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22William Bechtel and Linus Ta-Lun Huang, Philosophy of Neuroscience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2022), 94 pp., $20.00 (Paperback) (review)Erkenntnis 1-5. forthcoming.This new monograph _Philosophy of Neuroscience_ is a novel contribution to the relevant literatures. In this book review, I first summarise its contents, and then provide several critical points for the authors to consider. Even with these critical suggestions, the book is still highly recommended to those who work in philosophy of neuroscience, philosophy in neuroscience, neurophilosophy, philosophy of psychology, and cognitive sciences.
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25The language of tactile thoughtBehavioral and Brain Sciences 46. 2023.The target article argues that language-of-thought hypothesis (LoTH) is applicable to various domains, including perception. However, it focusses exclusively on the visual case, which is limited in this regard. I argue for two ideas in this commentary: first, their case can be extended to other modalities such as touch; and second, the status of those six criteria needs to be further clarified.
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16Capturing the Elusive SelfPhilosophical Psychology. forthcoming.Psychology and philosophy have maintained a special relationship since very long ago. Nowadays, many psychologists stay away from philosophy and focus on the empirical methods in their studies. The...
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396Perspectival shapes are viewpoint-dependent relational propertiesPsychological Review (1): 307-310. 2022.Recently, there is a renewed debate concerning the role of perspective in vision. Morales et al. (2020) present evidence that, in the case of viewing a rotated coin, the visual system is sensitive to what has often been called “perspectival shapes.” It has generated vigorous discussions, including an online symposium by Morales and Cohen, an exchange between Linton (2021) and Morales et al. (2021), and most recently, a fierce critique by Burge and Burge (2022), in which they launch various conce…Read more
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29Taking Conceptual Issues Really Seriously: One Next Step for the Cognitive Science of ConsciousnessCognitive Science 46 (11). 2022.In this letter we focus on the cognitive science of consciousness. The general message is that, while this interdisciplinary area has made much progress in recent years, there is a tendency of downplaying conceptual issues, and therefore underestimating the difficulties of various problems. We briefly focus on a few prominent examples only, due to the space limit, but the general message should be clear: this recent tendency can be problematic for the progress of the consciousness branch of cogn…Read more
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14Demystifying Consciousness and Non-cognitive Theories of ConsciousnessJournal of Neurophilosophy 1 (2). 2022.In “A conceptual framework for consciousness,” Michael Graziano provides a substantive conceptual framework for explaining consciousness. In this commentary I will focus on the way Graziano sets up the issue, which fails to capture the opposition accurately. The opponent of Graziano’s approach is no mysticism, but non-cognitive theories exemplified by, e.g., Ned Block’s Overflow thesis. Without identifying the opponent accurately, its significance cannot be fully appreciated. In this commentary …Read more
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13Bodily AwarenessInternet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2022.Bodily Awareness Most of us agree that we are conscious, and we can be consciously aware of public things such as mountains, tables, foods, and so forth; we can also be consciously aware of our own psychological states and episodes such as emotions, thoughts, perceptions, and so forth. Each of us can be aware of … Continue reading Bodily Awareness →
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14Radical internalism meets radical externalism or: Smithies’ epistemology transcendentalisedAsian Journal of Philosophy 1 (1): 1-8. 2022.In The Epistemic Role of Consciousness (2019), Declan Smithies has carried out a thorough radical internalist programme. Along the way he compares and contrasts many different views, including a group he calls “radical externalism.” From the labels, it might seem that radical internalism and radical externalism must be very different in their core commitments. In this short note, I will single out a version of radical externalism – factivism, more specifically John McDowell’s version (1994, 1995…Read more
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40Spatial representations in sensory modalitiesMind and Language 37 (3): 485-500. 2022.Some sensory modalities, such as sight, touch and audition, are arguably spatial, and one way to understand these spatial senses is to investigate spatial representations in them. Here I focus on a specific element in this area— the interplay between perspectival variation and spatial constancy—and discuss recent interdisciplinary works on this topic. With these relevant experimental works, we will see clearly how traditional controversies in philosophy, for example, whether we perceive perspect…Read more
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25Touch and other Somatosensory SensesIn Felipe De Brigard & Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (eds.), Neuroscience and philosophy, The Mit Press. pp. 211-240. 2022.In 1925, David Katz published an influential monograph on touch, Der Aufbau der Tastwelt, which was translated into English in 1989. Although it is called “the world of touch,” it also discusses the thermal and the nociceptive senses, albeit briefly. In this chapter, we will follow this approach, but we will speak about “somatosensory senses” in general in order to remind ourselves that perceptions of temperatures and pains should also be considered together in this context.
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12PerceptionIn Benjamin D. Young & Carolyn Dicey Jennings (eds.), Mind, Cognition, and Neuroscience: A Philosophical Introduction, Routledge. pp. 367-384. 2021.Humans and other animals perceive with many different sensory modalities, includ- ing olfaction, touch, audition, vision, echolocation, proprioception, gustation, and some other senses, depending on different criteria and definitions. Given its broad range, it is not possible to give a comprehensive overview of all of the philosophi- cal, psychological, and neuroscientific studies about perception in one chapter, so what will be offered here is quite selective. In the introduction, we will discu…Read more
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30John McDowell on Worldly Subjectivity: Oxford Kantianism Meets Phenomenology and Cognitive SciencesBloomsbury Academic. 2021.John McDowell's philosophical ideas are both influential and comprehensive, encompassing philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, epistemology, ethics, metaphysics and the history of philosophy. This book is a much-needed systematic overview of McDowell's thought that offers a clear and accessible route through the main elements of his philosophy. Arguing that the world and minded human subject are constitutively interdependent, the book examines and critically engages with McDowell's vi…Read more
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17Introduction: Sensing the self in worldAnalytic Philosophy 62 (1): 57-60. 2021.Analytic Philosophy, Volume 62, Issue 1, Page 57-60, March 2021.
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On the Very Idea of a Tactile Field, or: A Plea for Skin SpaceIn Tony Cheng, Ophelia Deroy & Charles Spence (eds.), Spatial Senses: Philosophy of Perception in an Age of Science, Routledge. pp. 226-247. 2019.
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1Is Bálint's Syndrome a Counterexample of the Kantian Spatiality Thesis?In Tony Cheng, Ophelia Deroy & Charles Spence (eds.), Spatial Senses: Philosophy of Perception in an Age of Science, Routledge. pp. 31-45. 2019.
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1Molyneux’s Question and Somatosensory SpacesIn Brian Glenney Gabriele Ferretti (ed.), Molyneux’s Question and the History of Philosophy, Routledge. 2020.
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11Review of Perception and Reality in Kant, Husserl, and McDowell (review)Phenomenological Reviews 6. 2020.
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12Introduction: striving for objectivity in spacePhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 18 (5): 791-797. 2019.In this special issue, we put together papers that explore the theme “objectivity, space, and mind” from various angles. In the introduction we minimally discuss what are involved in this theme.
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79ConsciousnessIn Heather Salazar (ed.), Introduction to Philosophy: Philosophy of Mind, Rebus Foundation Publishing. pp. 41-48. 2019.The term “consciousness” is very often, though not always, interchangeable with the term “awareness,” which is more colloquial to many ears. We say things like “are you aware that ...” often. Sometimes we say “have you noticed that ... ?” to express similar thoughts, and this indicates a close connection between consciousness (awareness) and attention (noticing), which we will come back to later in this chapter. Ned Block, one of the key figures in this area, provides a useful characterization o…Read more
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20Spatial Senses: Philosophy of Perception in an Age of Science (edited book)Routledge. 2019.This collection of essays brings together research on sense modalities in general and spatial perception in particular in a systematic and interdisciplinary way. It updates a long-standing philosophical fascination with this topic by incorporating theoretical and empirical research from cognitive science, neuroscience, and psychology. The book is divided thematically to cover a wide range of established and emerging issues. Part I covers notions of objectivity and subjectivity in spatial percept…Read more
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31Post-perceptual confidence and supervaluative matching profileInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (3): 249-277. 2022.ABSTRACT Issues concerning the putative perception/cognition divide are not only age-old, but also resurface in contemporary discussions in various forms. In this paper, I connect a relatively new debate concerning perceptual confidence to the perception/cognition divide. The term ‘perceptual confidence’ is quite common in the empirical literature, but there is an unsettled question about it, namely: are confidence assignments perceptual or post-perceptual? John Morrison in two recent papers put…Read more
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190Quine's Naturalism and BehaviorismsMetaphilosophy 49 (4): 548-567. 2018.This paper investigates the complicated relations between various versions of naturalism, behaviorism, and mentalism within the framework of W. V. O. Quine's thinking. It begins with Roger Gibson's reconstruction of Quine's behaviorisms and argues that it lacks a crucial ontological element and misconstrues the relation between philosophy and science. After getting clear of Quine's naturalism, the paper distinguishes between evidential, methodological, and ontological behaviorisms. The evidentia…Read more
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155A mechanism for spatial perception on human skinCognition 178 (C): 236-243. 2018.Our perception of where touch occurs on our skin shapes our interactions with the world. Most accounts of cutaneous localisation emphasise spatial transformations from a skin-based reference frame into body-centred and external egocentric coordinates. We investigated another possible method of tactile localisation based on an intrinsic perception of ‘skin space’. The arrangement of cutaneous receptive fields (RFs) could allow one to track a stimulus as it moves across the skin, similarly to the …Read more
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118The Recurrent Model of Bodily Spatial PhenomenologyJournal of Consciousness Studies 25 (3-4): 55-70. 2018.In this paper, we introduce and defend the recurrent model for understanding bodily spatial phenomenology. While Longo, Azañón and Haggard (2010) propose a bottom-up model, Bermúdez (2017) emphasizes the top-down aspect of the information processing loop. We argue that both are only half of the story. Section 1 intro- duces what the issues are. Section 2 starts by explaining why the top- down, descending direction is necessary with the illustration from the ‘body-based tactile rescaling’ para…Read more
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100Spatial Perception and the Sense of TouchIn Frederique De Vignemont & Adrian J. T. Alsmith (eds.), The Subject's Matter: Self-Consciousness and the Body, Mit Press. pp. 97-114. 2017.It remains controversial whether touch is a truly spatial sense or not. Many philosophers suggest that, if touch is indeed spatial, it is only through its alliances with exploratory movement, and with proprioception. Here we develop the notion that a minimal yet important form of spatial perception may occur in purely passive touch. We do this by showing that the array of tactile receptive fields in the skin, and appropriately relayed to the cortex, may contain the same basic informational bu…Read more
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123The trajectory of selfTrends in Cognitive Sciences 20 (7): 481-482. 2016.In a recent Opinion article, Sui and Humphreys [1] argue that experimental findings suggest self is ‘special’, in that self-reference serves a binding function within human cognitive economy. Contrasting their view with other functionalist positions, chiefly Dennett's [2], they deny that self is a convenient fiction and adduce findings to show that a ‘core self representation’ serves as an ‘integrative glue’ helping to bind distinct types of information as well as distinct stages of psycho- logi…Read more
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134World and Subject: Themes from McDowellDissertation, National Chengchi University, Taiwan. 2008.This essay is an inquiry into John McDowell’s thinking on ‘subjectivity.’ The project consists in two parts. On the one hand, I will discuss how McDowell understands and responds to the various issues he is tackling; on the other, I will approach relevant issues concerning subjectivity by considering different aspects of it: a subject as a perceiver, knower, thinker, speaker, agent, person and (self-) conscious being in the world. The inquiry begins by identifying and resolving a tension generat…Read more
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The Nature of Perceptual Experience |
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