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IntroductionIn Enrique Villanueva (ed.), Perception, Ridgeview Pub. Co. 1996.The book details several well-argued theories aiming to explain how the full, cohesive vista of human vision and perception is possible. The main query is broken down into several parts. The first deals with how we organize our representations of the world and whether these are processed and connected in a logical and sentential manner, or if these involve random connections across our neurons. The next part focuses on the amount of detail in the visual representations themselves and yields two …Read more
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Ships in the Night: Churchland and Ramachandran on Dennett's Theory of ConsciousnessIn Enrique Villanueva (ed.), Perception, Ridgeview Pub. Co. 1996.The chapter summarizes the discussions on perception between Churchland, Ramachandran, and Dennett. The arguments focus on a central issue—the relationship between the actual visual experience and one's internal neural representations. A detailed discourse on Dennett's Theory of Consciousness is provided, with particular focus on his explanations on the phenomenon of “filling in.” The chapter points out several weaknesses in Dennett's work, arising from his attempt to reconcile essentially diver…Read more
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51Philosophical Psychology would like to thank our reviewers for their generous contributions to the journal in 2010. Jonathan Adler Kenneth AizawaPhilosophical Psychology 23 (6): 845-848. 2010.
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15Cognition and the Brain: The Philosophy and Neuroscience Movement (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2005.This volume provides an up to date and comprehensive overview of the philosophy and neuroscience movement, which applies the methods of neuroscience to traditional philosophical problems and uses philosophical methods to illuminate issues in neuroscience. At the heart of the movement is the conviction that basic questions about human cognition, many of which have been studied for millennia, can be answered only by a philosophically sophisticated grasp of neuroscience's insights into the processi…Read more
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18Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Theory of the Mind/BrainJournal of Philosophy 87 (2): 93-102. 1990.
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Colour perceptionIn Mohan Matthen (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Perception, Oxford University Press Uk. 2015.
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169What is it like to be boring and myopic?In Josh Weisberg (ed.), Consciousness (Key Concepts in Philosophy), Polity. 2014.
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1What is it like to be boring and myopic?In Josh Weisberg (ed.), Consciousness (Key Concepts in Philosophy), Polity. 2014.
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11Neonatal imitation in context: Sensorimotor development in the perinatal periodBehavioral and Brain Sciences 40. 2017.Over 35 years ago, Meltzoff and Moore (1977) published their famous article ‘Imitation of facial and manual gestures by human neonates’. Their central conclusion, that neonates can imitate, was and continues to be controversial. Here we focus on an often neglected aspect of this debate, namely on neonatal spontaneous behaviors themselves. We present a case study of a paradigmatic orofacial ‘gesture’, namely tongue protrusion and retraction (TP/R). Against the background of new research on mammal…Read more
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16Beyond neonatal imitation: Aerodigestive stereotypies, speech development, and social interaction in the extended perinatal periodBehavioral and Brain Sciences 40. 2017.In our target article, we argued that the positive results of neonatal imitation are likely to be by-products of normal aerodigestive development. Our hypothesis elicited various responses on the role of social interaction in infancy, the methodological issues about imitation experiments, and the relation between the aerodigestive theory and the development of speech. Here we respond to the commentaries.
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12Lost the Plot? Reconstructing Dennett's Multiple Drafts Theory of ConsciousnessMind and Language 11 (1): 1-43. 1996.In Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett presents the Multiple Drafts Theory of consciousness, a very brief, largely empirical theory of brain function. From these premises, he draws a number of quite radical conclusions—for example, the conclusion that conscious events have no determinate time of occurrence. The problem, as many readers have pointed out, is that there is little discernible route from the empirical premises to the philosophical conclusions. In this article, I try to reconstruc…Read more
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20The prevalence of synaesthesia depends on early language learningConsciousness and Cognition 48 212-231. 2017.
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13Synesthesia and learning: a critical review and novel theoryFrontiers in Human Neuroscience 8. 2014.
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On Piranhas, Narcissism and Mental Representation: An Essay on Intentionality and NaturalismDissertation, University of Michigan. 1989.This dissertation is motivated by the following question: Is the portrayal of mind/brain processes as representations--as entities that in some sense reflect, correspond with, or symbolize the world--particularily apt? Through detailed examples from the neuroscientific literature, with an emphasis on sensory processing, I argue that this way of viewing brain functioning is typically misleading. It depicts neural functioning as a bipartite process: first the production of a set of neural "calibra…Read more
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20More than Mere Colouring: The Role of Spectral Information in Human VisionBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 65 (1): 125-171. 2014.A common view in both philosophy and the vision sciences is that, in human vision, wavelength information is primarily ‘for’ colouring: for seeing surfaces and various media as having colours. In this article we examine this assumption of ‘colour-for-colouring’. To motivate the need for an alternative theory, we begin with three major puzzles from neurophysiology, puzzles that are not explained by the standard theory. We then ask about the role of wavelength information in vision writ large. How…Read more
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11More than mere coloring: The art of spectral visionBehavioral and Brain Sciences 15 (1): 26-27. 1992.
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13Grapheme-color synaesthesia benefits rule-based Category learningConsciousness and Cognition 21 (3): 1533-1540. 2012.Researchers have long suspected that grapheme-color synaesthesia is useful, but research on its utility has so far focused primarily on episodic memory and perceptual discrimination. Here we ask whether it can be harnessed during rule-based Category learning. Participants learned through trial and error to classify grapheme pairs that were organized into categories on the basis of their associated synaesthetic colors. The performance of synaesthetes was similar to non-synaesthetes viewing graphe…Read more
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31What is it like to be boring and myopic?In B. Dahlbom (ed.), Dennett and His Critics: Demystifying Mind, Blackwell. 1993.
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21A bat without qualities?In Martin Davies & Glyn W. Humphreys (eds.), Consciousness: psychological and philosophical essays, Blackwell. pp. 345--358. 1993.
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21Of Sensory Systems and the "Aboutness" of Mental StatesJournal of Philosophy 93 (7): 337-372. 1996.
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2Color Perception: Philosophical, Psychological, Artistic, and Computational PerspectivesOxford University Press. 2000.
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7Perception (edited book)Oxford University Press. 1996.Throughout the text, fundamental questions concerning the nature of visual perception are addressed.
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2IntroductionBiology and Philosophy 18 (1): 1-11. 2003.Nativists about syntactic processing have argued that linguisticprocessing, understood as the implementation of a rule-basedcomputational architecture, is spared in Williams syndrome, (WMS)subjects – and hence that it provides evidence for a geneticallyspecified language module. This argument is bolstered by treatingSpecific Language Impairments (SLI) and WMS as a developmental doubledissociation which identifies a syntax module. Neuroconstructivists haveargued that the cognitive deficits of a d…Read more
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1Ships in the night: Churchland and Ramachandran on Dennett's theory of consciousnessIn Enrique Villanueva (ed.), Perception, Ridgeview Pub. Co. 1996.
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2A question of contentIn Andrew Brook & Don Ross (eds.), Daniel Dennett, Cambridge University Press. pp. 206. 2002.
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Biology |
Philosophy of Physical Science |