Sensory Modalities

Accounting for qualia in the natural world is a difficult business, and it is worth understanding why. A close examination of several theories of mind—Behaviorism, Identity Theory, Functionalism, and Integrated Information Theory—will be discussed, revealing shortcomings for these theories in explaining the contents of conscious experience: qualia. It will be argued that in order to overcome the main difficulty of these theories the senses should be interpreted as physical detectors. A new theory, Grounded Functionalism, will be proposed, which retains multiple (...) realizability while allowing for a scientifically based approach toward accounting for qualia in the natural world. (shrink)

Brincat and Westheimer [Journal of Neurophysiology 83 (2000) 1900] have reported facilitating interactions in the discrimination of spatially separated target orientations and co-linear inducing orientations by human observers. With smaller gaps between stimuli (short-range effects), facilitating interactions were found to depend on the contrast polarity of the stimuli. With larger gaps (longrange effects), only co-linearity of the stimuli seemed necessary to produce facilitation. In our study, the dependency of facilitating interactions on the intensity (luminance) of line stimuli is investigated by (...) measuring detection thresholds for a target line separated from the end of an inducing line by co-axial gaps ranging from 5 to 200 min of visual arc. We find facilitating interactions between target and inducing orientations, producing short-range and long-range effects similar to those reported by Brincat and Westheimer. In addition, detection thresholds as a function of the co-axial separation between target and inducing line reveal an interaction between the spatial regime of facilitating effects and the luminance of the stimuli. Short-range effects are found to be sensitive to changes in local intensity while long-range effects remain unaffected. (shrink)

Results from three experiments using spatial forced-choice techniques show that an illusory contour improves the detectability of a spatially superimposed, 1pixel-thin subthreshold line of either contrast polarity. Furthermore, the subthreshold line is found to enhance the visibility of an illusory contour bridging the gap between the two colinear edges of physically defined boundaries. Stimuli which do not induce illusory contours, but reduce uncertainty about the spatial position of the line, give rise to a slight detection facilitation, but the threshold of (...) 75% correct responses is not attained. The data indicate that superimposing illusory contours and 1pixel thin subthreshold lines produces interactions which are similar to classic subthreshold summation. This provides psychophysical evidence for the functional equivalence of illusory and real lines, as suggested by neurophysiological data from single-cell recordings in V1 and V2 of cats and primates. (shrink)

The thresholds of human observers detecting line targets improve significantly when the targets are presented in a spatial context of collinear inducing stimuli. This phenomenon is referred to as spatial facilitation, and may reflect the output of long-range interactions between cortical feature detectors. Spatial facilitation has thus far been observed with luminance-defined, achromatic stimuli on achromatic backgrounds. This study compares spatial facilitation with line targets and collinear, edge-like inducers defined by luminance contrast to spatial facilitation with targets and inducers defined (...) by color contrast. The results of a first experiment show that achromatic inducers facilitate the detection of achromatic targets on gray and colored backgrounds, but tend to suppress the detection of chromatic targets. Chromatic inducers facilitate the detection of chromatic targets on gray and colored backgrounds, but tend to suppress the detection of achromatic targets. Chromatic spatial facilitation appears to be strongest when inducers and background are isoluminant. The results of a second experiment show that spatial facilitation with chromatic targets and inducers requires a longer exposure duration of the inducers than spatial facilitation with achromatic targets and inducers, which is already fully effective at an inducer exposure of 30 ms only. The findings point towards two separate mechanisms for spatial facilitation with collinear form stimuli: one that operates in the domain of luminance, and one that operates in the domain of color contrast. These results are consistent with neural models of boundary and surface formation which suggest that achromatic and chromatic visual cues are represented on different cortical surface representations that are capable of selectively attracting attention. Multiple copies of these achromatic and chromatic surface representations exist corresponding to different ranges of perceived depth from an observer, and each can attract attention to itself. Color and contrast differences between inducing and test stimuli, and transient responses to inducing stimuli, can cause attention to shift across these surface representations in ways that sometimes enhance and sometimes interfere with target detection. (shrink)

Proponents of cognitive penetration often argue for the thesis on the basis of combined intuitions about categorical perception and perceptual learning. The claim is that beliefs penetrate perceptions in the course of learning to perceive categories. I argue that this “diachronic” penetration thesis is false. In order to substantiate a robust notion of penetration, the beliefs that enable learning must describe the particular ability that subjects learn. However, they cannot do so, since in order to help with learning they must (...) instruct learners to employ previously existing abilities. I argue that a better approach recognizes that we can have sophisticated causal precursors to perceptual learning, but that the learning process itself must operate outside of cognitive influence. (shrink)

Is blue food desirable or disgusting? The answer, it would seem, is both, but it really depends on the food in which the color happens to be present. It turns out that the oft-cited aversive response to blue meat may not even have been scientifically validated, despite the fact that blue food coloring is often added to discombobulate diners. In the case of drinks, however, there has been a recent growth of successful new blue product launches in everything from beer (...) to tea, and from wine to gin, arguing that coloring food products blue is more than simply a contemporary fad. In fact, the current interest in blue food coloring builds on the color's earlier appearance in everything from blue curacao to blue-raspberry candyfloss, and thereafter a number of soft drinks. Over the years, the combination of blue coloring with raspberry flavoring has also appeared in everything from bubble-gum to patriotic pop rocks. Ultimately, it is the rarity of naturally-blue foods that is likely what makes this color so special. As such, blue food coloring can both work effectively to attract the visual attention of the shopper while, at the same time, being linked to a range of different flavors depending on the food format in which it happens to appear. Note also that the basic descriptor “blue” covers a wide range of hues having a range of different associations, hence eliciting different reactions. While blue was once associated with artificiality, a growing number of natural blue food colorings have come onto the market in recent years thus perhaps changing the dominant associations that many consumers may have with this most unusual of food colors. (shrink)

The sounds that result from our movement and that mark the outcome of our actions typically convey useful information concerning the state of our body and its movement, as well as providing pertinent information about the stimuli with which we are interacting. Here we review the rapidly growing literature investigating the influence of non-veridical auditory cues (i.e., inaccurate in terms of their context, timing, and/or spectral distribution) on multisensory body and action perception, and on motor behavior. Inaccurate auditory cues provide (...) a unique opportunity to study cross-modal processes: the ability to detect the impact of each sense when they provide a slightly different message is greater. Additionally, given that similar cross-modal processes likely occur regardless of the accuracy or inaccuracy of sensory input, studying incongruent interactions are likely to also help us predict interactions between congruent inputs. The available research convincingly demonstrates that perceptions of the body, of movement, and of surface contact features (e.g., roughness) are influenced by the addition of non-veridical auditory cues. Moreover, auditory cues impact both motor behavior and emotional valence, the latter showing that sounds that are highly incongruent with the performed movement induce feelings of unpleasantness (perhaps associated with lower processing fluency). Such findings are relevant to the design of auditory cues associated with product interaction, and the use of auditory cues in sport performance and therapeutic situations given the impact on motor behavior. (shrink)

My dissertation contributes to a central and ongoing debate in the philosophy of perception about the fundamental nature of perceptual states. Such states include cases like seeing, hearing, or tasting as well as cases of merely seeming to see, hear, or taste. A central question about perceptual states arises in light of misperceptual phenomena. A commonsensical view of perceptual states construes them as simply relating us to the external and mind independent objects. But some misperceptual cases suggest that these states (...) fall short of contact with the world. The result is that perceptual states are either thought to fundamentally consist in a highest common factor that falls short of perceptual contact with the world, or are thought to be disjunctive in nature, with some cases involving perceptual contact, and others receiving a different analysis. Contrary to these views, I argue that no misperceptual cases compromise perceptual contact with worldly objects, so perceptual states should be understood as relations to the external and mind-independent world. I call this view I defend Pure Relationalism, and the view of misperceptual cases that makes pure relationalism possible Illusionism. (shrink)

Humans are poorer at identifying smells and communicating about them, compared to other sensory domains. They also cannot easily organize odor sensations in a general conceptual space, where geometric distance could represent how similar or different all odors are. These two generalities are more or less accepted by psychologists, and they are often seen as connected: If there is no conceptual space for odors, then olfactory identification should indeed be poor. We propose here an important revision to this conclusion: We (...) believe that the claim that there is no odor space is true only if by odor space, one means a conceptual space representing all possible odor sensations, in the paradigmatic sense used for instance for color. However, in a less paradigmatic sense, local conceptual spaces representing a given subset of odors do exist. Thus the absence of a global odor space does not warrant the conclusion that there is no olfactory conceptual map at all. Here we show how a localist account provides a new interpretation of experts and cross‐cultural categorization studies: Rather than being exceptions to the poor olfactory identification and communication usually seen elsewhere, experts and cross‐cultural categorization are here taken to corroborate the existence of local conceptual spaces. (shrink)

With the shortage of physicians and surgeons and increase in demand worldwide due to situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a growing interest in finding solutions to help address the problem. A solution to this problem would be to use neurotechnology to provide them augmented cognition, senses and action for optimal diagnosis and treatment. Consequently, doing so can negatively impact them and others. We argue that applying neurotechnology for human enhancement in physicians and surgeons can cause injustices, and (...) harm to them and patients. In this paper, we will first describe the augmentations and neurotechnologies that can be used to achieve the relevant augmentations for physicians and surgeons. We will then review selected ethical concerns discussed within literature, discuss the neuroengineering behind using neurotechnology for augmentation purposes, then conclude with an analysis on outcomes and ethical issues of implementing human augmentation via neurotechnology in medical and surgical practice. (shrink)

Multisensory integration can alter information processing, and previous research has shown that such processes are modulated by sensory switch costs and prior experience. Here we report an incidental finding demonstrating, for the first time, the interplay between these processes and experimental factors, specifically the presence of the experimenter in the testing room. Experiment 1 demonstrates that multisensory motor facilitation in response to audiovisual stimuli is higher in those trials in which the sensory modality switches than when it repeats. Those participants (...) who completed the study while alone exhibited increased RT variability. Experiment 2 replicated these findings using the letters “b” and “d” presented as unisensory stimuli or congruent and incongruent multisensory stimuli. Multisensory enhancements were inflated following a sensory switch; that is, congruent and incongruent multisensory stimuli resulted in significant gains following a sensory switch in the monitored condition. However, when the participants were left alone, multisensory enhancements were only observed for repeating incongruent multisensory stimuli. These incidental findings therefore suggest that the effects of letter congruence and sensory switching on multisensory integration are partly modulated by the presence of an experimenter. (shrink)

A collection of new articles in philosophy of perception, experimental psychology, and cognitive neurosciences written by world experts of the domain: Mohan Matthen, Scott Johnson, Berit Brogaard & Thomas Sørensen, EJ Green, Jake Quilty-Dunn, Brian Scholl, Philip Kellman, Frédérique de Vignemont, Mazviita Chirimuuta, Bence Nanay & Nick Young, Yale Cohen, William Lycan, Jonas Olofsson, Clare Batty & Barry Smith, Benjamin Young, Aleksandra Mroczko-Wąsowicz, Błażej Skrzypulec, Jonathan Cohen, Charles Spence, Casey O’Callaghan, Simon Lacey & Krish Sathian, Fabrizio Calzavarini & Alberto Voltolini, (...) and Matthew Fulkerson among others. (shrink)

In his explorations of time-consciousness, Edmund Husserl often draws upon the examples of a musical tone or melody to describe temporal experience. Yet, Husserl's arguments are not about music per se, and he never engages with the internal structures and dynamics of music. More specifically, Husserl does not discuss rhythm and metre, the principal temporal modalities of music. Nonetheless, Husserl's thoughts on time-consciousness have a direct bearing on the perception of musical metre, and particularly so with respect to Christopher Hasty's (...) ideas concerning metric projection. Hasty grounds his ideas on metric projection on the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead: my view is that he is better served by Husserl. This is because Husserl's understanding of the interrelationship between 'temporal fading' and 'temporal duration' enables us to account for the sense of the unfolding realization of a specific duration, a sense that is essential to the capacity to project musical metre. (shrink)

The perceptual system estimates distal conditions based upon proximal sensory input. It typically exploits information from multiple cues across and within modalities: it estimates shape based upon visual and haptic cues; it estimates depth based upon convergence, binocular disparity, motion parallax, and other visual cues; and so on. Bayesian models illuminate the computations through which the perceptual system combines sensory cues. I review key aspects of these models. Based on my review, I argue that we should posit co-referring perceptual representations (...) corresponding to distinct sensory cues. For example, the perceptual system represents a distal size using a representation canonically linked with vision and a distinct representation canonically linked with touch. Distinct co-referring perceptual representations represent the same denotation, but they do so under different modes of presentation. Bayesian cue combination models demonstrate that psychological explanation of perception should attend to mode of presentation and not simply to denotation. (shrink)

Encyclopedia entry on color synesthesia with cognitive/neurscientific focus.

The aim of this chapter is to shed new light on the question of what newly-sighted subjects are capable of seeing on the basis of previous experience with mind-independent, external objects and their properties through touch alone. This question is also known as “Molyneux’s Question.” Much of the empirically driven debate surrounding this question has been centered on the nature of the representational content of the subjects’ visual experiences. It has generally been assumed that the meaning of “seeing” deployed in (...) these disputes is more or less clear and unproblematic, and therefore requires no analysis or clarification. In this chapter, we wish to challenge this assumption. We argue that getting clear on the meaning of “seeing” is the only feasible way to determine whether the empirical attempts to answer Molyneux’s Question accurately capture what newly-sighted subjects are in fact capable of seeing. (shrink)

In 1688 the Irish scientist and politician William Molyneux sent a letter to the philosopher John Locke. In it, he asked him a question: could someone who was born blind, and able to distinguish a globe and a cube by touch, be able to immediately distinguish and name these shapes by sight if given the ability to see? -/- The philosophical puzzle offered in Molyneux’s letter fascinated not only Locke, but major thinkers such as Leibniz, Berkeley, Diderot, Reid, and numerous (...) others including psychologists and cognitive scientists today. Does such a question represent a philosophical puzzle or a problem that can be solved by experimental tests? Can vision be fully restored after blindness? What is the relation between vision and touch? Are the senses linked through learning or bound at birth? -/- Molyneux’s Question and the History of Philosophy is a major collection of essays that explore the long-standing issues Molyneux’s problem presents to philosophy of mind, perception and the senses. In addition, the volume considers the question from an interdisciplinary angle, examines the pre-history of the question, and aspects of it that have been ignored, such as perspectives from religion and disability. -/- As such, Molyneux’s Question and the History of Philosophy presents a set of philosophically rich, empirically informed, and scientifically rigorous original investigations into this famous puzzle. It will be of great interest to students and researchers in philosophy, psychology, and the cognitive sciences including neuroscience, neurobiology and ophthalmology, as well as those studying the mind, perception and the senses. (shrink)

This is an anthology of new papers by top researchers in epistemology and philosophy of mind focused on the epistemology of non-visual perception. The focus of the volume is to highlight the many different domains in which non-visual sensory experience, broadly construed to include multimodal experience associated with emotional and agential perception, plays a rational role, for instance, as an immediate justifier of belief. -/- .

This paper shows that direct-object perceptual verbs, such as "hear", "smell", "taste", "feel", and "see", share a collection of distinctive semantic behaviors with depictive verbs, among which are "draw'', "paint", "sketch", and "sculpt". What explains these behaviors in the case of depictives is that they are causative verbs, and have lexical decompositions that involve the creation of concrete artistic artifacts, such as pictures, paintings, and sculptures. For instance, "draw a dog" means "draw a picture of a dog", where the latter (...) occurrence of "draw" denotes a creative activity. While perceptual verbs are not obviously causatives, they have analogous decompositions involving noun phrases that denote modality-specific sense-objects, such as a sounds, smells, flavors, touches, and sights. Thus, "hear a trumpet" means "hear the sound of a trumpet", and the same holds, mutatis mutandis, for verbs denoting the other sensory modes. If we take this analogy at face value, our perceptual reports will commit us to a form of the sense-datum theory of perception. While the analogy can be resisted, resistance requires taking on unexpected commitments. (shrink)

This paper addresses the problem of intermodal perception, that of how warranted perception arises of objects having characteristics in multiple sense modalities. It first shows the inadequacy of the currently popular explanations of such perception in terms of special, innate mechanisms. It proposes instead a phenomenological account in terms of an infant's general capacities for observation and thought. To this end it prepares the terrain with brief investigations into four topics: spontaneity, non-symbolic thinking, the role of spontaneity in perception, and (...) the lived body. It then traces how an infant may, through spontaneous observations of invariable co-presence and sequence, integrate tactile objects, then tastes, smells, and sounds, and finally, with the help from topological and dynamic congruence, visual objects into a single world with the lived body as centre of orientation. (shrink)

Experts from wine tasters to radiologists to bird watchers have all undergone perceptual learning-long-term changes in perception that result from practice or experience. Philosophers have been discussing such cases for centuries, from the 14th-century Indian philosopher Vedanta Desika to the 18th-century Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid, and into contemporary times. -/- This book uses recent evidence from psychology and neuroscience to show that perceptual learning is genuinely perceptual, rather than post-perceptual. It also offers a taxonomy for classifying cases in the philosophical (...) literature. In some cases, perceptual learning involves changes in how one attends; in other cases, it involves a learned ability to differentiate two properties, or to perceive two properties as unified. Connolly uses this taxonomy to rethink several domains of perception in terms of perceptual learning, including multisensory perception, color perception, and speech perception. -/- As a whole, the book offers a theory of the function of perceptual learning. Perceptual learning embeds into our quick perceptual systems what would be a slower task were it to be done in a controlled, cognitive manner. A novice wine taster drinking a Cabernet Sauvignon might have to think about its features first and then infer the type of wine, while an expert can identify it immediately. This learned ability to immediately identify the wine enables the expert to think about other things like the vineyard or the vintage of the wine. More generally, perceptual learning serves to free up cognitive resources for other tasks. This book offers a comprehensive empirically-informed account, and explores the nature, scope, and theoretical implications of perceptual learning. (shrink)

This thesis is about experiential content: what it is; what kind of account can be given of it. I am concerned with identifying and attacking one main view - I call it the inferentialist proposal. This account is central to the philosophy of mind, epistemology and philosophy of science and perception. I claim, however, that it needs to be recast into something far more subtle and enriched, and I attempt to provide a better alternative in these pages. The inferentialist proposal (...) holds that experiential content is necessarily under¬pinned by sophisticated cognitive influences. My alternative, the continuum theory, holds that these influences are relevant to experience only at certain levels of organisation and that at other levels there are contents which such features do not capture at all. Central to my account is that there are degrees to which cognitive influences affect experiential content; indeed, for the most part, experience is an amalgam of both inferential and non-inferential features. I claim that the inferentialist proposal is fundamentally flawed and deserves replacement, and I argue that my alternative fills the hollow that remains. The thesis is divided into four sections. In Part I, Chapter 1, I introduce two traditionally rival views of experiential content. In Chapter 2, I develop my continuum alternative. Chapter 3 assesses the relationship between experience and language, while Chapter 4 explores the relationship between beliefs and experience. The overall argument is that it has been a mistake to understand experience simply in inferential or non-inferential terms. In Part II, I examine the structure of mental content. Chapter 5 is concerned with the kinds of experiences which escape the inferentialist analysis. Chapter 6 considers Kant’s metaphysic of experience counterpointed to Lorenz’s reading of his work in the light of evolutionary biology. Chapter 7 treats animal experience in relation to the continuum view I am developing, while Chapter 8 reviews Fodor’s contribution to perceptual psychology. It is argued that the view of experiential content being developed is both consistent with empirical data on informationally local perceptual sub-systems, but also accords well with evolutionary theory and a naturalist interpretation of Kant’s taxonomy. Part III deals with inferentialism in the philosophy of science. In Chapter 9, I assess the theory dependence of observation thesis as it is advanced by Paul Feyerabend. I bring out of his account a subtle confusion concerning the importance of inference in the context of scientific inquiry. Part IV deals with the issue of experience in the philosophy of mind. In Chapter 10, I look at Wilfred Sellars’s attack on sense data theories. Chapter 11 confronts Paul Churchland’s treatment of ‘folk psychology’ while Chapter 12 isolates the issue of experiential qualia and the position of property dualism. I offer a critical review of Thomas Nagel’s work in this chapter and claim that his position can be read in a way which is consistent with the continuum account I am developing. I conclude the thesis in the usual fashion with a summary of the central claims. (shrink)

Philosophers and scientists have studied sensory perception and, in particular, vision for many years. Increasingly, however, they have become interested in the nonvisual senses in greater detail and the problem of individuating the senses in a more general way. The Aristotelian view is that there are only five external senses—smell, taste, hearing, touch, and vision. This has, by many counts, been extended to include internal senses, such as balance, proprioception, and kinesthesis; pain; and potentially other human and nonhuman senses. This (...) “multisensory turn” has been driven partly by developments in contemporary psychology and neuroscience, which have revealed a host of complex interrelations and interactions between sensory modalities previously thought to be distinct. Contrasts between modalities and other crossmodal phenomena, including multisensory integration, synesthesia, and sensory substitution, have also begun to receive more attention in a burgeoning scientific and philosophical literature on multisensory perception and other crossmodal effects. This article focuses on recent empirically informed contributions to the philosophy of perception, as well as key scientific works that provide important background information and insights into the nature of the senses and sensory perception. Indeed, one of the lessons of the multisensory turn, and of contemporary philosophy of mind more generally, is that philosophers ignore this body of empirical research at their peril because many human and animal senses turn out to be richer and more complex than philosophers and scientists had previously imagined, making this a fruitful area for interdisciplinary interaction and research. (shrink)

This paper proposes a methodological strategy to investigate the question of the individuation of the senses both from a commonsensical and a scientific point of view. We start by discussing some traditional and recent criteria for distinguishing the senses and argue that none of them taken in isolation seems to be able to handle both points of views. We then pay close attention to the faculty of hearing which offers promising examples of the strategy we pursue of combining commonsense and (...) science. In particular, we argue in favour of a distinction between two kinds of modes of presentation associated with sound perception: a mechanical mode of presentation that makes sounds perceptible by other modalities than audition such as touch and a tonal mode of presentation that makes people conceive of sounds as the proper objects of auditory perception. (shrink)

The question of whether we can perceive absences, in addition to ‘positives’, has received recent attention in the literature on the nature of vision and audition. The aim is to demonstrate that there can be objectless forms of perceptual consciousness; specifically, to show that such episodes can be distinguished from those in which there is merely no perception at all. The current article explores this question for the domain of olfaction, and argues that there can be experiences of the absence (...) of odours, in addition to positive smell perception. Doing so sheds light upon the structure and spatial content of olfaction. (shrink)

Autistic individuals have been observed to demonstrate high intelligence through musical communication, leading to many empirical studies on this topic. Absolute Pitch has been a captivating phenomenon for researchers, although there has been disagreement regarding AP percentages among the population and appropriate testing methods for AP. This study analyzed data collected from 118 people, using a pitch matching paradigm designed specifically to be inclusive of those who are likely to have note-naming difficulty due to communication challenges. Thirty-eight participants were autistic (...) individuals, 32% of which were considered to have severe language impairment. Twelve other participants had other developmental disorders. All but 1 of the 38 autistics demonstrated exceptional and instantaneous pitch matching abilities on piano. Ten of the 12 with other developmental disorders demonstrated this ability, and approximately half of neurotypicals were able to exhibit this ability. Our numbers indicate that with a more inclusive paradigm for assessing AP, it may be demonstratable in close to 50% of the population, and near 100% in the autistic population. This testing method represents a neurodiversity-friendly and fully inclusive, non-verbal paradigm for demonstrating AP. (shrink)

Our knowledge of the world comes to us, one way or another, through our senses. I know there's a table here, because I see it, and that there's traffic outside, because I hear it. And similarly for our other senses. I know when it's cold, because I feel it; when there's sugar in my tea, because I taste it; smoke in the air, because I smell it; and so on.

This essay describes the friendship between Denis Diderot, the Enlightenment philosopher and art critic, and Melanie de Salignac, a seventeen-year-old girl who had been totally blind since her infancy. I compare their discussion of her conceptualizations of visual phenomena to autobiographical accounts by blind people from the 19th century to the present, and to theories about brain plasticity developed by modern cognitive scientists who study images of blind people's brains.

The doctoral thesis of Franz Brentano, first published in 1862 under the title Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles, has conditioned, on a surprisingly large scale, the introduction of German students to Aristotelian metaphysics. George’s translation now makes this historically important book accessible to Anglophones. The translation conveys accurately the characteristic facets of Brentano’s Aristotle, such as the systematic deduction of the Aristotelian categories, the twofold analogy of being throughout the categories, the direct exclusion of one category by (...) another, and so on. The deeply Scholastic background of the interpretation shines clearly through the English translation. It may be easily seen, for instance, through the notions of "abstraction" and "intention" in the statement that definition, genus, and universal "as such do not exist outside the abstracting understanding and so the two-footed animal as definition does not exist in things and is as such second intention". The only noticeable efforts at distinguishing Brentano from Aristotle are the addition of sic three times in brackets to show that Brentano’s example "horse" substitutes for Aristotle’s "man", a note contrasting Brentano’s version of a text with that of Ross, and a brief prefatory remark. This laudable avoidance of any slanting in one direction or another pervades the whole translation. The English title, however, may give pause for reflection. The original Greek phrasing "that which is is expressed in multiple fashion" brought together both the unity and the multiplicity of signification in the single notion "that which is." Perhaps the double bearing cannot be neatly phrased in either modern language—the German singular mannigfache Bedeutung stresses the unity of the notion, while the English plural "several senses" brings out only its multiplicity. (shrink)

Cette question a captivé les philosophes modernes de Berkeley à Condillac en passant par Diderot. Son attrait s'explique principalement par ce qu'elle semblait pouvoir jouer le rôle d'expérience cruciale dans le débat entre les empiristes et les rationalistes. On sait maintenant qu'un homme aveugle de naissance ne pourra jamais reconnaître visuellement quoi que ce soit. Devons-nous considérer dès lors que l'affaire est entendue, que le débat est clos? Deux mille ans de philosophie sans la moindre réussite devrait rendre le philosophe (...) averti suspicieux, et avec raison. (shrink)

In this brief note I clarify two points made in my 1996 book Philosophical Perspectives on Language. The clarifications are prompted by some criticisms in a recent Dialogue review of that book.

In visual information processing, two kinds of vision are distinguished: vision-for-perception related to the conscious identifi cation of objects, and vision-for-action that deals with visual control of movements. Neuroscience suggests that these two functions are performed by two separate brain neural systems - the ventral and dorsal pathways. Two experiments using behavioural measures were conducted with the objective of exploring any potential interaction between these two functions of vision. The aim was to combine in one task methods allowing for the (...) simultaneous capture of both perceptual global processing and affordance extraction and to check whether they infi uence each other. This aim was achieved by employing the paradigms of Navon and Tucker and Ellis. A compound fi gure was created made up of objects with handles that might or might not have orientation congruent between levels. The results revealed that while the affordance effect occurred every time, the Navon effect appeared only when subjects focused their attention on object elements responsible for inconsistence within compound fi gure. Most importantly, even when these two effects occurred at once, they had no effect on each other. Results from the study failed to confi rm the hypothesis about interaction and gives support to the view that vision-for-perception and vision-for-action tend to act as separate systems. (shrink)

The purposes of the present study were to explore the relationship between body awareness and negative body attitude, interoceptive body awareness and physical self in women practicing fitness as well as to analyze the determinants of body awareness. The Body Awareness Questionnaire, the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness, the Physical Self-Description Questionnaire and the Body Attitude Test were applied to 43 women practicing fitness and 32 non-fitness practitioners. Bodily self-awareness was connected with greater fitness practitioners’ interoceptive body awareness and greater (...) physical self. Noticing and global esteem predicted body awareness in women practicing fitness. (shrink)

From the conference report: Sue Golding, brought together contemporary art with continental philosophy in a lecture/installation/poetic, entitled: “Tactile Philosophy: From Ars Scientifica to Ars Erotica”. In absolute darkness, with her voice amplified through a microphone, she explored the event of synthetic life on aesthetics, sensuality and science. The audience was encouraged to visualize or construct through listening, a philosophical narrative that would amalgamate the speaker’s/author’s assertions with one’s own resonances – and fears – of what it means to be human, (...) sensuous and ‘alive’ in our digital, mediated age. (shrink)

Of all the things we eat or drink, wine is without question the most complex. So it should not be surprising that philosophers have turned their attention to wine: complex phenomena can lend themselves to philosophical speculation. Wine is complex not just in the variety of tastes it presents – ‘wine tastes of everything apart from grapes’, I once heard an expert say – but in its meaning...

A neuropsychological perspective on auditory verbal hallucinations links key phenomenological features of the experience, such as voice location and identity, to functionally separable pathways in normal human audition. Although this auditory processing stream framework has proven valuable for integrating research on phenomenology with cognitive and neural accounts of hallucinatory experiences, it has not yet been applied to other symptoms presumed to be closely related to AVH – such as thought insertion. In this paper, I propose that an APS framework offers (...) a useful way of thinking about the experience of TI as well as AVH, providing a common conceptual framework for both. I argue that previous self-monitoring theories struggle to account for both the differences and similarities in the characteristic features of AVH and TI, which can be readily accommodated within an APS framework. Furthermore, the APS framework can be integrated with predictive processing accounts of psychotic symptoms; makes predictions about potential sites of prediction error signals; and may offer a template for understanding a range of other symptoms beyond AVH and TI. (shrink)

In the paper Gernot Böhme considers the spatial aspects of the perception of sound, especially the human voice, which he sees not as a verbal bearer of meaning but the expression of “the speaker’s atmospheric presence.” The voice lends the communication space emotional colour and the atmospheres it creates envelop the communication partners by way of resonance. The author sets the signatures concept propounded by the Renaissance philosopher Jacob Böhme against semiotic theories: understanding music is not interpretation but resonance. Gernot (...) Böhme also focuses on contemporary experimental music, where musical instruments are not treated as tools for the production of musical sounds but bodies “provoked” to generate specific sounds in the acoustic space. (shrink)