In a recent paper, ‘Peripersonal perception in action’ (Synthese, 2018), Frédérique de Vignemont tackles the problem of defining what is peculiar to the visual perception of objects falling within the peripersonal space of the observer, i.e. the space immediately surrounding the body, and which is commonly described as the space in which action takes place. In this paper, I first discuss the proposal offered by de Vignemont about what characterizes peripersonal perception. Then, I suggest an extension of this account that (...) offers a meticulous description of the nature of the Content of Peripersonal Visual Experience - a topic never explicitly considered in the philosophical literature on vision - by discussing some peculiar features of it that, as recognized also by de Vignemont’s account, still need to be explained. In particular, I offer a philosophical examination of the specificity of peripersonal visual experience, in relation to its phenomenological dimension, its optical mechanisms and its neurophysiological underpinnings, in the light of our best theories from vision science, and in comparison to the visual experience of other visual spaces. (shrink)

What mental states are required for an agent to know-how to perform an action? This question fuels one of the hottest debates in the current literature on philosophy of action. Answering this question means facing what we call here The Challenge of Format Dualism, which consists in establishing which is the format of the mental representations involved in practical knowledge and, in case they are given in more than one format, explaining how these different formats can interlock. This challenge has (...) generated two parallel debates: the debate between Intellectualism and Anti-Intellectualism on the one hand, and the debate on the Interface Problem on the other. While the former is about whether practical knowledge can be considered a species of propositional knowledge, the latter investigates how motoric and propositional states can be related. Here we offer a unified account capable of explicitly analyzing those two problems within the same philosophical framework. Our account suggests a new way for solving the Interface Problem that paves the way for addressing the debate between Intellectualism and Anti-Intellectualism. (shrink)

Philosophers and cognitive scientists try to understand, from different perspectives, the nature of the experience of reality. Given this shared, interdisciplinary interest, it would be beneficial to have a coherent story about the experience of reality, in which there is reciprocal contribution from both philosophy and cognitive science. This paper wants to pave the way for this shared enterprise on the investigation of the experience of reality. I first distinguish between two indicators of reality. (1) The experience of availability to (...) motor interaction. (2) The experience of mind-independence. I then show how invoking an analysis of the results from vision science, concerning the visual mechanisms of stereopsis, which is related to the visual impression of a solid, three-dimensional world available to motor interaction, successfully provides a coherent description of the first indicator. Furthermore, I suggest that the analysis of the evidence about the first indicator is very informative in preparing the ground for the investigation of the second indicator. This is shown by discussing experimental evidence directly related to stereopsis, as well as some perceptual phenomena that are usually described by invoking the story from vision science about stereopsis. Thus, the epistemological analysis of the results from vision science on stereopsis, offered in this paper, is beneficial in a twofold manner, for the interdisciplinary enterprise aimed at understanding the experience of reality. It is explicitly beneficial in the description of the first indicator, and implicitly beneficial to understand the second indicator. Finally, it also suggests future research about their relation. (shrink)