176 found
Order:
  1. Between Perception and Action.Bence Nanay - 2013 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    What mediates between sensory input and motor output? What makes it possible to act on what you perceive? Bence Nanay argues that pragmatic representations provide the perceptual guidance for performing actions. They play a key role in our mental lives, and help explain why the majority of our mental processes are very similar to those of animals.
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   93 citations  
  2.  63
    Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception.Bence Nanay - 2016 - Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press UK.
    Bency Nanay brings the discussion of aesthetics and perception together, to explore how many influential debates in aesthetics look very different, and may be easier to tackle, if we clarify the assumptions they make about perception and about experiences in general. He focuses on the concept of attention and the ways in which the distinction between distributed and focused attention can help us re-evaluate various key concepts and debates in aesthetics. Sometimes our attention is distributed in an unusual way: we (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   55 citations  
  3. Perception and imagination: amodal perception as mental imagery.Bence Nanay - 2010 - Philosophical Studies 150 (2):239-254.
    When we see an object, we also represent those parts of it that are not visible. The question is how we represent them: this is the problem of amodal perception. I will consider three possible accounts: (a) we see them, (b) we have non-perceptual beliefs about them and (c) we have immediate perceptual access to them, and point out that all of these views face both empirical and conceptual objections. I suggest and defend a fourth account, according to which we (...)
    Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   109 citations  
  4. Perceptual content and the content of mental imagery.Bence Nanay - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (7):1723-1736.
    The aim of this paper is to argue that the phenomenal similarity between perceiving and visualizing can be explained by the similarity between the structure of the content of these two different mental states. And this puts important constraints on how we should think about perceptual content and the content of mental imagery.
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   58 citations  
  5. Do we see apples as edible?Bence Nanay - 2011 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 92 (3):305-322.
    Do we (sometimes) perceive apples as edible? One could argue that it is just a manner of speaking to say so: we do not really see an object as edible, we see it as having certain shape, size and color and we only infer on the basis of these properties that it is. I argue that we do indeed see objects as edible, and do not just believe that they are. My argument proceeds in two steps. First, I point out (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   87 citations  
  6. Attention and perceptual content.Bence Nanay - 2010 - Analysis 70 (2):263-270.
    I argue that perceptual content is always affected by the allocation of one’s attention. Perception attributes determinable and determinate properties to the perceived scene. Attention makes (or tries to make) our perceptual attribution of properties more determinate. Hence, a change in our attention changes the determinacy of the properties attributed to the perceived scene.
    Direct download (10 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   73 citations  
  7. Attention Is Amplification, Not Selection.Peter Fazekas & Bence Nanay - 2021 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 72 (1):299-324.
    We argue that recent empirical findings and theoretical models shed new light on the nature of attention. According to the resulting amplification view, attentional phenomena can be unified at the neural level as the consequence of the amplification of certain input signals of attention-independent perceptual computations. This way of identifying the core realizer of attention evades standard criticisms often raised against sub-personal accounts of attention. Moreover, this approach also reframes our thinking about the function of attention by shifting the focus (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  8. A Modal Theory of Function.Bence Nanay - 2010 - Journal of Philosophy 107 (8):412-431.
    The function of a trait token is usually defined in terms of some properties of other (past, present, future) tokens of the same trait type. I argue that this strategy is problematic, as trait types are (at least partly) individuated by their functional properties, which would lead to circularity. In order to avoid this problem, I suggest a way to define the function of a trait token in terms of the properties of the very same trait token. To able to (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   57 citations  
  9. Unconscious Mental Imagery.Bence Nanay - 2021 - Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 376 (1817):20190689.
    Historically, mental imagery has been defined as an experiential state - as something necessarily conscious. But most behavioural or neuroimaging experiments on mental imagery - including the most famous ones - don’t actually take the conscious experience of the subject into consideration. Further, recent research highlights that there are very few behavioural or neural differences between conscious and unconscious mental imagery. I argue that treating mental imagery as not necessarily conscious (as potentially unconscious) would bring much needed explanatory unification to (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   16 citations  
  10. Threefoldness.Bence Nanay - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (1):163-182.
    Theories of picture perception aim to understand our perceptual relation to both the picture surface and the depicted object. I argue that we should talk about not two, but three entities when understanding picture perception: the picture surface, the three dimensional object the picture surface visually encodes and the three dimensional depicted object. As and can come apart, we get a more complex picture of picture perception than normally assumed and one where the notion of twofoldness, which has played an (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   29 citations  
  11. (1 other version)Action-oriented Perception.Bence Nanay - 2010 - European Journal of Philosophy 20 (3):430-446.
    Abstract: When I throw a ball at you, do you see it as catch-able? Do we perceive objects as edible, climbable or Q-able in general? One could argue that it is just a manner of speaking to say so: we do not really see an object as edible, we only infer on the basis of its other properties that it is. I argue that whether or not an object is edible or climbable is indeed represented perceptually: we see objects as (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   48 citations  
  12.  89
    Multimodal mental imagery.Bence Nanay - 2018 - Cortex 105:125-136.
    When I am looking at my coffee machine that makes funny noises, this is an instance of multisensory perception – I perceive this event by means of both vision and audition. But very often we only receive sensory stimulation from a multisensory event by means of one sense modality, for example, when I hear the noisy coffee machine in the next room, that is, without seeing it. The aim of this paper is to bring together empirical findings about multimodal perception (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   49 citations  
  13. Implicit Bias as Mental Imagery.Bence Nanay - 2021 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 7 (3):329-347.
    What is the mental representation that is responsible for implicit bias? What is this representation that mediates between the trigger and the biased behavior? My claim is that this representation is neither a propositional attitude nor a mere association. Rather, it is mental imagery: perceptual processing that is not directly triggered by sensory input. I argue that this view captures the advantages of the two standard accounts without inheriting their disadvantages. Further, this view also explains why manipulating mental imagery is (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  14. Amodal completion and relationalism.Bence Nanay - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (8):2537-2551.
    Amodal completion is usually characterized as the representation of those parts of the perceived object that we get no sensory stimulation from. In the case of the visual sense modality, for example, amodal completion is the representation of occluded parts of objects we see. I argue that relationalism about perception, the view that perceptual experience is constituted by the relation to the perceived object, cannot give a coherent account of amodal completion. The relationalist has two options: construe the perceptual relation (...)
    Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  15. Perceiving pictures.Bence Nanay - 2011 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 10 (4):461-480.
    I aim to give a new account of picture perception: of the way our visual system functions when we see something in a picture. My argument relies on the functional distinction between the ventral and dorsal visual subsystems. I propose that it is constitutive of picture perception that our ventral subsystem attributes properties to the depicted scene, whereas our dorsal subsystem attributes properties to the picture surface. This duality elucidates Richard Wollheim’s concept of the “twofoldness” of our experience of pictures: (...)
    Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   35 citations  
  16. Amodal completion and knowledge.Grace Helton & Bence Nanay - 2019 - Analysis 79 (3):415-423.
    Amodal completion is the representation of occluded parts of perceived objects. We argue for the following three claims: First, at least some amodal completion-involved experiences can ground knowledge about the occluded portions of perceived objects. Second, at least some instances of amodal completion-grounded knowledge are not sensitive, that is, it is not the case that in the nearest worlds in which the relevant claim is false, that claim is not believed true. Third, at least some instances of amodal completion-grounded knowledge (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  17. Teleosemantics without etiology.Bence Nanay - 2014 - Philosophy of Science 81 (5):798-810.
    The aim of teleosemantics is to give a scientifically respectable, or ‘naturalistic’ theory of mental content. In the debates surrounding the scope and merits of teleosemantics a lot has been said about the concept of indication (or carrying information). The aim of this paper is to focus on the other key concept of teleosemantics: biological function. It has been universally accepted in the teleosemantics literature that the account of biological function one should use to flesh out teleosemantics is that of (...)
    Direct download (7 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   27 citations  
  18. Relationalism and unconscious perception.Jacob Berger & Bence Nanay - 2016 - Analysis 76 (4):426-433.
    Relationalism holds that perceptual experiences are relations between subjects and perceived objects. But much evidence suggests that perceptual states can be unconscious. We argue here that unconscious perception raises difficulties for relationalism. Relationalists would seem to have three options. First, they may deny that there is unconscious perception or question whether we have sufficient evidence to posit it. Second, they may allow for unconscious perception but deny that the relationalist analysis applies to it. Third, they may offer a relationalist explanation (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   21 citations  
  19. The role of imagination in decision-making.Bence Nanay - 2016 - Mind and Language 31 (1):126-142.
    The psychological mechanism of decision-making has traditionally been modeled with the help of belief-desire psychology: the agent has some desires (or other pro-attitudes) and some background beliefs and deciding between two possible actions is a matter of comparing the probability of the satisfaction of these desires given the background beliefs in the case of the performance of each action. There is a wealth of recent empirical findings about how we actually make decisions that seems to be in conflict with this (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   33 citations  
  20. The Representationalism versus Relationalism Debate: Explanatory Contextualism about Perception.Bence Nanay - 2015 - European Journal of Philosophy 23 (2):321-336.
    There are two very different ways of thinking about perception. According to representationalism, perceptual states are representations: they represent the world as being a certain way. They have content, which may or may not be different from the content of beliefs. They represent objects as having properties, sometimes veridically, sometimes not. According to relationalism, perception is a relation between the agent and the perceived object. Perceived objects are literally constituents of our perceptual states and not of the contents thereof. Perceptual (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   20 citations  
  21. (1 other version)Imagination and Perception.Bence Nanay - 2016 - In Amy Kind (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Imagination. New York: Routledge.
    Look at a red apple. Now close your eyes and visualize this apple. Your perceptual state and your imagery of the apple are very similar in some respects. They are also different in some respects. The aim of this paper is to address three questions about the relation between perception and imagination: -/- (a) How similar are perception and imagination and what explains this similarity? (b) How different are perception and imagination and what explains this difference? (c) How do perception (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   30 citations  
  22. Trompe l’oeil and the Dorsal/Ventral Account of Picture Perception.Bence Nanay - 2015 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 6 (1):181-197.
    While there has been a lot of discussion of picture perception both in perceptual psychology and in philosophy, these discussions are driven by very different background assumptions. Nonetheless, it would be mutually beneficial to arrive at an understanding of picture perception that is informed by both the philosophers’ and the psychologists’ story. The aim of this paper is exactly this: to give an account of picture perception that is valid both as a philosophical and as a psychological account. I argue (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   19 citations  
  23. 视觉的历史.Bence Nanay - 2018 - Zhongguo Meixue Yanjiu 10:311-331.
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  24. Imaginative resistance and conversational implicature.Bence Nanay - 2010 - Philosophical Quarterly 60 (240):586-600.
    We experience resistance when we are engaging with fictional works which present certain (for example, morally objectionable) claims. But in virtue of what properties do sentences trigger this ‘imaginative resistance’? I argue that while most accounts of imaginative resistance have looked for semantic properties in virtue of which sentences trigger it, this is unlikely to give us a coherent account, because imaginative resistance is a pragmatic phenomenon. It works in a way very similar to Paul Grice's widely analysed ‘conversational implicature’.
    Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   29 citations  
  25. Perceptual phenomenology.Bence Nanay - 2012 - Philosophical Perspectives 26 (1):235-246.
    I am looking at an apple. The apple has a lot of properties and some, but not all, of these are part of my phenomenology at this moment: I am aware of these properties. And some, but not all, of these properties that I am aware of are part of my perceptual (or sensory) phenomenology. If I am attending to the apple’s color, this property will be part of my perceptual phenomenology. The property of being a granny smith apple from (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   23 citations  
  26. Perception is not all-purpose.Bence Nanay - 2021 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 17):4069-4080.
    I aim to show that perception depends counterfactually on the action we want to perform. Perception is not all-purpose: what we want to do does influence what we see. After clarifying how this claim is different from the one at stake in the cognitive penetrability debate and what counterfactual dependence means in my claim, I will give a two-step argument: one’s perceptual attention depends counterfactually on one’s intention to perform an action and one’s perceptual processing depends counterfactually on one’s perceptual (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  27. Success semantics: the sequel.Bence Nanay - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 165 (1):151-165.
    The aim of this paper is to reinterpret success semantics, a theory of mental content, according to which the content of a belief is fixed by the success conditions of some actions based on this belief. After arguing that in its present form, success semantics is vulnerable to decisive objections, I examine the possibilities of salvaging the core of this proposal. More specifically, I propose that the content of some very simple, but very important, mental states, the immediate mental antecedents (...)
    Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   21 citations  
  28. Blur and perceptual content.Bence Nanay - 2018 - Analysis 78 (2):254-260.
    Intentionalism about visual experiences is the view according to which the phenomenal character of a visual experience supervenes on the content of this experience. One of the most influential objections to this view is about blur: seeing a fuzzy contour clearly and seeing a sharp contour blurrily have different phenomenal character but the same content. I argue that this objection does not work if we understand perceptual content simply, and not particularly controversially, as partly constituted by the sum total of (...)
    Direct download (7 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  29. Aesthetic attention.Bence Nanay - 2014 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 22 (5-6):96-118.
    The aim of this paper is to give a new account of the way we exercise our attention in some paradigmatic cases of aesthetic experience. I treat aesthetic experience as a specific kind of experience and like in the case of other kinds of experiences, attention plays an important role in determining its phenomenal character. I argue that an important feature of at least some of our aesthetic experiences is that we exercise our attention in a specific, distributed, manner: our (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   23 citations  
  30.  55
    Explanatory Contextualism about Episodic Memory: Towards A Diagnosis of the Causalist-Simulationist Debate.Christopher Jude McCarroll, Kourken Michaelian & Bence Nanay - 2024 - Erkenntnis 89 (6):2273-2301.
    We argue that the causal theory of memory and the simulation theory of memory are not as straightforwardly incompatible as they are usually taken to be. Following a brief review of the theories, we describe alternative normative and descriptive perspectives on memory, arguing that the causal theory aligns better with the normative perspective and the simulation theory with the descriptive perspective. Taking explanatory contextualism about perception as our starting point, we then develop a form of explanatory contextualism about memory, arguing (...)
    No categories
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  31. Perceiving indeterminately.Bence Nanay - 2020 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 9 (3):160-166.
    It has been argued recently that perception is indeterminate. But there are more than one ways of spelling out what this means. The standard line is that perceptual states attribute different probabilities to different propositions. I provide an alternative to this view, where it is not the attitude, but the content of perceptual states that is indeterminate, inasmuch as it consists of the representation of determinable properties. This view does justice to the more general claim that perception is indeterminate without (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  32. The Aesthetic Experience of Artworks and Everyday Scenes.Bence Nanay - 2018 - The Monist 101 (1):71-82.
    Some of our aesthetic experiences are of artworks. Some others are of everyday scenes. The question I examine in this paper is about the relation between these two different kinds of aesthetic experience. I argue that the experience of artworks can dispose us to experience everyday scenes in an aesthetic manner both short-term and long-term. Finally, I examine what constraints this phenomenon puts on different accounts of aesthetic experience.
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  33. Hallucination as Mental Imagery.Bence Nanay - 2016 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 23 (7-8):65-81.
    Hallucination is a big deal in contemporary philosophy of perception. The main reason for this is that the way hallucination is treated marks an important stance in one of the most hotly contested debates in this subdiscipline: the debate between 'relationalists' and 'representationalists'. I argue that if we take hallucinations to be a form of mental imagery, then we have a very straightforward way of arguing against disjunctivism: if hallucination is a form of mental imagery and if mental imagery and (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   18 citations  
  34. What do we see in pictures? The sensory individuals of picture perception.Bence Nanay - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (12):3729-3746.
    When I am looking at an apple, I perceptually attribute certain properties to certain entities. Two questions arise: what are these entities (what is it that I perceptually represent as having properties) and what are these properties (what properties I perceive this entity as having)? This paper is about the former, less widely explored, question: what does our perceptual system attribute properties to? In other words, what are these ‘sensory individuals’. There have been important debates in philosophy of perception about (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  35. Do we sense modalities with our sense modalities?1.Bence Nanay - 2011 - Ratio 24 (3):299-310.
    It has been widely assumed that we do not perceive dispositional properties. I argue that there are two ways of interpreting this assumption. On the first, extensional, interpretation whether we perceive dispositions depends on a complex set of metaphysical commitments. But if we interpret the claim in the second, intensional, way, then we have no reason to suppose that we do not perceive dispositional properties. The two most important and influential arguments to the contrary fail.
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   20 citations  
  36. Unconscious perceptual justification.Jacob Berger, Bence Nanay & Jake Quilty-Dunn - 2018 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 61 (5):569-589.
    Perceptual experiences justify beliefs. A perceptual experience of a dog justifies the belief that there is a dog present. But there is much evidence that perceptual states can occur without being conscious, as in experiments involving masked priming. Do unconscious perceptual states provide justification as well? The answer depends on one’s theory of justification. While most varieties of externalism seem compatible with unconscious perceptual justification, several theories have recently afforded to consciousness a special role in perceptual justification. We argue that (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  37. An experiential account of creativity.Bence Nanay - 2014 - In Elliot Samuel Paul & Scott Barry Kaufman (eds.), The Philosophy of Creativity. New York: Oxford University Press.
    The aim of the paper is to argue that the difference between creative and non-creative mental processes is not a functional/computational, but an experiential one. In other words, what is distinctive about creative mental processes is not the functional/computational mechanism that leads to the emergence of a creative idea, be it the recombination of old ideas or the transformation of one’s conceptual space, but the way in which this mental process is experienced. The explanatory power of the functional/computational theories and (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  38. (1 other version)Entity Realism About Mental Representations.Bence Nanay - 2019 - Erkenntnis 87 (1):75-91.
    The concept of mental representation has long been considered to be central concept of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. But not everyone agrees. Neo-behaviorists aim to explain the mind without positing any representations. My aim here is not to assess the merits and demerits of neo-behaviorism, but to take their challenge seriously and ask the question: What justifies the attribution of representations to an agent? Both representationalists and neo-behaviorists tend to take it for granted that the real question about (...)
    Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  39. Can Cumulative Selection Explain Adaptation?Bence Nanay - 2005 - Philosophy of Science 72 (5):1099-1112.
    Two strong arguments have been given in favor of the claim that no selection process can play a role in explaining adaptations. According to the first argument, selection is a negative force; it may explain why the eliminated individuals are eliminated, but it does not explain why the ones that survived (or their offspring) have the traits they have. The second argument points out that the explanandum and the explanans are phenomena at different levels: selection is a population-level phenomenon, whereas (...)
    Direct download (12 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   30 citations  
  40. The philosophical implications of the Perky experiments: reply to Hopkins.Bence Nanay - 2012 - Analysis 72 (3):439-443.
    The Perky experiments are taken to demonstrate the phenomenal similarity between perception and visualization. Robert Hopkins argues that this interpretation should be resisted because it ignores an important feature of the experiments, namely, that they involve picture perception, rather than ordinary seeing. My aim is to point out that the force of this argument depends on one’s views on picture perception. On what I take to be the most mainstream account of picture perception, Hopkins’s argument does not work. But even (...)
    Direct download (8 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   18 citations  
  41. Perceiving tropes.Bence Nanay - 2012 - Erkenntnis 77 (1):1-14.
    There are two very different ways of thinking about perception. According to the first one, perception is representational: it represents the world as being a certain way. According to the second, perception is a genuine relation between the perceiver and a token object. These two views are thought to be incompatible. My aim is to work out the least problematic version of the representational view of perception that preserves the most important considerations in favor of the relational view. According to (...)
    Direct download (6 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  42. Empirical problems with anti-representationalism.Bence Nanay - 2014 - In Berit Brogaard (ed.), Does Perception Have Content? New York, NY: Oup Usa.
    The aim of this paper is to raise some serious worries about anti-representationalism: the recently popular view according to which there are no perceptual representations. Although anti-representationalism is more and more popular, I will argue that we have strong empirical reasons for mistrusting it. More specifically, I will argue that it is inconsistent with some important empirical findings about dorsal perception and about the multimodality of perception.
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   22 citations  
  43. Inflected and uninflected perception of pictures.Bence Nanay - 2010 - In Catharine Abell & Katerina Bantinaki (eds.), Philosophical Perspectives on Depiction. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    It has been argued that picture perception is sometimes, but not always, ‘inflected’. Sometimes the picture’s design ‘inflects’, or is ‘recruited’ into the depicted scene. The aim of this paper is to cash out what is meant by these metaphors. Our perceptual state is different when we see an object fact to face or when we see it in a picture. But there is also a further distinction: our perceptual state is very different if we perceive objects in pictures in (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   19 citations  
  44.  19
    Mental Imagery: Philosophy, Psychology, Neuroscience.Bence Nanay - 2023 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    This book is about mental imagery and the important work it does in our mental life. It plays a crucial role in the vast majority of our perceptual episodes. It also helps us understand many of the most puzzling features of perception (like the way it is influenced in a top-down manner and the way different sense-modalities interact). But mental imagery also plays a very important role in emotions, action execution and even in our desires. In sum, there are very (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  45. Action without attention.Carolyn Dicey Jennings & Bence Nanay - 2016 - Analysis 76 (1):29-36.
    Wayne Wu argues that attention is necessary for action: since action requires a solution to the ‘Many–Many Problem’, and since only attention can solve the Many–Many Problem, attention is necessary for action. We question the first of these two steps and argue that it is based on an oversimplified distinction between actions and reflexes. We argue for a more complex typology of behaviours where one important category is action that does not require a solution to the Many–Many Problem, and so (...)
    Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  46. Perceiving the world.Bence Nanay (ed.) - 2010 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Philosophy of perception has recently become one of the most important and most central sub-fields of philosophical research. The aim of this volume is to give a representative sample of the new approaches in philosophy of perception that are responsible for this explosion of philosophical interest. Perceiving the World contains eleven original essays, written specially for this book by some of the leading contemporary philosophers of perception: Jonathan Cohen, JTr(me Dokic, Fred Dretske, Andy Egan, Benj Hellie, Sean D. Kelly, M.G.F. (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  47. The selective advantage of representing correctly.Bence Nanay - 2023 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 107 (3):706-717.
    Here is a widespread but controversial idea: those animals who represent correctly are likely to be selected over those who misrepresent. While various versions of this claim have been traditionally endorsed by the vast majority of philosophers of mind, recently, it has been argued that this is just plainly wrong. My aim in this paper is to argue for an intermediate position: that the correctness of some but not all representations is indeed selectively advantageous. It is selectively advantageous to have (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  48. Is twofoldness necessary for representational seeing?Bence Nanay - 2005 - British Journal of Aesthetics 45 (3):248-257.
    Richard Wollheim claimed that twofoldness is a necessary condition for the perception of pictorial representations and it is also a necessary condition for the aesthetic appreciation of pictures. Jerrold Levinson pointed out that these two questions are different and argued that though twofoldness may be a necessary condition for the aesthetic appreciation of pictures, it cannot be a necessary condition for the perception of pictorial representations. I argue that Wollheim's use of the term ‘twofoldness’ alternates between two concepts: the simultaneous (...)
    Direct download (8 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   20 citations  
  49. How to (and how not to) think about top-down influences on visual perception.Christoph Teufel & Bence Nanay - 2017 - Consciousness and Cognition 47:17-25.
    The question of whether cognition can influence perception has a long history in neuroscience and philosophy. Here, we outline a novel approach to this issue, arguing that it should be viewed within the framework of top-down information-processing. This approach leads to a reversal of the standard explanatory order of the cognitive penetration debate: we suggest studying top-down processing at various levels without preconceptions of perception or cognition. Once a clear picture has emerged about which processes have influences on those at (...)
    Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  50. Against aesthetic judgments.Bence Nanay - 2018 - In Jennifer A. McMahon (ed.), Social Aesthetics and Moral Judgment: Pleasure, Reflection and Accountability. New York, USA: Routledge.
    Analytic aesthetics has been obsessed with mature, art historically well-informed aesthetic judgment. But the vast majority of our engagement with art fails to take the form of this kind of judgment. Crucially, there seems to be a disconnect between taking pleasure in art and forming mature, well-informed judgments about it. My aim is to shift the emphasis away from aesthetic judgments to ways of engaging with works of art that are more enjoyable, more rewarding and happen to us more often.
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
1 — 50 / 176