Josefa Toribio

The study of perception and the role of the senses have recently risen to prominence in philosophy and are now a major area of study and research. However, the philosophical history of the senses remains a relatively neglected subject. Moving beyond the current philosophical canon, this outstanding collection offers a wide-ranging and diverse philosophical exploration of the senses, from the classical period to the present day. Written by a team of international contributors, it is divided into six parts: Perception from Non-Western Perspectives Perception in the Ancient Period Perception in the Medieval Latin/Arabic Period Perception in the Early Modern Period Perception in the Post-Kantian Period Perception in the Contemporary Period. The volume challenges conventional philosophical study of perception by covering a wide range of significant, as well as hitherto overlooked, topics, such as perceptual judgment, temporal and motion illusions, mirror and picture perception, animal senses and cross-modal integration. By investigating the history of the senses in thinkers such as Plotinus, Auriol, Berkeley and Cavendish; and considering the history of the senses in diverse philosophical traditions, including Chinese, Indian, Byzantine, Greek and Latin it brings a fresh approach to studying the history of philosophy itself. Including a thorough introduction as well as introductions to each section by the editors, The Senses and the History of Philosophy is essential reading for students and researchers in the history of philosophy, perception, philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, aesthetics and eastern and non-western philosophy. It will also be extremely useful for those in related disciplines such as psychology, religion, sociology, intellectual history and cognitive sciences.

Recent evidence regarding a novel functionality of the mirror neuron system , a so-called 'space mirror mechanism', seems to reinforce the central role of the MNS in social cognition. According to the space mirror hypothesis, neural mirroring accounts for understanding not just what an observed agent is doing, but also the range of potential actions that a suitably located object affords an observed agent in the absence of any motor behaviour. This paper aims to show that the advocate of this space mirror hypothesis faces a crippling dilemma. Either what observed agents can do remains underdetermined by space mirror representations, and no proper understanding of action potentiality is gained; or, if it is just understanding of potential motor acts that is achieved through the sensorimotor representations generated by shared object-related affordances, the very explanatory role of space mirroring is compromised

This paper has a two-fold goal. First, I defend the view that the prejudicial behaviour that results from implicit biases is best understood as a type of habitual action—as a harmful, yet deeply entrenched, passively acquired, socially relevant type of habit. Second, I explore how characterizing such implicitly biased behaviour as a habit aids our understanding of the responsibility we bear for it. As habits are ultimately susceptible of being controlled, agents ought to be held responsible for their implicit biased actions. Yet, the blaming response should target agents only insofar as they have failed (while being able) to develop a particular kind of ability: the ability to spot the kind of situations that require the exercise of the relevant intellectual, moral, social, and prudential obligations. Being thus responsible, however, is consistent with the agent’s not being blameworthy. For the automaticity of the blamed agent’s implicitly biased behaviour makes it unintentional relative to intellectual, moral, social, and prudential values that she already cares about.

It has recently been argued that beliefs formed on the basis of implicit biases pose a challenge for accessibilism, since implicit biases are consciously inaccessible, yet they seem to be relevant to epistemic justification. Recent empirical evidence suggests, however, that while we may typically lack conscious access to the source of implicit attitudes and their impact on our beliefs and behaviour, we do have access to their content. In this paper, I discuss the notion of accessibility required for this argument to work vis-à-vis these empirical results and offer two ways in which the accessibilist could meet the challenge posed by implicit biases. Ultimately both strategies fail, but the way in which they do, I conclude, reveals something general and important about our epistemic obligations and about the intuitions that inform the role of implicit biases in accessibilist justification.

In this paper, I argue against the view that the representational structure of the implicit attitudes responsible for implicitly biased behaviour is propositional—as opposed to associationist. The proposal under criticism moves from the claim that implicit biased behaviour can occasionally be modulated by logical and evidential considerations to the view that the structure of the implicit attitudes responsible for such biased behaviour is propositional. I argue, in particular, against the truth of this conditional. Sensitivity to logical and evidential considerations, I contend, proves to be an inadequate criterion for establishing the true representational structure of implicit attitudes. Considerations of a different kind, which emphasize the challenges posed by the structural social injustice that implicit attitudes reflect, offer, I conclude, better support for deciding this issue in favour of an associationist view.En este artículo cuestiono la tesis de que la estructura representacional de las actitudes implícitas responsables del comportamiento implícitamente sesgado es proposicional—en lugar de asociacionista. De acuerdo con la propuesta criticada, si la conducta implícita sesgada puede ocasionalmente ser modulada por consideraciones lógicas y evidenciales, entonces la estructura de las actitudes implícitas responsables de esa conducta es proposicional. Cuestiono, en particular, la verdad de este condicional. Sostengo que la sensibilidad de las actitudes implícitas a consideraciones lógicas y evidenciales resulta ser un criterio inadecuado para establecer su verdadera estructura representacional. Consideraciones de otro tipo, que enfatizan los desafíos planteados por la injusticia social estructural que las actitudes implícitas reflejan, ofrecen, concluyo, un mejor apoyo para decidir esta cuestión a favor de una visión asociacionista.

The main goal of this paper is to defend the thesis that the content of know-how states is an accuracy assessable type of nonconceptual content. My argument proceeds in two stages. I argue, first, that the intellectualist distinction between types of ways of grasping the same kind of content is uninformative unless it is tied in with a distinction between kinds of contents. Second, I consider and reject the objection that, if the content of know-how states is non-conceptual, it will be mysterious why attributions of knowing how create opaque contexts. I show that the objection conflates two distinct issues: the nature of the content of know-how states and the semantic evaluability of know-how ascriptions.

In this paper, I argue against the view that the representational structure of the implicit attitudes responsible for implicitly biased behaviour is propositional—as opposed to associationist. The proposal under criticism moves from the claim that implicit biased behaviour can occasionally be modulated by logical and evidential considerations to the view that the structure of the implicit attitudes responsible for such biased behaviour is propositional. I argue, in particular, against the truth of this conditional. Sensitivity to logical and evidential considerations, I contend, proves to be an inadequate criterion for establishing the true representational structure of implicit attitudes. Considerations of a different kind, which emphasize the challenges posed by the structural social injustice that implicit attitudes reflect, offer, I conclude, better support for deciding this issue in favour of an associationist view.

Is action-guiding vision cognitively penetrable? More specifically, is the visual processing that guides our goal-directed actions sensitive to semantic information from cognitive states? This paper critically examines a recent family of arguments whose aim is to challenge a widespread and influential view in philosophy and cognitive science: the view that action-guiding vision is cognitively impenetrable. I argue, in response, that while there may very well be top–down causal influences on action-guiding vision, they should not be taken to be an instance of cognitive penetration. Assuming otherwise is to assign a computational role to the influencing states that they cannot perform. Although questions about cognitive penetrability are ultimately empirical, the issues addressed in this paper are largely philosophical. The discussion here highlights an important set of considerations that help better understand the relations between cognition, vision, and action.

Peacocke's characterization of what he calls implicit conceptions recognizes the significance of a subset of contentful states in making rational behavior intelligible. What Peacocke has to offer in this paper is an account of (i) why we need implicit conceptions; (ii) how we can discover them; (iii) what they explain; (iv) what they are; and (v) how they can help us to better understand some issues in the theory of meaning and the theory of knowledge. The rationalist tradition in which Peacocke's project ought to be located is concerned with the nature of understanding. His notion of implicit conceptions is invoked to explain non-straightforwardly inferential but rational patterns of concept-involving behavior. We come to know about implicit conceptions because we treat the thinker's practices as having a certain representational content. They are implicit in what the thinker does. I intend to focus on the question of what implicit conceptions are (although in doing so some of the other aspects will also come to the fore). I will argue for the following position: that —even at the personal level— certain inferential principles underlie the process that leads to the thinker's reliably differential responses and that subsequently point us in the direction of a notion such as that of an implicit conception. More precisely, I will argue that practical inferential processes are involved in the understanding-based capacities that support our ascription of personal-level implicit conceptions to the thinker. If I am right, then Peacocke's implicit conceptions don't preclude acceptance of personal-level conceptual-role theories because that practical inferential articulation, i.e. that conceptual role, is the implicit conception itself.

In this paper I approach the debate over non-human animals’ concepts from a metaphilosophical perspective. I compare exemplars of a full-fledged and an austere view of concepts and concept possession. A deflationist response to these views main- tains that the austere and the full-fledged theorist each makes claims that are true when they, respectively, assert and deny ‘nonhuman animals have concepts’. I will argue that the deflationist response is misplaced, using an analogy with the debate over the putative non-conceptual content of perceptual experience. The argument turns on the type of intentional explanation that the austere view on concept posses- sion can support. For the deflationist response to be sustainable, adherents of the aus- tere view would need to have substantially weaker commitments to the explanatory power of their account of concepts and concept possession than, in fact, they do.

I raise some doubts about the plausibility of Stanley and Williamson's view that all knowledge-how is just a species of propositional knowledge. By tackling the question of what is involved in entertaining a proposition, I try to show that Stanley and Williamson's position leads to an uncomfortable dilemma. Depending on how we understand the notion of contemplating a proposition, either intuitively central cases of knowing-how cannot be thus classified or we lose our grip on the very idea of propositional knowledge, which then fails to demarcate any clear class of cases. I conclude with a brief discussion of the nature and role of knowledge-how, and its relation to the important, but less explored, notion of expertise.

Let’s consider the following paradox (Fodor [1989], Jackson and Petit [1988] [1992], Drestke [1988], Block [1991], Lepore and Loewer [1987], Lewis [1986], Segal and Sober [1991]): i) The intentional content of a thought (or any other intentional state) is causally relevant to its behavioural (and other) effects. ii) Intentional content is nothing but the meaning of internal representations. But, iii) Internal processors are only sensitive to the syntactic structures of internal representations, not their meanings. Therefore it seems that if we want to defend the idea -absolutely plausible from an intuitive point of view- that mental / intentional states are causally responsible for behavioural outputs and we want to do it on the physicalist basis of any scientific methodology, we will have to give up the conviction that such intentional states qua intentional, i. e. as having a particular meaning, are the ones causally responsible for our behaviour. The path that takes us to mental epiphenomenalism is clear: 1) the causal powers of any event are completely determined by its physical properties; 2) although intentional properties supervene on physical properties, they can’t be identified with them; 3) intentional properties, as intentional, are not causally responsible for behaviour, because they don’t take part in the causal powers of the states to which they belong, i. e., intentional properties are epiphenomenal. Let’s consider now a different yet parallel position to the one just described. There is an important debate in cognitive science about whether the class of mechanisms to which we belong and which the computational modelling project of cognitive processes refers to is best represented by classical or connectionist approaches (McClelland, Rumelhart et. al [1986], Smolensky [1987] [1988], Fodor and Pylyshyn [1988], Pinker and Prince [1988], Clark [1989], Ramsey, Stich and Rumelhart [1991], Clark and Karmiloff-Smith [forthcoming]).In classical, serial processing models, information is encoded in terms of rules that have a linguistic character. In connectionist or parallel distributed processing (PDP) models, the causal relationships among the units that constitute the system determine how the information is processes by the network, although these units don’t have a direct semantic interpretation. But, for both, classical and connectionist models, all the computations can be explained without any reference to the content of the processed information, i.e., in both cases the properties that seem to be responsible for the system’s behaviour are ultimately physical properties nor intentional ones. This situation mirrors thus, within cognitive science, the philosophical discussion concerning the causal efficacy of semantic properties. Now, if in this debate we opt for the classical paradigm, there is a way of finding a solution to the computational version of the epiphenomenalism paradox. This solution is based mainly on the notion of supervenience or, more precisely, on the notion of mereological supervenience (Kim [1984] [1988])1 . The idea of intentional properties supervening on physical properties makes sense within the classical context because there exists an easily isolable supervenience base comprising the syntactic items in the socalled language of thought. But, what happens if we opt for the connectionist paradigm?. The situation here doesn’t seem to favour the use of the same supervenience strategy. For it has been argued (Ramsey, Stich and Garon [1991]) that beliefs, desires, and other mental states are nor, in the connectionist paradigm, individuable as weight or activation states of the system. This is because information is encoded by the network in distributed and superpositional representations, i.e., there are no straightforwardly isolable vehicles at the physical level that can be identified as the articulated supervenience base on which the semantic properties supervene2 . If this is true, then the connectionist not only loses the battle against epiphenomenalism but more drastically, seems to offer a standing invitation to eliminativism, since talk of beliefs and desires, etc. now seems to be floating free of any acceptable scientific underpinning, i.e., she has lost the necessary theoretical apparatus for supporting the intuitive idea that propositional attitudes -beliefs, desires and any mental states with semantic content- are physically realized. This second line of argumentation doesn’t take us to a paradox but to a dilemma: either we accept eliminativism, if connectionist hypothesis are correct or we defend the causal efficacy of mental states with semantic content by showing that, after all, connectionist networks are not plausible cognitive models (Davies [1991]). From my point of view, however, both lines of argumentation need to be revised. The aim of this paper is to find an account of the causal efficacy of content that avoids the aforementioned epiphenomenalist objections and that doesn’t require the discovery of inner symbols in the computational modelling of such contentful mental states. In short, the aim is to find a meeting point where a philosophical story about content and cause and the connectionist computational model can be brought together (Cfr. Clark [1989]).

Dual factor theories of meaning are fatally flawed in at least two ways. First. their very duality constitutes a problem: the two dimensions of meaning (reference and conceptual role) cannot be treated as totally orthogonal without compromising the intuition that much of our linguistic and non linguistic behavior is based on the cognizer’s interaction with the world. Second, Conceptual Role Semantics is not adequate for explaining a crucial feature of linguistic representation, viz., the special kind of compositionality known as concatenative compositionality. Dual factor theories, I conclude, cannot constitute an acceptable philosophical model of content.

In a recent paper, Paul Coates defends a sophisticated dispositional account which allegedly resolves the sceptical paradox developed by Kripke in his monograph on Wittgenstein's treatment of following a rule (Kripke, 1982). Coates' account appeals to a notion of 'homeostasis', unpacked as a subject's second-order disposition to maintain a consistent pattern of extended first-order dispositions regarding her linguistic behavior. This kind of account, Coates contends, provides a naturalistic model for the normativity of intentional properties and thus resolves Kripke's sceptical paradox. In this paper I argue that Coates' second-order dispositional account cannot solve the sceptic's problems regarding meaning and normativity. My main contention is that in order for second-order dispositions to be able to effectively regulate the coordinated responses constitutive of first-order dispositions, those first order dispositions must be independently identifiable. Yet that's precisely what Kripke's sceptical argument calls into question. I shall also argue, in a more positive fashion, that Coates' own appeal to practical breakdowns may suggest a different —and more effective— response to the sceptic's concern

The paper has a negative and a positive side. The negative side argues that the classical notions of narrow and wide content are not suitable for the purposes of psychological explanation. The positive side shows how to characterize an alternative notion of content that is suitable for those purposes. This account is supported by a way of conceptualizing computation that is constitutively dependent upon properties external to the system and empirical research in developmental psychology. My main contention is that an adequate computational explanation of the behavior involved in cognitive activities should invoke a concept of content that can capture the intimate dynamical relationship between the inner and the outer. The notion of content thus reaches out to include the set of skills, abilities and know-hows that an agent deploys in a constantly variable environment. The assumption underlying my attempt to characterize this ecological notion of content is that cognition is better understood when treated as embedded cognition and that the idea of cognitive significance ought to be cashed out in non-individualistic and pragmatic terms.

In this paper I argue on two fronts. First, I press for the view that judging is a type of mental action, as opposed to those who think that judging is involuntary and hence not an action. Second, I argue that judging is specifically a type of non-voluntary mental action. My account of the non-voluntary nature of the mental act of judging differs, however, from standard non-voluntarist views, according to which ‘non-voluntary’ just means regulated by epistemic reasons. In addition, judging is non-voluntary, I contend, because it is partially constituted by the exercise of a non-reason-governed skill. This skill, which I call ‘critical pop-out’, consists of an unreflective, often unconscious, ability to detect the kind of situations in which the reflective abilities that also partially constitute our acts of judging should be deployed. We are responsible for our judgments, I conclude, because in identifying such reflection-inviting situations, we reveal the kind of epistemic agents we are

I argue that findings in support of Adams and Kveraga’s functional forecast model of emotion expression processing help settle the debate between rich and sparse views of the content of perceptual experience. In particular, I argue that these results in social vision suggest that the distinctive phenomenal character of experiences involving high-level properties such as emotions and social traits is best explained by their being visually experienced as opposed to being brought about by perceptual judgments

Left brain‐right brain differences: inquiries, evidence, and new approaches, James F. Iaccino. Hillsdale, NH: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993. ISBN 0–8058–1340–3Artificial intelligence: a philosophical introduction, Jack Copeland Oxford: Blackwell, 1993 ISBN 0–631–18384–1Shadows of the mind, Roger Penrose. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. ISBN 019–8539789Raw feeling: a philosophical account of the essence of consciousness, R. Kirk. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. ISBN 0–19–824081–3Vision: variations on some Berkeleian themes‘, Robert Schwartz Oxford: Blackwell, 1994 ISBN 1–55786–220–6Physicalism, Jeffrey Poland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. ISBN 0–19–824980–2Constructing the subject: historical origins of psychological research, Kurt Danziger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. ISBN 0–521–46785–3 Language in the world: a philosophical enquiry, Max J. Cresswell. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994. ISBN 0–521–44562–0.

Nonconceptualists maintain that there are ways of representing the world that do not reflect the concepts a creature possesses. They claim that the content of these representational states is genuine content because it is subject to correctness conditions, but it is nonconceptual because the creature to which we attribute it need not possess any of the concepts involved in the specification of that content. Appeals to nonconceptual content have seemed especially useful in attempts to capture the representational properties of perceptual experiences, the representational states of pre-linguistic children and non-human animals, the states of subpersonal visual information-processing systems, and the subdoxastic states involved in tacit knowledge of the grammar of a language. Nonconceptual content is also invoked in the explanation of concept possession, concept acquisition, sensorimotor behaviour, and in the analysis of the notion of self-consciousness. The notion of nonconceptual content plays an important role in many discussions about the relationships between perception and thought.

This paper concerns the role of the structural properties of representations in determining the nature of their content. I take as a starting point Fodor's (2007) and Heck's (2007) recent arguments making the iconic structure of perceptual representations essential in establishing their content as content of a different (nonconceptual) kind. I argue that the prima facie state–content error this strategy seems to display is nothing but a case of “state–content error error,” i.e., the mistake of considering that the properties that characterize the type of content certain representations have are indeed independent of their structural properties. I also consider another objection to the general strategy, namely that it falls short of showing that the nonconceptual content of perceptual experiences thus established is the kind of content that figures in true explanations of intentional behavior. I concede this point in respect of Fodor's version of the strategy, while denying that it has any bearing on Heck's approach. The success of this objection in Heck's case ultimately depends, I argue, upon an unjustified commitment to a certain empirically suspect model of perception.