Bence Nanay

This paper is about the overlooked topic of how the content of remembering changes in the course of the temporally unfolding mental action of remembering. The main claim is that what is distinctive about remembering as a mental act is not the kind of content it has, but rather how such content changes as the act of remembering unfolds. More specifically, remembering increases – or tries to increase – the determinacy of the content of memory. When I am trying to remember what I had for breakfast yesterday morning, this remembering means that I am trying to make the content of my memory of yesterday’s breakfast more determinate. This either succeeds or it doesn’t. This is a sharp contrast with the way increasing the determinacy of content works in the case of other mental states. An important consequence of thinking about the content of remembering this way is that it can help us not only to explain the difference between misremembering and confabulation, but also to reframe the debate about the difference between remembering and imagining.

According to a widely held view both within and outside philosophy, imagination is innocent in the sense that it does not influence what we think and do. Hence, we can let our imagination wander anywhere. There are two ways of pushing back against this ‘innocence of imagination’ claim. The less controversial one is to argue that imagination does in fact influence some of our other mental states. The defenders of the ‘innocence of imagination’ claim could accept this line of argument and still maintain that this does not mean the loss of innocence as imagination may still never be in a position to have any kind of (harmful) influence on our actions. I argue that imagination is not innocent even in this narrower sense as imagination can and does influence many of our actions.

People do not appreciate unfamiliar art as deeply as those who have known it all their lives; empirical studies confirm that few features in any art category have universal appeal. From the eighteenth century onward, relatively few European philosophers built this diversity into the foundations of their aesthetic theories, and their critics argue that this deficiency stems from colonialist and other discriminatory ideologies. Recent analytic philosophers of art inherit some of this indifference to diversity, though some have fashioned tools that could assist in understanding the phenomenon. This introduction surveys highlights of this history.

There has been a lot of discussion about how the cognitive penetrability of perception may or may not have important implications for understanding perceptual justification. The aim of this chapter is to argue that a different set of findings in perceptual psychology poses an even more serious challenge to the very idea of perceptual justification. These findings are about the importance of perceptual processing that is not driven by corresponding sensory stimulation in the relevant sense modality (such as amodal completion and multimodal completion). These findings show that everyday perception is in fact a mixture of sensory-stimulation-driven perceptual processing and perceptual processing that is not driven by corresponding sensory stimulation in the relevant sense modality and that we have strong reasons to doubt the epistemic pedigree of the latter process. The implication of this is not that we should become skeptics or deny the possibility of perceptual justification. It is, rather, that the only way in which we can understand when and whether a perceptual state justifies beliefs is by paying close attention to empirical facts about the reliability of perceptual processing that is not driven by corresponding sensory stimulation in the relevant sense modality. In this sense (a very narrow sense) epistemology needs to be naturalized.

The aim of the chapter is to argue that the difference between creative and noncreative mental processes is not a functional/computational one, but an experiential one. In other words, what is distinctive about creative mental processes is not the functional/computational mechanism that leads to the emergence of a creative idea, be it the recombination of old ideas or the transformation of one’s conceptual space, but the way in which this mental process is experienced. The explanatory powers of the functional/computational theories and the experiential account are compared, and it is pointed out that if creativity is a natural kind, it is not a functional/computational natural kind, but an experiential one.

This chapter urges us to consider the philosophy of perception to be a guide to aesthetics. More precisely, its claim is that many, maybe even most traditional problems in aesthetics are in fact about the philosophy of perception and can, as a result, be fruitfully addressed with the help of the conceptual apparatus of the philosophy of perception. This claim may sound provocative, but after qualifying what he means by aesthetics (to be contrasted with philosophy of art) and by philosophy of perception, Nanay argues it may in fact be easier to accept.

It has been argued that picture perception is sometimes, but not always, ‘inflected’. Sometimes each of the two aspects of the twofold experience of seeing‐in influences the other such that the picture's design ‘inflects’, or is ‘recruited’ into, the depicted scene. The aim of this chapter is to cash out what is meant by these metaphors. Our perceptual state is different when we see an object face to face or when we see it in a picture. But there is also a further distinction: our perceptual state is very different if we perceive objects in pictures in an inflected or uninflected manner. The question is what this difference amounts to. The answer put forward in this chapter is that it is a difference of attention. In the case of inflected, but not uninflected, picture perception, we are consciously attending to certain properties: to ‘design‐scene properties’: relational property that cannot be fully characterized without reference to both the picture's design and the depicted object. I defend this way of interpreting inflected picture perception from some important objections and emphasize the importance of this, inflected, way of perceiving pictures.

A recent focus of Philip Kitcher’s research has been, somewhat surprisingly in the light of his earlier work, the philosophical analyses of literary works and operas. Some may see a discontinuity in Kitcher’s oeuvre in this respect—it may be difficult to see how his earlier contributions to philosophy of science relateto this much less mainstream approach to philosophy. The aim of this paper is to show that there is no such discontinuity: Kitcher’s contributions to the philosophy of science and his more recent endeavors into the philosophy of literature and of music are grounded in the same big picture attitude towards the humanmind—an attitude that he would undoubtedly call ‘pragmatic’: one that emphasizes the importance of those mental processes that are not (or not entirely) rational.El análisis filosófico de obras literarias y óperas se ha convertido en un objeto de estudio reciente para Philip Kitcher, algo quizá sorprendente a la vista de su trabajo anterior. Hay quien puede percibir una discontinuidad en la obra de Kitcher a este respecto: puede ser difícil apreciar cómo sus anteriores contribucionesa la filosofía de la ciencia se relacionan con este otro tipo menos mayoritario de filosofía. El propósito de este artículo es mostrar que no hay tal discontinuidad: las contribuciones de Kitcher a la filosofía de la ciencia y sus empresas más recientes en filosofía de la literatura y de la música se basan en la misma visión general del espíritu humano, una actitud que indudablemente él denominaría pragmática: enfatiza la importancia de los procesos mentales que no son (o no completamente) racionales.

I aim to show that perception depends counterfactually on the action we want to perform. Perception is not all-purpose: what we want to do does influence what we see. After clarifying how this claim is different from the one at stake in the cognitive penetrability debate and what counterfactual dependence means in my claim, I will give a two-step argument: (a) one’s perceptual attention depends counterfactually on one’s intention to perform an action (everything else being equal) and (b) one’s perceptual processing depends counterfactually on one’s perceptual attention (everything else being equal). If we put these claims together, what we get is that one’s perceptual processing depends counterfactually on one’s intention to perform an action (everything else being equal).

Entity realism is the view that ‘a good many theoretical entities do really exist’. The main novelty of entity realism was that it provided an account of scientific realism that did not have to endorse realism about theories—the general proposal was that entity realism is noncommittal about whether we should be realist about scientific theories. I argue that the only way entity realists can resist the pull of straight scientific realism about theories is by endorsing a recent new player in the scientific realism debate: singularist semirealism.

What are the sensory individuals of audition? What are the entities our auditory system attributes properties to? We examine various proposals about the nature of the sensory individuals of audition, and show that while each can account for some aspects of auditory perception, each also faces certain difficulties. We then put forward a new conception of sensory individuals according to which auditory sensory individuals are composite individuals. A feature shared by all existing accounts of sounds and sources is that they postulate sensory individuals that are non-composite. They identify the sensory individual of sound hearing or source hearing with one type of entity in the environment, be they sound waves, vibrations, or interactions. We question this assumption and argue that our perceptual systems represent two or more aspects of the environment as a single sensory individual. Finally, we show that taking auditory individuals to be composite sensory individuals allows for an account of audition that is less problematic than its existing alternatives.

This book combines approaches from philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience in the study of perception. In addition to appealing to readers from all three of these disciplines, Perception: The Basics is a perfect introduction for students and general readers. Its interdisciplinary coverage of all aspects of perception does not require familiarity with either abstract philosophical concepts or neuroscientific knowledge. Besides addressing the classic questions of how perception works, the book highlights the intricate connections between perception and action as well as perception that is not triggered by sensory input, like mental imagery, dreaming, and hallucination. Further, the book balances out an overemphasis on vision in the literature by giving almost equal coverage to all the sense modalities (although some examples are easier to present in visual form).

This book is about mental imagery and the important work it does in our mental life. It plays a crucial role in the vast majority of our perceptual episodes. It also helps us understand many of the most puzzling features of perception (like the way it is influenced in a top-down manner and the way different sense-modalities interact). But mental imagery also plays a very important role in emotions, action execution and even in our desires. In sum, there are very few mental phenomena that mental imagery doesn’t show up in – in some way or other. The hope is that if we understand what mental imagery is, how it works and how it is related to other mental phenomena, we can make real progress on a number of important questions about the mind.

The concept of mental representation has long been considered to be central concept of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. But not everyone agrees. Neo-behaviorists aim to explain the mind (or some subset thereof) without positing any representations. My aim here is not to assess the merits and demerits of neo-behaviorism, but to take their challenge seriously and ask the question: What justifies the attribution of representations to an agent? Both representationalists and neo-behaviorists tend to take it for granted that the real question about representations is whether we should be realist about the theory of representationalism. This paper is an attempt to shift the emphasis from the debate concerning realism about theories to the one concerning realism about entities. My claim is that regardless of whether we are realist about representational theories of the mind, we have compelling reasons to endorse entity realism about mental representations.

There is systematic epistemic asymmetry between different centers of art production: we know far more about some (e.g. fifteenth-century Italian paintings) than about others (e.g. fifteenth-century Inca textiles). As long as we are focusing on the social context of the artworks or the artist’s intention, this epistemic asymmetry remains, given that we have vastly more information about the social context of the artworks or the artist’s intention when it comes to ‘Western’ art—again, because of the historically contingent differences in record-keeping and the survival rate of such records. If we want to overcome the epistemic asymmetry between ‘Western’ and ‘Non-Western’ art, we need to look elsewhere. I will argue, using Franz Boas’s work, that we should look for formal features. In order to avoid the epistemic asymmetry that follows from the historically contingent fact that we have more information about some cultures than about others, we need to start our analysis with formal categories.

Aesthetic preferences and practices vary widely between individuals and between cultures. How should aesthetics proceed if we take this fact of aesthetic diversity, rather than the presumption of aesthetic universality, as our starting point? How should we theorize the cultural origins and cultural basis of aesthetic diversity? How should we think about the value and normativity of aesthetic diversity? In an effort to model what the turn toward diversity might look like in aesthetic inquiry, each author defends a different account of aesthetic diversity, and they engage in a collective dialogue about these issues.

The aim of this article is to argue that what is distinctive about aesthetic experiences has to do with what we do -- not with our perception or evaluation, but with our action and, more precisely, with our interaction with whatever we are aesthetically engaging with. This view goes against the mainstream inasmuch as aesthetic engagement is widely held to be special precisely because it is detached from the sphere of the practical. I argue that taking the interactive nature of aesthetic experiences seriously can help us to understand some of the most important features of aesthetic experiences and the role they play in our life: their normativity, their crucial role in the ways in which the aesthetic domain looms large in our self-image and in the social dimension of aesthetic engagement.

Both Arthur Danto and Jerry Fodor are modularist: they both think that perception is an encapsulated process that is in no way influenced by any kind of non‐perceptual processing. Danto's aesthetics can in part be separated out from his modularism, leading us to draw slightly different but arguably even more interesting conclusions from famous thought experiments such as the Gallery of Indiscernibles. Danto firmly rejects this post‐Wittgensteinian turn, offering evidence for his position that perception is neutral to language and cognition of three connected kinds. These are optical illusions, cultural and historical variation in pictorial representation, and the perception and cognition of animals. Despite his avowed rejection of perceptual plasticity, some doubts might arise about the actual extent of Danto's modularism. Extended perception involves “associations” that “have reference to things that lie outside the minimal visual experience.”