According to what I’ll call the ‘two visual systems account’ (TWO-SYSTEMS), the visual system is divided into two independent sub- systems, a ventral system implementing ‘vision for perception’ and a dorsal system implementing ‘vision for action’ (Milner and Goodale, 2006). TWO-SYSTEMS is widely discussed in philosophy due to the counter-intuitive role that it posits for conscious experience in the control of actions. However, recent evidence undermines the model’s core tenets: it no longer appears that the ventral and dorsal streams constitute (...) isolated processing systems, and there is now evidence for the involvement of both streams in conscious experience and online motor control. I articulate a new ‘direct dorsal control account’ (DORSAL-CONTROL), show that it is immune to three empirical challenges facing TWO-SYSTEMS, and show that it nonetheless has similarly significant implications for the perceiving mind. -/- Section 1 articulates TWO-SYSTEMS and its philosophical implications. Section 2 describes three empirical challenges to TWO-SYSTEMS. Section 3 articulates DORSAL-CONTROL and shows that it is immune to the three challenges. Section 4 articulates DORSAL-CONTROL’s philosophical implications. (shrink)

The Rhetorical Invention of Man examines how the category "Man" has dominated Western thinking since the sixteenth century. This category, a historical anomaly according to Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, has produced distortions in our ability to understand reality that do great harm to our health, morals, and environment.

This volume synthesizes these different approaches and demonstrates how anthropologists have engaged with human rights as committed activists, empirical ...

Although the mechanics of how the eye works are well understood, debate still exists as to how the complex machinery of the brain interprets neural impulses...

First published in 1995, The Visual Brain in Action remains a seminal publication in the cognitive sciences. For this new edition, a very substantial and illustrated epilogue has been added to the book in which Milner and Goodale review the key developments that support or challenge the views that were put forward in the first edition.

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)

Drugs targeting a single TK/RTK in the treatment of solid cancers has not had the same success seen in blood cancers. This is, in part, due to acquired resistance in solid cancers arising from a range of mechanisms including the upregulation of compensatory RTK signalling. Rather than attempting to inhibit individual compensatory RTK—requiring knowledge of which RTKs are upregulated in any given tumour—strategies to universally inhibit signalling from multiple RTKs may represent an effective alternative. Endosomal trafficking of RTKs is a (...) common conduit that can regulate signalling from multiple RTKs simultaneously. As such, we posit that targeting endosomal trafficking—in particular, aberrant post‐translational modifications in cancers that contribute to dysregulated endosomal trafficking—could inhibit oncogenic signalling driven by multiple RTKs and pave the way for the development of a novel class of inhibitors that shift the trafficking of RTKs to inhibit tumour growth. (shrink)

In this updated and extended edition of their book, Goodale and Milner explore one of the most extraordinary neurological cases of recent years--one that profoundly changed scientific views on the visual brain. Taking us on a journey into the unconscious brain, this book is a fascinating illustration of the power of the 'unconscious' mind.

Two major functions of the visual system are discussed and contrasted. One function of vision is the creation of an internal model or percept of the external world. Most research in object perception has concentrated on this aspect of vision. Vision also guides the control of object-directed action. In the latter case, vision directs our actions with respect to the world by transforming visual inputs into appropriate motor outputs. We argue that separate, but interactive, visual systems have evolved for the (...) perception of objects on the one hand and the control of actions directed at those objects on the other. This 'duplex' approach to high-level vision suggests that Marrian or 'reconstructive' approaches and Gibsonian or 'purposive-animate-behaviorist' approaches need not be seen as mutually exclusive, but rather as complementary in their emphases on different aspects of visual function. (shrink)

First published in 1986, Knowledge, Belief, and Witchcraft remains the only analysis of indigenous discourse about an African belief system undertaken from within the framework of Anglo-American analytical philosophy. Taking as its point of departure W. V. O. Quine's thesis about the indeterminacy of translation, the book investigates questions of Yoruba epistemology and of how knowledge is conceived in an oral culture.

The McCollough effect, an orientation-contingent color aftereffect, has been known for over 30 years and, like other aftereffects, has been taken as a means of probing the brain's operations psychophysically. In this paper, we review psychophysical, neuropsychological, and neuroimaging studies of the McCollough effect. Much of the evidence suggests that the McCollough effect depends on neural mechanisms that are located early in the cortical visual pathways, probably in V1. We also review evidence showing that the aftereffect can be induced without (...) conscious perception of the induction patterns. Based on these two lines of evidence, it is argued that our conscious visual experience of the world arises in the cortical visual system beyond V1. (shrink)

The New Evil Demon problem has been hotly debated since the case was introduced in the early 1980’s (e.g. Lehrer and Cohen 1983; Cohen 1984), and there seems to be recent increased interest in the topic. In a forthcoming collection of papers on the New Evil Demon problem (Dutant and Dorsch, forthcoming), at least two of the papers, both by prominent epistemologists, attempt to resist the problem by appealing to the distinction between justification and excuses. My primary aim here is (...) to critically evaluate this new excuse maneuver as a response to the New Evil Demon problem. -/- Their response attempts to give us reason to reject the idea that victims of the New Evil Demon have justification for believing as they do. I shall argue that this approach is ultimately unsuccessful, however much of value can be learned from these attempts. In particular, progress in the debate can be made by following those who advance the excuse maneuver and make explicit the connection between epistemic justification and epistemic norms. By doing so, the questions being debated are clarified, as is the methodology being used to attempt to answer them. (shrink)

There are various equivalent formulations of the Church-Turing thesis. A common one is that every effective computation can be carried out by a Turing machine. The Church-Turing thesis is often misunderstood, particularly in recent writing in the philosophy of mind.

“D-linked” wh-phrases such as 'which car' are known to increase the acceptability of sentences with island violations. One influential account of this attributes the effect to working memory: the D-linked filler is easier to retrieve at the site of the gap and this leads to the amelioration in acceptability. Such an account predicts that this effect should occur in general with non-trivial wh-dependencies, not just in island environments. An experiment is presented here to test this prediction. Wh-questions with both D-linked (...) and bare wh-phrases and with both island and non-island embedded clauses are presented to participants, who rate their acceptability on a 7-point scale. Results show that D-linking significantly increases acceptability in both island and non-island environments, in accord with analyses that attribute the effect to working memory. In addition, the increase in acceptability is uniform in both types of environments, suggesting that the island effect itself may not be attributable to working memory. (shrink)

Orlan and Stelarc both work with the body as the primary medium for their art and both, in their very different ways, are interested in redesigning the body. Their experiments depart radically from popular and traditional ways of imagining enhanced forms of human embodiment and, in a climate of intense speculation about the future of the body, their ideas offer some important provocations. As performance artists, Orlan and Stelarc explore embodiment through enactment in ways that evade the stock formulations of (...) cultural anxiety and open up fundamental questions about the nature and meanings of the human body, questions that are too easily foreclosed by over-heated imaginings about the `posthuman' condition. (shrink)

Hommel et al. propose that high-level perception and action planning share a common representational domain, which facilitates the control of intentional actions. On the surface, this point of view appears quite different from an alternative account that suggests that “action” and “perception” are functionally and neurologically dissociable processes. But it is difficult to reconcile these apparently different perspectives, because Hommel et al. do not clearly specify what they mean by “perception” and “action planning.” With respect to the visual control of (...) action, a distinction must be made between conscious visual perception and unconscious visuomotor processing. Hommel et al. must also distinguish between the what and how aspects of action planning, that is, planning what to do versus planning how to do it. (shrink)

It is our contention that the concept of planning in Glover's model is too broadly defined, encompassing both action/goal selection and the programming of the constituent movements required to acquire the goal. We argue that this monolithic view of planning is untenable on neuropsychological, neurophysiological, and behavioural grounds. The evidence demands instead that a distinction be made between action planning and the specification of the initial kinematic parameters, with the former depending on processing in the ventral stream and the latter (...) on processing in the dorsal stream. (shrink)

Mirrors of Justice is a groundbreaking study of the meanings of and possibilities for justice in the contemporary world. The book brings together a group of both prominent and emerging scholars to reconsider the relationships between justice, international law, culture, power, and history through case studies of a wide range of justice processes. The book's eighteen authors examine the ambiguities of justice in Europe, Africa, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and Melanesia through critical empirical and historical chapters. The introduction (...) makes an important contribution to our understanding of the multiplicity of justice in the twenty-first century by providing an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that synthesizes the book's chapters with leading-edge literatures on human rights, legal pluralism, and international law. (shrink)