Fictions evoke imagery, and their value consists partly in that achievement. This paper offers analysis of this neglected topic. Section 2 identifies relevant philosophical background. Section 3 offers a working definition of imagery. Section 4 identifies empirical work on visual imagery. Sections 5 and 6 criticize imagery essentialism, through the lens of genuine fictional narratives. This outcome, though, is not wholly critical. The expressed spirit of imagery essentialism is to encourage philosophers to ‘put the image back into the imagination’. The (...) weakened conclusion is that while an image is not essential to imagining, it should be returned to our theories of imagination. (shrink)

[File is the introduction to the monograph] -/- Abstract to monograph -/- How and whether thinking affects perceiving is a deeply important question. Of course it is of scientific interest: to understand the human mind is to understand how we best distinguish its processes, how those processes interact, and what this implies for how and what we may know about the world. And so in the philosopher’s terms, this book is one on both mental architecture and the epistemology of perception. (...) But there is a more human interest. How we make contact with the world, and with one another, is of the most basic of importance. We can make both sensory contact and cognitive contact with the world. The first is traditionally supposed to be determined by the biological nature of our sensory systems, while the second is at least partly determined by us, what we have learned, our experiences, and so on. The most basic claim of the book is that this is mistaken and importantly so. Our sensory contact with the world can also change and in a way that is importantly affected by the cognitive contact that we have, or have had, with the world. Thinking does not just affect perceiving, thinking improves perceiving. If this is true, it changes not only how we should theorize the mind, it changes how we should understand, as individuals, our place in and contact with the world. (shrink)

This paper considers an orectic penetration hypothesis which says that desires and desire-like states may influence perceptual experience in a non-externally mediated way. This hypothesis is clarified with a definition, which serves further to distinguish the interesting target phenomenon from trivial and non-genuine instances of desire-influenced perception. Orectic penetration is an interesting possible case of the cognitive penetrability of perceptual experience. The orectic penetration hypothesis is thus incompatible with the more common thesis that perception is cognitively impenetrable. It is of (...) importance to issues in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, epistemology, and general philosophy of science. The plausibility of orectic perception can be motivated by some classic experimental studies, and some new experimental research inspired by those same studies. The general suggestion is that orectic penetration thus defined, and evidenced by the relevant studies, cannot be deflected by the standard strategies of the cognitive impenetrability theorist. (shrink)

Perception is typically distinguished from cognition. For example, seeing is importantly different from believing. And while what one sees clearly influences what one thinks, it is debatable whether what one believes and otherwise thinks can influence, in some direct and non-trivial way, what one sees. The latter possible relation is the cognitive penetration of perception. Cognitive penetration, if it occurs, has implications for philosophy of science, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science. This paper offers an analysis of the phenomenon, (...) its theoretical consequences, and a variety of experimental results and possible interpretations of them. The paper concludes by proposing some constraints for analyses and definitions of cognitive penetrability. (shrink)

One sceptical rejoinder to those who claim that sensory perception is cognitively penetrable is to appeal to the involvement of attention. So, while a phenomenon might initially look like one where, say, a perceiver’s beliefs are influencing her visual experience, another interpretation is that because the perceiver believes and desires as she does, she consequently shifts her spatial attention so as to change what she senses visually. But, the sceptic will urge, this is an entirely familiar phenomenon, and it hardly (...) involves some special or theoretically important cognitive effect on sensory perception. Even supposing that the sceptic is correct about cases that are accurately described in this way, the rejoinder oversimplifies the possible roles that attention may play in mediating cognition and perception. This paper aims to identify these different roles, and by emphasis on empirical research on feature-based and object-based attention. What emerges is a plausible and well- evidenced mental schema that describes attention -mediated cognitive penetration. At the very least, the burden of proof is shifted to the sceptic, as he then must show that there are no mental phenomena involving attention in the more nuanced ways described here. One additional benefit of this analysis is that it illuminates various features of attention and its relation to both cognition and phenomenal consciousness. Therefore the analysis should be of interest to a broad range of theorists of the mind, and not just those invested in the cognitive penetration debate. (shrink)

Both common sense and dominant traditions in art criticism and philosophical aesthetics have it that aesthetic features or properties are perceived. However, there is a cast of reasons to be sceptical of the thesis. This paper defends the thesis—that aesthetic properties are sometimes represented in perceptual experience—against one of those sceptical opponents. That opponent maintains that perception represents only low-level properties, and since all theorists agree that aesthetic properties are not low-level properties, perception does not represent aesthetic properties. I offer (...) a novel argument—what I call the argument from seeing-as—against that sceptic which moves from consideration of ambiguous figures to consideration of visual art. It concludes that aesthetic properties are sometimes perceived and delivers a general lesson for philosophy of perception. Contrary to extant theories of rich perceptual content, aesthetic properties are far better candidates for high-level perceptual contents than standardly theorized rich contents like natural kinds. (shrink)

Expertise is a cognitive achievement that clearly involves experience and learning, and often requires explicit, time-consuming training specific to the relevant domain. It is also intuitive that this kind of achievement is, in a rich sense, genuinely perceptual. Many experts—be they radiologists, bird watchers, or fingerprint examiners—are better perceivers in the domain(s) of their expertise. The goal of this paper is to motivate three related claims, by substantial appeal to recent empirical research on perceptual expertise: Perceptual expertise is genuinely perceptual (...) and genuinely cognitive, and this phenomenon reveals how we can become epistemically better perceivers. These claims are defended against sceptical opponents that deny significant top-down or cognitive effects on perception, and opponents who maintain that any such effects on perception are epistemically pernicious. (shrink)

There are good, even if inconclusive, reasons to think that cognitive penetration of perception occurs: that cognitive states like belief causally affect, in a relatively direct way, the contents of perceptual experience. The supposed importance of – indeed as it is suggested here, what is definitive of – this possible phenomenon is that it would result in important epistemic and scientific consequences. One interesting and intuitive consequence entirely unremarked in the extant literature concerns the perception of art. Intuition has it (...) that knowledge about art changes how one aesthetically evaluates artworks. A profound explanation of this intuitive fact is that perceptual experiences vary with artistic expertise. Cognitive penetration provides an explanatory mechanism for this latter effect. What one knows or otherwise thinks about art may affect, in one of two ways sketched below, how one perceives art. Differences in aesthetic evaluation may follow, either because high-level aesthetic properties can be perceptually represented or because they causally depend on low-level perceptible properties. All of this lends credence to the hypothesis that the expert better judges art because she better perceives art. And she better perceives art because she better knows art. (shrink)

This paper offers a critical survey and analysis of empirical studies on creativity, with emphasis on how imagination plays a role in the creative process. It takes as a foil the romantic view that, given features like novelty, incubation, and insight, we should be skeptical about the prospects for naturalistic explanation of creativity. It rebuts this skepticism by first distinguishing stages or operations in the creative process. It then works through various behavioral and neural studies, and corresponding philosophical theorizing, that (...) concern the preparation, generation, insight, and evaluation stages of creative processes. The result is not a complete explanation of creativity, but it identifies an explanatory path towards such an explanation, including the features of creativity that motivate that skepticism. (shrink)

This paper surveys historical and recent philosophical discussions of the relations between imagination and creativity. In the first two sections, it covers two insufficiently studied analyses of the creative imagination, that of Kant and Sartre, respectively. The next section discusses imagination and its role in scientific discovery, with particular emphasis on the writings of Michael Polanyi, and on thought experiments and experimental design. The final section offers a brief discussion of some very recent work done on conceptual relations between imagination (...) and creativity. (shrink)

One distinct interest in self-knowledge concerns whether one can know about one’s own mental states and processes, how much, and by what methods. One broad distinction is between accounts that centrally claim that we look inward for self-knowledge (introspective methods) and those that claim that we look outward for self-knowledge (transparency methods). It is here argued that neither method is sufficient, and that we see this as soon as we move beyond questions about knowledge of one’s beliefs, focusing instead on (...) how one distinguishes, for oneself, one’s veridical visual memories from mere (non-veridical) visual images. Given robust psychological and phenomenal similarities between episodic memories and mere imagery, the following is a genuine question that one might pose to oneself: “Do I actually remember that happening, or am I just imagining it?” After critical analysis of the transparency method (advocated by Byrne 2010, following Evans 1982) to this latter epistemological question, a brief sketch is offered of a more holistic and inferential method for acquisition of broader self-knowledge (broadly following the interpretive-sensory access account of Carruthers 2011). In a slogan, knowing more of the mind requires using more of the mind. (shrink)

We offer a brief characterization of creativity, followed by a review of some of the reasons people have been skeptical about the possibility of explaining creativity. We then survey some of the recent work on creativity that is naturalistic in the sense that it presumes creativity is natural (as opposed to magical, occult, or supernatural) and is therefore amenable to scientific inquiry. This work is divided into two categories. The broader category is empirical philosophy, which draws on empirical research while (...) addressing questions that have traditionally been regarded as philosophical. The second category is experimental philosophy, a special branch of empirical philosophy in which experiments are designed (by philosophers) with the explicit purpose of addressing philosophical questions. All of this highlights the relative theoretical neglect of creativity, while at the same time suggesting ample opportunity for experimentally minded philosophers to break new ground. (shrink)

A fiction may prescribe imagining that a pig can talk or tell the future. A fiction may prescribe imagining that torturing innocent persons is a good thing. We generally comply with imaginative prescriptions like the former, but not always with prescriptions like the latter: we imagine non-evaluative fictions without difficulty but sometimes resist imagining value-rich fictions. Thus arises the puzzle of imaginative resistance. Most analyses of the phenomenon focus on the content of the relevant imaginings. The present analysis focuses instead (...) on the character of certain kinds of imaginings, arguing that we resist in such cases given the rich evaluative character of the imaginings prescribed, and the agent-dependent constraints on imagining in such ways. (shrink)

This chapter has four parts. I distinguishes some types of perceptual skills and highlights their importance in everyday perception. II identifies a well-studied class of perceptual skills: cases of perceptual expertise. III discusses a less studied possible instance of perceptual skill: picture perception. Finally, IV outlines some important mechanisms underlying perceptual skills, with special emphasis on attention and mental imagery.

Amongst philosophers and cognitive scientists, modularity remains a popular choice for an architecture of the human mind, primarily because of the supposed explanatory value of this approach. Modular architectures can vary both with respect to the strength of the notion of modularity and the scope of the modularity of mind. We propose a dilemma for modular architectures, no matter how these architectures vary along these two dimensions. First, if a modular architecture commits to the informational encapsulation of modules, as it (...) is the case for modularity theories of perception, then modules are on this account impenetrable. However, we argue that there are genuine cases of the cognitive penetrability of perception and that these cases challenge any strong, encapsulated modular architecture of perception. Second, many recent massive modularity theories weaken the strength of the notion of module, while broadening the scope of modularity. These theories do not require any robust informational encapsulation, and thus avoid the incompatibility with cognitive penetrability. However, the weakened commitment to informational encapsulation greatly weakens the explanatory force of the theory and, ultimately, is conceptually at odds with the core of modularity. (shrink)

Many traditional theories of creativity put heavy emphasis on an incubation stage in creative cognitive processes. The basic phenomenon is a familiar one: we are working on a task or problem, we leave it aside for some period of time, and when we return attention to the task we have some new insight that services completion of the task. This feature, combined with other ostensibly mysterious features of creativity, has discouraged naturalists from theorizing creativity. This avoidance is misguided: we can (...) maintain unconscious incubated cognition as (sometimes) part of the creative process and we can explain it in scientifically responsible ways. This paper, focusing on the effects of attention on the functional networking of the brain, attempts just such an explanation. It also serves to assuage the naturalist's scepticism about other features of creative cognition. The broad upshot, one would hope, is that philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists return some attention to the long neglected topic of creativity. (shrink)

Vision often dominates other perceptual modalities both at the level of experience and at the level of judgment. In the well-known McGurk effect, for example, one’s auditory experience is consistent with the visual stimuli but not the auditory stimuli, and naïve subjects’ judgments follow their experience. Structurally similar effects occur for other modalities (e.g. rubber hand illusions). Given the robustness of this visual dominance, one might not be surprised that visual imagery often dominates imagery in other modalities. One might be (...) surprised, however, that visual imagery often dominates perception in other modalities. This more controversial claim is motivated both by empirical data and by introspection. Some think of perception-perception visual dominance as epistemically good, holding that cases in which visual dominance misleads us (e.g. McGurk and rubber hand illusions) are cases in which the perceptual system resolves conflicts according to principles that are generally reliable. Here, we explore support for the more controversial claim that imagery-perception visual dominance is epistemically good. We suggest that, when the task is richly spatial, requiring for optimal performance the all-at-once identification of macro-spatial and allocentric properties (e.g. identifying the shape or location of a felt or heard object), the visual, whether perception or imagination, should dominate other modalities. Put another way, when identifying objects, one should go and look or, short of that, visually imagine candidate objects, and then follow the visual, even against conflicting perceptions from other modalities. For this broadly-typed category of of cognitive-perceptual task, vision does dominate and it should. (shrink)

Creativity has received, and continues to receive, comparatively little analysis in philosophy and the brain and behavioural sciences. This is in spite of the importance of creative thought and action, and the many and varied resources of theories of mind. Here an alternative approach to analyzing creativity is suggested: start from the bottom up with minimally creative thought. Minimally creative thought depends non-accidentally upon agency, is novel relative to the acting agent, and could not have been tokened before the time (...) it is in fact tokened, relative to the agent in question. Thoughts that meet these three conditions—agency, psychological novelty, and modal—are what may be called cognitive breakthroughs. Even if such breakthroughs are not necessary to or definitive of richer creativity, they are indeed central to much of creativity. The minimal analysis provides a more workable explanandum for theories of creativity of varied motivation and method. (shrink)

Philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists have recently taken renewed interest in cognitive penetration, in particular, in the cognitive penetration of perceptual experience. The question is whether cognitive states like belief influence perceptual experience in some important way. Since the possible phenomenon is an empirical one, the strategy for analysis has, predictably, proceeded as follows: define the phenomenon and then, definition in hand, interpret various psychological data. However, different theorists offer different and apparently inconsistent definitions. And so in addition to (...) the usual problems (e.g., definitions being challenged by counterexample), an important result is that different theorists apply their definitions and accordingly get conflicting answers to the question “Is this a genuine case of cognitive penetration?”. This hurdle to philosophical and scientific progress can be remedied, I argue, by returning attention to the alleged consequences of the possible phenomenon. There are three: theory-ladenness of perception in contexts of scientific theory choice, a threat to the general epistemic role of perception, and implications for mental architecture. Any attempt to characterize or define, and then empirically test for, cognitive penetration should be constrained by these consequences. This is a method for interpreting and acquiring experimental data in a way that is agreeable to both sides of the cognitive penetration debate. Put crudely, the question shifts to “Is this a cognitive-perceptual relation that results in (or constitutes) one or more of the relevant consequences?” In answering this question, relative to various data, it may turn out that there is no single unified phenomenon of cognitive penetration. But this should be no matter, since it is the consequences that are of central importance to philosophers and scientists alike. (shrink)

This article offers a reply to commentaries from Amy Kind, Casey O’Callaghan, and Wayne Wu. It features a defense and further analysis of perceptual malleability, as defended in Thinking and Perceiving. In turn, it considers the consequences of malleability for attention and the cognitive penetrability of perception, imagination and perceptual skills, and perceptual content and objectivity.

Experiences of art involve exercise of ordinary cognitive and perceptual capacities but in unique ways. These two features of experiences of art imply the mutual importance of aesthetics and cognitive science. Cognitive science provides empirical and theoretical analysis of the relevant cognitive capacities. Aesthetics thus does well to incorporate cognitive scientific research. Aesthetics also offers philosophical analysis of the uniqueness of the experience of art. Thus, cognitive science does well to incorporate the explanations of aesthetics. This paper explores this general (...) framework of expansionism : a research strategy that suggests that the explanatory goals and resources of both aesthetics and cognitive science should expand to include those of the other. Two relations are considered. First, what is the relation between aesthetics and more traditional cognitive science? Second, what is the relation between aesthetics and new developments in cognitive science that de-emphasize mental representation and emphasize body and action? (shrink)

The question of whether perception can be penetrated by cognition is in the limelight again. The reason this question keeps coming up is that there is so much at stake: Is it possible to have theory-neutral observation? Is it possible to study perception without recourse to expectations, context, and beliefs? What are the boundaries between perception, memory, and inference (and do they even exist)? Are findings from neuroscience that paint a picture of perception as an inherently bidirectional and interactive process (...) relevant for understanding the relationship between cognition and perception? We have assembled a group of philosophers and psychologists who have been considering the thesis of cognitive (im)penetrability in light of these questions (Abdel Rahman & Sommer, 2008; Goldstone, Landy, & Brunel, 2011; Lupyan, Thompson-Schill, & Swingley, 2010; Macpherson, 2012; Stokes, 2011). Rather than rehashing previous arguments which appear, in retrospect, to have been somewhat ill-posed (Pylyshyn, 1999), this symposium will present a thesis of cognitive (im)penetrability that is at once philosophically satisfying, empirically testable, and relevant to the questions that cognitive scientists find most interesting. (shrink)

We perceive in many ways. But several dubious presuppositions about the senses mask this diversity of perception. Philosophers, scientists, and engineers alike too often presuppose that the senses (vision, audition, etc.) are independent sources of information, perception being a sum of these independent contributions. We too often presuppose that we can generalize from vision to other senses. We too often presuppose that vision itself is best understood as a passive receptacle for an image thrown by a lens. In this essay (...) we illustrate how reflection on results from the cognitive sciences undermine these (and many other) traditional presuppositions. Our illustration situates the remaining essays in the volume, Perception and its Modalities, which further extend the case against various traditional presuppositions, and offer alternatives ways to understand the senses and their role in perception. While many of the essays in this volume represent competing views and draw on different fields, from conceptual analysis to engineering, most contributors believe that to understand perception properly, we need to treat as foundational the idea that the senses work together. From that agreement, new paradigms for theorizing about perception begin to emerge. (shrink)

In the September 2020 edition of Perception, Alan Gilchrist published an editorial entitled “The Integrity of Vision” (Gilchrist, 2020). In it, Gilchrist critiques motivated perception research. His main points are as follows: (1) Motivated perception is compromised by experimental demand: Results do not actually show motivated perception but instead reflect subjects’ desires to comply with inferred predictions. (2) Motivated perception studies use designs that make predictions obvious to subjects. These transparent designs conspire with experimental demand to yield confirmatory but compromised (...) results. (3) Motivated perception research lacks guiding theory and cannot explain what appear to be contradictory results. (4) Motivated perception presents an unsupportable assault upon the impermeability of perception. The present commentary responds to these four assertions. (shrink)

Three kinds of things may be creative: persons, processes, and products. The standard definition of creativity, used nearly by consensus in psychological research, focuses specifically on products and says that a product is creative if and only if it is new and valuable. We argue that at least one further condition is necessary for a product to be creative: it must have been produced by the right kind of process. We argue furthermore that this point has an interesting epistemological implication: (...) when you judge a product to be creative--attributing creativity--you are not just judging it to be new and valuable. Even if you did not witness how it was produced, you are also making a judgement about how it was produced. (shrink)

This paper concerns how extant theorists of predictive coding conceptualize and explain possible instances of cognitive penetration. §I offers brief clarification of the predictive coding framework and relevant mechanisms, and a brief characterization of cognitive penetration and some challenges that come with defining it. §II develops more precise ways that the predictive coding framework can explain, and of course thereby allow for, genuine top-down causal effects on perceptual experience, of the kind discussed in the context of cognitive penetration. §III develops (...) these insights further with an eye towards tracking one extant criterion for cognitive penetration, namely, that the relevant cognitive effects on perception must be sufficiently direct. Throughout these discussions, we extend the analyses of the predictive coding models, as we know them. So one open question that surfaces is how much of the extended analyses are genuinely just part of the predictive coding models, or something that must be added to them in order to generate these additional explanatory benefits. In §IV, we analyze and criticize a claim made by some theorists of predictive coding, namely, that (interesting) instances of cognitive penetration tend to occur in perceptual circumstances involving substantial noise or uncertainty. It is here that our analysis is most critical. We argue that, when applied, the claim fails to explain (or perhaps even be consistent with) a large range of important and uncontroversially interesting possible cases of cognitive penetration. We conclude with a general speculation about how the recent work on the predictive mind may influence the current dialectic concerning top-down effects on perception. (shrink)

The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) is an ontology that provides terms with precisely defined meanings to describe all aspects of how investigations in the biological and medical domains are conducted. OBI re-uses ontologies that provide a representation of biomedical knowledge from the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) project and adds the ability to describe how this knowledge was derived. We here describe the state of OBI and several applications that are using it, such as adding semantic expressivity to (...) existing databases, building data entry forms, and enabling interoperability between knowledge resources. OBI covers all phases of the investigation process, such as planning, execution and reporting. It represents information and material entities that participate in these processes, as well as roles and functions. Prior to OBI, it was not possible to use a single internally consistent resource that could be applied to multiple types of experiments for these applications. OBI has made this possible by creating terms for entities involved in biological and medical investigations and by importing parts of other biomedical ontologies such as GO, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) and Phenotype Attribute and Trait Ontology (PATO) without altering their meaning. OBI is being used in a wide range of projects covering genomics, multi-omics, immunology, and catalogs of services. OBI has also spawned other ontologies (Information Artifact Ontology) and methods for importing parts of ontologies (Minimum information to reference an external ontology term (MIREOT)). The OBI project is an open cross-disciplinary collaborative effort, encompassing multiple research communities from around the globe. To date, OBI has created 2366 classes and 40 relations along with textual and formal definitions. The OBI Consortium maintains a web resource providing details on the people, policies, and issues being addressed in association with OBI. (shrink)

Studies in the psychology of visual expertise have tended to focus on a limited set of expert domains, such as radiology and athletics. Conclusions drawn from these data indicate that experts use parafoveal vision to process images holistically. In this study, we examined a novel, as-of-yet-unstudied class of visual experts—architects—expecting similar results. However, the results indicate that architects, though visual experts, may not employ the holistic processing strategy observed in their previously studied counterparts. Participants (n = 48, 24 architects, 24 (...) naïve) were asked to find targets in chest radiographs and perspective images. All images were presented in both gaze-contingent and normal viewing conditions. Consistent with a holistic processing model, we expected two results: (1) architects would display a greater difference in saccadic amplitude between the gaze- contingent and normal conditions, and (2) architects would spend less time per search than an undergraduate control group. We found that the architects were more accurate in the perspectival task, but they took more time and displayed a lower difference in saccadic amplitude than the controls. Our research indicates a disjunctive conclusion. Either architects are simply different kinds of visual experts than those previously studied, or we have generated a task that employs visual expertise without holistic processing. Our data suggest a healthy skepticism for across-the-board inferences collected from a single domain of expertise to the nature of visual expertise generally. More work is needed to determine whether holism is a feature of all visual expertise. (shrink)

Proof by refutation of a geometry theorem that is not universally true produces a Gröbner basis whose elements, called side polynomials, may be used to give inequations that can be added to the hypotheses to give a valid theorem. We show that (in a certain sense) all possible subsidiary conditions are implied by those obtained from the basis; that what we call the kind of truth of the theorem may be derived from the basis; and that the side polynomials may (...) be classified in a useful way. We analyse the relationship between side polynomials and kinds of truth, and we give a unified algorithmic treatment of side polynomials, with examples generated by an implementation. (shrink)

The position that Stokes’s Thinking and Perceiving aims to overthrow is committed to the idea that the facts about one’s propositional attitudes and the facts about one’s perceptual experiences are alike grounded in facts about representations (in various formats) that are being held in a short or long term memory store, so that computations can be performed upon them. Claims about modularity are claims about the distinctness of these memory stores, and of these representations. One way in which to (...) reject these claims is to deny only that distinctness. A more radical way would be to reject the underlying idea that facts about perception and facts about propositional attitudes are alike grounded in facts about stored representations. Although the more radical approach might seem to face a problem concerning causal efficacy, I suggest that the way is open for Stokes to take it. (shrink)

Here, we try to show that the method used in -/- Theory of Fuzzy Time Computation(TC * vs TC, TQC). 2023. ￿hal-04330281￿ -/- is a general method that sheds light on various types of problems. The author choose the navier stocks problem, to check the possibility of solving this problem by this method. This text is a guideline of possible proof of this problem.

A reply to Patrick Stokes' “Between Generalism and Particularism About Conspiracy Theory".

Arguments for the effectiveness, and even the indispensability, of mathematics in scientific explanation rely on the claim that mathematics is an effective or even a necessary component in successful scientific predictions and explanations. Well-known accounts of successful mathematical explanation in physical science appeals to scientists’ ability to solve equations directly in key domains. But there are spectacular physical theories, including general relativity and fluid dynamics, in which the equations of the theory cannot be solved directly in target domains, and yet (...) scientists and mathematicians do effective work there (McLarty 2023, Elder 2023). Building on extant accounts of structural scientific explanation (Bokulich 2011, Leng 2021), I argue that philosophical accounts of the role of equations in scientific explanation need not rely on scientists’ ability to solve equations independently of their understanding of the empirical or experimental context. For instance, the process of formulating solutions to equations can involve significant appeal to information about experimental contexts (Curiel 2010) or of physically similar systems (Sterrett 2023). Working from a close analysis of work in fluid mechanics by Martin Bazant and Keith Moffatt (2005), I propose an account of heuristic structural explanation in mathematics (Einstein 1921, Pincock 2021), which explains how physical explanations can be constructed even in domains where basic equations cannot be solved directly. (shrink)

A review of two recent books on Kierkegaard's thought, with attention to his relevance for ethics, phenomenology, and metaphysics.

Dustin Stokes argues for the existence of orectic penetration, a phenomenon in which a desire-like state penetrates our perceptual experience. His candidate for a case of orectic penetration is the most convincing candidate presented thus far. It is argued here that his candidate and his further arguments for the existence of orectic penetration do not support the claim that orectic penetration takes place. As a result, it is concluded that there are no convincing cases of desire-like states penetrating perceptual (...) experience. (shrink)

Grief is, and has always been, technologically supported. From memorials and shrines to photos and saved voicemail messages, we engage with the dead through the technologies available to us. As our technologies evolve, so does how we grieve. In this paper, we consider the role chatbots might play in our grieving practices. Influenced by recent phenomenological work, we begin by thinking about the character of grief. Next, we consider work on developing “continuing bonds” with the dead. We argue that for (...) some, chatbots may play an important role in establishing these continuing bonds by helping us develop what we term “habits of intimacy”. We then turn to the “ick factor” some may feel about this prospect, focusing especially on ethical concerns raised by Patrick Stokes and Adam Buben about the risk of replacing our dead with chatbots. We argue that replacement worries are not as pressing as Stokes and Buben suggest. We resist these replacement worries by appealing to the “thin reciprocity”, as we refer to it, that such bots offer, as well as the fictionalist stance that we think users of the bots adopt when engaging with them. We conclude by briefly raising some additional concerns and highlighting future research questions. (shrink)

A reply to Patrick Stokes' 'Reluctance and Suspicion'—itself a reply to an early piece by myself replying to Stokes—in which I clarify what it is I intend when talking about how we should investigate conspiracy theories.

Whether we perceive high-level properties is presently a source of controversy. A promising test case for whether we do is aesthetic perception. Aesthetic properties are distinct from low-level properties, like shape and colour. Moreover, some of them, e.g. being serene and being handsome, are properties we appear to perceive. Aesthetic perception also shares a similarity with gestalt effects, e.g. seeing-as, in that aesthetic properties, like gestalt phenomena, appear to ‘emerge’ from low-level properties. Gestalts effects, of course, are widely observed, which (...) raises the question: do gestalt effects make it plausible that we perceive high-level aesthetic properties? Contra Stokes, this paper argues that they don’t. This is interesting in its own right, but it also points to a more general lesson, namely we should resist the temptation to appeal to gestalt effects to argue for high-level perception. (shrink)

On 4th of August 2020, the Lebanese capital and port city, Beirut, was rocked by a massive explosion that has killed hundreds and injured thousands more, ravaging the heart of the city’s nearby downtown business district and neighbouring housing areas, where more than 750,000 people live. The waterfront neighbourhood and a number of dense residential neighbourhoods in the city’s eastern part were essentially flattened. Lebanese Government officials believe that the blast was caused by around 2,700 tonnes of ammonium nitrate stored (...) near the city’s cargo port without proper control for six years. -/- The disaster devastating Beirut’s port and city shows the latent danger of safe storage of potentially dangerous goods in modern ports, particularly ones located close to the heart of the city. The huge blast tore through major grain silos, stoking fears of shortages in a nation that imports nearly all its food and is already reeling from economic crisis. As the WFP (World Food Programme) said in a statement: the blast will “exacerbate the grim economic and food-security situation.” The Beirut blast also reminds us of the importance of ports in the contemporary globalized world. It calls our attention to safety and security, of governance and collaboration between port and city or region and of accessibility to the hinterland. What do local governments and port cities need to do to enhance the safety and security issues in port terminals? Or, to put it differently, how do we reconcile this challenge between the ports we need to feed us, serve us, provide us with medicines, equipment, etc. and the ports that threatens us? (shrink)

Geoffrey Stokes's introduction to Karl Popper's work portrays it as an evolving system of ideas and aims to explore the little-understood intricate logical relationships between Popper's work on scientific method and his philosophy of politics. It is one of the few books to cover the debate between Popper and the Frankfurt School. Characteristic of many of Stokes's "criticisms" is that they are presented as Popper "admitting" or "granting" them - as if Popper was not the one who originally (...) raised and dealt with them in the systematic elaboration of his philosophy. A refreshing exception is that Stokes acknowledges (but only in a footnote) that the idea that Popper was originally a "dogmatic falsificationist" is merely a Lakatosian myth. (shrink)

The idea that the brain is a representational organ has roots in the nineteenth century, when neurologists began drawing conclusions about what the brain represents from clinical and experimental studies. One of the earliest controversies surrounding representation in the brain was the “muscles versus movements” debate, which concerned whether the motor cortex represents complex movements or rather fractional components of movement. Prominent thinkers weighed in on each side: neurologists John Hughlings Jackson and F.M.R. Walshe in favor of complex movements, neurophysiologist (...) Charles Sherrington and neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield in favor of movement components. This essay examines these and other brain scientists’ evolving notions of representation during the first eighty years of the muscles versus movements debate (c. 1873–1954). Although participants agreed about many of the superficial features of representation, their inferences reveal deep-seated disagreements about its inferential role. Divergent epistemological commitments stoked conflicting conceptions of what representational attributions imply and what evidence supports them. (shrink)

The layers of a solvent liquid flowing around a moving molecule have a finite thickness corresponding to the finite dimensions of the solvent molecules. Taking this feature into account leads to a modification of Stokes’ laws of the relation between friction and viscosity in continuous media. We derive the observed order of magnitude of the microfriction, for rotation as well as translation, and its approximately correct dependence on the radii of moving and solvent molecules.