In the paper the author explores the question ‘Did Wittgenstein (re)invent emoticons?’ in three sub-questions. What did he draw and for which purposes? What are emoticons? Are there similarities and differences between his drawings and emoticons? The answers are following. Wittgenstein has drawn faces from the 1930s to the 1940s which are graphically and by use like emoticons. He presented a philosophical problem of interpretation of faces. Emoticons as made of written and typed punctuation marks or as drawings were invented (...) and used centuries before the 1930s, but common and popular use started in the 1960s. Previous inventions were probably unknown to Wittgenstein, and his faces probably didn’t influence later inventions. His faces and emoticons are graphically similar and made with the similar purposes. Differences are that he only used drawings and never written or typed punctuation marks, and he used them to deal with problems of emotions and perception (similar to his problems of the duck-rabbit head). These answers are connected to available textual and interpretative evidence, interpretations are given in propositions from (a) to (p), and summarized in the conclusion (r). Some consequences of visual thinking on philosophical thinking are also drawn in terms of a future research. (shrink)

Naïve realism is the view according to which perception is a non-representational relation of conscious awareness to mind-independent objects and properties. According to this approach, the phenomenal character of experience is constituted by just the objects, properties, or facts presented to the senses. In this article, I argue that such a conception of the phenomenology of experience faces a clear counter-example, i.e., the experience of seeing aspects. The discussion suggests that, to accommodating such a kind of experience, it must be (...) acknowledged that perception is, at least in part, representational. (shrink)

According to Brandom, perceptual knowledge is the product of two distinguishable capacities: the capacity to reliably discriminate behaviorally between different sorts of stimuli, and the capacity to take up a position in the game of giving and asking for reasons. However, in focusing exclusively on the entitlements and commitments of observation reports, rather than on perception itself, Brandom passes over a conception of perceptual experience as a sort of contentful mental state. In this article, I argue that this is a (...) blind spot, which makes Brandom’s account of perceptual knowledge unable to properly accommodate the phenomenon of seeing aspects. (shrink)

In ‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, McDowell revisits the main themes of Mind and World in order to make two important corrections: first, he does not longer believe that the content of perceptual...