Virtuosity in music performance is often associated with fast, precise, and efficient sound-producing movements. The generation of such highly skilled movements involves complex joint and muscle control by the central nervous system, and depends on the ability to anticipate, segment, and coarticulate motor elements, all within the biomechanical constraints of the human body. When successful, such motor skill should lead to what we characterize as fluency in musical performance. Detecting typical features of fluency could be very useful for technology-enhanced learning (...) systems, assisting and supporting students during their individual practice sessions by giving feedback and helping them to adopt sustainable movement patterns. In this study, we propose to assess fluency in musical performance as the ability to smoothly and efficiently coordinate while accurately performing slow, transitionary, and rapid movements. To this end, the movements of three cello players and three drummers at different levels of skill were recorded with an optical motion capture system, while a wireless electromyogrphy (EMG) system recorded the corresponding muscle activity from relevant landmarks. We analyze the kinematic and coarticulation characteristics of these recordings separately and then propose a combined model of fluency in musical performance predicting music sophistication. Results suggest movements from expert performers' are characterized by consistently smooth strokes and scaling of muscle phasic coactivation. The explored model of fluency as function of movement smoothness and coarticulation patterns was shown to be limited by the sample size but serves as a proof of concept. Results from this study show the potential of a technology-enhanced objective measure of fluency in musical performance, which could lead to improved practices for aspiring musicians, instructors, and researchers. (shrink)

Psychology considered as a natural science began as Aristotelian "physics" or "natural philosophy" of the soul, conceived as an animating power that included vital, sensory, and rational functions. C. Wolff restricted the term " psychology " to sensory, cognitive, and volitional functions and placed the science under metaphysics, coordinate with cosmology. Near the middle of the eighteenth century, Krueger, Godart, and Bonnet proposed approaching the mind with the techniques of the new natural science. At nearly the same time, Scottish thinkers (...) placed psychology within moral philosophy, but distinguished its "physical" laws from properly moral laws. British and French visual theorists developed mathematically precise theories of size and distance perception; they created instruments to test these theories and to measure visual phenomena such as the duration of visual impressions. By the end of the century there was a flourishing discipline of empirical psychology in Germany, with a professorship, textbooks, and journals. The practitioners of empirical psychology at this time typically were dualists who included mental phenomena within nature. Accordingly, psychology as a natural scientific disciplines was not invented in the 18th and 19th centuries, but *remade* from the extant empirical psychology. (shrink)

This chapter considers Kant's relation to Hume as Kant himself understood it when he wrote the Critique of Pure Reason and the Prolegomena. It first seeks to refine the question of Kant's relation to Hume's skepticism, and it then considers the evidence for Kant's attitude toward Hume in three works: the A Critique, Prolegomena, and B Critique. It argues that in the A Critique Kant viewed skepticism positively, as a necessary reaction to dogmatism and a spur toward critique. In his (...) initial statement of the critical philosophy Kant treated Hume as an ally in curbing dogmatism, but one who stopped short of what was really needed: a full critique of reason, to establish the boundaries of metaphysical cognition. Kant found fault with Hume's analyses of cognition and experience, and specifically his failure to see the crucial importance of synthetic a priori cognition in metaphysics. In particular, he held that Hume's empiricist account of cognition could neither explain the synthetic a priori cognition actually found in mathematics and natural science, nor provide a principled account of the limits on what can be known--and what can be thought--through the pure concepts of the understanding. According to Kant, Hume therefore failed in his attempt to determine the limits of metaphysics, whereas he was able to succeed because his transcendental philosophy provided a thorough account of cognition, its structure and limits. In the Prolegomena and the B Critique Kant distinguished his position more sharply from Hume's. He also adopted a more negative attitude toward "skeptical idealism" than before; but he attributed such skepticism to Descartes, not Hume. Prior to the B Critique Kant did not see Hume as attacking natural science or ordinary cognition. In none of the three works was Kant's main aim to "answer the skeptic." His primary aim was to firmly establish the boundary of metaphysics, by discovering the elements of human cognition and fixing its proper domain. His purported discoveries about the limits of metaphysical cognition meant that the traditional objects of metaphysical knowledge, God, the soul, and the world as it is in itself, are unknowable, hence that traditional metaphysics itself is impossible. Besides settling the possibility or impossibility of metaphysics, his findings would also prevent the illegitimate extension of principles of sensibility to God and the noumenal self, an extension that would threaten the metaphysics of morals by incorrectly denying the thinkability of noumenal freedom, and that might otherwise lead to "materialism, fatalism, atheism, and freethinking unbelief" (B xxxiv). (shrink)

This chapter poses questions about the existence and character of the Scientific Revolution by deriving its initial categories of analysis and its initial understanding of the intellectual scene from the writings of the seventeenth century, and by following the evolution of these initial categories in succeeding centuries. This project fits the theme of cross cultural transmission and appropriation -- a theme of the present volume -- if one takes the notion of a culture broadly, so that, say, seventeenth and eighteenth (...) or nineteenth century European intellectual cultures are deemed sufficiently distinct that one can speak of the "transmission" of texts and ideas from the one to the other as cross cultural. I maintain that a process of transforming and assimilating seventeenth century achievements manifests itself in two distinct cultures of interpretation, one developed by historians of philosophy, the other by scientists and historians of science. The first, following actor's categories, interprets the revolution in the seventeenth century as a philosophical displacement, partly fomented by a radical change in astronomical theory; the second, retrospectively applying the post nineteenth century sense of the term "science" to seventeenth century events, finds a "scientific" revolution, or the birth of modern science. The chapter proposes interpreting the Scientific Revolution as a revolution in natural philosophy and metaphysics. (shrink)

As the word “optics” was understood from antiquity into and beyond the early modern period, it did not mean simply the physics and geometry of light, but meant the “theory of vision” and included what we should now call physiological and psychological aspects. From antiquity, these aspects were subject to geometrical analysis. Accordingly, the geometry of visual experience has long been an object of investigation. This chapter examines accounts of size and distance perception in antiquity (Euclid and Ptolemy) and the (...) Middle Ages (Ibn al-Haytham), before turning to "natural geometry" in Kepler and Descartes. It finds a purely mechanical realization of natural geometry in Descartes (primarily in his L'Homme, 1664), in which he conceives states of the visual system as varying in accordance with distance, much as his geometrical compasses vary their spatial relations in accordance with geometrical proportions. This reading challenges the notion that a two-dimensional sensation (without three-dimensional phenomenality) was universally accepted prior to the nineteenth century by positing a direct psychophysiological account of the experience of distance in Descartes. It thereby challenges the interpretations of Descartes on natural geometry of George Berkeley, Nancy Maull, Margaret Wilson, Erwin Panofsky, and Jonathan Crary. (shrink)

The quantitative experimental scientific psychology that became prominent by the turn of the twentieth century grew from three main areas of intellectual inquiry. First and most directly, it arose out of the traditional psychology of the philosophy curriculum, as expressed in theories of mind and cognition. Second, it adopted the attitudes of the new natural philosophy of the scientific revolution, attitudes of empirically driven causal analysis and exact observation and experimentation. Third, it drew upon investigations of the senses. Natural philosophical (...) disciplines such as optics and acoustics treated the functioning of the senses. Optics, in particular, had from antiquity comprised a complete theory of vision, combining the physics, physiology, psychology, metaphysics, and epistemology of vision, using mathematical techniques where feasible. Within medicine, sensory physiology examined anatomy, physiology, and pathology. Philosophical psychology had long examined the senses as mental capacities connected with cognition and knowledge, and such discussions also heeded the new attitudes of natural philosophy. This chapter first examines the early relations of psychology to biology and characterizes various eighteenth-century loci of psychological thought. It then pursues nineteenth-century developments in Germany and Britain that culminate in the “new” psychology of the 1860s and 1870s. (shrink)

A review of: Manfred Kuehn. Scottish Common Sense in Germany, 1768-1800: A Contribution to the History of Critical Philosophy. (McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Ideas.) xiv + 300 pp., app., bibl., index. Kingston, Ont./Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1987. $35.

This volume contains essays by five British philosophers and one Swedish philosopher working in metaphysics and in particular metaphysics as it relates to the philosophy of science. These philosophers are the core of a tight network of European philosophers of science and metaphysicians and their essays have evolved as a result of workshops in Lund, Edinburgh, and Athens.

This volume contains essays by five British philosophers and one Swedish philosopher working in metaphysics and in particular metaphysics as it relates to the philosophy of science. These philosophers are the core of a tight network of European philosophers of science and metaphysicians and their essays have evolved as a result of workshops in Lund, Edinburgh, and Athens.

During the seventeenth century the major cognitive faculties--sense, imagination, memory, and understanding or intellect--became the central focus of argument in metaphysics and epistemology to an extent not seen before. The theory of the intellect, long an important auxiliary to metaphysics, became the focus of metaphysical dispute, especially over the scope and powers of the intellect and the existence of a `pure' intellect. Rationalist metaphysicians such as Descartes, Spinoza, and Malebranche claimed that intellectual knowledge, gained independently of the senses, provides the (...) framework for constructing a new theory of nature. Other writers, including Hobbes and the early Gassendi, denied the existence of a distinct intellectual faculty, and so challenged the metaphysicians' abilities directly to perceive the essences of substances. The theory of the senses, which had long been a part of philosophical discussion, took on a new urgency, for adherents of the new corpuscularian philosophy needed to replace the dominant Aristotelian theory of real sensory qualities and sensible species. The revival of skepticism and a renewed interest in method also brought the faculties into prominence, for skeptical challenges typically were directed toward the faculties of sense and understanding, and the theory of method was conceived as providing instructions for the proper use of one's cognitive equipment. The theory of the faculties, then, is an important key to theories of knowledge in the seventeenth century. Indeed, rather than speaking of seventeenth century epistemology, it would be less anachronistic and more informative to speak of theories of cognition. The familiar (and over-stated) point that epistemology became fundamental to metaphysics during that century can then be restated as the point that the theory of faculties became central in metaphysical dispute. (shrink)

The chapter places Kant's discussions of empirical and rational psychology in the context of previous discussions in Germany. It also considers the status of what might be called his "transcendental psychology" as an instance of a special kind of knowledge: transcendental philosophy. It is divided into sections that consider four topics: the refutation of traditional rational psychology in the Paralogisms; the contrast between traditional empirical psychology and the transcendental philosophy of the Deduction; Kant's appeal to an implicit psychology in his (...) taxonomy and theory of cognitive faculties throughout the Critique of Pure Reason; and his new definitions of and support for empirical and rational psychology in the Doctrine of Method. (shrink)

Descartes' Meditations is one of the most widely read philosophical texts and has marked the beginning of what we now consider as modern philosophy. It is the first text that most students of philosophy are introduced to and this Guidebook will be an indispensable introduction to what is undeniably one of the most important texts in the history of philosophy. Gary Hatfield offers a clear and concise introduction to Descartes' background, a careful reading of the Meditations and a methodological (...) investigation of its main themes. As with all the Guidebooks, this is an exemplary companion to any reading of the Meditations. (Note: This edition has been superseded by Gary Hatfield (2014), The Routledge Guidebook to Descartes' Meditations.). (shrink)

The purpose of this valuable book is to consider recent cultural trends in bioethics from a Catholic perspective. Bioethics is intended for a lay audience interested in understanding bioethical issues from a Catholic perspective.

A User's Guide to Melancholy takes Robert Burton's encyclopaedic masterpiece The Anatomy of Melancholy (first published in 1621) as a guide to one of the most perplexing, elusive, attractive, and afflicting diseases of the Renaissance. Burton's Anatomy is perhaps the largest, strangest, and most unwieldy self-help book ever written. Engaging with the rich cultural and literary framework of melancholy, this book traces its causes, symptoms, and cures through Burton's writing. Each chapter starts with a case study of melancholy - from (...) the man who was afraid to urinate in case he drowned his town to the girl who purged a live eel - as a way into exploring the many facets of this mental affliction. A User's Guide to Melancholy presents in an accessible and illustrated format the colourful variety of Renaissance melancholy, and contributes to contemporary discussions about wellbeing by revealing the earlier history of mental health conditions. (shrink)

This chapter examines Russell’s appreciation of the relevance of psychology for the theory of knowledge, especially in connection with the problem of the external world, and the background for this appreciation in British philosophy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Russell wrote in 1914 that “the epistemological order of deduction includes both logical and psychological considerations.” Indeed, the notion of what is “psychologically derivative” played a crucial role in his epistemological analysis from this time. His epistemological discussions engage psychological factors (...) in the perception of external objects that had been closely examined in the nineteenth century, among other places in J. S. Mill’s response to William Hamilton’s conception of knowledge of the external world. These considerations came to Russell in various ways, including his contact with British Empiricism (Mill, with Berkeley, Hume, and Reid as background), his engagement with Austrian philosophy, his close acquaintance with the philosophy and psychology of William James, and his exposure to contemporary British writings concerning the problem of the external world. The latter writings provide a crucial context within which natural scientific psychology came to be seen as distinct from epistemology and yet as relevant to its concerns. (shrink)

My primary aim in this paper is to show that the structure of experience must include a subject (or self). I argue that the subjectless (No-Self) views of our experience must be rejected, primarily because without the consciousness-unifying function of a subject they are unable to account for the unities of consciousness present in our experience. In addition, I contend that such views fail in another respect. They emphasize the streaming of experience, the ever-changing flow of conscious events, but have (...) difficulty identifying what must stand unmoving to provide the contrast needed for the experience of motion. (shrink)

Descartes’ accounts of sensory perception have long troubled his interpreters, for their lack of clear and explicit statements on some fundamental issues. His readers have wondered whether he allows spatial sensory ideas (spatial qualia); whether sensory ideas such as color or pain are representations and, if so, what they represent; and what cognitive value Descartes attributed to sense perception. Recent discussions take differing stands on the questions just mentioned, and also disagree over Descartes’ account of the externalization of sensory qualities, (...) on the origin and correct analysis of the “material falsity” he attributes to some sensory ideas, and on the value of the “teachings of nature.” Such disagreement should not be surprising, for although sensory perception was an important topic for Descartes, his treatment of these particular issues is not systematic – or at least not apparently so. Generally, there are no proof texts that unequivocally settle questions about Descartes’ views on spatial qualia, the representationality of sensory ideas, their cognitive value, externalization, material falsity, and the status of the teachings of nature. Yet these questions and topics naturally arise from matters about which Descartes is explicit and (reasonably) consistent, regarding the role of the senses in philosophy and everyday life and concerning the nature of minds and ideas. It is, therefore, worthwhile to ask what his positions might have been. This chapter develops answers by considering Descartes’ systematic doctrines on the nature of the mind and its ideas and by combing his statements on sensation and perception for hints about how to apply such principles. The first section reviews some key texts. Succeeding sections develop positions on representationality, cognitive value, externalization, material falsity, and the teachings of nature. Ultimately, I favor an interpretation in which, for Descartes, all sensory ideas represent by resemblance, different kinds of sensory ideas vary in cognitive value, externalization arises through spatial localization, and, with sensory ideas of color and the like, as materially false they do not intrinsically misrepresent but afford occasion for false judgments, which arise as merely apparent, and so not actually legitimate, teachings of nature. (shrink)

Descartes boldly claimed: "I think, therefore I am." But one might well ask: Why do we think? How? When and why did our human ancestors develop language and culture? In other words, what makes the human mind human? _Evolution of Mind, Brain, and Culture_ offers a comprehensive and scientific investigation of these perennial questions. Fourteen essays bring together the work of archaeologists, cultural and physical anthropologists, psychologists, philosophers, geneticists, a neuroscientist, and an environmental scientist to explore the evolution of the (...) human mind, the brain, and the human capacity for culture. The volume represents and critically engages major theoretical approaches, including Donald's stage theory, Mithen's cathedral model, Tomasello's joint intentionality, and Boyd and Richerson's modeling of the evolution of culture in relation to climate change. The volume contains chapters by: Peter Carruthers; Thierry Chaminade; Philip Chase; Merlin Donald; Peter Gardenfors; Gary Hatfield; Jody Hey; Steven Mithen; April Nowell; Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd; Theodore Schurr; Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney; Kim Sterelny; and Felix Warneken. ISBN 978-1-934536-49-0. (shrink)

This article seeks to provide commentary and rationale for Orthodox Christian rites and prayers for the sick as found in the Euchologion, or Book of Needs. The reader needs to understand that the prayers of the Orthodox Church prayed at times of sickness and suffering will often strike the non-Orthodox as harsh and even unjust. References to God willing suffering do not sit well with most Western Christians. However, this is the Orthodox Christian belief, and it is expressed in the (...) prayers of the Orthodox Church. Sickness and suffering are understood to be avenues of salvation and a participation in the glory and joys of the resurrection of Christ and life in the Kingdom of God. This is why the Orthodox Church teaches her faithful to accept suffering as something that has the potential to bring them further along in the process of theosis. (shrink)

We examine a number of investigations of perceptual economy or, more specifically, of minimum tendencies and minimum principles in the visual perception of form, depth, and motion. A minimum tendency is a psychophysical finding that perception tends toward simplicity, as measured in accordance with a specified metric. A minimum principle is a theoretical construct imputed to the visual system to explain minimum tendencies. After examining a number of studies of perceptual economy, we embark on a systematic analysis of this notion. (...) We examine the notion that simple perceptual representations must be defined within the "geometric constraints" provided by proximal stimulation. We then take up metrics of simplicity. Any study of perceptual economy must use a metric of simplicity; the choice of metric may be seen as a matter of convention, or it may have deep theoretical and empirical implications. We evaluate several answers to the question of why the visual system might favor economical representations. Finally, we examine several accounts of the process for achieving perceptual economy, concluding that those which favor massively parallel processing are the most plausible. (shrink)

Reprint of: Gary Hatfield, Force (God) in Descartes' physics, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 10 (2):113-140 (1979) -/- Abstract. It is difficult to evaluate the role of activity - of force or of that which has causal efficacy - in Descartes’ natural philosophy. On the one hand, Descartes claims to include in his natural philosophy only that which can be described geometrically, which amounts to matter (extended substance) in motion (where this motion is described kinematically).’ (...) Yet on the other hand, rigorous adherence to a purely geometrical description of matter in motion would make it difficult to account for the interactions among the particles that constitute Descartes’ universe, since the notions of extension and kinematical motion do not in themselves imply any causal agency. There is, after all, no reason to expect that a particle whose single essence is extension, even if we suppose it to be moving, should impart motion to another particle, while conversely, there is no reason to expect a resting particle to hinder the motion of an impinging one. Descartes' hankering for an austere ontology of matter in motion is in danger of excluding causal agency (force, conceived dynmically) from matter. To the modern reader it may seem obvious that Descartes did not get himself into such a fix, since matter in motion so readily reminds us of kinetic energy or of some more primitive notion of force. Yet by no means is it obvious that Descartes attributed causal efficacy to matter in motion per se. Serious scholars have held opposite positions on this issue. Westfall, Gabbey, and others’ have argued that although on the metaphysical plane Descartes attempted to eliminate force from his mechanical universe, nonetheless ‘force is a real feature’ of his mechanical world. The thrust of this view is that Descartes conceived of force as ‘the capacity of a body in motion to act’, by means of impact, upon other bodies. An opposing interpretation, defended here, is that Descartes did in fact deny causal agency to moving matter per se, restricting agency to immaterial substances such as the human mind, angels, and God. The intention of this interpretation is not to de-emphasize the role of matter in motion in Descartes’ explanation of nature, but rather to stress the fact that Descartes did not conceive of this moving matter dynamically. (shrink)

This introductory chapter surveys some basic findings on primate evolution and the evolution of mind; examines socially transmitted traditions in relation to the concept of culture; recounts the sources of evidence regarding the evolution of mind and culture; charts the history of evolutionary approaches to mind and behavior since Darwin; reviews several prominent theoretical syntheses concerning the evolution of the human mind and behavior; and, along the way, introduces the specific questions examined in the individual chapters.

In philosophical writings from Descartes’ time, the topic of attention attracted notice but not systematic treatment. In Descartes’s own writings, attention was not given the kind of extended analysis that he devoted to the theory of the senses, or the passions, or to the intellect and will. Nonetheless, phenomena of attention arose in relation to these other topics and were discussed in terms of mental operations and, where appropriate, relations to bodily organs. Although not producing a systematic account, Descartes frequently (...) noted attentional phenomena and creatively imagined intricate relations between sensory attention and brain processes. Descartes's observations of attentional phenomena show remarkable breadth, including cases of active mental control of attention and cases in which attention is drawn involuntarily to a novel event (first section). Descartes did not merely observe attentional phenomena; he also offered a framework for understanding them (second section). Part of this framework related attention to the activity of the will. Part also came from his conception of mind-body interaction. He assigned a significant functional role to brain processes in explaining mental phenomena, including aspects of attention. He sometimes moves beyond the usual notions of unidirectional activity or passivity in the process of interaction. Rather, mind and brain are mutually constraining. Mental and physiological processes form a functional unity, in which brain processes contribute to the mental functioning of attention (final section). Furthermore, Descartes was willing to speak of “attention” in the mindless machine portrayed in his Traité de l’homme. That work describes brain states that interact with mind to explain aspects of mental attention. But we must also suppose that these same brain states constitute attention as it occurs in non-human animals, which lack a mind. According to Descartes, although attention is, in the first instance, a mental phenomenon, it can also be ascribed to non-human animals that share brain mechanisms with human beings and the behavior of which can be described as attentively directed toward selected objects in the environment. Translated into French by Olivier Dubouclez. (shrink)

Taking its point of departure in an anachronic exhibition, Soulèvements (2016/18), this book is a theoretical exploration of how the notion of contemporaneity understood as the coming together of different times in the same historical present relates to the end of a certain history of art. Critical of hitherto dominant chronological, ahistorical, and/or culturally restricted notions of the contemporary, Lund's overall aim is to make an argument for the contemporary contemporary, as the point of departure for any anachronic relationship with (...) time today, and as the inescapable point of departure for any possible historical imagination. (shrink)

This essay discusses the attempt by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British writers to achieve a clear definition of "wit." I provide a number of quotations from Hobbes, Locke, Pope, Addison, Dryden, and others to make the point that there was an unresolved tension between wit and judgment, imagination and reason, and rhetoric and philosophy, throughout the period.

This chapter argues that recent attempts to make sense of the delusion of thought insertion in terms of a distinction between two notions of thought ownership have been unsuccessful. It also proposes an alternative account, in which the delusion is to be interpreted in the light of its prehistory.

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION Fichte in Jena The year was one of rare calm for Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Behind him lay more than a decade of employment as an ...

Si l’on connaît aujourd’hui le dialogue fructueux que Paul Ricœur a noué avec les penseurs structuralistes, on ignore largement son positionnement face à la mouvance poststructuraliste. Faut-il opposer la philosophie de Ricœur au poststructuralisme à la française ou au contraire doit-on montrer qu’elle en est une variante singulière? C’est la seconde option qui est ici défendue. Certes, le poststructuralisme ne doit pas être considéré comme une école de pensée mais comme une reconstruction qui relève de l’histoire de la philosophie. Dans (...) la mesure où les horizons de dépassement du structuralisme ont été posés de manière chaque fois particulière, il est préférable de parler de poststructuralismes au pluriel. C’est la raison pour laquelle J. Michel propose des confrontations dyadiques entre Ricœur et certains de ses contemporains que l’on regroupe habituellement dans cette mouvance. (shrink)

Corporate violations of the law are occurring with increasing frequency and with increasing public attention. Solutions to date have proved ineffectual because of the problem of determining whom is to be punished for the offense of the corporation. Instead of individual jail terms or corporate fines, we propose that the dissolution of the corporation be considered as a more effectual means of conforming corporate behavior to the norms of the legal system.

This article examines joint action initiatives among small- and medium-sized enterprises in the manufacturing industries in developing countries in the context of the ascendancy of corporate social responsibility and the proliferation of a variety of international accountability tools and standards. Through empirical fieldwork in the football manufacturing industry of Jalandhar in North India, the article documents how local cluster-based SMEs stay coupled with the global CSR agenda through joint CSR initiatives focusing on child labor. Probing further, however, also reveals patterns (...) of selective decoupling in relation to core humanitarian and labor rights issues. Through in-depth interviews with a wide range of stakeholders involved in the export-oriented football manufacturing industry of Jalandhar in North India, the article highlights the dynamics of coupling and decoupling taking place, and how developing country firms can gain credit and traction by focusing on high visibility CSR issues, although the plight of workers remains fundamentally unchanged. The authors revisit these findings in the discussion and concluding sections, highlighting the main research and policy implications of the analysis. (shrink)

Noam Chomsky and Frances Egan argue that David Marr’s computational theory of vision is not intentional, claiming that the formal scientific theory does not include description of visual content. They also argue that the theory is internalist in the sense of not describing things physically external to the perceiver. They argue that these claims hold for computational theories of vision in general. Beyond theories of vision, they argue that representational content does not figure as a topic within formal computational theories (...) in cognitive science. I demonstrate that Chomsky’s and Egan’s claims about Marr’s theory are false. Marr’s computational theory contains a mathematical theory of visual content, based on empirical psychophysical evidence. It also contains mathematical descriptions of distal physical surfaces and objects, and of their optic projection to the perceiver. Much computational research on vision contains these types of intentional and externalist components within the formal, mathematical, theories. Chomsky’s and Egan’s claims demonstrate inadequate study and understanding of Marr’s work and other research in this area. Computational theories of vision, by containing empirically based mathematical theories of visual content, to this extent present naturalizations of semantics. (shrink)