A common view in both philosophy and the vision sciences is that, in human vision, wavelength information is primarily ‘for’ colouring: for seeing surfaces and various media as having colours. In this article we examine this assumption of ‘colour-for-colouring’. To motivate the need for an alternative theory, we begin with three major puzzles from neurophysiology, puzzles that are not explained by the standard theory. We then ask about the role of wavelength information in vision writ large. How might wavelength information (...) be used by any monochromat or dichromat and, finally, by a trichromatic primate with object vision? We suggest that there is no single ‘advantage’ to trichromaticity but a multiplicity, only one of which is the ability to see surfaces and so on as having categorical colours. Instead, the human trichromatic retina exemplifies a scheme for a general encoding of wavelength information given the constraints imposed by high spatial resolution object vision. Chromatic vision, like its partner, luminance vision, is primarily for seeing. Viewed this way, the ‘puzzles’ presented at the outset make perfect sense. 1 Reframing the Problem1.1 Introduction1.2 Three puzzles1.2.1 Why is trichromatic vision an anomaly in diurnal mammals?1.2.2 Why does the colour system occupy such a large and central part in human vision?1.2.3 Why are the blue cones so rare?1.3 Recasting the question2 The Costs and Benefits of Spectral Vision2.1 Spectral information and object vision2.2 Encoding the spectral dimension of light2.2.1 ‘General’ versus ‘specific’ encoding2.2.2 Spectral encoding and the monochromat2.2.3 Spectral encoding and the dichromat2.2.4 Spectral encoding and the human trichromat2.3 Three puzzles revisited2.3.1 Why is trichromatic vision an anomaly in diurnal mammals?2.3.2 Why does the colour system occupy such a large and central part in human vision?2.3.3 Why are the blue cones so rare3 Conclusion. (shrink)

La autora presenta una critica a la concepcion clasica de los sentidos asumida por la mayoria de autores naturalistas que pretenden explicar el contenido mental. Esta crítica se basa en datos neurobiologicos sobre los sentidos que apuntan a que estos no parecen describir caracteristicas objetivas del mundo, sino que actuan de forma ʼnarcisita', es decir, representan informacion en funcion de los intereses concretos del organismo.El articulo se encuentra también en: Bechtel, et al., Philosophy and the Neuroscience.

Nativists about syntactic processing have argued that linguisticprocessing, understood as the implementation of a rule-basedcomputational architecture, is spared in Williams syndrome, (WMS)subjects – and hence that it provides evidence for a geneticallyspecified language module. This argument is bolstered by treatingSpecific Language Impairments (SLI) and WMS as a developmental doubledissociation which identifies a syntax module. Neuroconstructivists haveargued that the cognitive deficits of a developmental disorder cannot beadequately distinguished using the standard gross behavioural tests ofneuropsychology and that the linguistic abilities of the (...) WMS subject canbe equally well explained by a constructivist strategy of neurallearning in the individual, with linguisitic functions implemented in anassociationist architecture. The neuroconstructivist interpretation ofWMS undermines the hypothesis of a double dissociation between SLI andWMS, leaving unresolved the question of nativism about syntax. Theapparent linguistic virtuosity of WMS subjects is an artefact ofenhanced phonological processing, a fact which is easier to demonstratevia the associationist computational model embraced byneuroconstructivism. (shrink)

The chapter summarizes the discussions on perception between Churchland, Ramachandran, and Dennett. The arguments focus on a central issue—the relationship between the actual visual experience and one's internal neural representations. A detailed discourse on Dennett's Theory of Consciousness is provided, with particular focus on his explanations on the phenomenon of “filling in.” The chapter points out several weaknesses in Dennett's work, arising from his attempt to reconcile essentially divergent beliefs on philosophy as it relates to persons and science as it (...) relates to “sub-personal” processing. Three concerns are identified: first, the supposed transparency of content and a person's capacity to make mistakes in describing one's own visual experience must be reconciled; second, an explanation on the similarity of our neurological experiences with both abstract and detailed veridical content must be given; and third, computational content must be provided to support his claim of content being transparent to consciousness. (shrink)

In Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett presents the Multiple Drafts Theory of consciousness, a very brief, largely empirical theory of brain function. From these premises, he draws a number of quite radical conclusions—for example, the conclusion that conscious events have no determinate time of occurrence. The problem, as many readers have pointed out, is that there is little discernible route from the empirical premises to the philosophical conclusions. In this article, I try to reconstruct Dennett's argument, providing both the philosophical views (...) behind the empirical premises, and the hidden empirical arguments behind the derivation of the philosophical conclusions. (shrink)

Throughout the text, fundamental questions concerning the nature of visual perception are addressed.

The book details several well-argued theories aiming to explain how the full, cohesive vista of human vision and perception is possible. The main query is broken down into several parts. The first deals with how we organize our representations of the world and whether these are processed and connected in a logical and sentential manner, or if these involve random connections across our neurons. The next part focuses on the amount of detail in the visual representations themselves and yields two (...) opposing theories: the “Literalist View”—“You See What You Think You See”—and the non-Literalist or “Functional View”—“You Don't See What You Think You See.” Also discussed is whether the intentional content of neural representations is individuated by factors external or internal to the subject. The last part of the chapter tackles how visual perception is processed and unified via the “Feature Integration Theory” or the “Recollective Theory.”. (shrink)

Over 35 years ago, Meltzoff and Moore (1977) published their famous article ‘Imitation of facial and manual gestures by human neonates’. Their central conclusion, that neonates can imitate, was and continues to be controversial. Here we focus on an often neglected aspect of this debate, namely on neonatal spontaneous behaviors themselves. We present a case study of a paradigmatic orofacial ‘gesture’, namely tongue protrusion and retraction (TP/R). Against the background of new research on mammalian aerodigestive development, we ask: How does (...) the human aerodigestive system develop and what role does TP/R play in the neonate’s emerging system of aerodigestion? We show that mammalian aerodigestion develops in two phases: (1) from the onset of isolated orofacial movements in utero to the post-natal mastery of suckling at 4 months after birth, and; (2) thereafter, from preparation to the mastery of mastication and deglutition of solid foods. Like other orofacial stereotypies, TP/R emerges in the first phase and vanishes prior to the second. Based upon recent advances in activity-driven early neural development, we suggest a sequence of three developmental events in which TP/R might participate: the acquisition of tongue control, the integration of the central pattern generator for TP/R with other aerodigestive CPGs, and the formation of connections within the cortical maps of S1 and M1. If correct, orofacial stereotypies are crucial to the maturation of aerodigestion in the neonatal period but also unlikely to co-occur with imitative behavior. (shrink)

This volume provides an up to date and comprehensive overview of the philosophy and neuroscience movement, which applies the methods of neuroscience to traditional philosophical problems and uses philosophical methods to illuminate issues in neuroscience. At the heart of the movement is the conviction that basic questions about human cognition, many of which have been studied for millennia, can be answered only by a philosophically sophisticated grasp of neuroscience's insights into the processing of information by the human brain. Essays in (...) this volume are clustered around five major themes: data and theory in neuroscience; neural representation and computation; visuomotor transformations; color vision; and consciousness. (shrink)

In our target article, we argued that the positive results of neonatal imitation are likely to be by-products of normal aerodigestive development. Our hypothesis elicited various responses on the role of social interaction in infancy, the methodological issues about imitation experiments, and the relation between the aerodigestive theory and the development of speech. Here we respond to the commentaries.

Feminist critiques of science are widely dispersed and often quite inaccessible as a body of literature. We describe briefly some of the influences evident in this literature and identify several key themes which are central to current debates. This is the introduction to a bibliography of general critiques of science, described as the “core literature,” and a selection of feminist critiques of biology. Our objective has been to identify those analyses which raise reflexive (epistemological and methodological) questions about the status (...) of scientific knowledge and practice, both in general terms and in relation to biological research. We have abstracted these listings from a body of material compiled by members of the research project, “Philosophical Feminism: The Critiques of Science,” which covers a range of discipline-specific critiques beyond biology, as well as the more general philosophical critiques which constitute the core of the present bibliography. (shrink)

Researchers have long suspected that grapheme-color synaesthesia is useful, but research on its utility has so far focused primarily on episodic memory and perceptual discrimination. Here we ask whether it can be harnessed during rule-based Category learning. Participants learned through trial and error to classify grapheme pairs that were organized into categories on the basis of their associated synaesthetic colors. The performance of synaesthetes was similar to non-synaesthetes viewing graphemes that were physically colored in the same way. Specifically, synaesthetes learned (...) to categorize stimuli effectively, they were able to transfer this learning to novel stimuli, and they falsely recognized grapheme-pair foils, all like non-synaesthetes viewing colored graphemes. These findings demonstrate that synaesthesia can be exploited when learning the kind of material taught in many classroom settings. (shrink)

Public education is not just a way to organise and fund education. It is also the expression of a particular ideal about education and of a particular way to conceive of the relationship between education and society. The ideal of public education sees education as an important dimension of the common good and as an important institution in securing the common good. The common good is never what individuals or particular groups want or desire, but always reaches beyond such particular (...) desires towards that which societies as a whole should consider as desirable. This does, of course, put the common good in tension with the desires of individuals and groups. Neo-liberal modes of governance have, over the past decades, put this particular educational set up under pressure and have, according to some, eroded the very idea of the common good. This set of contributions reflects on this state of affairs, partly through an exploration of the idea of publicness itself – how it can be rearticulated and regained – and partly through reflections on the current state of education in the ‘north’ and the ‘south.’. (shrink)

From the comparative framework of writing on the meaning of ritual in the field of the history of religions, this essay argues that one of the major problems in Benjamin’s thinking is how to make certain forms of materiality stand out against other forms. In his early work, the way that Benjamin deals with this problem is to call degraded forms “symbolic”, and those forms of materiality with positive value, “allegorical”. The article shows how there is more than an incidental (...) connection with the recent approach to ritual in the field of history of religions, seeing that Benjamin too wants to set out the significance of certain material forms against those that are “ritualistic” and hence false. It is argued that he treats the latter in his essay on Elective Affinities and the former in his Trauerspiel. The key claim is that the way material forms stand out as meaningful is akin to the Kantian description of the aesthetic attitude, which identifies how certain formations warrant and attract reflective attention and underpin moral orientation. The point is significant since Kantian aesthetics is an object of polemical attention across Benjamin’s heterogeneous corpus. Moreover, the approach shows the main difficulty in Benjamin’s treatment of sensible forms: what are the criteria he uses to distinguish the “bad” way a sensible form has of being meaningful from the “good”? (shrink)

In Canions be Causes, David Johnson defends the view that abstractions can have causal force. He offers as his own example of natural kinds ecological niches, arguing that the causal force of these niches in nature is akin to the force of Aristotelian final causes. He concludes that, rooted as it is in seventeenth century mechanism, the currently-accepted model of causality which recognises only efficient causes is inadequate to the needs of contemporary science. In Natural Kinds and Ecological Niches — (...) Response to Johnson ''s Paper, Melinda Hogan offers a critique of Johnson ''s paper which, by begging the question in favor of the very sort of causality Johnson seeks to supplement, misses the epistemological implications of his idea. In this paper I will attempt to clarify and defend Johnson ''s position, pointing out some of its implications for the epistemology of science in general. (shrink)

Ironies are implicit in the title of Zoltan Somhegyi’s book Reviewing the Past: The Presence of Ruins, and this is in keeping with ruins’ own paradoxical character as manifesting endurance and fragility, presence and absence, vivid physicality and an import that is almost entirely reflective. By inviting readers to take a desultory approach to the sequence of the book’s chapters, the author positions them to be active co-explorers of ruins who are reflective about their responses. Somhegyi analyzes various threats to (...) the survival of ruins as structures and aesthetic objects but nevertheless finds bases for some optimism. He ends the book with a chapter on a topic that seems far afield from ruins: museums that make the process of remembering thematic. This somewhat abrupt conclusion forces the reader to draw connections between his remarks on such museums and the topic of ruins. This provocation of the reader’s own reflections encourages a stance akin to that involved in the aesthetic appreciation of ruins and draws attention to their open-endedness. (shrink)

While feminist critiques of AI are increasingly common in the scholarly literature, they are by no means new. Alison Adam’s Artificial Knowing (1998) brought a feminist social and epistemological stance to the analysis of AI, critiquing the symbolic AI systems of her day and proposing constructive alternatives. In this paper, we seek to revisit and renew Adam’s arguments and methodology, exploring their resonances with current feminist concerns and their relevance to contemporary machine learning. Like Adam, we ask how new (...) AI methods could be adapted for feminist purposes and what role new technologies might play in addressing concerns raised by feminist epistemologists and theorists about algorithmic systems. In particular, we highlight distributed and federated learning as providing partial solutions to the power-oriented concerns that have stymied efforts to make machine learning systems more representative and pluralist. (shrink)

This study, the third in a series of three, draws on a broader Norwegian research project exploring the phenomenon of support for young persons with mental health issues. The aim was to explore and explicate the sense of “nourishing communion”, as a somewhat neglected aspect of support. Fourteen Norwegian young adults, aged 18-25, were interviewed about their experiences of support. Data was analyzed using van Manen’s hermeneutic-phenomenological approach to open up possible meanings of how nourishing communion is concretely lived. Analysis (...) was supplemented by in-depth reflexive dialogues between the first and second author, which fostered a nourishing communion akin to the processes and dimensions of our phenomenon of interest. Findings highlight five intertwined existential themes: a) trusting the other to hold vulnerability safely; b) flourishing in mutual participation; c) acceptance in a felt togetherness; d) feeling found and received; and e) feeling an attuned resonance. The notion of “nourishing communion” as a significant but neglected element of support challenges current practice, suggesting the need for a different approach to collaboration with young persons and their networks. From the perspectives both of individual professional engagement and of policy making, there is a need for further exploration of how young persons might be supported to create and maintain a broader range of nourishing relationships. (shrink)

In ‘Of Sensory Systems and the “Aboutness” of Mental States’, Kathleen Akins (1996) argues against what she calls ‘the traditional view’ about sensory systems, according to which they are detectors of features in the environment outside the organism. As an antidote, she considers the case of thermoreception, a system whose sensors send signals about how things stand with themselves and their immediate dermal surround (a ‘narcissistic’ sensory system); and she closes by suggesting that the signals from many sensory (...) systems may not in any familiar sense be about anything at all. Her presentation of the issues, however, overlooks resources available to ‘the traditional view’—or so I shall argue. Akins’s own thumbnail sketch of what is wrong with the traditional view is that it asks, concerning a given sensory system, ‘what is it detecting?’, when we should instead be asking ‘what is it doing?’ (352). Her point is that on the traditional view the function of a sensory system—what it's ‘for’—is to detect or indicate (values of) features of the outside environment. But at least on one version of the traditional view—namely Ruth Millikan’s—this would never be the sole or main proper function of a sensory system. (Akins does not list Millikan as a traditionalist, but Millikan fits squarely Akins’s description of them, since she believes in a naturalistic theory of aboutness and thinks it should begin with the senses.) For Millikan (1989, 1993), the proper function of a sensory system is in the first instance enabling behavioural systems—in the simplest case, motor routines—to perform their proper function. This they do, roughly, by switching on and steering the behavioural routines. Where features of the outside environment come in is as Normal (= assumed-by-the-design) conditions for the successful performance of the sensory system's proper function. That is, the only strategy for switching on and steering that is simple enough for evolution to have hit upon it, and reliable enough for evolution to have liked it, is a strategy which gears the steering to (values of) features of the outside environment. But as soon as one starts fleshing out the details of this story, one notices that they are probably quite different in the case of thermoreception from how they are with ‘distance’ senses such as vision and olfaction--a point which Akins overlooks.. (shrink)

Live coding is an embodied, sensorial and live technological–human relationship that is recursively iterated through sonic and visual outputs based on what we argue are kinship relations between and through bodies and technology. At the same time, and in a familiar moment of déjà vu for feminist scholars, live coding is most often discussed not in relation to the lived and sensory human–technology kinship, but in terms of fetishised code or software, output and agency. As feminist scholars have long argued, (...) emphasising and fetishising code or software, and celebrating output and agency are normatively masculine, white and Western conceptions of technology that feed into the growing valorisation of accelerationist logic whilst also negating embodied, not to mention other (non-white, Western, masculine) bodies, expertise or histories per se. In this article, we want to redress this by drawing on our empirical material on live coding to focus on human–technology kinship and, in so doing, think about failure, slowness and embodiment and about human–technology relations that are more akin to what Alison Kafer (drawing on the work of Donna Haraway) has termed ‘becoming with’ or ‘making kin’. This, we argue, has the potential to shift the focus from the potentialities of technologies on or through the body, towards the generative capacities of mediation (including failure), which are caught up in lived experiences. The question is not only about how the relations of bodies and technologies are played out in certain circumstances but about what might be played out if we reconceptualise these relations in these terms. (shrink)

18th-century British aesthetics addressed itself to a variety of questions: What is taste? What is beauty? Is there is a standard of taste and of beauty? What is the relation between the beauty of nature and that of artistic representation? What is the relation between one fine art and another? How ought the fine arts be ranked one against another? What is the nature of the sublime and ought it be ranked with the beautiful? What is the nature of genius (...) and what is its relation to taste? -/- Although none of these questions was peripheral to 18th-century British aesthetics, not all were equally central. The question on which the others tended to turn was the question concerning the nature of taste. But this question was not simply how best generally to define taste. Everyone seems to have been in at least rough agreement with Joseph Addison’s early definition of taste as “that faculty of soul, which discerns the beauties of an author with pleasure, and the imperfections with dislike” (Addison and Steele 1879, no. 409). But agreeing with Addison meant agreeing only to use “taste” to refer to that faculty and to acknowledge that such discerning has something of the phenomenology of sensation. The central question was how to think of taste so defined. Is taste a higher, cognitive faculty, akin perhaps to reason, with objects of a primarily intellectual nature? Or is it a lower, bodily faculty, more akin to the five bodily senses, and with objects of a primarily material nature? The major theories that arose in response to this question can be grouped into three main lineages: (a) internal-sense theories, of which the theories of Shaftesbury (1711), Hutcheson (1725), Hume (1739–40, 1751, and 1757) and Reid (1785) are representative; (b) imagination theories, of which theories of Addison (1712) and Burke (1757/59) are representative; and (c) association theories, of which the theories of Gerard (1757) and Alison (1790) are representative. (shrink)

In “What is it like to be boring and myopic?” Kathleen Akins offers an interesting, empirically driven, argument for thinking that there is nothing that it is like to be a bat. She suggests that bats are “boring” in the sense that they are governed by behavioral scripts and simple, non-representational, control loops, and are best characterized as biological automatons. Her approach has been well received by philosophers sympathetic to empirically informed philosophy of mind. But, despite its influence, (...) her work has not met with any critical appraisal. -/- It is argued that a reconsideration of the empirical results shows that bats are not boring automatons, driven by short input-output loops, instincts, and reflexes. Grounds are provided for thinking that bats satisfy a range of philosophically and scientifically interesting elaborations of the general idea that consciousness is best understood in terms of representational functions. A more complete examination of bat sensory capabilities suggests there is something that it is like after all. -/- The discussion of bats is also used to develop an objection to strongly neurophilosophical approaches to animal consciousness. (shrink)

Recently, the theory theory has led to much interesting research. However, this is the first book to look at the theory in extensive detail and to systematically contrast it with other theories.

In the first half of this book, I offer a theory of fictional content or, as it is sometimes known, ‘fictional truth’.The theory of fictional content I argue for is ‘extreme intentionalism’. The basic idea – very roughly, in ways which are made precise in the book - is that the fictional content of a particular text is equivalent to exactly what the author of the text intended the reader to imagine. The second half of the book is concerned with (...) showing how extreme intentionalism and the lessons learnt from it can illuminate cognate questions in the philosophy of fiction and imagination. For instance, I argue, my position helps us to explain how fiction can provide us with reliable testimony ; it helps explain the phenomenon of imaginative resistance ; and it fits with, and so supports, a persuasive theory of the nature of fiction itself. In my final chapter, I show how attending to intentionalist practices of interpreting fictional content can illuminate the nature of propositional imagining itself. (shrink)

_A critical introduction to Hegel's metaphysics and philosophy of nature._.