It seems natural to think that emotional experiences associated with a memory of a past event are new and present emotional states triggered by the remembered event. This common conception has nonetheless been challenged at the beginning of the 20th century by intellectuals who considered that emotions can be encoded and retrieved, and that emotional aspects linked to memories of the personal past need not necessary to be new emotional responses caused by the act of recollection. They called this specific (...) kind of memories “affective memories” and defended their existence. My aim here is to expound the historical background of this debate as well as the characterization and development of the notion of affective memory since its first inception. I aim to show that although the debate was left unresolved and the term disappeared from academy around 1930, many of the characterizations of the nature of emotions and memory done by the advocates of affective memory have reappeared in the scientific agenda and been further developed during the last decades. (shrink)

This chapter argues that epistemic uses of the imagination are a sui generis form of reasoning. The argument proceeds in two steps. First, there are imaginings which instantiate the epistemic structure of reasoning. Second, reasoning with imagination is not reducible to reasoning with doxastic states. Thus, the epistemic role of the imagination is that it is a distinctive way of reasoning out what follows from our prior evidence. This view has a number of important implications for the epistemology of the (...) imagination. For one thing, it clarifies the epistemic role of widely invoked “constraints” on the imagination. For another, it highlights important and underappreciated disanalogies between how perceptual experiences and imaginings justify beliefs. Ultimately, the view that we can reason with imagination offers an illuminating and theoretically fruitful framework through which to understand the epistemic structure of the imagination. (shrink)

Both perception and imagination seem to play a crucial role in our engagement with fiction films but whether they really do so, and which role they possibly play, is controversial. On the one hand, a fiction film, as film, is a depiction that invites us to perceive the events portrayed. On the other hand, as fiction, it invites us to imagine the story told. Thus, after watching the film Alien, one might say that one saw Ripley fighting the monster but (...) one might also say that one imagined Ripley fighting the monster. Are these two reports compatible? If they are, how can we combine them so to make sense of them? If, instead, they are not, which of them should we give up? (shrink)

It is widely believed, among philosophers of literature, that imagining contradictions is as easy as telling or reading a story with contradictory content. Italo Calvino’s The Nonexistent Knight, for instance, concerns a knight who performs many brave deeds, but who does not exist. Anything at all, they argue, can be true in a story, including contradictions and other impossibilia. While most will readily concede that we cannot objectually imagine contradictions, they nevertheless insist that we can propositionally imagine them, and regularly (...) do, simply by entertaining a text which prompts us to do so. I argue that this narrative does not bear scrutiny for two main reasons. First, because propositional imagining is beside the point, where truth in fiction is concerned; evaluating truth in fiction engages the cognitive architecture in ways that prohibit the mobilization of merely propositional imagination to that end. And second, because it is not obvious, given the strategies usually suggested, that we ever propositionally imagine contradictions in the first place—in fact, it seems we go out of our way to avoid directly imagining them. (shrink)

What role does the imagination play in scientific progress? After examining several studies in cognitive science, I argue that one thing the imagination does is help to increase scientific understanding, which is itself indispensable for scientific progress. Then, I sketch a transcendental justification of the role of imagination in this process.

This essay argues that there are theoretical benefits to keeping distinct—more pervasively than the literature has done so far—the psychological states of imagining that p versus believing that in-the-story p, when it comes to cognition of fiction and other forms of narrative. Positing both in the minds of a story’s audience helps explain the full range of reactions characteristic of story consumption. This distinction also has interesting conceptual and explanatory dimensions that haven’t been carefully observed, and the two mental state (...) types make distinct contributions to generating emotional responses to stories. Finally, the differences between the mental states illuminate how a given story can be both shared with others and at the same time experienced as personal. (shrink)

Vor etwa einem Jahrhundert entwickelte sich im deutschsprachigen Raum imRahmen einer allgemeinen Charakterisierung unserer ästhetischen Erfahrungvon Kunst eine umfassende Debatte über die Natur und die Möglichkeit vonGefühlen über fiktionale Charaktere und Situationen. Die damalige Debatteweist große Ähnlichkeit zur heutigen analytischen Debatte über das Paradoxonder Fiktion auf. Trotz des unterschiedlichen jeweiligen historischen Kontextesfindet sich in der analytischen Debatte und in der Philosophie zu Beginn des20. Jahrhunderts fast der gleiche Lösungsansatz. Gefühle über Fiktionen seienQuasi-Gefühle, d.h. ein gefühlsartiges Phänomen mit einer Realität sui (...) generis ,dem im Unterschied zu den wirklichen Gefühlen kein Urteil über die Existenzdes Objektes zugrunde liegt und dem die Verbindung zur Motivation fehlt. Zieldieses Aufsatzes ist es, eine Untersuchung der These der Quasi-Gefühle An-fang des 20. Jahrhunderts zu unternehmen sowie die Analogien zur heutigenDebatte zu zeigen. Der Aufsatz baut sich um drei thematische Achsen herumauf. Zunächst wird eine historische Darstellung der These der Gefühle über Fiktionen bei Groos, Lipps, Lange, Geiger und Külpe unternommen. Diese bil-det den Rahmen für die Debatte über die Quasi-Gefühle in der Grazer Schule.Anschließend wird die Aufmerksamkeit auf die Diskussion über Quasi-Gefühle bei Meinong, Witasek, Saxinger und Schwarz gerichtet. Zuletzt wer-den die Berührungspunkte zur heutigen analytischen Debatte im Ausgang vonsystematischen Fragen aufgezeigt. (shrink)

The following paper considers one important feature of our experiential or ‘recollective’ memories, namely their spatial perspectival characteristics. I begin by considering the ‘Past-Dependency-Claim’, which states that every recollective memory (or ‘R-memory’) has its spatial perspectival characteristics in virtue of the subject’s present awareness of the spatial perspectival characteristics of a relevant past perceptual experience. Although the Past-Dependency-Claim might for various reasons seem particularly attractive, I show that it is false. I then proceed to develop and defend the ‘Present-Dependency-Claim’, namely (...) the claim that the spatial perspectival characteristics of an R-memory depend on the spatial perspectival characteristics of perceptual experiences that the subject has at the time at which the R-memory occurs. Lastly, I discuss the phenomenon of so-called ‘observer-memories’, which presents a special challenge for any attempt to account for the spatial perspectival characteristics of R-memories. I argue that we have no good reason to deny that the relevant experiences should count as memories, and I show that we can account for the spatial perspectival characteristics of observer-memories with the help of the ‘Present-Dependency-Claim’. More generally, the paper shows that certain events that occur in a subject’s mental life (namely, a subject’s R-memories) are necessarily dependent on other events that occur in the relevant subject’s mental life (namely, on certain perceptual experiences). This more general conclusion in turn should be relevant for any attempt to develop an appropriate account of a subject’s mental life as a whole. (shrink)

According to the BD-model of mindreading, we primarily understand others in terms of beliefs and desires. In this article we review a number of objections against explicit versions of the BD-model, and discuss the prospects of using its implicit counterpart as an explanatory model of early emerging socio-cognitive abilities. Focusing on recent findings on so-called ‘implicit’ false belief understanding, we put forward a number of considerations against the adoption of an implicit BD-model. Finally, we explore a different way to make (...) sense of implicit false belief understanding in terms of keeping track of affordances. (shrink)

Abstract In this article, we investigate the merits of an enactive view of cognition for the contemporary debate about social cognition. If enactivism is to be a genuine alternative to classic cognitivism, it should be able to bridge the “cognitive gap”, i.e. provide us with a convincing account of those higher forms of cognition that have traditionally been the focus of its cognitivist opponents. We show that, when it comes to social cognition, current articulations of enactivism are—despite their celebrated successes (...) in explaining some cases of social interaction—not yet up to the task. This is because they (1) do not pay sufficient attention to the role of offline processing or “decoupling”, and (2) obscure the cognitive gap by overemphasizing the role of phenomenology. We argue that the main challenge for the enactive view will be to acknowledge the importance of both coupled (online) and decoupled (offline) processes for basic and advanced forms of (social) cognition. To meet this challenge, we articulate a dynamic embodied view of cognition. We illustrate the fruitfulness of this approach by recourse to recent findings on false belief understanding. Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-23 DOI 10.1007/s11097-011-9223-1 Authors Leon C. de Bruin, Department of Philosophy II, Ruhr-University Bochum, Universitätsstr. 150, 44801 Bochum, Germany Lena Kästner, Department of Philosophy II, Ruhr-University Bochum, Universitätsstr. 150, 44801 Bochum, Germany Journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences Online ISSN 1572-8676 Print ISSN 1568-7759. (shrink)

We outline a theory of one puzzling aspect of human cognition: a tendency to exaggerate the degree to which agency is manifested in the world. We call this over‐coherent thinking. We use Pylyshyn's idea of cognitive penetrability to help characterize this notion. We argue that this kind of thinking is essentially narrative in form rather than theoretical. We develop a theory of the relation between the degree of narrativity in a representation and its aptness to represent, and to express, mind. (...) We review the prospects for several theories about how over‐coherent thinking gains a purchase on motivation. We argue that progress in this difficult area may require the abandonment of a categorical belief/imagination distinction in favour of vaguely specified clusterings in a many‐dimensional cognitive space. We conclude with the idea that an error‐prone system for the retention of ideas that are low in some of the characteristics generally thought desirable in belief might emerge as a result of an arms‐race between deceivers and deceiver‐detectors. (shrink)

The article explores the basic conceptual relationship between social cognition, intersubjectivity and self-consciousness. A much-debated recent approach to social cognition, the so-called interaction theory, is the view that the ability to perceive, understand and interpret the behavior of others relies on interaction in the sense of mutual coordination of the embodied agents involved. It will be shown that this notion of reciprocity is too weak in order to fully account for social understanding. It will be argued that the idea of (...) reciprocity should at least in some cases be conceived of as a stance persons adopt towards each other, which in turn presupposes that they acknowledge each other as self-conscious agents. This view is inspired by an argument originally introduced by Johann Gottlieb Fichte. (shrink)

In the past decade, experimental philosophy---the attempt at making progress on philosophical problems using empirical methods---has thrived in a wide range of domains. However, only in recent years has aesthetics succeeded in drawing the attention of experimental philosophers. The present paper constitutes the first survey of these works and of the nascent field of 'experimental philosophy of aesthetics'. We present both recent experimental works by philosophers on topics such as the ontology of aesthetics, aesthetic epistemology, aesthetic concepts, and imagination, as (...) well as research from other disciplines that not only are relevant to philosophy of aesthetics but also open new avenues of research for experimental philosophy of aesthetics. Overall, we conclude that the birth of an experimental philosophy of aesthetics is good news not only for aesthetics but also for experimental philosophy itself, as it contributes to broaden the scope of experimental philosophy. (shrink)

Autism Spectrum Condition presents a challenge to social and relational accounts of the self, precisely because it is broadly seen as a disorder impacting social relationships. Many influential theories argue that social deficits and impairments of the self are the core problems in ASC. Predictive processing approaches address these based on general purpose neurocognitive mechanisms that are expressed atypically. Here we use the High, Inflexible Precision of Prediction Errors in Autism approach in the context of cultural niche construction to explain (...) atypicalities of the relational self, specifically its minimal, extended, and intersubjective aspects. We contend that the social self in ASC should not be seen as impaired, but rather as an outcome of atypical niche construction. We unpack the scientific, ethical, and practical consequences of this view, and discuss implications for how the challenges that autistic persons face should be approached. (shrink)

Autism Spectrum Condition presents a challenge to social and relational accounts of the self, precisely because it is broadly seen as a disorder impacting social relationships. Many influential theories argue that social deficits and impairments of the self are the core problems in ASC. Predictive processing approaches address these based on general purpose neurocognitive mechanisms that are expressed atypically. Here we use the High, Inflexible Precision of Prediction Errors in Autism approach in the context of cultural niche construction to explain (...) atypicalities of the relational self, specifically its minimal, extended, and intersubjective aspects. We contend that the social self in ASC should not be seen as impaired, but rather as an outcome of atypical niche construction. We unpack the scientific, ethical, and practical consequences of this view, and discuss implications for how the challenges that autistic persons face should be approached. (shrink)

In this paper I present an account of musical arousal that takes into account key demands of formalist philosophers such as Peter Kivy and Nick Zangwill. Formalists prioritise our understanding and appreciation of the music itself. As a result, they demand that any feelings we have in response to music must be directed at the music alone, without being distracted by non-musical associations. To accommodate these requirements I appeal to a mechanism of contagion which I synthesize with the expectation-based arousal (...) mechanism proposed by Leonard Meyer. This account connects musical expressivity and arousal in a way that formalists have rejected, but I argue that it provides the best explanation of our observations of listener responses while also focusing on the music itself. (shrink)

Different notions of objectivity support different notions of what is required for a moral value or obligation to be experienced as objective. If the objectivity of a property requires that it can exist even when we fail to notice its existence, then experiencing a property as objective will require that we imagine it appearing in some way that is not presently available to us. Explaining what that imagining involves is the central task of this paper. Defending the epistemic value of (...) such imagining is a secondary aim. (shrink)

Works of fiction are alleged to differ from works of nonfiction in instructing their audience to imagine their content. Indeed, works of fiction have been defined in terms of this feature: they are works that mandate us to imagine their content. This paper examines this definition of works of fiction, focusing on the nature of the activity that ensues in response to reading or watching fiction. Investigating how imaginings function in other contexts, I show, first, that they presuppose a cognitive (...) infrastructure encompassing at least one additional kind of mental state, whose role is to determine, to some degree, truth in an imaginary world. I then discuss the implications for the definition of fiction, showing that the definition should be refined to accommodate the structure that imagining presupposes: a work counts as fiction just in case it mandates us, not only to imagine, but to engage in a more complex mental activity, an activity that in addition to imagining, involves positing a backdrop for our imaginings. (shrink)

This paper puts forward an account of imaginative immersion. Elaborating on Kendall Walton’s thesis that imagining aims at the fictional truth, it first argues that imaginings are inherently rule- or norm-governed: they are ‘regulated’ by that which is presented as fictionally true. It then shows that an imaginer can follow the rule or norm mandating her to imagine the propositions presented as fictional truths either by acquiring explicit beliefs about how the rule (norm) is to be followed, or directly, without (...) acquiring such beliefs. It proceeds to argue that to the extent that an imaginer follows this rule (norm) without holding such beliefs, she is more immersed in her imaginings. The general idea is that immersion in an activity is a matter of following rules or norms that apply to that activity without explicitly thinking about how to follow them, that is, without ‘doxastic mediation.’ Lastly, the paper shows that this thesis can explain various features associated with imaginative immersion, such as the sort of attentiveness it involves, the emotional response it generates, and its relation to spoilers. (shrink)

This paper explores the sense in which correctness applies to belief-like imaginings. It begins by establishing that when we imagine, we ‘direct’ our imaginings at a certain imaginary world, taking the propositions we imagine to be assessed for truth in that world. It then examines the relation between belief-like imagining and positing truths in an imaginary world. Rejecting the claim that correctness, in the literal sense, is applicable to imaginings, it shows that the imaginer takes on, vis-à-vis the imaginary world, (...) the first-person perspective of a believer. Imaginings, it concludes, ‘mimic’ beliefs with respect to the property of being correct or incorrect by virtue of having true or false content. (shrink)

Suppose you’re imagining that it’s raining hard. You then proceed to imagine, as part of the same imaginative project, that you believe that it isn’t raining. Such an imaginative project is possible if the two imaginings arise in succession. But what about simultaneously imagining that it’s raining and that you believe that it isn’t raining? I will argue that, under certain conditions, such an imagining is impossible. After discussing these conditions, I will suggest an explanation of this impossibility. Elaborating on (...) the view outlined in Walton (1990), I will argue that the impossibility follows from the fact that imaginings ‘mimic’ beliefs in aiming at the fictionally true, just as beliefs aim at the true. (shrink)

Predictive processing (PP) accounts of perception are unique not merely in that they postulate a unity between perception and imagination. Rather, they are unique in claiming that perception should be conceptualised in terms of imagination and that the two involve an identity of neural implementation. This paper argues against this postulated unity, on both conceptual and empirical grounds. Conceptually, the manner in which PP theorists link perception and imagination belies an impoverished account of imagery as cloistered from the external world (...) in its intentionality, akin to a virtual reality, as well as endogenously generated. Yet this ignores a whole class of imagery whose intentionality is directed on the actual environment—projected mental imagery—and also ignores the fact that imagery may be triggered crossmodally in a bottom-up, stimulus-driven way. Empirically, claiming that imagery and perception share neural circuitry ignores relevant clinical results in this area. These evidence substantial perception/imagery neural dissociations, most notably in the case of aphantasia. Taken together, the arguments here suggest that PP theorists should substantially temper, if not outright abandon, their claim to a perception/imagination unity. (shrink)

What is the relationship between perception and mental imagery? I aim to eliminate an answer that I call perceptualism about mental imagery. Strong perceptualism, defended by Bence Nanay, predictive processing theorists, and several others, claims that imagery is a kind of perceptual state. Weak perceptualism, defended by M. G. F. Martin and Matthew Soteriou, claims that mental imagery is a representation of a perceptual state, a view sometimes called The Dependency Thesis. Strong perceptualism is to be rejected since it misclassifies (...) imagery disorders and abnormalities as perceptual disorders and abnormalities. Weak Perceptualism is to be rejected since it gets wrong the aim and accuracy conditions of a whole class of mental imagery–projected mental imagery–and relies on an impoverished concept of perceptual states, ignoring certain of their structural features. Whatever the relationship between perception and imagery, the perceptualist has it wrong. (shrink)

This paper introduces a novel conceptualisation of mental imagery; namely, that is grease for the mind’s gears (MGT). MGT is not just a metaphor. Rather, it describes an important and overlooked higher-order function of mental imagery: that it aids various mental faculties discharge their characteristic functional roles. MGT is motivated by reflection on converging evidence from clinical, experimental and social psychology and solves at least two neglected conceptual puzzles about mental imagery. The first puzzle concerns imagery’s architectural promiscuity; that is, (...) its ability to assist diverse mental faculties and perform many different functions when doing so. The second puzzle concerns how to square imagery’s architectural promiscuity with its psychopathological relevance; that is, its being a maintaining cause, and possibly even a partial constituent, of several psychological disorders, including post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder. Mental imagery helps and harms human psychology to extreme degrees and this is something that calls for elucidation. MGT says that instead of facing perplexing heterogeneities here, we instead face a significant unity. On this score, MGT is argued to be superior to the currently dominant conception of imagery in the philosophical literature; namely, as a perception-like state of mind. (shrink)

Imagination has received a great deal of attention in different fields such as psychology, philosophy and the cognitive sciences, in which some works provide a detailed account of the mechanisms involved in the creation and elaboration of imaginary worlds. Although imagination has also been formalized using different logical systems, none of them captures those dynamic mechanisms. In this work, we take inspiration from the Common Frame for Imagination Acts, that identifies the different processes involved in the creation of imaginary worlds, (...) and we use it to define a dynamic formal system called the Logic of Imagination Acts. We build our logic by using a possible-worlds semantics, together with a new set of static and dynamic modal operators. The role of the new dynamic operators is to call different algorithms that encode how the formal model is expanded in order to capture the different mechanisms involved in the creation and development of imaginary worlds. We provide the definitions of the language, the semantics and the algorithms, together with an example that shows how the model is expanded. By the end, we discuss some interesting features of our system, and we point out to possible lines of future work. (shrink)

Creativity is generally thought to be the production of things that are novel and valuable. Humans are unique in the extent of their creativity, which plays a central role in innovation and problem solving, as well as in the arts. But what are the cognitive sources of novelty? More particularly, what are the cognitive sources of stochasticity in creative production? I will argue that they belong to two broad categories. One is associative, enabling the selection of goal-relevant ideas that have (...) become activated by happenstance in an unrelated context. The other relies on selection processes that leverage stochastic fluctuations in neural activity. At the same time, I will address a central puzzle, which is to understand how the outputs of stochastic processes can nevertheless generally fall within task constraints. While the components appealed to in the accounts that I offer are well established, the ways in which I combine them together are new. (shrink)

Theories of children's developing understanding of mind tend to emphasize either individualistic processes of theory formation, maturation, or introspection, or the process of enculturation. However, such theories must be able to account for the accumulating evidence of the role of social interaction in the development of social understanding. We propose an alternative account, according to which the development of children's social understanding occurs within triadic interaction involving the child's experience of the world as well as communicative interaction with others about (...) their experience and beliefs (Chapman 1991; 1999). It is through such triadic interaction that children gradually construct knowledge of the world as well as knowledge of other people. We contend that the extent and nature of the social interaction children experience will influence the development of children's social understanding. Increased opportunity to engage in cooperative social interaction and exposure to talk about mental states should facilitate the development of social understanding. We review evidence suggesting that children's understanding of mind develops gradually in the context of social interaction. Therefore, we need a theory of development in this area that accords a fundamental role to social interaction, yet does not assume that children simply adopt socially available knowledge but rather that children construct an understanding of mind within social interaction. Key Words: language; Piaget; social interaction; theories of mind; Vygotsky; Wittgenstein. (shrink)

According to the BD-model of mindreading, we primarily understand others in terms of beliefs and desires. In this article we review a number of objections against explicit versions of the BD-model, and discuss the prospects of using its implicit counterpart as an explanatory model of early emerging socio-cognitive abilities. Focusing on recent findings on so-called ‘implicit’ false belief understanding, we put forward a number of considerations against the adoption of an implicit BD-model. Finally, we explore a different way to make (...) sense of implicit false belief understanding in terms of keeping track of affordances. (shrink)

In this paper we review two debates in the current literature on clinical delusions. One debate is about what delusions are. If delusions are beliefs, why are they described as failing to play the causal roles that characterise beliefs, such as being responsive to evidence and guiding action? The other debate is about how delusions develop. What processes lead people to form delusions and maintain them in the face of challenges and counter-evidence? Do the formation and maintenance of delusions require (...) abnormal experience alone, or also reasoning biases or deficits? We hope to show that the focus on delusions has made a substantial contribution to the philosophy of the mind and continues to raise issues that are central to defining the concept of belief and gaining a better understanding of how people process information and learn about the world. (shrink)

Here I reply to the main points raised by the commentators on the arguments put forward in my Delusions and Other Irrational Beliefs (OUP, 2009). My response is aimed at defending a modest doxastic account of clinical delusions, and is articulated in three sections. First, I consider the view that delusions are inbetween perceptual and doxastic states, defended by Jacob Hohwy and Vivek Rajan, and the view that delusions are failed attempts at believing or not-quitebeliefs, proposed by Eric Schwitzgebel and (...) Maura Tumulty. Then, I address the relationship between the doxastic account of delusions and the role, nature, and prospects of folk psychology, which is discussed by Dominic Murphy, Keith Frankish, and Maura Tumulty in their contributions. In the final remarks, I turn to the continuity thesis and suggest that, although there are important differences between clinical delusions and non-pathological beliefs, these differences cannot be characterised satisfactorily in epistemic terms. (shrink)

Self-ascriptions of thoughts and attitudes depend on a sense of the intentionality of one’s own mental states, which develops later than, and independently of, the sense of the intentionality of the thoughts and attitudes of others. This sense of the self-intentionality of one’s own mental states grows initially out of executive developments that enable one to simulate one’s own actions and perceptions, as genuine off-line thoughts, and to regulate such simulations.

There is some consensus on the claim that imagination as suppositional thinking can have epistemic value insofar as it’s constrained by a principle of minimal alteration of how we know or believe reality to be – compatibly with the need to accommodate the supposition initiating the imaginative exercise. But in the philosophy of imagination there is no formally precise account of how exactly such minimal alteration is to work. I propose one. I focus on counterfactual imagination, arguing that this can (...) be modeled as simulated belief revision governed by Laplacian imaging. So understood, it can be rationally justified by accuracy considerations: it minimizes expected belief inaccuracy, as measured by the Brier score. (shrink)

In this paper we defend the doxastic conception of delusions against the metacognitive account developed by Greg Currie and collaborators. According to the metacognitive model, delusions are imaginings that are misidentified by their subjects as beliefs: the Capgras patient, for instance, does not believe that his wife has been replaced by a robot, instead, he merely imagines that she has, and mistakes this imagining for a belief. We argue that the metacognitive account is untenable, and that the traditional conception of (...) delusions as beliefs should be retained. (shrink)

A popular approach to monothematic delusions in the recent literature has been to argue that monothematic delusions involve broadly rational responses to highly unusual experiences. Campbell calls this the empiricist approach to monothematic delusions, and argues that it cannot account for the links between meaning and rationality. In place of empiricism Campbell offers a rationalist account of monothematic delusions, according to which delusional beliefs are understood as Wittgensteinian framework propositions. We argue that neither Campbell's attack on empiricism nor his rationalist (...) alternative to empiricism is successful. (shrink)

Mindreading is the ability to attribute mental states to other individuals. According to the Theory-Theory (TT), mindreading is based on one's possession of a Theory of Mind. On the other hand, the Simulation Theory (ST) maintains that one arrives at the attribution of a mental state by simulating it in one's own mind. In this paper, I propose a ST-TT hybrid model of the ability to attribute disgust on the basis of visual stimuli such as facial expressions, body postures, etc. (...) More precisely, while I defend Goldman's (2006) thesis that the ability to attribute disgust based on observing disgusted facial expressions stems from a mirror-based simulation process, I argue that ST is unable to account for the ability to attribute disgust based on non-facial visual stimuli; I propose, rather, that this latter ability is theory-based. My model is grounded in evidence from individuals suffering from Huntington's Disease. (shrink)

Clinical delusions are difficult to investigate in the laboratory because they co-occur with other symptoms and with intellectual impairment. Partly for these reasons, researchers have recently begun to use hypnosis with neurologically intact people in order to model clinical delusions. In this paper we describe striking analogies between the behavior of patients with a clinical delusion of mirrored self misidentification, and the behavior of highly hypnotizable subjects who receive a hypnotic suggestion to see a stranger when they look in the (...) mirror. Based on these analogies, we argue that the use of hypnosis is a reliable method to investigate the surface features of clinical delusions. But to what extent can hypnosis successfully recreate delusions? Can it also contribute to a better understanding of delusion formation? Although clinical delusions and hypnotically induced beliefs are different in etiology, some analogies can be identified in the underlying processes that characterise them, based on the two-factor theory of delusion formation. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article intends to reconsider the epistemological status of delusional beliefs on the basis of Wittgenstein’s conception of certainty. Several works over the last two decades have compared delusional beliefs with so-called hinge propositions, which – according to Wittgenstein – function as expressions of objective certainty. This gives rise to a paradox. On the one hand, delusions are compatible to Wittgensteinian certainties in some respects; on the other hand, they contradict beliefs shared by other members of the community, which makes (...) them different from ‘normal’ certainties. In order to address this issue, I use Moyal-Sharrock’s taxonomy of hinge propositions. This taxonomy allows one to distinguish between different types of hinge propositions; all types share the same features, but these features are manifested in a variety of ways. Thus, delusional beliefs might also be regarded as constituting a specific type of hinge propositions. This move makes it possible to resolve the paradox and to identify the special epistemic features of delusional beliefs. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to outline several valuable elements of Mead’s pragmatist theory of perception in action developed in his The Philosophy of the Act, in order to strengthen the pragmatist legacy of the enactivist approach. In particular, Mead’s theory of perception in action turns out to be a forerunner of sensorimotor enactivist theory. Unlike the latter, however, Mead explicitly refers to imagery as an essential capacity for agency. Nonetheless, the article argues that the ways in which Mead (...) refers to this capacity do not necessarily place it in opposition to enactivist non-representationalism. On the contrary, as a synthetic process of re-presenting of present and past sensorimotor elements, imagery can be seen as the hallmark of a pragmatically inspired sensorimotor enactivist approach that bypasses the opposition between representationalists and non-representationalists. (shrink)

I develop and defend the view that subjects are necessarily psychologically able to revise their beliefs in response to relevant counter-evidence. Specifically, subjects can revise their beliefs in response to relevant counter-evidence, given their current psychological mechanisms and skills. If a subject lacks this ability, then the mental state in question is not a belief, though it may be some other kind of cognitive attitude, such as a supposition, an entertained thought, or a pretense. The result is a moderately revisionary (...) view of belief: while most mental states we thought were beliefs are beliefs, some mental states which we thought were beliefs are not beliefs. The argument for this view draws on two key claims: First, subjects are rationally obligated to revise their beliefs in response to relevant counter-evidence. Second, if some subject is rationally obligated to revise one of her mental states, then that subject can revise that mental state, given her current psychological mechanisms and skills. Along the way to defending these claims, I argue that rational obligations can govern activities which reflect on one’s rational character, whether or not those activities are under one’s voluntary control. I also show how the relevant version of epistemic ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ survives an objection which plagues other variants of the principle. (shrink)

The main purpose of this dissertation is to examine critically and discuss the role of imagination in science and religion, with particular emphasis on its possible epistemic, creative, and meaning-making functions. In order to answer my research questions, I apply theories and concepts from contemporary philosophy of mind on scientific and religious practices. This framework allows me to explore the mental state of imagination, not as an isolated phenomenon but, rather, as one of many mental states that co-exist and interplay (...) in our cogntive architecture. Based on the philosophical discourse of philosophy of mind, four types of imagination are indentified and conceptualized: sensory, propositional, experiential, and creative imagination. These categories are then employed on five phenomena that can be found in scientific and religious environments: metaphors, models, thought experiments, aspect perception, and - in the religious case - rituals. In relation to the concept of religious "seeing" I consider how imaginings may influence visionary experiences and visualization, and compare these phenomena with cases of scientific visualization and eureka experiences. In regard to scientific and religious models, a distinction is made between, on the one hand, two notions of truth and, on the other hand, truth-independent meaning-making. In light of these categories, I differentiate between, and critically discuss, the use of imagination in doxastic, non-doxastic and fictionalist accounts. In light of this investigation, I formulate and defend the position of interactivism, which acknowledges a constant interplay between different attitudes and mental states. In my examination of rituals and scientific and religious thought experiments, special attention is given to the mental capacity to recreate the experiences that are entailed in an imagined scenario. At the end of the investigation, I consider the possible impact that my study might have on how we view science and religion as well as the dialogue bewteen these two fields. (shrink)

This paper examines the causal basis of our ability to attribute emotions to music, developing and synthesizing the existing arousal, resemblance and persona theories of musical expressivity to do so. The principal claim is that music hijacks the simulation mechanism of the brain, a mechanism which has evolved to detect one's own and other people's emotions.

Imagination is widely thought to come in two varieties: perception-like and belief-like imagination. What precisely sets them apart, however, is not settled. More needs to be said about the features that make one variety perception-like and the other belief-like. One common, although typically implicit, view is that they mimic their counterparts along the conceptuality dimension: while the content of belief-like imagination is fully conceptual, the content of perception-like imagination is fully non-conceptual. Such a view, however, is not sufficiently motivated in (...) the literature. I will show that there are good reasons to reject it and I will argue that both varieties of imagination involve fully conceptual contents. I will suggest an alternative way to draw the distinction between perception-like and belief-like imagination along the conceptuality dimension, according to which only perception-like imagination requires observational concepts. (shrink)

A popular view maintains that supposition is a kind of cognitive mental state, very similar to belief in essential respects. Call this view “cognitivism about supposition”. There are at least three grades of cognitivism, construing supposition as (i) a belief, (ii) belief-like imagination or (iii) a species of belief-like imagination. I shall argue against all three grades of cognitivism and claim that supposition is a sui generis form of imagination essentially dissimilar to belief. Since for good reasons (i) is not (...) supported in the literature, I shall dwell on (ii) and (iii). Without further explanation supposition has been very often merely postulated as being nothing but belief-like imagination—that is, (ii). I shall show that at least two considerations undermine (ii). First, supposition and belief-like imagination are governed by different norms, more precisely the former is freer than the latter and requires minimal or no mental effort. Second, contrary to belief-like imagination, supposition is “cold”, in that it is typically dissociated from emotional reactions. Proponents of (iii) face the pressure of explaining these differences between supposition and belief-like imagination too. I shall argue that they have not sufficiently motivated the claim that supposition is belief-like. In particular they fail to accommodate precisely the dimensions of supposition pertaining to its normativity and emotionality. I shall close with a sketch of a new account of supposition. (shrink)

A new approach to developing models of folk psychology is suggested, namely that different models exist for different folk psychological practices. This point is made through an example: the explanation and justification of morally heinous actions. Human folk psychology in this area is prone to a specific error of conflating an explanation for behaviour with a justification of it. An analysis of the error leads me to conclude that simulation is used to generate both explanations and justifications of heinous acts. (...) It is needed in both these cases because most of us lack theoretical information about evil actors. I will argue that it is difficult to simulate such acts, and hence difficult to develop explanations for behaviour widely accepted as evil. This difficulty explains the judgements made against successful simulators by those who don't succeed, and so explains the common problem of conflating an explanation with a justification. (shrink)

This paper offers a modeling account of episodic representation. I argue that the episodic system constructsmental models: representations that preserve the spatiotemporal structure of represented domains. In prototypical cases, these domains are events: occurrences taken by subjects to have characteristic structures, dynamics and relatively determinate beginnings and ends. Due to their simplicity and manipulability, mental event models can be used in a variety of cognitive contexts: in remembering the personal past, but also in future-oriented and counterfactual imagination. As structural representations, (...) they allow surrogative reasoning, supporting inferences about their constituents which can be used in reasoning about the represented events. (shrink)

How are we to understand the phenomenology of imagining? Attempts to answer this question often invoke descriptors concerning the “vivacity” or “vividness” of our imaginative states. Not only are particular imaginings often phenomenologically compared and contrasted with other imaginings on grounds of how vivid they are, but such imaginings are also often compared and contrasted with perceptions and memories on similar grounds. Yet however natural it may be to use “vividness” and cognate terms in discussions of imagination, it does not (...) take much reflection to see that these terms are ill understood. In this paper, I review both some relevant empirical literature as well as the philosophical literature attempt to get a handle on what it could mean, in an imaginative context, to talk of vividness. As I suggest, this notion ultimately proves to be so problematic as to be philosophically untenable. (shrink)