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651Sorting 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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7754The role of imagination in creativityIn Elliot Samuel Paul & Scott Barry Kaufman (eds.), The Philosophy of Creativity, Oxford University Press. 2014.
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1423Modular 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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2712The dominance of the visualIn D. Stokes, M. Matthen & S. 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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1035Naturalistic 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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2424Perceiving 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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45Commentary on Balcetis: On Some Limits to the Motivational Direction ApproachEmotion Review 8 (2): 129-130. 2016.While we are sympathetic to Balcetis’s approach, we feel that using motivational direction as the sole organizing structure for influences of affect on perception may be unnecessarily limiting. Three reasons for this concern are discussed.
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1039On perceptual expertiseMind and Language 36 (2): 241-263. 2021.Expertise is a cognitive achievement that clearly involves experience and learning, and often requires explicit, time-consuming training specific to the relevant domain. It is also intuitive that this kind of achievement is, in a rich sense, genuinely perceptual. Many experts—be they radiologists, bird watchers, or fingerprint examiners—are better perceivers in the domain(s) of their expertise. The goal of this paper is to motivate three related claims, by substantial appeal to recent empirical …Read more
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569Attributing CreativityIn Berys Nigel Gaut & Matthew Kieran (eds.), Creativity and Philosophy, Routledge. 2018.Three kinds of things may be creative: persons, processes, and products. The standard definition of creativity, used nearly by consensus in psychological research, focuses specifically on products and says that a product is creative if and only if it is new and valuable. We argue that at least one further condition is necessary for a product to be creative: it must have been produced by the right kind of process. We argue furthermore that this point has an interesting epistemological implicat…Read more
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1019A Metaphysics of CreativityIn Kathleen Stock & Katherine Thomson-Jones (eds.), New Waves in Aesthetics, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 105--124. 2008.
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1496Noise, uncertainty, and interest: Predictive coding and cognitive penetrationConsciousness and Cognition 47 86-98. 2017.This paper concerns how extant theorists of predictive coding conceptualize and explain possible instances of cognitive penetration. §I offers brief clarification of the predictive coding framework and relevant mechanisms, and a brief characterization of cognitive penetration and some challenges that come with defining it. §II develops more precise ways that the predictive coding framework can explain, and of course thereby allow for, genuine top-down causal effects on perceptual experience, of …Read more
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1567Cognitive 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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39Schellekens, 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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2471Aesthetics 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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1328Rich 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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363Review of Bence Nanay-Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 8 00. 2016.
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 |