University of California, Berkeley
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 2006
Cambridge, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
  •  3054
    Internal History versus External History
    Philosophy 92 (2): 207-230. 2017.
    The aim of this paper is to generalize a pair of concepts that are widely used in the history of science, in art history and in historical linguistics – the concept of internal and external history – and to replace the often very vague talk of ‘historical narratives’ with this conceptual framework of internal versus external history. I argue that this way of framing the problem allows us to see the possible alternatives more clearly – as a limited number of possible relations between internal an…Read more
  •  1951
    Aesthetic attention
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 22 (5-6): 96-118. 2014.
    The aim of this paper is to give a new account of the way we exercise our attention in some paradigmatic cases of aesthetic experience. I treat aesthetic experience as a specific kind of experience and like in the case of other kinds of experiences, attention plays an important role in determining its phenomenal character. I argue that an important feature of at least some of our aesthetic experiences is that we exercise our attention in a specific, distributed, manner: our attention is focused …Read more
  •  1844
    视觉的历史
    Zhongguo Meixue Yanjiu 10 311-331. 2018.
  •  1766
    Perception and imagination: amodal perception as mental imagery
    Philosophical Studies 150 (2): 239-254. 2010.
    When we see an object, we also represent those parts of it that are not visible. The question is how we represent them: this is the problem of amodal perception. I will consider three possible accounts: (a) we see them, (b) we have non-perceptual beliefs about them and (c) we have immediate perceptual access to them, and point out that all of these views face both empirical and conceptual objections. I suggest and defend a fourth account, according to which we represent the occluded parts of per…Read more
  •  1570
    Popper's Darwinian analogy
    Perspectives on Science 19 (3): 337-354. 2011.
    One of the most deeply entrenched ideas in Popper's philosophy is the analogy between the growth of scientific knowledge and the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection. Popper gave his first exposition of these ideas very early on. In a letter to Donald Campbell, 1 Popper says that the idea goes back at least to the early thirties. 2 And he had a fairly detailed account of it in his "What is dialectic?", a talk given in 1937 and published in 1940: 3 If we want to explain why human thought tend…Read more
  •  1497
    There are two very different ways of thinking about perception. According to representationalism, perceptual states are representations: they represent the world as being a certain way. They have content, which may or may not be different from the content of beliefs. They represent objects as having properties, sometimes veridically, sometimes not. According to relationalism, perception is a relation between the agent and the perceived object. Perceived objects are literally constituents of our …Read more
  •  1478
    The Aesthetic Experience of Artworks and Everyday Scenes
    The Monist 101 (1): 71-82. 2018.
    Some of our aesthetic experiences are of artworks. Some others are of everyday scenes. The question I examine in this paper is about the relation between these two different kinds of aesthetic experience. I argue that the experience of artworks can dispose us to experience everyday scenes in an aesthetic manner both short-term and long-term. Finally, I examine what constraints this phenomenon puts on different accounts of aesthetic experience.
  •  1412
    The role of imagination in decision-making
    Mind and Language 31 (1): 126-142. 2016.
    The psychological mechanism of decision-making has traditionally been modeled with the help of belief-desire psychology: the agent has some desires (or other pro-attitudes) and some background beliefs and deciding between two possible actions is a matter of comparing the probability of the satisfaction of these desires given the background beliefs in the case of the performance of each action. There is a wealth of recent empirical findings about how we actually make decisions that seems to be in…Read more
  •  1349
    The Geography of Taste
    with Dominic Lopes, Samantha Matherne, and Mohan Matthen
    Oxford University Press. 2024.
    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, eac…Read more
  •  1292
    Perceptual content and the content of mental imagery
    Philosophical Studies 172 (7): 1723-1736. 2015.
    The aim of this paper is to argue that the phenomenal similarity between perceiving and visualizing can be explained by the similarity between the structure of the content of these two different mental states. And this puts important constraints on how we should think about perceptual content and the content of mental imagery
  •  1088
    Amodal completion and knowledge
    Analysis 79 (3): 415-423. 2019.
    Amodal completion is the representation of occluded parts of perceived objects. We argue for the following three claims: First, at least some amodal completion-involved experiences can ground knowledge about the occluded portions of perceived objects. Second, at least some instances of amodal completion-grounded knowledge are not sensitive, that is, it is not the case that in the nearest worlds in which the relevant claim is false, that claim is not believed true. Third, at least some instances …Read more
  •  1062
    Perceiving pictures
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 10 (4): 461-480. 2011.
    I aim to give a new account of picture perception: of the way our visual system functions when we see something in a picture. My argument relies on the functional distinction between the ventral and dorsal visual subsystems. I propose that it is constitutive of picture perception that our ventral subsystem attributes properties to the depicted scene, whereas our dorsal subsystem attributes properties to the picture surface. This duality elucidates Richard Wollheim’s concept of the “twofoldness” …Read more
  •  1028
    Motor imagery and action execution
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy. 2020.
    What triggers the execution of actions? What happens in that moment when an action is triggered? What mental state is there at the moment of action-execution that was not there a second before? My aim is to highlight the importance of a thus far largely ignored kind of mental state in the discussion of these old and much-debated questions: motor imagery. While there have been a fair amount of research in psychology and neuroscience on motor imagery in the last 30 years or so, it is only recently…Read more
  •  1008
    The Multimodal Experience of Art
    British Journal of Aesthetics 52 (4): 353-363. 2012.
    The aim of this paper is to argue that our experience of artworks is normally multimodal. It is the result of perceptual processing in more than one sense modality. In other words, multimodal experience of art is not the exception; it is the rule. I use the example of music in order to demonstrate the various ways in which the visual sense modality influences the auditory processing of music and conclude that this should make us look more closely at our practices of engaging with artworks.
  •  982
    Hallucination as Mental Imagery
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 23 (7-8): 65-81. 2016.
    Hallucination is a big deal in contemporary philosophy of perception. The main reason for this is that the way hallucination is treated marks an important stance in one of the most hotly contested debates in this subdiscipline: the debate between 'relationalists' and 'representationalists'. I argue that if we take hallucinations to be a form of mental imagery, then we have a very straightforward way of arguing against disjunctivism: if hallucination is a form of mental imagery and if mental imag…Read more
  •  975
    An experiential account of creativity
    In Elliot Samuel Paul & Scott Barry Kaufman (eds.), The Philosophy of Creativity, Oxford University Press. 2014.
    The aim of the paper is to argue that the difference between creative and non-creative mental processes is not a functional/computational, 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 power of the fu…Read more
  •  951
    Philosophy of perception as a guide to aesthetics
    In Greg Currie, Matthew Kieran, Aaron Meskin & Jon Robson (eds.), Aesthetics and the Sciences of Mind, Oxford University Press. 2014.
    The aim of this paper is to argue that it is a promising avenue of research to consider philosophy of perception to be a guide to aesthetics. More precisely, my claim is that many, maybe even most, traditional problems in aesthetics are in fact about philosophy of perception that can, as a result, be fruitfully addressed with the help of the conceptual apparatus of philosophy of perception. This claim may sound provocative, but after qualifying what I mean by aesthetics (to be contrasted with ph…Read more
  •  949
    Attention and perceptual content
    Analysis 70 (2): 263-270. 2010.
    I argue that perceptual content is always affected by the allocation of one’s attention. Perception attributes determinable and determinate properties to the perceived scene. Attention makes (or tries to make) our perceptual attribution of properties more determinate. Hence, a change in our attention changes the determinacy of the properties attributed to the perceived scene.
  •  939
    Unconscious Mental Imagery
    Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 376 (1817): 20190689. 2021.
    Historically, mental imagery has been defined as an experiential state - as something necessarily conscious. But most behavioural or neuroimaging experiments on mental imagery - including the most famous ones - don’t actually take the conscious experience of the subject into consideration. Further, recent research highlights that there are very few behavioural or neural differences between conscious and unconscious mental imagery. I argue that treating mental imagery as not necessarily conscious…Read more
  •  864
    Is twofoldness necessary for representational seeing?
    British Journal of Aesthetics 45 (3): 248-257. 2005.
    Richard Wollheim claimed that twofoldness is a necessary condition for the perception of pictorial representations and it is also a necessary condition for the aesthetic appreciation of pictures. Jerrold Levinson pointed out that these two questions are different and argued that though twofoldness may be a necessary condition for the aesthetic appreciation of pictures, it cannot be a necessary condition for the perception of pictorial representations. I argue that Wollheim's use of the term ‘two…Read more
  •  844
    This chapter explores insights concerning the relations among imagination, imagined selves, and knowledge of one’s own self that are to be found in Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. The insights are explored via close reading of the text and comparison with contemporaries of Pessoa. First, a tempting account of the importance of imagination in The Book of Disquiet is set out. On this reading, Pessoa is immersed in miasmatic boredom, but able to temporarily rise above it through the restora…Read more
  •  844
    Look at a red apple. Now close your eyes and visualize this apple. Your perceptual state and your imagery of the apple are very similar in some respects. They are also different in some respects. The aim of this paper is to address three questions about the relation between perception and imagination: -/- (a) How similar are perception and imagination and what explains this similarity? (b) How different are perception and imagination and what explains this difference? (c) How do perception and …Read more
  •  825
    Perceptual phenomenology
    Philosophical Perspectives 26 (1): 235-246. 2012.
    I am looking at an apple. The apple has a lot of properties and some, but not all, of these are part of my phenomenology at this moment: I am aware of these properties. And some, but not all, of these properties that I am aware of are part of my perceptual (or sensory) phenomenology. If I am attending to the apple’s color, this property will be part of my perceptual phenomenology. The property of being a granny smith apple from Chile is unlikely to be part of my perceptual phenomenology. Here ar…Read more
  •  823
    What if reality has no architecture?
    The Monist 94 (2): 181-197. 2011.
    The aim of this paper is to show that we can deny that reality is neatly segmented into natural kinds and still give a plausible view about what science is supposed to do – and the way science in fact works does not rely on the dubious metaphysical assumption that reality is segmented into natural kinds. The score is simple: either there are natural kinds or there aren’t. The former view has been the default position in mainstream analytic metaphysics and philosophy of science. I want to put the…Read more
  •  822
    Three ways of resisting essentialism about natural kinds
    In Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O'Rourke & Matthew H. Slater (eds.), Carving nature at its joints: natural kinds in metaphysics and science, Mit Press. pp. 175--97. 2011.
    Essentialism about natural kinds has three tenets. The first tenet is that all and only members of a natural kind has some essential properties. The second tenet is that these essential properties play a causal role. The third tenet is that they are explanatorily relevant. I examine the prospects of questioning these tenets and point out that arguing against the first and the second tenets of kind-essentialism would involve taking parts in some of the grand debates of philosophy. But, at least i…Read more
  •  815
    Teleosemantics without etiology
    Philosophy of Science 81 (5): 798-810. 2014.
    The aim of teleosemantics is to give a scientifically respectable, or ‘naturalistic’ theory of mental content. In the debates surrounding the scope and merits of teleosemantics a lot has been said about the concept of indication (or carrying information). The aim of this paper is to focus on the other key concept of teleosemantics: biological function. It has been universally accepted in the teleosemantics literature that the account of biological function one should use to flesh out teleosemant…Read more
  •  815
    Implicit Bias as Mental Imagery
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association 7 (3): 329-347. 2021.
    What is the mental representation that is responsible for implicit bias? What is this representation that mediates between the trigger and the biased behavior? My claim is that this representation is neither a propositional attitude nor a mere association. Rather, it is mental imagery: perceptual processing that is not directly triggered by sensory input. I argue that this view captures the advantages of the two standard accounts without inheriting their disadvantages. Further, this view also ex…Read more
  •  792
    Action-oriented Perception
    European Journal of Philosophy 20 (3): 430-446. 2010.
    Abstract: When I throw a ball at you, do you see it as catch-able? Do we perceive objects as edible, climbable or Q-able in general? One could argue that it is just a manner of speaking to say so: we do not really see an object as edible, we only infer on the basis of its other properties that it is. I argue that whether or not an object is edible or climbable is indeed represented perceptually: we see objects as edible, and do not just believe that they are. My argument proceeds in two steps. F…Read more
  •  777
    Success semantics: the sequel
    Philosophical Studies 165 (1): 151-165. 2013.
    The aim of this paper is to reinterpret success semantics, a theory of mental content, according to which the content of a belief is fixed by the success conditions of some actions based on this belief. After arguing that in its present form, success semantics is vulnerable to decisive objections, I examine the possibilities of salvaging the core of this proposal. More specifically, I propose that the content of some very simple, but very important, mental states, the immediate mental antecedent…Read more
  •  773
    Singularist Semirealism
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 64 (2): 371-394. 2013.
    This paper proposes to carve out a new position in the scientific realism/antirealism debate and argue that it captures some of the most important realist and some of the most important antirealist considerations. The view, briefly stated, is that there is always a fact of the matter about whether the singular statements science gives us are literally true, but there is no fact of the matter about whether the non-singular statements science gives us are literally true. I call this view singulari…Read more