More than one third of the human brain is devoted to the processes of seeing - vision is after all the main way in which we gather information about the world. But human vision is a dynamic process during which the eyes continually sample the environment. Where most books on vision consider it as a passive activity, this book is unique in focusing on vision as an 'active' process. It goes beyond most accounts of (...) class='Hi'>vision where the focus is on seeing, to provide an integrated account of seeing AND looking. The book starts by pointing out the weaknesses in our traditional approaches to vision and the reason we need this new approach. It then gives a thorough description of basic details of the visual and oculomotor systems necessary to understand active vision. The book goes on to show how this approach can give a new perspective on visual attention, and how the approach has progressed in the areas of visual orienting, reading, visual search, scene perception and neuropsychology. Finally, the book summarises progress by showing how this approach sheds new light on the old problem of how we maintain perception of a stable visual world. Written by two leading vision scientists, this book will be valuable for vision researchers and psychology students, from undergraduate level upwards. (shrink)

It is fruitful to think of the representational and the organism-centered approaches as complementary levels of analysis, rather than mutually exclusive alternatives. Claims to the contrary by proponents of the organism-centered approach face what we call the “basketball problem.”.

This paper examines the status of unattended visual stimuli in the light of recent work on the role of attention in visual perception. Although the question of whether attention is required for visual experience seems very interesting, this paper argues that there currently is no good reason to take a stand on the issue. Moreover, it is argued that much of the allure of that question stems from a continued attachment to the defective ‘inner picture view’ of experience and a (...) mistaken notion that the ultimate goal of vision is to produce visual experience. The paper considers a promising general account of the content and structure of vision and presents reasons for not taking that account to be committed to any substantive claims about the experiential status of unattended visual stimuli. Also addressed are the active nature of vision and the role of vision in enabling our ecological success. These considerations highlight that visual experience is not the whole of vision and that a much more important question about unattended visual stimuli than whether they are consciously experienced is what contribution they make to how we interact with the world. (shrink)

The efficient coding hypothesis posits that sensory systems are tuned to the regularities of their natural input. The statistics of natural image databases have been the topic of many studies, which have revealed biases in the distribution of orientations that are related to neural representations as well as behavior in psychophysical tasks. However, commonly used natural image databases contain images taken with a camera with a planar image sensor and limited field of view. Thus, these images do not incorporate the (...) physical properties of the visual system and its active use reflecting body and eye movements. Here, we investigate quantitatively, whether the active use of the visual system influences image statistics across the visual field by simulating visual behaviors in an avatar in a naturalistic virtual environment. Images with a field of view of 120° were generated during exploration of a virtual forest environment both for a human and cat avatar. The physical properties of the visual system were taken into account by projecting the images onto idealized retinas according to models of the eyes' geometrical optics. Crucially, different active gaze behaviors were simulated to obtain image ensembles that allow investigating the consequences of active visual behaviors on the statistics of the input to the visual system. In the central visual field, the statistics of the virtual images matched photographic images regarding their power spectra and a bias in edge orientations toward cardinal directions. At larger eccentricities, the cardinal bias was superimposed with a gradually increasing radial bias. The strength of this effect depends on the active visual behavior and the physical properties of the eye. There were also significant differences between the upper and lower visual field, which became stronger depending on how the environment was actively sampled. Taken together, the results show that quantitatively relating natural image statistics to neural representations and psychophysical behavior requires not only to take the structure of the environment into account, but also the physical properties of the visual system, and its active use in behavior. (shrink)

When the stored representation of the meaning of a stimulus is accessed through the processing of a sensory input it is maintained in an activated state for a certain amount of time that allows for further processing. This semantic activation is generally accompanied by conscious identification, which can be demonstrated by the ability of a person to perform discriminations on the basis of the meaning of the stimulus. The idea that a sensory input can give rise to semantic activation without (...) concomitant conscious identification was the central thesis of the controversial research in subliminal perception. Recently, new claims for the existence of such phenomena have arisen from studies in dichotic listening, parafoveal vision, and visual pattern masking. Because of the fundamental role played by these types of experiments in cognitive psychology, the new assertions have raised widespread interest. (shrink)

Looking back on the many prophets who tried to predict the future as if it were predetermined, at first sight any forward-looking activity is reminiscent of making predictions with a crystal ball. In contrast to fortune tellers, today’s exercises do not predict, but try to show different paths that an open future could take. A key motivation to undertake forward-looking activities is broadening the information basis for decision-makers to help them actively shape the future in a desired way. Experts, laypeople, (...) or stakeholders may have different sets of values and priorities with regard to pending decisions on any issue related to the future. Therefore, considering and incorporating their views can, in the best case scenario, lead to more robust decisions and strategies. However, transferring this plurality into a form that decision-makers can consider is a challenge in terms of both design and facilitation of participatory processes. In this paper, we will introduce and critically assess a new qualitative method for forward-looking activities, namely CIVISTI (Citizen Visions on Science, Technology and Innovation; www.civisti.org), which was developed during an EU project of the same name. Focussing strongly on participation, with clear roles for citizens and experts, the method combines expert, stakeholder and lay knowledge to elaborate recommendations for decision-making in issues related to today’s and tomorrow’s science, technology and innovation. Consisting of three steps, the process starts with citizens’ visions of a future 30–40 years from now. Experts then translate these visions into practical recommendations which the same citizens then validate and prioritise to produce a final product. The following paper will highlight the added value as well as limits of the CIVISTI method and will illustrate potential for the improvement of future processes. (shrink)

Looking back on the many prophets who tried to predict the future as if it were predetermined, at first sight any forward-looking activity is reminiscent of making predictions with a crystal ball. In contrast to fortune tellers, today’s exercises do not predict, but try to show different paths that an open future could take. A key motivation to undertake forward-looking activities is broadening the information basis for decision-makers to help them actively shape the future in a desired way. Experts, laypeople, (...) or stakeholders may have different sets of values and priorities with regard to pending decisions on any issue related to the future. Therefore, considering and incorporating their views can, in the best case scenario, lead to more robust decisions and strategies. However, transferring this plurality into a form that decision-makers can consider is a challenge in terms of both design and facilitation of participatory processes. In this paper, we will introduce and critically assess a new qualitative method for forward-looking activities, namely CIVISTI (Citizen Visions on Science, Technology and Innovation; www.civisti.org ), which was developed during an EU project of the same name. Focussing strongly on participation, with clear roles for citizens and experts, the method combines expert, stakeholder and lay knowledge to elaborate recommendations for decision-making in issues related to today’s and tomorrow’s science, technology and innovation. Consisting of three steps, the process starts with citizens’ visions of a future 30–40 years from now. Experts then translate these visions into practical recommendations which the same citizens then validate and prioritise to produce a final product. The following paper will highlight the added value as well as limits of the CIVISTI method and will illustrate potential for the improvement of future processes. (shrink)

According to some technology enthusiasts our technological developments appear to be accelerating at an exponential rate. A common vision of such enthusiasts is that the accelerating pace of science and technology development will enable us to transform the world in more profound and significant ways than at any other time in our history. More importantly, some of these technology enthusiasts have gone beyond having technological-driven visions about the future to be actively engaged in a diverse set of activities aimed (...) at shaping the future they envision. These are not just people with visions about the future, they are visioneers. (shrink)

The strategies of action employed by a human subject in order to perceive simple 2-D forms on the basis of tactile sensory feedback have been modelled by an explicit computer algorithm. The modelling process has been constrained and informed by the capacity of human subjects both to consciously describe their own strategies, and to apply explicit strategies; thus, the strategies effectively employed by the human subject have been influenced by the modelling process itself. On this basis, good qualitative and semi-quantitative (...) agreement has been achieved between the trajectories produced by a human subject, and the traces produced by a computer algorithm. The advantage of this reciprocal modelling option, besides facilitating agreement between the algorithm and the empirically observed trajectories, is that the theoretical model provides an explanation, and not just a description, of the active perception of the human subject. (shrink)

Animate vision systems have gaze control mechanisms that can actively position the camera coordinate system in response to physical stimuli. Compared to passive systems, animate systems show that visual computation can be vastly less expensive when considered in the larger context of behavior. The most important visual behavior is the ability to control the direction of gaze. This allows the use of very low resolution imaging that has a high virtual resolution. Using such a system in a controlled way (...) provides additional constraints that dramatically simplify the computations of early vision. Another important behavior is the way the environment “behaves‘. Animate systems under real-time constraints can further reduce their computational burden by using environmental cues that are perspicuous in the local context. A third source of economy is introduced when behaviors are learned. Because errors are rarely fatal, systems using learning algorithms can amortize computational cost over extended periods. Further economies can be achieved when the learning system uses indexical reference, which is a form of dynamic variable binding. Animate vision is a natural way of implementing this dynamic binding. (shrink)

In this paper, I critically assess the enactive account of visual perception recently defended by Alva Noë (2004). I argue inter alia that the enactive account falsely identifies an object’s apparent shape with its 2D perspectival shape; that it mistakenly assimilates visual shape perception and volumetric object recognition; and that it seriously misrepresents the constitutive role of bodily action in visual awareness. I argue further that noticing an object’s perspectival shape involves a hybrid experience combining both perceptual and imaginative elements—an (...) act of what I call ‘make‐perceive’. (shrink)

This IEEE Vision for Smart Grid Communications: 2030 and Beyond Roadmap is a high-levelsupplement of the full vision document IEEE Vision for Smart Grid Communications: 2030 andBeyond. Communication is a major enabling technology for the Smart Grid. We believe that the powergrid will tend to utilize advances in communications since the data exchange requirements willscale up for the Smart Grid. Smart Grid communication will help to improve demand forecasting,enable self-healing from power disturbance events, facilitate active participation (...) by consumers in demand-response mechanisms, and provide resilience against physical and cyber attacks. Smart Grid communication will also help to improve quality of power, allow easy integration of renewable energy sources into the grid, foster innovation to enable new products, services, and markets, assist in optimization of assets, and improve operating efficiency. (shrink)

Evidence has accumulated that rod activation under mesopic and scotopic light levels alters visual perception and performance. Here we review the most recent developments in the measurement of rod and cone contributions to mesopic color perception and temporal processing, with a focus on data measured using the four-primary photostimulator method that independently controls rod and cone excitations. We discuss the findings in the context of rod inputs to the three primary retinogeniculate pathways to understand rod contributions to mesopic vision. (...) Additionally, we present evidence that hue perception is possible under scotopic, pure rod-mediated conditions that involves cortical mechanisms. (shrink)

Martin Sand explores the problems of responsibility at the early, visionary stages of technological development. He discusses the increasingly dominant concept of innovation and outlines how narratives about the future are currently used to facilitate technological change, to foster networks, and to raise public awareness for innovations. This set of activities is under increasing scrutiny as a form of “visioneering”. The author discusses intentionality and freedom as important, albeit fuzzy, preconditions for being responsible. He distinguishes being from holding responsible and (...) explores this distinction’s effects on the problem of moral luck. Finally, he develops a virtue ethical framework to discuss visioneers’ and innovators’ responsibilities.​. (shrink)

Feminists have re-visioned women as active subjects in knowledge by granting them agency and diversity and by challenging divisions like public versus private. But both feminist and traditional knowledge remain deeply adult centered. Adult perspectives infuse three contemporary images of children: as threats to adult society, as victims of adults, and as learners of adult culture. We can bring children more fully into knowledge by clarifying ideological constructions, with attention to the diversity of children's actual lives and circumstances; by (...) emphasizing children's agency as well as their subordination; and by challenging their conceptual privatization. The re-visioning of children involves complex issues of gender, generation, autonomy, and relatedness. (shrink)

In _Action in Perception _Alva No develops and presents a sensorimotor account of vision and of visual consciousness. According to such an account seeing (and indeed perceiving more generally) is analysed as a kind of skilful bodily activity. Such a view is consistent with the emerging emphasis, in both philosophy and cognitive science, on the critical role of embodiment in the construction of intelligent agency. I shall argue, however, that the full sensorimotor model faces three important challenges. The first (...) is to negotiate a path between two prima facie unsatisfactory readings of the central claim that conscious perceptual experience is constituted by knowledge of patterns of sensorimotor dependence. The second is to convince us that the sensorimotor contribution, in such cases, is actually constitutive of perceptual experience rather than merely causally implicated in the origination of such experience.² And the third is to respond to the important challenge raised by what I will dub 'sensorimotor summarizing' models of the relation between conscious experience and richly detailed sensorimotor routines. According to such models³ conscious perceptual experience only rather indirectly reflects the rich detail of our actual sensorimotor engagements, which are instead lightly sampled as a coarse guide, optimized for planning and reasoning, and geared and filtered according to current needs and purposes. (shrink)

Objective: Individually, vision and hearing impairments have been linked to higher levels of anxiety and depression. We investigated the effect of dual sensory impairment in a large representative sample of Spanish adults. Methods: Data from a total of 23,089 adults from the Spanish National Health Survey 2017 were analyzed. Self-reported difficulty of seeing and hearing, and depression and chronic anxiety were analyzed. Multivariable logistic regression was assessed for difficulty with vision alone, hearing alone and with difficulty with both, (...) adjusting for gender, age, marital status, living as a couple, education, smoking, alcohol consumption, BMI, physical activity, use of glasses/contact lenses, and hearing aid. Results: Visual difficulty, hearing difficulty, and dual difficulties were all associated with significantly higher odds for depression and for chronic anxiety. Dual sensory difficulty was associated with higher odds ratios for depression and anxiety when compared to either impairment alone. Conclusion: Dual sensory difficulty is associated with significantly higher odds of anxiety and depression when compared to either vision or hearing difficulty alone. Appropriate interventions are needed to address any reversible causes of vision and hearing as well as anxiety and depression in people in these specific groups. (shrink)

Many current neurophysiological, psychophysical, and psychological approaches to vision rest on the idea that when we see, the brain produces an internal representation of the world. The activation of this internal representation is assumed to give rise to the experience of seeing. The problem with this kind of approach is that it leaves unexplained how the existence of such a detailed internal representation might produce visual consciousness. An alternative proposal is made here. We propose that seeing is a way (...) of acting. It is a particular way of exploring the environment. Activity in internal representations does not generate the experience of seeing. The out- side world serves as its own, external, representation. The experience of seeing occurs when the organism masters what we call the gov- erning laws of sensorimotor contingency. The advantage of this approach is that it provides a natural and principled way of accounting for visual consciousness, and for the differences in the perceived quality of sensory experience in the different sensory modalities. Sev- eral lines of empirical evidence are brought forward in support of the theory, in particular: evidence from experiments in sensorimotor adaptation, visual “filling in,” visual stability despite eye movements, change blindness, sensory substitution, and color perception. (shrink)

The emerging neurocomputational vision of humans as embodied, ecologically embedded, social agents—who shape and are shaped by their environment—offers a golden opportunity to revisit and revise ideas about the physical and information-theoretic underpinnings of life, mind, and consciousness itself. In particular, the active inference framework makes it possible to bridge connections from computational neuroscience and robotics/AI to ecological psychology and phenomenology, revealing common underpinnings and overcoming key limitations. AIF opposes the mechanistic to the reductive, while staying fully grounded (...) in a naturalistic and information-theoretic foundation, using the principle of free energy minimization. The latter provides a theoretical basis for a unified treatment of particles, organisms, and interactive machines, spanning from the inorganic to organic, non-life to life, and natural to artificial agents. We provide a brief introduction to AIF, then explore its implications for evolutionary theory, ecological psychology, embodied phenomenology, and robotics/AI research. We conclude the paper by considering implications for machine consciousness. (shrink)

The Marxian visions of the post-capitalist future evolved with significant changes over three decades. From the outset Marx and Engels divided the future into stages, economically and philosophically, a final communist or socialist stage, and a transitional stage or stages preceding it. The final stage remained largely constant throughout, the actualization of the ideal of Feuerbach's anthropological philosophy, supplemented by Fourier's ideas for the abolition of the division of labor and its transformation into pleasurable activity. The original institutional conception was (...) pastoral, adopted from Owen's communal plans and materialistic determinism, with socialized means of production and comprehensive communal control of social and economic life. They substituted for Owen's equal labor-time exchange principle Cabet's principle of from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs, and estimated the duration of the transition at one to two years. Interpreting history according to Hegel's dialectic they conceived this future as the inevitable result of a revolution dialectically effecting the complete rehumanization of a totally dehumanized proletariat, whose consciousness accomplishes the revolution and recovers its theretofore alienated nature. ;With the subsequent formulation of the theory of historical materialism and its conception of all history as class conflict their published descriptions of the final stage became brief and vague and it was relegated to an increasingly remote future, based on varying material and social requirements which would transform human nature sometime during these increasingly lengthy transitional stages. To preserve the material accomplishments of capitalism they substituted state centralization for Owen's communalism, but began to misrepresent this for tactical political reasons, defining the state and classes solely in terms of property, state expropriation thereby abolishing the state. Retaining Cabet's principle for the final stage, they formulated a succession of contradictory principles of production and distribution within a varying number of transitional stages. These principles ranged from the equal exchange of labor time, through unequal distribution for equal labor time based on results, and finally to equal distribution for unequal labor time and results. The most egalitarian plans were the most widely publicized, the least egalitarian restricted in circulation. (shrink)

Insect vision is nothing if not active. The regular head movements, called saccades, enable the fly Drosophila to keep a straight path in flight despite inequalities in the thrust of the wings. Using their own motion, bees in flight measure the ranges of nearby objects. A long history of research shows that bees discriminate visually in ways that depend on their activity or task, so we must distinguish between vision during flying, fixating or hovering and landing.Bees return (...) again and again for a reward of sugar solution and use their eyes to find their way. In an apparatus that makes them discriminate between two simulataneously visible but regularly interchanged targets, seen at a distance of 27 cm, bees are able to distinguish a remarkable number of simple patterns, but they fail in certain critical cases. The results can be explained with the hypothesis that bees have several broadly tuned overlapping filters with large fields that respond to the predominant orientation in a region of the image, and others for radial and circular patterns. Together with colour, these filters are independent of range. Bees prefer to use landmarks where they can, then global pattern at the largest scale, and lastly the detail around the goal. The way that discrimination of one visual feature is independent of other variables can be explained by models analogous to the colour triangle in colour discrimination. (shrink)

Mark S. Cladis pinpoints the origins of contemporary notions of the public and private and their relationship to religion in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His thesis cuts across many fields and issues-philosophy of religion, women's studies, democratic theory, modern European history, American culture, social justice, privacy laws, and notions of solitude and community-and wholly reconsiders the political, cultural, and legal nature of modernity in relation to religion. Turning to Rousseau's Garden, its inhabitants, the Solitaires, and the question of restoration (...) and redemption that preoccupied much of Rousseau's thought, Cladis examines how Rousseau addressed the tension between the joys and moral obligations of social engagement and the desire for solitude. He was caught between two possibilities: active involvement in the creation of an enlightened and humane society or extrication from social entanglements in favor of cultivating a spiritual interior life. Yet Rousseau did not view this conflict as a desperate division. Rather, for him it was a moral struggle to be endured by those who had fallen from the Garden. For this edition Cladis has added a substantive introduction that discusses the role of religion in contemporary democratic societies, particularly in American public life. Cladis proposes four models of thinking about religion in public and champions what he calls spiritual democracy-a dynamic, culturally specific, and progressive democracy. Cladis argues that spiritual democracy refers not only to a society's legal codes and principles but also to its democratic culture and symbols and its daily practices and institutions. It encompasses the nation's character, diverse identities, and a distinctivel exchange between the nation's public vision and citizens' complex, private lives. (shrink)

Iris Murdoch thinks that ‘the activity and imagery of vision is at the centre of human consciousness’, ever re-orienting us to ‘reflection, reverence, respect’ for reality. Murdoch believes that Buber’s emphasis on the ‘I-Thou’ relation conflicts with this morally re-orienting power of the visual. Buber thinks that his language of encounter and dialogue makes space for the moral challenge of the other, and for growth, movement, creative response in human life, in a way shouldered out by ‘visual metaphysics’. Murdoch’s (...) privileging of ‘the visual’ is a source of her moral objections to Buber’s I-Thou God, and of her objections to his language of encounter and dialogue more generally. I mount various criticisms of Murdoch’s championing of the visual and of her broader critique of Buber. (shrink)

Ballard and Zhang offer a fascinating review of how computational models of human vision have evolved since David Marr proposed his Tri‐Level Hypothesis, with a focus on the refinement of algorithm descriptions over time.

The purpose of this article is to provide a quick survey of William James’s views on the plurality of visions that humans have regarding reality, as a background for more extensive discussions of his views on the plurality of values that orient human thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, as well as his views on the enactment of those values through active resistance to the ways things are and the risk-taking involved in striving to improve the human condition. Consonant with pluralism (...) itself, I intend this discussion to open up rather than close off further considerations of James’s views on ethics. (shrink)

This book is about aesthetic processes and play from the perspectives of psychologists, philosophers, and semiologists. They explore the underlying processes from many viewpoints, including the prehistoric roots of language and art; the historical evolution of artistic, literary, and musical styles; the structure of artworks from both gestalt and semiotic perspectives; the biological and psychological processes underlying production and appreciation; the appeal of sentimental art; emotional responses to art and other aesthetic forms; personality in relation to artistic style; the testing (...) and measurement of art-related skills; the relations between social life and literary understanding; literature in relation to media; as well as neurobiological, developmental and individual growth perspectives on play activity. (shrink)

Winner of the Gustave O. Arlt Award in the HumanitiesThree understandings of the nature of religion--religion as experience, symbolic meaning, and power--have dominated scholarly discussions, in succession, for the past hundred years. Proponents of each of these three approaches have tended to downplay, ignore, or actively criticize the others. But why should the three approaches be at odds? Religion as it is practiced involves experiences, meanings, and power, so students of religion should attend to all three. Furthermore, theorists of religion (...) should have an account that carefully conceptualizes all three aspects, without regarding any of them as more basic than the others.Visions of Religion provides just such an account. Stephen S. Bush examines influential proponents of the three visions, arguing that each approach offers substantial and lasting contributions to the study of religion, although each requires revision.Bush rehabilitates the concepts of experience and meaning, two categories that are much maligned these days. In doing so, he shows the extent to which these categories are implicated in matters of social power. As for power, the book argues that the analysis of power requires attention to meaning and experience.Visions of Religion accomplishes all this by articulating a social practical theory of religion that can account for all three aspects, even as it incorporates them into a single theoretical framework. (shrink)

For Jung, the beautiful and brilliantly creative 28-year old Christiana Morgan was an inspired force whose path in self-analysis paralleled his own quest for personal knowledge. By teaching Morgan the trance-like technique of active imagination, Jung helped her embark on a series of archetypal adventures which she depicted in paintings of great virtuosity and he candidly recounted at a seminar given to some of his closest followers. Through his eloquent description of the fiery, mythic visions of a woman discovering (...) her repressed sexuality and feminine power, Jung reveals how deeply this encounter challenged his understanding of feminine psychology. These two volumes bring together for the first time colour reproductions of Morgan's paintings with a complete transcript of the seminar. (shrink)

Many public debates about the societal significance and impact of agriculture are usefully framed by Paul Thompson’s distinction between the “agrarian” and the “industrial vision.” The key argument of the present paper is that the ongoing debate between these visions goes beyond academic philosophy and has direct effects on the political economy of agriculture by influencing the scope of rent-seeking activities that are undertaken primarily in the name of the agrarian vision. The existence of rent-seeking activities is shown (...) to reflect the fact that the agrarian vision is not universally supported, which is certainly true of the industrial vision as well. The key argument of the present paper is that these two philosophical visions of agriculture are not radically incongruent. Rather, they share a common ground within which they are even mutually supportive. If agricultural policy making is oriented toward this common ground, it may reduce overall dissatisfaction with the resulting institutional regime of agricultural production. Such an agricultural policy may also stimulate the emergence of new business practices that not only enable efficient agricultural production but also minimize negative ecological impact and preserve cultural landscapes. (shrink)

This article describes an implemented architecture for intermediate vision. By integrating a variety of Intermediate visual mechanisms and putting them to use in support of concrete activity, the implementation demonstrates their utility. The sytem, SIVS, models psychophysical discoveries about visual attention and search. It is designed to be efficiently implementable in slow, massively parallel, locally connected hardware, such as that of the brain.SIVS addresses five fundamental problems. Visual attention is required to restrict processing to task-relevant locations in the image. (...) Visual search finds such locations. Visual routines are a means for nonuniform processing based on task demands. Intermediate objects keep track of intermediate results of this processing. Visual operators are a set of relatively abstract, general-purpose primitives for spatial analysis, out of which visual routines are assembled. (shrink)

Is vision merely a state of the beholder’s sensory organ which can be explained as an immediate effect caused by external sensible objects? Or is it rather a successive process in which the observer actively scanning the surrounding environment plays a major part? These two general attitudes towards visual perception were both developed already by ancient thinkers. The former is embraced by natural philosophers (e.g., atomists and Aristotelians) and is often labelled “intromissionist”, based on their assumption that vision (...) is an outcome of the causal influence exerted by an external object upon a sensory organ receiving an entity from the object. The latter attitude to vision as a successive process is rather linked to the “extramissionist” theories of the proponents of geometrical optics (such as Euclid or Ptolemy) who suggest that an entity – a visual ray – is sent forth from the eyes to the object. The present paper focuses on the contributions to this ancient controversy proposed by some 13th-century Latin thinkers. [...]. (shrink)

The article explores digital literacy practices in children’s everyday lives at Norwegian preschools and some of the ways in which young children appropriate basic digital literacy skills through guided participation in situated activities. Building on an ethnomethodological perspective, the analyses are based on 70 hours of video recordings documenting the activities in which 45 children, aged 5-6, and eight preschool teachers participated. Through the detailed analysis of two categorization activities – identifying geometrical shapes and identifying feelings/thoughts –the use of digital (...) tools in the social organization of the activities are examined. The article finds that children’s digital literacy activities encompass visual, verbal, audio and embodied competencies that are made relevant, and thus accessible for learning, in interaction between the children and between the adults and children in the form of norms and guidelines for what constitutes correct categorizations (geometrical shapes and green and red feelings) in the situated activities, and that are appropriated and actualized by the children in interaction with their peers. The findings also show how the categorization practices in preschools deal with symbols and labels in ways that create and sustain socially organized ways of knowing, seeing and acting upon the world. Digital media are embedded in routines, procedures and socialites that are part of these categorization practices; they are part of how children are instructed to experience, interpret, understand and act in the world. Moreover, the different technologies created different conditions for the children’s participation. It was found that peer interaction was part of the digital literacy activities that involved such mobile technologies as smartphones and tablets, while when using non-mobile technologies, e.g. smartboards, the activities were structured more as ‘classic’ classroom activities, primarily guided by the teacher and the didactic material presented through the smartboard. (shrink)

Callaway calls the process of re-appraisal of women's characteristics, social roles and culture, independent of male value systems...'re-vision', and identifies three ways it can describe women's current activities: 'Revision' in the standard sense of correcting or completing the record; then 're-vision' as looking again, a deliberate act to see through the stereotypes of our society as these are taken for granted in daily life and deeply embedded in academic tradition; and finally, 're-vision' in its extended sense as (...) the imaginative power of sighting possibilities and thus helping to bring about what is not visible, a new ordering of human relationships. (shrink)

‘Visualisations play an important role in science’, this seems to be an uncontroversial statement today. Scientists not only use visual representations as means to communicate their research results in publications or talks, but also often as surrogates for their objects of interest during the process of research. Thus, we can make a distinction between two contexts of usage here, namely the explanatory and the exploratory context. The focus of this paper is on the latter one. Obviously, using visualisations as surrogates (...) for their objects of depiction presupposes the assumption that the former can tell us something relevant about the latter. Thus, a particular referential relation between object and image has to be assumed that can transfer the relevant information. Furthermore, as science is a collaborative enterprise – a social activity – this information has to be intersubjectively accessible and stable. Nonetheless, philosophers of science still quarrel about the epistemic and ontological status of such visualisations. After all, they are means to visualise theoretical entities, such as the Higgs Boson, i.e. entities that are principally not observable with the unaided eye. Especially the significant reliance on information technology devices to access this world of the unobservable provokes a lot of suspicion with regard to the referential status of such visualisations. In this sense, quite a few philosophers adopt social constructivism as an explanatory hypothesis. A particular image is constructed with the aid of instruments and theoretical assumptions; hence it does not refer to an entity outside this system. In this paper, I will critically analyse this assumption and try to argue for an alternative point of view. (shrink)

Vision, more than any other sense, dominates our mental life. Our visual experience is just so rich, so detailed, that we can hardly distinguish that experience from the world itself. Even when we just think about the world and don't look at it directly, we can't help but 'imagine' what it looks like. We think of 'seeing' as being a conscious activity--we direct our eyes, we choose what we look at, we register what we are seeing. The series of (...) events described in this book radically altered this attitude towards vision. This book describes one of the most extraordinary neurological cases of recent years--one that profoundly changed scientific views on consciousness. It is the story of Dee Fletcher--a woman recently blinded--who became the subject of a series of scientific studies. As events unfolded, Milner and Goodale found that Dee wasn't in fact blind--she just didn't know that she could see. Taking us on a journey into the unconscious brain, the two scientists who made this incredible discovery tell the amazing story of their work, and the surprising conclusion they were forced to reach. Written to be accessible to students and popular science readers, this book is a fascinating illustration of the power of the 'unconscious' mind. (shrink)

We argue, contra Joshua Knobe in a companion chapter, that most people have an understanding of free will and responsible agency that is compatible with a naturalistic vision of the human mind. Our argument is supported by results from a new experimental philosophy study showing that most people think free will is consistent with complete and perfect prediction of decisions and actions based on prior activity in the brain (a scenario adapted from Sam Harris who predicts most people will (...) find it inconsistent with free will). We explain why most people are "theory-lite" about the nature of mind and free will--they are not committed to substantive theories of the underlying causal structure of mind, such as Knobe's "transcendence vision". Rather, we suggest a "causal competition principle"--that an agent's actions will be deemed unfree when they are perceived to be fully caused by factors that do not include her reasons. This principle explains why people, including some scientists, perceive neuroscientific explanations as threatening free will when they are described in terms of neural processes fully causing actions to the exclusion of agents' reasons or reasoning processes. (shrink)

Few sectors are more ethically contentious than dairy, with debates tending to be polarised between “intensification” and “abolitionist” narratives which often drown out alternative voices operating in-between. This paper examines the marginal spaces occupied by a group of farmers in the United Kingdom who are attempting to move towards what they see as “more ethical” dairying. Drawing on findings from ethnographic research on five farms which have adopted “cow-calf contact rearing”—which focuses on keeping calves with their mothers longer, in opposition (...) to conventional practices of removing them shortly after birth—it asks what values underpin this alternative approach, and how and why “ethical” dairies seek to dairy ethically. To do this, it draws on a feminist epistemology and methodology that sees ethics as situated and contextual, and finds an “ethics of care” to be central to changing entanglements between humans and nonhuman animals. Instead of casting dairy as either “good” or “bad”, it explores the activities of farms which are trying to move towards what they perceive to be “better”, and draws three conclusions: (a) “ethical” dairying demonstrates a heterogeneity of dairy practices which are grounded in “care” and are happening between narrative extremes of intensification versus abolition; (b) although this practice may be, and could be, commodified, farmers are primarily guided by strong ideological principles and influenced by affective and empathetic “entanglements” with cows and calves, the agency of bovines themselves, and their social and ecological environment; and (c) “cow-calf contact rearing” represents a significant shift from a focus on the broader welfare environment towards centring the quality of individual cows’ lives. Ultimately, the paper argues that we should pay greater attention to alternative economies built on an “ethics of care” when envisaging new sustainable food and agricultural systems. (shrink)

This article argues that the distinction between the sensible and the intelligible in Plato’s dialogues (here with respect to the Republic) is not a dogmaticassertion or the foundation for a set of doctrines, but is rather the very starting point of philosophical activity. This starting point will be shown to be, in its most fundamental aspect, not something chosen by the philosopher, but rather the attribute that makes the philosopher who he is. Much of my argument will turn on a (...) consideration of the divided line. In Part I, I situate the discussion of the divided line within both its global and immediate context in the Republic. As the divided line will serve as the focal point of my argument it is important to clarify its place in Socrates’ discussion with Glaucon and Adeimantus from the outset of my presentation. Part II consists of a brief analysis of the key passages devoted to the divided line. This analysis will culminate by highlighting the problematic nature of geometrical objects with respect to the schema of the line. I will argue that geometrical objects have no secure place on the line. This insecurity will call into question the apparent continuity between the sensible and the intelligible that the divided line suggests, and might call for a way to mediate or bridge the gap between the sensible and the intelligible. In Part III, I consider one such attempt in Proclus’s commentary on Euclid in order to show how such an attempt failson Platonic terms and thus cannot constitute the true core of Platonic philosophy. Part IV will argue that if rightly interpreted the divided line itself offers a solution to the problem and clarifies both the nature of philosophical activity and the status of the sensibility/intelligibility distinction within Platonic philosophy. (shrink)

This article argues that the distinction between the sensible and the intelligible in Plato’s dialogues (here with respect to the Republic) is not a dogmaticassertion or the foundation for a set of doctrines, but is rather the very starting point of philosophical activity. This starting point will be shown to be, in its most fundamental aspect, not something chosen by the philosopher, but rather the attribute that makes the philosopher who he is. Much of my argument will turn on a (...) consideration of the divided line. In Part I, I situate the discussion of the divided line within both its global and immediate context in the Republic. As the divided line will serve as the focal point of my argument it is important to clarify its place in Socrates’ discussion with Glaucon and Adeimantus from the outset of my presentation. Part II consists of a brief analysis of the key passages devoted to the divided line. This analysis will culminate by highlighting the problematic nature of geometrical objects with respect to the schema of the line. I will argue that geometrical objects have no secure place on the line. This insecurity will call into question the apparent continuity between the sensible and the intelligible that the divided line suggests, and might call for a way to mediate or bridge the gap between the sensible and the intelligible. In Part III, I consider one such attempt in Proclus’s commentary on Euclid in order to show how such an attempt failson Platonic terms and thus cannot constitute the true core of Platonic philosophy. Part IV will argue that if rightly interpreted the divided line itself offers a solution to the problem and clarifies both the nature of philosophical activity and the status of the sensibility/intelligibility distinction within Platonic philosophy. (shrink)

The foundational basis of the cinematic moving image is camera movement, which occurs not only in the image but also, and from the first, as the image. This essay approaches off-screen camera movement through phenomenological description of the gestalt structure of its four interrelated onscreen forms: the moving image as an intentional and composite “viewing view/viewed view”; the moving image as “qualified” by optical camera movement through subjective modes of spatiotemporal transcendence; the movement of subjects and objects in the moving (...) image as seen by a world-directed camera; and the spatial movement of the camera, whose perspectival vision affirms its status as an embodied, if anonymous, “quasi-subject,” whose visually perceptive motility responds to its world in visibly expressive mobility. Throughout, the essay develops Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s claim that the cinema is, perhaps, the phenomenological art par excellence, given that its “technical methods” correspond to an “existential” and phenomenological “mode of thought.”. (shrink)