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390Review of Bence Nanay-Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 8 00. 2016.
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961Incubated 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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361Perception 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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3313Cognitive 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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1019The 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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508Art and Modal KnowledgeIn Dominic Lopes & Matthew Kieran (eds.), Knowing Art: Essays in Epistemology and Aesthetics, Springer. 2004.
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1052Towards 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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1533Attention 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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1585Minimally 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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359Review 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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1554Imagination 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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686Sorting 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
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8081The role of imagination in creativityIn Elliot Samuel Paul & Scott Barry Kaufman (eds.), The Philosophy of Creativity, Oxford University Press. 2014.
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1507Modular architectures and informational encapsulation: A dilemmaEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Science 5 (3): 315-38. 2015.Amongst philosophers and cognitive scientists, modularity remains a popular choice for an architecture of the human mind, primarily because of the supposed explanatory value of this approach. Modular architectures can vary both with respect to the strength of the notion of modularity and the scope of the modularity of mind. We propose a dilemma for modular architectures, no matter how these architectures vary along these two dimensions. First, if a modular architecture commits to the information…Read more
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2789The dominance of the visualIn Dustin Stokes, Mohan Matthen & Stephen Biggs (eds.), Perception and Its Modalities, Oxford University Press. 2014.Vision often dominates other perceptual modalities both at the level of experience and at the level of judgment. In the well-known McGurk effect, for example, one’s auditory experience is consistent with the visual stimuli but not the auditory stimuli, and naïve subjects’ judgments follow their experience. Structurally similar effects occur for other modalities (e.g. rubber hand illusions). Given the robustness of this visual dominance, one might not be surprised that visual imagery often domina…Read more
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1106Naturalistic approaches to creativityIn J. Systma W. Buckwalter (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy, . 2016.We offer a brief characterization of creativity, followed by a review of some of the reasons people have been skeptical about the possibility of explaining creativity. We then survey some of the recent work on creativity that is naturalistic in the sense that it presumes creativity is natural (as opposed to magical, occult, or supernatural) and is therefore amenable to scientific inquiry. This work is divided into two categories. The broader category is empirical philosophy, which draws on empir…Read more
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2525Perceiving and Desiring: A New Look at the Cognitive Penetrability of ExperiencePhilosophical Studies 158 (3): 479-92. 2012.This paper considers an orectic penetration hypothesis which says that desires and desire-like states may influence perceptual experience in a non-externally mediated way. This hypothesis is clarified with a definition, which serves further to distinguish the interesting target phenomenon from trivial and non-genuine instances of desire-influenced perception. Orectic penetration is an interesting possible case of the cognitive penetrability of perceptual experience. The orectic penetration hyp…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Aesthetics |
Metaphysics |
General Philosophy of Science |