I defend the thesis that most or all perceptual experiences are infused with imaginative contributions. While the idea is not new, it has few supporters. I begin by developing a framework for the underlying debate. Central to that framework is the claim that a perceptual experience is infused with imagination if and only if there are self-generated contributions to that experience that have ampliative effect on its phenomenal and directed elements. Self-generated ingredients to experience are produced by the subject as (...) opposed to being received from the world. Some form of stored content is an obvious starting point. Ampliative effects are aspects of perceptual experience that outstrip the content the senses get from the world. This conceptual framework is applied to three case studies: object-sameness and object-kind recognition (section 2), memory colour (section 3), and perceptual constancy and amodal completion (section 4). If the three cases and my overall analysis are accepted (a substantive if), then we have a forceful inductive argument for perception being infused with imagination. (shrink)

Colour Relationalism asserts that colours are non-intrinsic or inherently relational properties of objects, properties that depend not only on a target object but in addition on some relation that object bears to other objects. The most powerful argument for Relationalism infers the inherently relational character of colour from cases in which one’s experience of a colour contextually depends on one’s experience of other colours. Experienced colour layering—say looking at grass through a tinted window and experiencing opaque green through transparent grey—demands (...) a contextual interdependency of one’s experience of one of these colours on one’s experience of the other. However, most if not all colour ontologies, and core perceptual experiential mechanisms like acquaintance and representation, can accommodate colour layering. It follows that experienced colour layering is consistent with colours being non-relational—this contextual interdependency of colours does not entail the constitutive dependency of one colour on the other. I utilize colour layering to examine the inference from the contextual to the constitutive interdependency of colours as it is employed in a well-known argument for Relationalism. I conclude that our justification for Relationalism is far weaker than Relationalists suggest. I first introduce readers to colour layering, then to Relationalism, and following this focus on the intersection of these topics. (shrink)

Loosely put, colour constancy for example occurs when you experience a partly shadowed wall to be uniformly coloured, or experience your favourite shirt to be the same colour both with and without sunglasses on. Controversy ensues when one seeks to interpret ‘experience’ in these contexts, for evidence of a constant colour may be indicative a constant colour in the objective world, a judgement that a constant colour would be present were things thus and so, et cetera. My primary aim is (...) to articulate a viable conception of Present Constancy, of what occurs when a constant colour is present in experience, despite the additional presence of some experienced colour variation (e.g., correlating to a change in illumination). My proposed conception involves experienced colour layering – experiencing one opaque colour through another transparent one – and in particular requires one of those experienced layers to remain constant while the other changes. The aim is not to propose this layering conception of colour constancy as the correct interpretation of all constancy cases, but rather to develop the conception enough to demonstrate how it could and plausibly should be applied to various cases, and the virtues it has over rivals. Its virtues include a seamless application to constancy cases involving variations in filters (e.g., sunglasses) and illuminants; its ability to accommodate experiences of partial colours and error-free interpretations of difficult cases; and its broad theoretical-neutrality, allowing it to be incorporated into numerous perceptual epistemologies and ontologies. If layered constancy is prevalent, as I suspect it is, then our experiential access to colours is critically nuanced: we have been plunged into a world of colour without being told that we will rarely, if ever, look to a location and experience just one of them. (shrink)

This is a review of Athanassios Raftopoulos "Cognition and perception: How do psychology and neuroscience inform philosophy?" (MIT Press, 2009). Raftopoulos defends the modularity of vision, i.e. early vision not penetrable by other processes. He maintains that early vision forms and outputs a kind of nonconceptual content to subsequent stages of vision and cognition. The work is heavily informed by visual neuroscience and embedded in familiar debates about scientific realism. It is also an important contribution to the now-popular debates about (...) the cognitive penetration of perception. (shrink)

A dual referent approach to colour theory maintains that colour names have two intended, equally legitimate referents. For example, one might argue that ‘red’ refers both to red appearances or qualia, and also to the way red objects reflect light, the spectral surface reflectance properties of red things. I argue that normal cases of perceptual relativity can be used to support a dual referent approach, yielding an understanding of colour whose natural extension includes abnormal cases of perceptual relativity. This contrasts (...) with Peacocke’s multi-referent view, according to which such abnormal cases force us to introduce a wholly distinct kind of colour experience. I also argue that the two uses of colour names, arising from their two referents, have different extensions, even in normal perceptual circumstances, a consequence which conflicts with the heart of Rosenthal’s dual referent view. (shrink)

The claim that perceptual illusions can motivate the existence of sense-data is both familiar and controversial. My aim is to carve out a subclass of illusions that are up to the task, and a subclass that are not. It follows that when we engage the former we are not simply incorrectly perceiving the world outside ourselves, we are directly perceiving a subjective entity: one’s grip on the external world has been marginalized – not fully lost, but once-removed. However, admitting that (...) various illusions do not give evi¬dence for sense-data considerably limits the power of the argument from illusion (Section 6) and brings out its distinctness from the argument from perceptual relativity (Section 7). To reach these conclusions we will examine the role of ambiguity in perception (Section 3), its connection to illusion (Section 4), and the link reference has to every element of this dis¬course (Sections 2 and 5). (shrink)

Projectivism is the thesis that we project at least some subjective aspects of perception into what we experience as the world outside ourselves. It is familiar from various phantom pains, afterimages, and hallucinations. Strong Projectivism asserts that all perceptual experiences involve and only involve direct awareness of projected elements. Strong Projectivism is an unpopular and I argue underappreciated variety of intentionalism (or representationalism). It straightforwardly explains the transparency of experience (section 2) and phenomena qualia theorists offer to avoid intentionalism such (...) as blurry vision and spectrum inversion (section 3). Finally, projectivism illuminates residual qualia-friendly cases involving imagination and emotion (section 4). Ultimately, instances of non-projected, non-intentional aspects of experience are hard to identify. Thus, the notion of phenomenal presence drawn from projectivism does justice to a great many of the forces at play in debates surrounding qualia and intentionalism. We should bound toward Strong Projectivism. (shrink)

This essay is an introduction to the Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Colour. Why has the examination of many different aspects of colour been a prominent feature in philosophy, to such an extent that the topic is worthy of a handbook? Here are two related answers. First, colours are exceedingly familiar, seemingly simple features that become enigmatic under scrutiny, and they are difficult to capture in any familiar-sounding, unsophisticated theory. Second, through colour one can confront various problems that span the (...) breadth of philosophy, including problems pertaining to perception, the mind-body relation, the nature of science, scepticism, vagueness, meta-ethics, and aesthetics. In this introduction we elaborate and guide the reader to the essays in the rest of this volume. (shrink)

© The Authors 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] Colour is a welcome work in history and philosophy of science.1 The opening chapters offer a fresh take on the history of perceptual theory and a broad overview of contemporary philosophy of colour. This is followed by the central fourth chapter, which introduces readers to a cluster of empirical data that to this point have not received explicit (...) treatment in philosophy. The core message is that instead of thinking of colour vision as filling in or painting the experienced world of primary qualities, we should think of colour vision as helping us to experience primary qualities. The colour visual system does not colour in an experiential world of primary qualities, it uses colour for the experience of those qualities. This colouring... (shrink)

At first pass, colour constancy occurs when one sees a thing in one’s environment to have a stable colour despite differences in the way it is illuminated. The phenomenon is intuitively grounded for example in everyday experiences in which something is partly shadowed but, in some sense, looks to be uniformly coloured. After a brief introduction to the colour constancy concept (§0) and the science of colour constancy (§1), my focus is on the significance of colour constancy for two intertwined (...) philosophical issues. The first is colour ontology, where constancy has been used to argue for the objectivity of colour, and in particular for a reductive form of it (see §2). The second is colour constancy’s complicated connection to colour experience and colour epistemology. Colour constancy is a subtle phenomenon: it is situated at the intersection of perceptual experience and judgement; it is influenced by myriad forces within our visual-cognitive systems; and is likely a composite of interestingly disparate phenomena. I approach this suite of issues from the perspective of the given in colour perception (§3). As will become plain, the ontological and epistemic issues are related in important ways. This does not, however, detract from the value of focusing on each individually. (shrink)

Studying colour vision across various species suggests that different species perceive different colours (the Disunity Hypothesis). It is plausible that all species’ color visual systems are, at least in principle, equally correct/veridical regarding colour (Ecumenicism). Assuming that colours are mind-independent features of material objects (Objectivism), it follows that objects simultaneously have different colours for different species (Pluralism). But are all these colours compatible with one another? Some have argued that they are on grounds that, while comparisons between colours are possible (...) within a given species’ colour space, they are not possible across the colour spaces of different species. Since colours from different spaces are not comparable, they cannot be incompatible. Hence, a given object can have a colour from as many colour spaces as needed to explain interspecies variations in colour perception. I argue that this reasoning is flawed in two ways. First, colour spaces that are non-comparable in pure or abstract reasoning, may nonetheless be comparable in applied contexts. Second, in our applied context – our world – evidence suggests that incompatibilities between colours from different species’ spaces are extremely likely when Colour Objectivism is presumed. But then the Pluralist solution to interspecies variation seems unavailable to the colour objectivist. (shrink)

Sensory substitution devices (SSDs) are most familiar from their use with subjects who are deficient in a target modality (e.g. congenitally blind subjects), but there is no doubt that the use and potential value of SSDs extend to persons without such deficits. Recent work by Amedi and his team (in particular Levy-Tzedek et al. 2012) has begun to explore this. Their idea is that SSDs may facilitate behavioural transference (BT) across sense modalities. In this case, a motor skill learned through (...) visual perception might be subsequently employed in response to auditory perception, using an SSD as a mediator. They infer from the existence of such BT that the learned skill is amodally represented. After a brief overview I identify ways to more fully test for BT within this experimental paradigm and argue that their conclusion about amodal representation is premature. Additionally, I argue that their preferred SSD (Eyemusic) is of limited value for the project. While my remarks are critical, my intention is to be constructive, particularly in light of the fact that Levy-Tzedek et al. (2012), is, I believe, the first output from Amedi's lab concerning this line of research. (shrink)

Intentionalism debates seek to uncover the relationship between the qualitative aspects of experience—phenomenal character—and the intentionality of the mind. They have been at or near center stage in the philosophy of mind for more than two decades, and in my view need to be reexamined. There are two core distinct intentionalism debates that are rarely distinguished (Sect. 1). Additionally, the characterization of spectrum inversion as involving inverted qualities and constant intentional content is mistaken (Sect. 3). These confusions can be witnessed (...) from an often-ignored and lonely perspective, that of the sense-datum theorist, and in particular of the projectivist (Sect. 2). In my view we have been so wary of sense-datum theory in recent years that we have failed to see that, even if false, it may permit perspectives on intentionalism issues difficult to occupy from other views. (shrink)

From David Hume's famous puzzle about 'the missing shade of blue' to current research into the science of colour, the topic of colour is an incredibly fertile region of study and debate, cutting across philosophy of mind, epistemology, metaphysics and aesthetics as well as psychology. Debates about the nature of our experience of colour and the nature of colour itself are central to contemporary discussion and argument in philosophy of mind and psychology, and philosophy of perception. This outstanding Handbook contains (...) twenty-nine specially commissioned contributions by leading philosophers and examines the most important aspects of philosophy of colour. It is organised into six parts: The Importance of Colour to Philosophy The Science and Spaces of Colour Colour Phenomena Colour Ontology Colour Experience and Epistemology Language, Categories and Thought. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Colour is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of mind and psychology, epistemology, metaphysics and aesthetics, as well as for those interested in conceptual issues in the psychology of colour. (shrink)

This paper reports a psychological study of human categorization that looked at the procedures used by expert scientists when dealing with puzzling items. Five professional botanists were asked to specify a category from a set of positive and negative instances. The target category in the study was defined by a feature that was unusual, hence situations of uncertainty and puzzlement were generated. Subjects were asked to think aloud while solving the tasks, and their verbal reports were analyzed. A number of (...) problem solving strategies were identified, and subsequently integrated in a model of knowledge‐guided inductive categorization. Our model proposes that expert knowledge influences the subjects' reasoning in more complex ways than suggested by earlier investigations of scientific reasoning. As in previous studies, domain knowledge influenced our subjects' hypothesis generation and testing; but, additionally, it played a central role when subjects revised their hypotheses. (shrink)

In timing perception studies, the timing of one event is usually manipulated relative to another, and participants are asked to judge if the two events were synchronous, or to judge which of the two events occurred first. Responses are analyzed to determine a measure of central tendency, which is taken as an estimate of the timing at which the two events are perceptually synchronous. When these estimates do not coincide with physical synchrony, it is often assumed that the sensory signals (...) are asynchronous, as though the transfer of information concerning one input has been accelerated or decelerated relative to the other. Here we show that, while this is a viable interpretation, it is equally plausible that such effects are driven by shifts in the criteria used to differentiate simultaneous from asynchronous inputs. Our analyses expose important ambiguities concerning the interpretation of simultaneity judgement data, which have hitherto been underappreciated. (shrink)

Thomas Jefferson and Philosophy: Essays on the Philosophical Cast of Jefferson’s Writings is a collection of essays on topics that relate to philosophical aspects of Jefferson’s thinking over the years. Much historical insight is given to ground the various philosophical strands in Jefferson’s thought and writing on topics such as political philosophy, moral philosophy, slavery, republicanism, wall of separation, liberty, educational philosophy, and architecture.

A difference of opinion exists among some philosophers who have recently inquired whether Marx thinks that capitalism is distributively unjust. What has to be determined is whether in Marx's view the wage worker suffers an injustice in not receiving most or all of the surplus value he creates. Allen Wood argues that this is not Marx's view, and George Brenkert agrees, for quite similar reasons; but Ziyad Husami and Gary Young, on the other hand, argue in reply to Wood, and (...) on overlapping grounds, for the opposite interpretation; Wood, in turn, has defended himself against Husami. (shrink)

Chervenak and McCullough, authors of the most acknowledged ethical framework for maternal–fetal surgery, rely on the ‘ethical–obstetrical’ concept of the fetus as a patient in order to determine what is morally owed to fetuses by both physicians and the women who gestate them in the context of prenatal surgery. In this article, we reconstruct the argumentative structure of their framework and present an internal criticism. First, we analyse the justificatory arguments put forward by the authors regarding the moral status of (...) the fetus qua patient. Second, we discuss the internal coherence and consistency of the moral obligations those authors derive from that concept. We claim that some of the dilemmas their approach is purported to avoid, such as the debate about the independent moral status of the fetus, and the foundation of the moral obligations of pregnant women (towards the fetuses they gestate) are not, all things considered, avoided. Chervenak and McCullough construct the obligations of physicians as obligations towards entities with equal moral status. But, at the same time, they assume that the woman has an independent moral status while the moral status of the fetus is dependent on the decision of the woman to present it to a physician for care. According to the logic of their own argumentation, Chervenak and McCullough implicitly admit a different moral status of the woman and the fetus, which will lead to different ascription of duties of the physician than those they ascribed. (shrink)

This article focuses on maternal-fetal surgery (MFS) and on the concept of clinical equipoise that is a widely accepted requirement for conducting randomized controlled trials (RCT). There are at least three reasons why equipoise is unsuitable for MFS. First, the concept is based on a misconception about the nature of clinical research and the status of research subjects. Second, given that it is not clear who the research subject/s in MFS is/are, if clinical equipoise is to be used as a (...) criterion to test the ethical appropriateness of RCT, its meaning should be unambiguous. Third, because of the multidisciplinary character of MFS, it is not clear who should be in equipoise. As a result, we lack an adequate criterion for the ethical review of MFS protocols. In our account, which is based on Chervenak and McCullough's seminal work in the field of obstetric ethics, equipoise is abandoned. and RCT involving MFS can be ethically initiated when a multidisciplinary ethics review board (ERB), having an evidence-based assessment of the risks involved, is convinced that the value of answering the research hypothesis, for the sake of the health interests of future pregnant women carrying fetuses with certain congenital birth defects, justifies the actual risks research participants might suffer within a set limit of low/manageable. (shrink)

There are some Marxist moral philosophers who think that a distinctive and defensible ethic can be unearthed from Marx's writings. The task of unearthing it must, of course, be kept distinct from the task or elaborating and defending it. Professor Aronovitch undertakes both tasks in his paper, but he does not always succeed in keeping them apart. As a result, I believe, damage is done to the exegetical side of his project.The question of whether there is a Marxian ethic is (...) a problem both of textual interpretation and of moral philosophy. Consider, for instance, the claim that Marx has an ethic whose centrepiece is a principle of selfrealization. It is an exegetical problem to provide evidence that a principle of self-realization is to be found in Marx and to explain how he understands it. (shrink)

A difference of opinion exists among some philosophers who have recently inquired whether Marx thinks that capitalism is distributively unjust. What has to be determined is whether in Marx's view the wage worker suffers an injustice in not receiving most or all of the surplus value he creates. Allen Wood argues that this is not Marx's view, and George Brenkert agrees, for quite similar reasons; but Ziyad Husami and Gary Young, on the other hand, argue in reply to Wood, and (...) on overlapping grounds, for the opposite interpretation; Wood, in turn, has defended himself against Husami. (shrink)

InWord and Object W. V. Quine argues that there is no uniquely correct way to assign referents to the terms of a language; any claim about the reference of a term is implicitly relative to a manual of translation. To Rudolf Carnap this must have seemed familiar. BeforeWord and Object was written Carnap had been saying the same thing inMeaning and Necessity: under the assumption of the method of the name-relation, any claim about the reference of a term is implicitly (...) relative to what Carnap calls a conception of the name-relation. Yet Carnap is often taken to be a victim of Quine's relativistic notion of reference. Drawing on Carnap's discussion of the name-relation inMeaning and Necessity, it is argued that Carnap's and Quine's views on reference are not so far apart as is usually perceived. (shrink)