Many philosophers use findings about sensory substitution devices in the grand debate about how we should individuate the senses. The big question is this: Is “vision” assisted by (tactile) sensory substitution really vision? Or is it tactile perception? Or some sui generis novel form of perception? My claim is that sensory substitution assisted “vision” is neither vision nor tactile perception, because it is not perception at all. It is mental imagery: visual mental imagery triggered by tactile sensory stimulation. But it (...) is a special form of mental imagery that is triggered by corresponding sensory stimulation in a different sense modality, which I call “multimodal mental imagery.”. (shrink)

In visual science the term filling-inis used in different ways, which often leads to confusion. This target article presents a taxonomy of perceptual completion phenomena to organize and clarify theoretical and empirical discussion. Examples of boundary completion (illusory contours) and featural completion (color, brightness, motion, texture, and depth) are examined, and single-cell studies relevant to filling-in are reviewed and assessed. Filling-in issues must be understood in relation to theoretical issues about neuralignoring an absencejumping to a conclusionanalytic isomorphismCartesian materialism, a particular (...) neural stage that forms the immediate substrate of perceptual experience enactiveanimatesubpersonal” considerations about internal processing, but rather by considerations about the task of vision at the level of the animal or person interacting with the world. (shrink)

Mental imagery has often been taken to be equivalent to “sensory imagination”, the perception‐like type of imagination at play when, for example, one visually imagines a flower when none is there, or auditorily imagines a music passage while wearing earplugs. I contend that the equation of mental imagery with sensory imagination stems from a confusion between two senses of mental imagery. In the first sense, mental imagery is used to refer to a psychological attitude, which is perception‐like in nature. In (...) the second sense, mental imagery refers to a mental content, which can be grasped via different attitudes. I will show that failure to acknowledge the distinction between these senses of mental imagery has muddled philosophical discussion. This distinction brings much needed clarity to debates where sensory imagination and mental imagery are invoked, shedding light on issues such as the nature of imagistic mental states, and the representational powers and limits of mental imagery. I will conclude by sketching a general attitudinal account of imagination that does justice to both senses of mental imagery, outlining a promising framework for understanding imagination. (shrink)

What is the relation between the nature of the things you think about, and the ways you think about them? Christopher Peacocke argues that meaning is never prior to metaphysics - to the nature of the world. He shows that this view holds for a wide range of topics, including magnitudes, time, the self, and abstract objects such as numbers.

How can we think about things in the outside world? There is still no widely accepted theory of how mental representations get their meaning. In light of pioneering research, Nicholas Shea develops a naturalistic account of the nature of mental representation with a firm focus on the subpersonal representations that pervade the cognitive sciences.

Much of what we say is never said aloud. It occurs only silently, as inner speech. We chastise, congratulate, joke and cajole, all without making a sound. This distinctively human ability to create public language in the privacy of our own minds is no less remarkable for its familiarity. And yet, until recently, inner speech remained at the periphery of philosophical and psychological theorizing. This essay collection, from an interdisciplinary group of leading philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists, displays the rapidly growing (...) interest among researchers in the puzzles surrounding the nature and cognitive role of the inner voice. Questions explored include: the aids and obstacles inner speech presents to self-knowledge; the complex relation it bears to overt speech production and perception; the means by which inner speech can be identified and empirically assessed; its role in generating auditory verbal hallucinations; and its relationship to conceptual thought itself. (shrink)

Amodal completion is the representation of occluded parts of perceived objects. We argue for the following three claims: First, at least some amodal completion-involved experiences can ground knowledge about the occluded portions of perceived objects. Second, at least some instances of amodal completion-grounded knowledge are not sensitive, that is, it is not the case that in the nearest worlds in which the relevant claim is false, that claim is not believed true. Third, at least some instances of amodal completion-grounded knowledge (...) are not safe, that is, it is not the case that in all or nearly all near worlds where the relevant claim is believed true, that claim is in fact true. Thus, certain instances of amodal completion-grounded knowledge refute both the view that knowledge is necessarily sensitive and the view that knowledge is necessarily safe. (shrink)

(Open Access article, freely available to download from publisher's site.) Our visual experiences of objects as located in external space, and as having definite three-dimensional shapes, are closely linked to our implicit expectations about what things will look like from alternative viewpoints. What sorts of contents do these expectations involve? One standard answer is that they relate to what things will look like to us upon changing our positions. And what sorts of mental representations do the expectations call upon? A (...) standard answer is that they involve our powers of visual imagery; this answer requires us to allow for the possibility of unconscious visual imagery, however. The current paper presents an alternative model of the contents of our implicit visual expectations, one that regards them as wholly nonreflexive. It also argues that, once we ascribe the relevant contents to the expectations, there is no longer any reason for holding that they involve our powers of visual imagery. (shrink)

Experiments with young infants provide evidence for early-developing capacities to represent physical objects and to reason about object motion. Early physical reasoning accords with 2 constraints at the center of mature physical conceptions: continuity and solidity. It fails to accord with 2 constraints that may be peripheral to mature conceptions: gravity and inertia. These experiments suggest that cognition develops concurrently with perception and action and that development leads to the enrichment of conceptions around an unchanging core. The experiments challenge claims (...) that cognition develops on a foundation of perceptual or motor experience, that initial conceptions are inappropriate to the world, and that initial conceptions are abandoned or radically.. (shrink)

According to the additive view of sensory imagination, mental imagery often involves two elements. There is an image-like element, which gives the experiences qualitative phenomenal character akin to that of perception. There is also a non-image element, consisting of something like suppositions about the image's object. This accounts for extra- sensory features of imagined objects and situations: for example, it determines whether an image of a grey horse is an image of Desert Orchid, or of some other grey horse. The (...) view promises to give a simple and intuitive explanation of some puzzling features of imagination, and, further, to illuminate imagination 's relation to modal knowledge. I contend that the additive view does not fulfil these two promises. The explanation of how images come to be determinate is redundant: the content constituting the indeterminate mental images on which the view relies is sufficient to deliver determinate images too, so the extra resources offered by the view are not required.. (shrink)

Written by one of today's most creative and innovative philosophers, Ruth Garrett Millikan, this book examines basic empirical concepts; how they are acquired, how they function, and how they have been misrepresented in the traditional philosophical literature. Millikan places cognitive psychology in an evolutionary context where human cognition is assumed to be an outgrowth of primitive forms of mentality, and assumed to have 'functions' in the biological sense. Of particular interest are her discussions of the nature of abilities as different (...) from dispositions, her detailed analysis of the psychological act of reidentifying substances, and her critique of the language of thought for mental representation. In a radical departure from current philosophical and psychological theories of concepts, this book provides the first in-depth discussion on the psychological act of reidentification. (shrink)

Despite the considerable attention that the systematicity argument has enjoyed, it is worthwhile examining the argument within the context of similar explanatory arguments from the history of science. This kind of analysis helps show that Connectionism, qua Connectionism, really does not have an explanation of systematicity. Second, and more surprisingly, one finds that the systematicity argument sets such a high explanatory standard that not even Classicism can explain the systematicity of thought.

The nature of representation is a central topic in philosophy. This is the first book to connect problems with understanding representational artifacts, like pictures, diagrams, and inscriptions, to the philosophies of science, mind, and art. Can images be a source of knowledge? Are images merely conventional signs, like words? What is the relationship between the observer and the observed? In this clear and stimulating introduction to the problem John V. Kulvicki explores these questions and more. He discusses: the nature of (...) pictorial experience and "seeing in" recognition, resemblance, pretense, and structural theories of depiction images as aids to scientific discovery and understanding mental imagery and the nature of perceptual content photographs as visual prostheses. In so doing he assesses central problems in the philosophy of images, such as how objects we make come to represent other things, and how we distinguish kinds of representation - pictures, diagrams, graphs - from one another. Essential reading for students and professional philosophers alike, the book also contains chapter summaries, annotated further reading, and a glossary. (shrink)

Compelling evidence that the most important assumptions on which Darwinism rests are scientifically wrong. The controversial best-seller that sent Oxford University and Nature magazine into a frenzy. Shattering the Myths of Darwinism exposes the gaping holes in an ideology that has reigned unchallenged over the scientific world for a century. Darwinism is considered to be hard fact, the only acceptable explanation for the formation of life on Earth, but with keen insight and objectivity Richard Milton reveals that the theory totters (...) atop a shambles of outdated and circumstantial evidence which in any less controversial field would have been questioned long ago. Sticking to the facts at hand and tackling a vast array of topics, Shattering the Myths of Darwinism offers compelling evidence that the theory of evolution has become an act of faith rather than a functioning science, and that not until the scientific method is applied to it and the right questions are asked will we ever get true answers to the mystery of life on Earth. (shrink)

Classical empiricists are notorious for claiming that cognition is perceptually based. This dissertation reassesses that claim against the background of contemporary cognitive science. More specifically, it develops a broadly empiricist theory of concepts and argues that this theory outperforms other theories. In the first chapter, I lay down seven desiderata. An adequate theory of concepts should lend itself to an explanation of expressive scope, intentionality, cognitive content, acquisition, categorization, compositionality, and publicity. I argue that none of the leading theories that (...) have been developed by philosophers and psychologists can satisfy all of these desiderata . ;In the second chapter, I propose an alternative theory, which identifies concepts with what I call 'proxytypes'. A proxytype is a collection of stored, high-level perceptual representations, which represent features typically exhibited by members of the category it designates. I argue that proxytypes lend themselves to an economical account of concept acquisition by bootscrapping on independently motivated theories of perception, and I provide an account of categorization by exploiting the kinship between proxytypes and prototypes. The third chapter raises three objections to proxytype theory, involving three of the remaining desiderata: expressive scope, publicity, and compositionality. In responding to these objections, I develop a viable successor to the reviled analytic/synthetic distinction, and I outline a three-stage model of concept combination. The final chapter completes my defense of proxytype theory, by taking on the last two desiderata. It provides a naturalistic account of intentionality and cognitive content inspired by Locke's distinction between real and nominal essences. The real content of a proxytype is the property of belonging to some unique kind, and the nominal content is a set of properties typically exhibited by members of that kind. I contrast my account of nominal content with three theories of narrow content and conclude that it has all of their merits and none of their flaws. (shrink)