• York University
    Department of Philosophy
    Centre for Vision Research
    Associate Professor
Harvard University
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 2008
APA Eastern Division
Toronto, Canada
  •  10
    Animal rationality and belief
    with Hans Johann Glock and Kirstin Andrews
    In Glock, Hans Johann (2018). Animal rationality and belief. In: Andrews, Kirstin; Beck, Jacob. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Animal Minds. London: Routledge, 89-99, . pp. 89-99. 2018.
  •  196
    Between Perception and Thought
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. forthcoming.
    In The Border between Seeing and Thinking, Ned Block argues that the distinction between perception and cognition should be grounded in representational format. I object that cognition is multifaceted, and includes representations with the same format as some perceptual representations. We can save Block’s view by interpreting it as concerning the border between one elite species of cognition—namely, propositional thought—and everything below it, including perception. But that leaves the border …Read more
  •  30
    Perceptual noise and the bell curve objection
    with William Languedoc
    Analysis 83 (3): 429-436. 2023.
    Perceptual experience supports the assignment of confidences in belief – doxastic confidences. To explain this fact, many philosophers appeal to Perceptual Indeterminacy, which holds that perceptual content can be more or less determinate. Others instead appeal to Perceptual Confidence, which says that perceptual experience supports doxastic confidences because it assigns confidences too. Morrison argues that a primary reason to favour Perceptual Confidence is that it is uniquely capable of acco…Read more
  •  76
    Review of Ned Block's The Border between Seeing and Thinking
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. 2023.
    I summarize and critically review Block's book, focusing on his format-based account of the border between perception and cognition and his argument for the phenomenal overflow of color perception.
  •  305
    Contents and Vehicles in Analog Perception
    Crítica. Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofía 55 (163). 2023.
    Building on Christopher Peacocke’s account of analog perceptual contentand my own account of analog perceptual vehicles, I defend three claims: that theperception of magnitudes often has analog contents; that the perception of magni-tudes often has analog vehicles; and that the first claim is true in virtue of the second—that is, the analog vehicles help to ground the analog contents.
  •  398
    The distinction between perception and cognition frames countless debates in philosophy and cognitive science. But what, if anything, does this distinction actually amount to? In this introductory article, we summarize recent work on this question. We first briefly consider the possibility that a perception-cognition border should be eliminated from our scientific ontology, and then introduce and critically examine five positive approaches to marking a perception–cognition border, framed in term…Read more
  •  67
    Born to Count
    with Sam Clarke
    Scientific American 328 (3): 42-49. 2023.
    Imagine hosting a party. You arrange snacks, curate a playlist and place a variety of beers in the refrigerator. Your first guest shows up, adding a six-pack before taking one bottle for himself. You watch your next guest arrive and contribute a few more beers, minus one for herself. Ready for a drink, you open the fridge and are surprised to find only eight beers remaining. You haven't been consciously counting the beers, but you know there should be more, so you start poking around. Sure enoug…Read more
  • El requisito de generalidad y la estructura del pensamiento
    In Mariela Aguilera, Laura Danón, Carolina Scotto & Elisabeth Camp (eds.), Conceptos, lenguaje y cognición, Editorial Universidad Nacional De Córdoba. 2015.
  •  118
    Mundane hallucinations and new wave relationalism
    Noûs 57 (2): 391-413. 2021.
    Relationalism maintains that mind-independent objects are essential constituents of veridical perceptual experiences. According to the argument from hallucination, relationalism is undermined by perfect hallucinations, experiences that are introspectively indistinguishable from veridical perceptual experiences but lack an object. Recently, a new wave of relationalists have responded by questioning whether perfect hallucinations are possible: what seem to be perfect hallucinations may really be s…Read more
  •  209
    Numbers, numerosities, and new directions
    with Sam Clarke
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 44 1-20. 2021.
    In our target article, we argued that the number sense represents natural and rational numbers. Here, we respond to the 26 commentaries we received, highlighting new directions for empirical and theoretical research. We discuss two background assumptions, arguments against the number sense, whether the approximate number system represents numbers or numerosities, and why the ANS represents rational numbers.
  •  1735
    The number sense represents (rational) numbers
    with Sam Clarke
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 44 1-57. 2021.
    On a now orthodox view, humans and many other animals possess a “number sense,” or approximate number system, that represents number. Recently, this orthodox view has been subject to numerous critiques that question whether the ANS genuinely represents number. We distinguish three lines of critique – the arguments from congruency, confounds, and imprecision – and show that none succeed. We then provide positive reasons to think that the ANS genuinely represents numbers, and not just non-numerica…Read more
  •  448
    Does the number sense represent number?
    with Sam Clarke
    In Blair Armstrong, Stephanie Denison, Michael Mack & Yang Xu (eds.), Proceedings of the 42nd Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, . 2020.
    On a now orthodox view, humans and many other animals are endowed with a “number sense”, or approximate number system (ANS), that represents number. Recently, this orthodox view has been subject to numerous critiques, with critics maintaining either that numerical content is absent altogether, or else that some primitive analog of number (‘numerosity’) is represented as opposed to number itself. We distinguish three arguments for these claims – the arguments from congruency, confounds, and impre…Read more
  •  352
    Perception is Analog: The Argument from Weber's Law
    Journal of Philosophy 116 (6): 319-349. 2019.
    In the 1980s, a number of philosophers argued that perception is analog. In the ensuing years, these arguments were forcefully criticized, leaving the thesis in doubt. This paper draws on Weber’s Law, a well-entrenched finding from psychophysics, to advance a new argument that perception is analog. This new argument is an adaptation of an argument that cognitive scientists have leveraged in support of the contention that primitive numerical representations are analog. But the argument here is ex…Read more
  •  148
    On Perceptual Confidence and “Completely Trusting Your Experience”
    Analytic Philosophy 61 (2): 174-188. 2019.
    John Morrison has argued that confidences are assigned in perceptual experience. For example, when you perceive a figure in the distance, your experience might assign a 55-percent confidence to the figure’s being Isaac. Morrison’s argument leans on the phenomenon of ‘completely trusting your experience’. I argue that Morrison presupposes a problematic ‘importation model’ of this familiar phenomenon, and propose a very different way of thinking about it. While the article’s official topic is whet…Read more
  •  152
    Analog Mental Representation
    WIREs Cognitive Science. forthcoming.
    Over the past 50 years, philosophers and psychologists have perennially argued for the existence of analog mental representations of one type or another. This study critically reviews a number of these arguments as they pertain to three different types of mental representation: perceptual representations, imagery representations, and numerosity representations. Along the way, careful consideration is given to the meaning of “analog” presupposed by these arguments for analog mental representation…Read more
  •  182
    While philosophers have been interested in animals since ancient times, in the last few decades the subject of animal minds has emerged as a major topic in philosophy. _The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Animal Minds_ is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting subject and is the first collection of its kind. Comprising nearly fifty chapters by a team of international contributors, the _Handbook_ is divided into eight parts: Mental representat…Read more
  •  298
    Marking the Perception–Cognition Boundary: The Criterion of Stimulus-Dependence
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96 (2): 319-334. 2018.
    Philosophy, scientific psychology, and common sense all distinguish perception from cognition. While there is little agreement about how the perception–cognition boundary ought to be drawn, one prominent idea is that perceptual states are dependent on a stimulus, or stimulus-dependent, in a way that cognitive states are not. This paper seeks to develop this idea in a way that can accommodate two apparent counterexamples: hallucinations, which are prima facie perceptual yet stimulus-independent; …Read more
  •  67
    I reply to comments by David Miguel Gray and Grant Gillett concerning my paper, ‘The Generality Constraint and the Structure of Thought’
  •  142
    I review six bad arguments for banning performance-enhancing drugs from sports--and a seventh good one.
  •  280
    Do Animals Engage in Conceptual Thought?
    Philosophy Compass 7 (3): 218-229. 2012.
    This paper surveys and evaluates the answers that philosophers and animal researchers have given to two questions. Do animals have thoughts? If so, are their thoughts conceptual? Along the way, special attention is paid to distinguish debates of substance from mere battles over terminology, and to isolate fruitful areas for future research.
  •  116
    Attention and Mental Primer
    with Keith A. Schneider
    Mind and Language 32 (4): 463-494. 2017.
    Drawing on the empirical premise that attention makes objects look more intense, Ned Block has argued for mental paint, a phenomenal residue that cannot be reduced to what is perceived or represented. If sound, Block's argument would undermine direct realism and representationism, two widely held views about the nature of conscious perception. We argue that Block's argument fails because the empirical premise it is based upon is false. Attending to an object alters its salience, but not its perc…Read more
  •  171
    Because we humans speak a public language, there has always been a special reason to suppose that we have a language of thought. For nonhuman animals, this special reason is missing, and the issue is less straightforward. On the one hand, there is evidence of various types of nonlinguistic representations, such as analog magnitude representations, which can explain many types of intelligent behavior. But on the other hand, the mere fact that some aspects of animal cognition can be explained by n…Read more
  •  351
    The Generality Constraint and the Structure of Thought
    Mind 121 (483): 563-600. 2012.
    According to the Generality Constraint, mental states with conceptual content must be capable of recombining in certain systematic ways. Drawing on empirical evidence from cognitive science, I argue that so-called analogue magnitude states violate this recombinability condition and thus have nonconceptual content. I further argue that this result has two significant consequences: it demonstrates that nonconceptual content seeps beyond perception and infiltrates cognition; and it shows that wheth…Read more
  •  120
    Can Bootstrapping Explain Concept Learning?
    Cognition 158 (C). 2017.
    Susan Carey's account of Quinean bootstrapping has been heavily criticized. While it purports to explain how important new concepts are learned, many commentators complain that it is unclear just what bootstrapping is supposed to be or how it is supposed to work. Others allege that bootstrapping falls prey to the circularity challenge: it cannot explain how new concepts are learned without presupposing that learners already have those very concepts. Drawing on discussions of concept learning fro…Read more
  •  183
    Analogue Magnitude Representations: A Philosophical Introduction
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 66 (4): 829-855. 2015.
    Empirical discussions of mental representation appeal to a wide variety of representational kinds. Some of these kinds, such as the sentential representations underlying language use and the pictorial representations of visual imagery, are thoroughly familiar to philosophers. Others have received almost no philosophical attention at all. Included in this latter category are analogue magnitude representations, which enable a wide range of organisms to primitively represent spatial, temporal, nume…Read more
  •  262
    Why we can’t say what animals think
    Philosophical Psychology 26 (4). 2013.
    Realists about animal cognition confront a puzzle. If animals have real, contentful cognitive states, why can’t anyone say precisely what the contents of those states are? I consider several possible resolutions to this puzzle that are open to realists, and argue that the best of these is likely to appeal to differences in the format of animal cognition and human language.
  •  130
    Sense, Mentalese, and Ontology
    ProtoSociology 30 29-48. 2013.
    Modes of presentation are often posited to accommodate Frege’s puzzle. Philosophers differ, however, in whether they follow Frege in identifying modes of presentation with Fregean senses, or instead take them to be formally individuated symbols of “Mentalese”. Building on Fodor, Margolis and Laurence defend the latter view by arguing that the mind-independence of Fregean senses renders them ontologically suspect in a way that Mentalese symbols are not. This paper shows how Fregeans can withstand…Read more