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1Walking-related locomotion is facilitated by the perception of distant targets in the extrapersonal spaceScientific Reports 9 9884. 2019.
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9Habits, Motor Representations and Practical Modes of PresentationIn Raffaela Giovagnoli & Robert Lowe (eds.), The Logic of Social Practices II, Springer Nature Switzerland. pp. 177-191. 2023.Habits usually come in the form of skilled action. Then, accurately explaining the nature of habitual actions requires to say something on skilled actions. Here we focus on the debate on skilled actions in the philosophical literature informed by motor neuroscience. The main question in the literature is whether practical knowledge can be reduced to propositional knowledge and, if not, how these different forms of knowledge can be related when skilled motor performance is in play. But this, ipso…Read more
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24The Rationality and Flexibility of Motor Representations in Skilled PerformancePhilosophia 51 (5): 2517-2542. 2023.Philosophers and cognitive scientists have been debating about the nature of practical knowledge in skilled action. A big challenge is that of establishing whether and how practical knowledge (knowledge-how) is influenced by, or related to propositional knowledge (knowledge-that). This becomes even more challenging when trying to understand how propositional and motor representations may cooperate in making action performance flexible, while also remaining rational. In this paper, we offer an ac…Read more
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13For an Epistemology of StereopsisReview of Philosophy and Psychology 1-18. forthcoming.Philosophers and cognitive scientists try to understand, from different perspectives, the nature of the experience of reality. Given this shared, interdisciplinary interest, it would be beneficial to have a coherent story about the experience of reality, in which there is reciprocal contribution from both philosophy and cognitive science. This paper wants to pave the way for this shared enterprise on the investigation of the experience of reality. I first distinguish between two indicators of re…Read more
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18Visual Feeling of PresencePacific Philosophical Quarterly 99 (7–8): 112-136. 2016.Everyday visual experience constantly confronts us with things we can interact with in the real world. We literally feel the outside presence of physical objects in our environment via visual perceptual experience. The visual feeling of presence is a crucial feature of vision that is largely unexplored in the philosophy of perception, and poorly debated in vision neuroscience. The aim of this article is to investigate the feeling of presence. I suggest that visual feeling of presence depends on …Read more
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11Why the Pictorial Needs the MotoricErkenntnis 88 (2): 771-805. 2021.Does action play any crucial role in our perception of pictures? The standard literature on picture perception has never explicitly tackled this question. This is for a simple reason. After all, objects in a picture seem to be static objects of perception. Thus, it might sound extremely controversial to say that action is crucial in picture perception. Contrary to this general intuitive stance, this paper defends, for the first time, the apparently very controversial claim, never addressed in th…Read more
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14Presenza e realtà: nuovi sviluppi in epistemologia e filosofia delle scienze cognitiveLe Monnier Università. 2022.
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21Evolutionary Dynamics and Accurate Perception. Critical Realism as an Empirically Testable HypothesisPhilosophia Scientiae 25 157-178. 2021.Mathematical models can be profitably used to establish whether our perception of the external world is accurate. Donald Hoffman and his collaborators have developed a promising mathematical framework within which this question can be addressed and which is based on an exhaustive taxonomy of the different possible relations between perceptual representations and the external world. After reformulating their framework by means of an improved formal system, we discuss their application of evolutio…Read more
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49Seeing Entities without Seeing N-EntitiesJournal of Consciousness Studies 27 (1-2): 57-70. 2019.When seeing a jaguar, we can see all the spots on its mantle without seeing a determinate number, N, of spots on the mantle. How is this visual phenomenon possible? Philosophers have tried to provide a reliable answer to this question, by recruiting evidence from vision science about the way attention works. Here we push this idea forward, by suggesting that an alternative and less complex solution, with respect to the one proposed in the literature, is possible. In particular, we argue that the…Read more
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28Why Trompe l'oeils Deceive Our Visual ExperienceJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 78 (1): 33-42. 2020.Philosophers suggested that usual picture perception requires the simultaneous occurrence of the perception of the surface and of the depicted object. However, there are special cases of picture perception, such as trompe l'oeil perception, in which, unlike in usual picture perception, the object looks like a real, present object we can interact with, of the kind we are usually acquainted with in face-to-face perception. While philosophers suggested that usual picture perception and trompe l'oei…Read more
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1A Model for the Interlock Between Propositional and Motor FormatsIn Matthieu Fontaine, Cristina Barés-Gómez, Francisco Salguero-Lamillar, Lorenzo Magnani & Ángel Nepomuceno-Fernández (eds.), Model-Based Reasoning in Science and Technology: Inferential Models for Logic, Language, Cognition and Computation, Springer Verlag. 2019.
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116Visual Feeling of PresencePacific Philosophical Quarterly 99 (S1): 112-136. 2018.Everyday visual experience constantly confronts us with things we can interact with in the real world. We literally feel the outside presence of physical objects in our environment via visual perceptual experience. The visual feeling of presence is a crucial feature of vision that is largely unexplored in the philosophy of perception, and poorly debated in vision neuroscience. The aim of this article is to investigate the feeling of presence. I suggest that visual feeling of presence depends on …Read more
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37Why the Pictorial Needs the MotoricErkenntnis 88 (2): 1-35. 2021.Does action play any crucial role in our perception of pictures? The standard literature on picture perception has never explicitly tackled this question. This is for a simple reason. After all, objects in a picture seem to be static objects of perception. Thus, it might sound extremely controversial to say that action is crucial in picture perception. Contrary to this general intuitive stance, this paper defends, for the first time, the apparently very controversial claim, never addressed in th…Read more
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90Semantic and pragmatic integration in vision for actionConsciousness and Cognition 48 40-54. 2017.According to an influential view, the detection of action possibilities and the selection of a plan for action are two segregated steps throughout the processing of visual information. This classical approach is committed with the assumption that two independent types of processing underlie visual perception: the semantic one, which is at the service of the identification of visually presented objects, and the pragmatic one which serves the execution of actions directed to specific parts of the …Read more
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64Visual phenomenology versus visuomotor imagery: How can we be aware of action properties?Synthese 198 (4): 3309-3338. 2019.Here is a crucial question in the contemporary philosophy of perception: how can we be aware of action properties? According to the perceptual view, we consciously see them: they are present in our visual phenomenology. However, this view faces some problems. First, I review these problems. Then, I propose an alternative view, according to which we are aware of action properties because we imagine them through a special form of imagery, which I call visuomotor imagery. My account is to be prefer…Read more
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376Molyneux’s Question and the History of Philosophy (edited book)Routledge. 2020.In 1688 the Irish scientist and politician William Molyneux sent a letter to the philosopher John Locke. In it, he asked him a question: could someone who was born blind, and able to distinguish a globe and a cube by touch, be able to immediately distinguish and name these shapes by sight if given the ability to see? The philosophical puzzle offered in Molyneux’s letter fascinated not only Locke, but major thinkers such as Leibniz, Berkeley, Diderot, Reid, and numerous others including psycholog…Read more
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36Why Trompe l'oeils Deceive Our Visual ExperienceJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 78 (1): 33-42. 2020.Philosophers suggested that usual picture perception requires the simultaneous occurrence of the perception of the surface and of the depicted object. However, there are special cases of picture perception, such as trompe l'oeil perception, in which, unlike in usual picture perception, the object looks like a real, present object we can interact with, of the kind we are usually acquainted with in face-to-face perception. While philosophers suggested that usual picture perception and trompe l'oei…Read more
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How Philosophical Reasoning and Neuroscientific Modeling Come TogetherIn Matthieu Fontaine, Cristina Barés-Gómez, Francisco Salguero-Lamillar, Lorenzo Magnani & Ángel Nepomuceno-Fernández (eds.), Model-Based Reasoning in Science and Technology: Inferential Models for Logic, Language, Cognition and Computation, Springer Verlag. 2019.
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21The Neural Dynamics of Seeing-InErkenntnis 84 (6): 1285-1324. 2019.Philosophers have suggested that, in order to understand the particular visual state we are in during picture perception, we should focus on experimental results from vision neuroscience—in particular, on the most rigorous account of the functioning of the visual system that we have from vision neuroscience, namely, the ‘Two Visual Systems Model’. According to the initial version of this model, our visual system can be dissociated, from an anatomo-functional point of view, into two streams: a ve…Read more
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39Pictures, Emotions, and the Dorsal/Ventral Account of Picture PerceptionReview of Philosophy and Psychology 8 (3): 595-616. 2017.Everyday life suggests that picture seeing is sometimes infused by an emotional charge. However, nobody has addressed the importance of explaining this emotional charge in picture perception. Even our best model of picture perception, the dorsal/ventral account of picture perception, which integrates the most important empirical results coming from our best model on vision in neuroscience, the two visual systems model, lacks a reference to this emotional charge. The aim of the present paper is t…Read more
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14Neurophysiological States and Perceptual Representations: The Case of Action Properties Detected by the Ventro-Dorsal Visual StreamIn Lorenzo Magnani & Claudia Casadio (eds.), Model Based Reasoning in Science and Technology. Logical, Epistemological, and Cognitive Issues, Springer Verlag. 2006.Philosophers and neuroscientists often suggest that we perceptually represent objects and their properties. However, they start from very different background assumptions when they use the term “perceptual representation”. On the one hand, sometimes philosophers do not need to properly take into consideration the empirical evidence concerning the neural states subserving the representational perceptual processes they are talking about. On the other hand, neuroscientists do not rely on a meticulo…Read more
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48Solving the Interface Problem Without Translation: The Same Format ThesisPacific Philosophical Quarterly 100 (1): 301-333. 2018.In this article, we propose a new account concerning the interlock between intentions and motor representations (henceforth: MRs), showing that the interface problem is not as deep as previously proposed. Before discussing our view, in the first section we report the ideas developed in the literature by those who have tried to solve this puzzle before us. The article proceeds as follows. In Sections 2 and 3, we address the views by Butterfill and Sinigaglia, and Mylopoulos and Pacherie, respecti…Read more
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42Two visual systems in Molyneux subjectsPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 17 (4): 643-679. 2018.Molyneux’s question famously asks about whether a newly sighted subject might immediately recognize, by sight alone, shapes that were already familiar to her from a tactile point of view. This paper addresses three crucial points concerning this puzzle. First, the presence of two different questions: the classic one concerning visual recognition and another one concerning vision-for-action. Second, the explicit distinction, reported in the literature, between ocular and cortical blindness. Third…Read more
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31On the content of Peripersonal visual experiencePhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 21 (3): 487-513. 2022.In a recent paper, ‘Peripersonal perception in action’ (Synthese, 2018), Frédérique de Vignemont tackles the problem of defining what is peculiar to the visual perception of objects falling within the peripersonal space of the observer, i.e. the space immediately surrounding the body, and which is commonly described as the space in which action takes place. In this paper, I first discuss the proposal offered by de Vignemont about what characterizes peripersonal perception. Then, I suggest an ext…Read more
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48The Neural Dynamics of Seeing-InErkenntnis 84 (6): 1285-1324. 2019.Philosophers have suggested that, in order to understand the particular visual state we are in during picture perception, we should focus on experimental results from vision neuroscience—in particular, on the most rigorous account of the functioning of the visual system that we have from vision neuroscience, namely, the ‘Two Visual Systems Model’. According to the initial version of this model, our visual system can be dissociated, from an anatomo-functional point of view, into two streams: a ve…Read more
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33Visual attention in pictorial perceptionSynthese 199 (1-2): 2077-2101. 2020.According to the received view in the philosophical literature on pictorial perception, when perceiving an object in a picture, we perceive both the picture’s surface and the depicted object, but the surface is only unconsciously represented. Furthermore, it is suggested, such unconscious representation does not need attention. This poses a crucial problem, as empirical research on visual attention shows that there can hardly be any visual representation, conscious or unconscious, without attent…Read more
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63Pictures, action properties and motor related effectsSynthese 193 (12): 3787-3817. 2016.The most important question concerning picture perception is: what perceptual state are we in when we see an object in a picture? In order to answer this question, philosophers have used the results of the two visual systems model, according to which our visual system can be divided into two streams, a ventral stream for object recognition, allowing one to perceive from an allocentric frame of reference, and a dorsal stream for visually guided motor interaction, thus allowing one to perceive fro…Read more
Gabriele Ferretti
Università Di Bergamo
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Università Di BergamoAssistant Professor
Areas of Specialization
Perception |
Epistemology of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Perception |
Epistemology of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |