Dimitria Gatzia

This volume provides novel approaches to a variety of questions about ambivalence and the role it plays in our lives. As the contributions illustrate, ambivalence finds its way into a gamut of philosophical and psychological debates about rationality, skepticism, emotions, intentionality, racism, global justice, well-being, mindfulness, and intersubjectivity. These debates concern questions like: “Is ambivalence distinct from uncertainty?”, “Does ambivalence affect the way we respond to paradoxes?”, “How can two nations come to an agreement about nuclear disarmament?”, “Is ambivalence irrational when it frustrates effective action?”, “Why do people who have had training in law enforcement commit such heinous acts of violence?”, “How does mindfulness resolve ambivalence?”, and “Why isn’t valuing your interests and ends and taking them seriously sufficient for self-love?”

The aim of this chapter is to shed new light on the question of what newly sighted subjects are capable of seeing on the basis of previous experience with mind- independent, external objects and their properties through touch alone. This question is also known as "Molyneux’s question." Much of the empirically driven debate surrounding this question has been centered on the nature of the representational content of the subjects' visual experiences. It has generally been assumed that the meaning of "seeing" deployed in these disputes is more or less clear and unproblematic, and therefore requires no analysis or clarification. In this chapter, we wish to challenge this assumption. We argue that getting clear on the meaning of "seeing" is the only feasible way to determine whether the empirical attempts to answer Molyneux’s question accurately capture what newly sighted subjects are in fact capable of seeing. Specifically, we show that the dominant interpretations of the empirical results from a recent study (Held et al., 2011) fail to take into account that seeing can be not only purely visual but also epistemic in that it requires background knowledge (such as what an object with a particular viewpoint-independent shape looks like from a particular perspective).

Tracking theories of mental representation posit a privileged relation between color representations and the color properties of objects. Tracking theories of mental representation have been used to motivate color realism as they posit that the function of color vision is to represent the colors of objects. It has been argued that tracking theories have a major flaw, namely they cannot account for reliable misrepresentation. It has further been suggested that reliable color misrepresentation is a live possibility. In this chapter, I argue that the current evidence indicates that our color representations reliably misrepresent. This conclusion undermines tracking theories and the color realist theories they purport to motivate.

Dogmatism holds that an experience or seeming that p can provide prima facie immediate justification for believing p in virtue of its phenomenology. Dogmatism about perceptual justification has appealed primarily to proponents of representational theories of perceptual experience. Call dogmatism that takes perceptual experience to be representational "representational phenomenal dogmatism." As we show, phenomenal seemings play a crucial role in dogmatism of this kind. Despite its conventional appeal to representational theorists, dogmatism is not by definition committed to any particular view of perceptual experience. Naive realists and disjunctivists who hold that perceptual experience is a perceptual relation of direct acquaintance can also endorse dogmatism. Indeed, we argue that they ought to do so. Otherwise, they cannot maintain that relationalism about perceptual experience has an epistemic advantage compared to the representational view. We then show that even if we grant that relationalism has this advantage, only dogmatism that takes perceptual experience to be representational can be extended to account for non-deductive inferential justification. As an account of the latter is required to avoid succumbing to skepticism, relationalism, we argue, does not have the epistemic advantage its defenders claim it has.

This entry does not have an abstract. The following is a summary. Dogmatism, as popularized by Jim Pryor (2000), holds that the perceptual experience or perceptual phenomenal seeming that p can confer at least some degree of immediate, prima facie propositional justification on the belief that p. This entry begins by explaining what we mean by "propositional," "immediate," and "prima facie." Propositional justification contrasts with doxastic justification. We then discuss different kinds of dogmatism and examine some objections.

The question of whether blindsight is a form of unconscious perception continues to spark fierce debate in philosophy and psychology. One side of the debate holds that while the visual information categorized in blindsight is not access-conscious, it is nonetheless a form of perception, albeit a form of unconscious perception. The opposition, by contrast, holds that blindsight is just a form of degraded conscious perception that makes the categorized information harder to access because it is degraded. In this chapter, we address the opposition’s arguments for thinking that blindsight is a form of degraded conscious vision and then argue that the residual awareness found in blindsight is a form of non-perceptual awareness. To back this claim, we examine the residual visual abilities to detect and discriminate colour found in some blindsight patients and show that residual consciousness in blindsight is indirect and lacks the phenomenal character characteristic of conscious vision.

There is no abstract for this chapter. The following is a summary. We distinguish between, explicit, inadvertent, and habitual racist actions. We argue that while inadvertent bigots and habitual racists are inclined to (sincerely) deny that they committed a racially motivated action, they have different reasons for their denial. Inadvertent bigots are denying it because, however deeply they search, they are not going to find any such motive. Habitual racists, by contrast, may hold explicit egalitarian attitudes but they are nonetheless implicitly racially motivated. There is thus an implicit stressful conflict between their covert racist intentions and their overt egalitarian attitudes. While they aren’t aware of the source of this distress, cognitive dissonance theory predicts that they nevertheless will engage in dissonance-reducing strategies. Specifically, we argue that habitual racists will be inclined to confabulate a description of the action in non-racial terms.

There is no abstract for this chapter, which introduces the reader to the papers in the book. The following is only a sample of the chapter: It is quite common for people not to be able to make up their minds. One of the most famous literary examples comes from Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, in which the protagonist Hamlet poses the well-known question “To be or not to be, that is the question,” while contemplating suicide. In the play, Hamlet is expressing discontent about life, as he thinks of the pain and unfairness it involves. At the same time, he fears that death maybe worse. It seems that he desires to have it both ways: he wants to both end his life and not end his life. This is, of course, a case of ambivalence where the stakes are very high. When we are ambivalent, it’s often about much more mundane aspects of life.

In this chapter, we first present findings indicating that psilocybin-induced visual distortions and impaired executive functioning originate in temporary disruptions of bottom-up and top-down attentional mechanisms. We then revisit a recent predictive processing account of psychedelic experiences and argue that it lacks the resources to provide an adequate account of psychedelic experiences. Lastly, we propose an alternative theory of perceptual processing that can explain how the psilocybin-induced disruptions of attentional mechanisms may elicit psychedelic experiences.

Objectophilia (also known as Objectum-Sexuality) involves romantic and sexual attraction to specific objects. Objectophiles often develop deep and enduring emotional, romantic, and sexual relations with specific inanimate (concrete or abstract) objects such as trains, bridges, cars, or words. . The determinants of objectophilia are poorly understood. The aim of this paper is to examine the determining factors of objectophilia. We examine four hypotheses about the determinants of objectophilia (pertaining to fetishism, synesthesia, cross-modal mental imagery, and autism) and argue that the most likely determining factors of objectophilia are the social and non-social features of autism. Future studies on the determinants of objectophilia could enhance our understanding and potentially lessen the marginalization experienced by objectophiles.

This book collects original essays by top scholars that address questions about the nature, origins, and effects of ambivalence. While the nature of agency has received an enormous amount of attention, relatively little has been written about ambivalence or how it relates to topics such as agency, rationality, justification, knowledge, autonomy, self-governance, well-being, social cognition, and various other topics. Ambivalence presents unique questions related to many major philosophical debates. For example, it relates to debates about virtues, rationality, and decision-making, agency or authenticity, emotions, and social or political metacognition. It is also relevant to a variety of larger debates in philosophy and psychology, including nature vs. nature, objectivity vs. subjectivity, or nomothetic vs. idiographic. The essays in this book offer novel and wide-ranging perspectives on this emerging philosophical topic. They will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in ethics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, and social cognition.

Cognitive dissonance is a kind of ambivalence in which your apprehension of the fact that you performed or want to perform an action of which you disapprove gives rise to psychological distress. This, in turn, causes you to solicit unconscious processes that can help you reduce the distress. Here we look at the role that cognitive dissonance plays in explaining the inner workings of racism. We distinguish between three types of racist acts: inadvertent bigotry, habitual racism, and explicit racism. Unlike inadvertent bigots, habitual and explicit racists are racially motivated and they therefore are responsible for their racial acts. But unlike the explicit racists, habitual racists aren’t immediately aware of their racial motives. As habitual racists hold overt egalitarian attitudes, the conflict between their over attitudes and their covert racial motives are a potential source of distress. To avoid having to face their racial motives, they tend to turn to confabulation. While explicit racists aren’t bothered by a similar form of cognitive dissonance, their explicit racial attitudes and desires to cause black people to suffer are at odds with majority public opinion, which can be a source of shame. To escape this kind of negative self-realization, explicit racists seek to justify their actions as honorable or as necessary for the good of society. We conclude by briefly pondering how cognitive dissonance can be used as a strategy for transforming habitual and explicit racists.

Integration information theories posit that the integration of information is necessary and/or sufficient for consciousness. In this paper, we focus on three of the most prominent information integration theories: Information Integration Theory, Global Workspace Theory, and Attended Intermediate-Level Theory. We begin by explicating each theory and key concepts they utilize. We then argue that the current evidence indicates that the integration of information is neither necessary nor sufficient for consciousness. Unlike GWT and AIR, IIT maintains that conscious experience is both necessary and sufficient for consciousness. We present empirical evidence indicating that simple features are experienced in the absence of feature integration and argue that it challenges IIT’s necessity claim. In addition, we challenge IIT’s sufficiency claim by presenting evidence from hemineglect cases and amodal completion indicating that contents may be integrated and yet fail to give rise to subjective experience. Moreover, we present empirical evidence from subjects with frontal lesions who are unable to carry out simple instructions and argue that they are irreconcilable with GWT. Lastly, we argue that empirical evidence indicating that patients with visual agnosia fail to identify objects they report being conscious of present a challenge to AIR’s necessity claim.

This is volume is ambitious both with respect to the number of contributions and its scope: it contains 18 papers, which cover a wide variety of topics within metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, logic, mathematics, and aesthetics. It is divided into three parts: (i) history of philosophy, (ii) aesthetics and philosophy of mind, and (iii) philosophy of language and logic, although there is a nice overlap among these areas. Unlike other anthologies on colour (e.g., Readings on Color by Alex Byrne and David Hilbert, 1996), which survey primarily empirically based philosophy of colour and colour science, this volume is all-encompassing. Various themes in this volume extend across the analytic and continental traditions. This approach makes, to quote Wittgenstein, “the riddle of colour stimulating.”

In "The Epistemic Significance of Perceptual Learning," Elijah Chudnoff (this issue) argues that cases from perceptual learning show that perception not only generates reasons for beliefs but also preserves those reasons over time in perceptual learning cases. In this paper, we dispute the idea that perceptual learning enables the preservation of perceptual reasons. We then argue for an alternative view, viz. the view that perceptual learning is epistemically significant insofar as it modifies our perceptual system in such a way as to make us capable of perceiving subtle low-level properties (e.g. lightness) and high-level properties (e.g. chess configurations). Acquiring the capacity to perceive these properties is what enables us to achieve expertise in a variety of subject matters (e.g. chicken sexing, chess playing, language fluency). Along the way, we argue against two main points in Chudnoff’s paper. The first is that, pace Chudnoff, perceptual learning does not result in the acquisition of new facts. It only results in the acquisition of a new perceptual capacity. The second is that experiences resulting from perceptual learning can always serve as immediate justifiers of beliefs and hence do not need supporting background information in order to serve as reasons.

Cognition can influence action. Your belief that it is raining outside, for example, may cause you to reach for the umbrella. Perception can also influence cognition. Seeing that no raindrops are falling, for example, may cause you to think that you don’t need to reach for an umbrella. The question that has fascinated philosophers and cognitive scientists for the past few decades, however, is whether cognition can influence perception. Can, for example, your desire for a rainy day cause you to see, hear, or feel raindrops when you walk outside? More generally, can our cognitive states influence the way we see the external world? In this paper, I discuss three experiments on memory colour effects. In these experiments, subjects systematically made different colour matches or adjustments for object-patches representing objects that have prototypical colours and neutral object-patches. I argue that these differences are not merely differences in judgments but are best explained in terms of phenomenology. However, I show that these differences in phenomenology can be explained without reference to cognitive states such as colour concepts or beliefs.

Rapid advances in the field of neuroimaging techniques including magnetoencephalography (MEG), electroencephalography (EEG), functional MRI (fMRI), diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), voxel based morphomentry (VBM), and optical imaging, have allowed neuroscientists to investigate neural processes in ways that have not been possible until recently. Combining these techniques with advanced analysis procedures during different conditions such as hypnosis, psychiatric and neurological conditions, subliminal stimulation, and psychotropic drugs began transforming the study of neuroscience, ushering a new paradigm that may allow neuroscientists to tackle the hard problem of consciousness.

In The Principles of Psychology, William James (1981) has long ago suggested that attending to a stimulus can make it appear more ‘vivid and clear.’ Pre-cueing, the procedure in which a cue stimulus is presented to direct a subject’s attention to the location of a test stimulus, has been used to test James’ hypothesis (Posner, 1978; Carrasco et al., 2004; Carrasco, Loula, & Ho, 2006; Yeshurun & Rashal, 2010; Carrasco, 2011). One recent debate concerns whether the effects of pre-cueing and other perceptual changes associated with covert attention are evidence for cognitive penetration. In this paper, we argue that the pre-cueing effects associated with covert attention are similar to perceptual learning effects, despite the former having more transient effects than the latter.

Traditionally, philosophers have appealed to the phenomenological similarity between visual experience and visual imagery to support the hypothesis that there is significant overlap between the perceptual and imaginative domains. The current evidence, however, is inconclusive: while evidence from transcranial brain stimulation seems to support this conclusion, neurophysiological evidence from brain lesion studies (e.g., from patients with brain lesions resulting in a loss of mental imagery but not a corresponding loss of perception and vice versa) indicates that there are functional and anatomical dissociations between mental imagery and perception. Assuming that the mental imagery and perception do not overlap, at least, to the extent traditionally assumed, then the question arises as to what exactly mental imagery is and whether it parallels perception by proceeding via several functionally distinct mechanisms. In this review, we argue that even though there may not be a shared mechanism underlying vision for perception and conscious imagery, there is an overlap between the mechanisms underlying vision for action and unconscious visual imagery. On the basis of these findings, we propose a modification of Kosslyn’s model of imagery that accommodates unconscious imagination and explore possible explanations of the quasi-pictorial phenomenology of conscious visual imagery in light of the fact that its underlying neural substrates and mechanisms typically are distinct from those of visual experience.

In this paper, I propose a fictionalist approach to the problem of color. On my view, which I call prescriptive color fictionalism, we can continue to employ our color discourse as we have thus far even if it turns out that there are no colored objects. My proposal is a species of error theory. As such, it does not describe our current practices. It is rather proposed as a prescription to a problem, namely that the color theory we accept (according to which there are colored objects) is false. By formulating a fictionalist account of color and showing that we can preserve ordinary color discourse in the absence of colored objects, I provide a solution to the problem of color.

The aim of this paper is to address the problem of unemployment. Economists generally agree that a zero rate of unemployment is not only unattainable but also undesirable within capitalism. This is problematic because, as it will be shown, unemployment has adverse effects on both individuals and societies. Assuming that the primary aim of economics is to improve people’s lives, it behooves us to find a solution to the problem of unemployment. Two solutions will be offered. The first works within the confines of the capitalist system –it requires instituting welfare policies that alleviate the adverse effects of unemployment. The second involves a paradigm change –it requires replacing capitalism with an alternative economic system that is consistent with a zero rate of unemployment.

This volume is essential to anyone doing work on the philosophy of mind. Burge’s contribution to this field of philosophy is of the utmost importance and must be carefully considered if we are to make progress with respect to the nature of mental states and events. The essays included in this volume have established Burge as a leading philosopher of mind in general, and a defender of anti-individualism in particular. The order of the essays in defense of anti-individualism is not historical; instead, it reflects the evolution of Burge's view.

According to the hierarchical model of sensory information processing, sensory inputs are transmitted to cortical areas, which are crucial for complex auditory and speech processing, only after being processed in subcortical areas (Hickok and Poeppel, 2007; Rauschecker and Scott, 2009). However, studies using electroencephalography (EEG) indicate that distinguishing simultaneous auditory inputs involves a widely distributed neural network, including the medial temporal lobe, which is essential for declarative memory, and posterior association cortices (Alain et al., 2001; Squire et al., 2004). More recent studies have even demonstrated plasticity of auditory signals as low as the brainstem (Suga, 2008). Collectively, studies suggest that the functional architecture of perceptual processing involves primarily top-down modulation (Suga et al., 2002; Gilbert and Li, 2013; Chandrasekaran et al., 2014). Top-down influences exerted throughout the auditory systems (Lotto and Holt, 2011) include: memory (Goldinger, 1998)1, attention (Choi et al., 2014), which has been found to modulate auditory encoding in the cochlea, a subcortical area (Maison et al., 2001), (prior) knowledge of syntax or words (Ganong, 1980; Warren, 1984)2, and experience-based expectations pertaining to the speaker's accent (Deutsch, 1996; Deutsch et al., 2004; Irino and Patterson, 2006), gender (Johnson et al., 1999), and vocal folds or tract (Irino and Patterson, 2002; Patterson and Johnsrude, 2008)

While much has been written about whether visual perception is cognitively penetrable, the analogous question with respect to auditory perception has received very little attention. Here we argue that instances of top-down modulation of auditory processing, although extensive, do not constitute cases of cognitive penetration of auditory perception since the changes in the phenomenology of auditory perception caused by top-down influences cannot plausibly be attributed to the listeners’ discursive thoughts.

The statement “Mr. Darcy proposes to Elizabeth” seems true in Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice (even though it may not actually appear in the text) while the statement “Mr. Darcy is a detective” seems false. One explanation for this intuition is that when we read or talk about fictional stories, we implicitly employ the fictional operator “It is fictional that” or “It is part of the story that.” “It is fictional that Mr. Darcy proposes to Elizabeth” expresses a true proposition while “It is fictional that Mr. Darcy is a detective” does not. Fictive statements can be abbreviated as “In F, P”. Determining what statements are fictionally true in a story requires providing truth conditions for statements of the form “In F, P.” This paper proposes an analysis of truth in fiction and examines the notion of make-believe