mohan Matthen & Stephen Biggs (eds.), Perception and Its Modalities, Oxford University Press. pp. 1-19. 2014.We perceive in many ways. But several dubious presuppositions about the senses mask this diversity of perception. Philosophers, scientists, and engineers alike too often presuppose that the senses (vision, audition, etc.) are independent sources of information, perception being a sum of these independent contributions. We too often presuppose that we can generalize from vision to other senses. We too often presuppose that vision itself is best understood as a passive receptacle for an image thro…Read more
Salt Lake City, Utah, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Aesthetics |
Metaphysics |
General Philosophy of Science |