•  1422
    “Categories of Art” at 50: An IntroductionSymposium: “Categories of Art” at 50
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 78 (1): 65-66. 2020.
    Introduction to a symposium in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism on the 50th anniversary of Kendall Walton's "Categories of Art." Featuring papers by Madeleine Ransom, Stacie Friend, David Davies and Kendall Walton.
  •  987
    Touching Voids: On the Varieties of Absence Perception
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 8 (2): 355-366. 2017.
    Seeing one’s laptop to be missing, hearing silence and smelling fresh air; these are all examples of perceptual experiences of absences. In this paper I discuss an example of absence perception in the tactual sense modality, that of tactually perceiving a tooth to be absent in one’s mouth, following its extraction. Various features of the example challenge two recently-developed theories of absence perception: Farennikova’s memory-perception mismatch theory and Martin and Dockic’s meta-cognitive…Read more
  •  939
    Naïve Realism and the Cognitive Penetrability of Perception
    Analytic Philosophy 59 (3): 391-412. 2018.
    Perceptual experience has representational content. My argument for this claim is an inference to the best explanation. The explanandum is cognitive penetration. In cognitive penetration, perceptual experiences are either causally influenced, or else are partially constituted, by mental states that are representational, including: mental imagery, beliefs, concepts and memories. If perceptual experiences have representational content, then there is a background condition for cognitive penetration…Read more
  •  783
    Odors, Objects and Olfaction
    American Philosophical Quarterly 55 (1): 81-94. 2018.
    Olfaction represents odors, if it represents anything at all. Does olfaction also represent ordinary objects like cheese, fish and coffee-beans? Many think so. This paper argues that it does not. Instead, we should affirm an austere account of the intentional objects of olfaction: olfactory experience is about odors, not objects. Visuocentric thinking about olfaction has tempted some philosophers to say otherwise.
  •  622
    Aesthetic non-inferentialism is the widely-held thesis that aesthetic judgements either are identical to, or are made on the basis of, sensory states like perceptual experience and emotion. It is sometimes objected to on the basis that testimony is a legitimate source of such judgements. Less often is the view challenged on the grounds that one’s inferences can be a source of aesthetic judgements. This paper aims to do precisely that. According to the theory defended here, aesthetic judgements m…Read more
  •  573
    Predictive processing and perception: What does imagining have to do with it?
    Consciousness and Cognition 106 (C): 103419. 2022.
    Predictive processing (PP) accounts of perception are unique not merely in that they postulate a unity between perception and imagination. Rather, they are unique in claiming that perception should be conceptualised in terms of imagination and that the two involve an identity of neural implementation. This paper argues against this postulated unity, on both conceptual and empirical grounds. Conceptually, the manner in which PP theorists link perception and imagination belies an impoverished acco…Read more
  •  558
    High-Level Perception and Multimodal Perception
    In Heather Logue & Louise Richardson (eds.), Purpose and Procedure in Philosophy of Perception, Oxford University Press. 2021.
    What is the correct procedure for determining the contents of perception? Philosophers tackling this question increasingly rely on empirically-oriented procedures in order to reach an answer. I argue that this constitutes an improvement over the armchair methodology constitutive of phenomenal contrast cases, but that there is a crucial respect in which current empirical procedures remain limited: they are unimodal in nature, wrongly treating the senses as isolatable faculties. I thus have two ai…Read more
  •  526
    Mental imagery: pulling the plug on perceptualism
    Philosophical Studies 178 (12): 3847-3868. 2021.
    What is the relationship between perception and mental imagery? I aim to eliminate an answer that I call perceptualism about mental imagery. Strong perceptualism, defended by Bence Nanay, predictive processing theorists, and several others, claims that imagery is a kind of perceptual state. Weak perceptualism, defended by M. G. F. Martin and Matthew Soteriou, claims that mental imagery is a representation of a perceptual state, a view sometimes called The Dependency Thesis. Strong perceptualism …Read more
  •  525
    Are the psychophysical laws fine-tuned?
    International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 89 (3): 285-292. 2020.
    Neil Sinhababu :89–98, 2017) has recently argued against the fine-tuning argument for God. They claim that the question of the universe’s fine-tuning ought not be ‘why is the universe so hospitable to life?’ but rather ‘why is the universe so hospitable to morally valuable minds?’ and that, moreover, the universe isn’t so hospitable. For it is metaphysically possible that psychophysical laws be substantially more permissive than they in fact are, allowing for the realisation of morally valuable …Read more
  •  404
    Mental Imagery: Greasing the Mind's Gears
    Philosophers' Imprint 23. 2023.
    This paper introduces a novel conceptualisation of mental imagery; namely, that is grease for the mind’s gears (MGT). MGT is not just a metaphor. Rather, it describes an important and overlooked higher-order function of mental imagery: that it aids various mental faculties discharge their characteristic functional roles. MGT is motivated by reflection on converging evidence from clinical, experimental and social psychology and solves at least two neglected conceptual puzzles about mental imagery…Read more
  •  384
    How tight is the conceptual connection between imagination and perception? A number of philosophers, from the early moderns to present-day predictive processing theorists, tie the knot as tightly as they can, claiming that states of the imagination, i.e. mental imagery, are a proper subset of perceptual experience. This paper labels such a view ‘perceptualism’ about the imagination and supplies new arguments against it. The arguments are based on high-level perceptual content and, distinctly, co…Read more
  •  347
    Arrangement and Timing: Photography, Causation and Anti-Empiricist Aesthetics
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 7. 2021.
    According to the causal theory of photography (CTP), photographs acquire their depictive content from the world, whereas handmade pictures acquire their depictive content from their makers’ intentional states about the world. CTP suffers from what I call the Problem of the Missing Agent: it seemingly leaves no room for the photographer to occupy a causal role in the production of their pictures and so is inconsistent with an aesthetics of photography. In this paper, I do three things. First, I a…Read more
  •  340
    Aphantasia is a condition characterised by a deficit of mental imagery. Since several psychopathologies are partially maintained by mental imagery, it may be illuminating to consider the condition against the background of psychological disorder. After outlining current findings and hypotheses regarding aphantasia and psychopathology, this paper suggests that some support for defining aphantasia as a lack of voluntary imagery may be found here. The paper then outlines potentially fruitful direct…Read more
  •  337
    Life Through a Lens
    In Sophie Archer (ed.), Salience: A Philosophical Inquiry, Routledge. 2022.
    Kantian disinterest is the view that aesthetic judgement is constituted (at least in part) by a form of perceptual contemplation that is divorced from concerns of practical action. That view, which continues to be defended to this day, is challenged here on the basis that it is unduly spectator-focussed, ignoring important facets of art-making and its motivations. Beauty moves us, not necessarily to tears or rapt contemplation, but to practical action; crucially, it may do so as part and parcel …Read more
  •  265
    Sensorimotor expectations and the visual field
    Synthese 198 (Suppl 17): 3991-4006. 2018.
    Sensorimotor expectations concern how visual experience covaries with bodily movement. Sensorimotor theorists argue from such expectations to the conclusion that the phenomenology of vision is constitutively embodied: objects within the visual field are experienced as 3-D because sensorimotor expectations partially constitute our experience of such objects. Critics argue that there are two ways to block the above inference: to explain how we visually experience objects as 3-D, one may appeal to …Read more
  •  246
    Scalar Epistemic Consequentialism
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 11 (1): 1-5. 2022.
    The following is an advertisement for scalar epistemic consequentialism. Benefits include an epistemic consequentialism that (i) is immune from the the no-positive-epistemic-duties objection and (ii) doesn’t require bullet-biting on the rightness of epistemic tradeoffs. The advertisement invites readers to think more carefully about both the definition and logical space of epistemic consequentialism.
  •  145
    Perceptual content and sensorimotor expectations
    Philosophical Quarterly 61 (243): 383-391. 2011.
    I distinguish between two kinds of sensorimotor expectations: agent- and object-active ones. Alva Noë's answer to the problem of how perception acquires volumetric content illicitly privileges agent-active expectations over object-active expectations, though the two are explanatorily on a par. Considerations which Noë draws upon concerning how organisms may ‘off-load’ internal processes onto the environment do not support his view that volumetric content depends on our embodiment; rather, they s…Read more
  •  117
    Still epiphenomenal qualia: Response to Muller
    Philosophia 37 (1): 105-107. 2009.
    Hans Muller has recently attempted to show that Frank Jackson cannot assert the existence of qualia without thereby falsifying himself on the matter of such mental states being epiphenomenal with respect to the physical world. I argue that Muller misunderstands the commitments of qualia epiphenomenalism and that, as a result, his arguments against Jackson do not go through
  •  113
    The Space of Seeing-In
    British Journal of Aesthetics 51 (3): 271-278. 2011.
    Recent work on seeing-in has taken a pluralist turn. There is variety among pictures, so we should expect variety among seeing-in. Dominic Lopes’s taxonomy of seeing-in is arguably the most thorough that is currently available. Lopes identifies five varieties of seeing-in. In this paper I identify a sixth: pseudo-actualism. This paper improves our current best taxonomy of seeing-in
  •  99
    In defence of fictional incompetence
    Ratio 23 (2): 141-150. 2010.
    The claim that photographs are fictionally incompetent (i.e. that they can only depict those particulars they are appropriately causally related to) is argued by Noël Carroll, Gregory Currie, and Nigel Warburton to be falsified by cinematic works of fiction. In response I firstly argue that it does not follow from cinema's having a capacity for the representation of ficta that photography has a capacity for the representation of ficta. Secondly, and inspired by the work of Roger Scruton, I devel…Read more
  •  96
    The Epistemic Status of Photographs and Paintings: A Response to Cohen and Meskin
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67 (2): 230-235. 2009.
  •  96
    Photographically based knowledge
    Episteme 10 (3): 283-297. 2013.
    Pictures are a quintessential source of aesthetic pleasure. This makes it easy to forget that they are epistemically valuable no less than they are aesthetically so. Pictures are representations. As such, they may furnish us with knowledge of the objects they represent. In this article I provide an account of why photographs are of greater epistemic utility than handmade pictures. To do so, I use a novel approach: I seek to illuminate the epistemic utility of photographs by situating both photog…Read more
  •  96
    Kind Properties and the Metaphysics of Perception: Towards Impure Relationalism
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 96 (4): 487-509. 2015.
    A central debate in contemporary philosophy of perception is between those who hold that perception is a detection relation of sensory awareness and those who hold that it is representational state akin to belief. Another key debate is between those who claim that we can perceive natural or artifactual kind properties, e.g. ‘being a tomato’, ‘being a doorknob’, etc. and those who hold we cannot. The current consensus is that these debates are entirely unrelated. I argue that this consensus is wr…Read more
  •  78
    Photographic Phenomenology as Cognitive Phenomenology
    British Journal of Aesthetics 55 (1): 71-89. 2015.
    Photographic pictorial experience is thought to have a peculiar phenomenology to it, one that fails to accompany the pictorial experiences one has before so-called ‘hand-made’ pictures. I present a theory that explains this in terms of a common factor shared by beliefs formed on the basis of photographic pictorial experience and beliefs formed on the basis of ordinary, face-to-face, perceptual experience: the having of a psychologically immediate, non-inferential etiology. This theory claims tha…Read more
  •  67
    Sensorimotor theorists of perception have argued that eye movement is a necessary condition for seeing on the basis that subjects whose retinal images do not move undergo a form of blindness. I show that the argument does not work.
  •  34
    Belief, experience and the act of picture-making
    Philosophical Explorations 17 (1): 1-14. 2014.
    Philosophical Explorations, Volume 17, Issue 1, Page 35-48, March 2014