Can companies be identified by how ethical they are? The concept of organizational culture suggests that organizations have identifiable cultures of which ethics are a part. By definition culture is the shared beliefs of an organization's members, hence the ethical culture of an organization would be reflected in the beliefs about the ethics of an organization which are shared by its members. Thus, it is logical to conceptualize the ethics of different organizations as existing on a continuum bounded at one (...) end by unethical companies and at the other, highly ethical companies. This research assesses the efficacy of the existing measure of organizational ethical culture for identifying the ethical status of organizations on a this continuum. Results suggest that the Ethical Culture Questionnaire designed by Trevino, Butterfield and McCabe (1995) measures individual perceptions regarding organizational ethics but does not identify shared beliefs about an organizationÕs ethical culture. (shrink)

Previous studies conducted in the United States indicate that people associate numbers with gender, such that odd numbers are more likely to be considered male and even numbers considered female. It has been argued that this number gendering phenomenon is acquired through social learning and conditioning, and that male-odd/female-even associations reflect a general, cross-cultural human consensus on gender roles relating to agency and communion. However, the incidence and pattern of number gendering in cultures outside the United States remains to be (...) established. Against this background, the purpose of this study was to determine whether people from a culture and country very different from the United States also associate numbers with gender, and, if they do, whether the pattern of these associations is the male-odd/female-even associations previously observed. To investigate this issue, we adopted the Implicit Association Test used frequently in previous research, where associations between numbers and gender were examined using male and female Arabic participants native to, and resident in, the United Arab Emirates. The findings indicated that the association of numbers with gender does occur in Arabic culture. But while Arabic females associated odd numbers with male faces and even numbers with female faces, Arabic males showed the reversed pattern of gender associations, associating even numbers with male faces and odd numbers with female faces. These findings support the view that number gendering is indeed a cross-cultural phenomenon and show that the phenomenon occurs across very different countries and cultures. But the findings also suggest that the pattern with which numbers are associated with gender is not universal and, instead, reflects culture-specific views on gender roles which may change across cultures and gender. Further implications for understanding the association of numbers with gender across human societies are discussed. (shrink)

Collects twenty five classic articles in visual perception, the articles span a century and include examples from disciplines that contribute to our current understanding of vision. Discussion questions and further reading suggestions follow.

The law applicable to genomics in the United States is currently in transition and under debate. The rapid evolution of the science, burgeoning clinical research, and growing clinical application pose serious challenges for federal and state law. Although there has been some empirical work in this area, this is the first paper to survey and interview key scientific and legal stakeholders in the field of genomics to help ground identification of the most important legal problems that must be solved to (...) successfully integrate genomics into clinical care. The respondents in this study identified a wide range of interconnected issues, focusing specifically on the need for clear guidelines about how to use these data, fear of liability for those who use these data, and the need to protect patients from use of this information particularly by insurers, while endorsing data sharing. Developing legal strategies to support appropriate use of genomics now and in the future clearly will require making trade-offs, taking into account the full complexity of this legal ecosystem. (shrink)

Although Grodzinsky's target article has merit, it neglects the importance of neural mechanisms underlying language functions. We present results from our clinical studies on different levels of temporal information processing in aphasic patients and briefly review the existing data on neurobiology of language to cast new light on the main thesis of the target article.

Charles Travis presents a series of essays on philosophy of perception, inspired by the insights of Gottlob Frege. He engages with a range of contemporary thinkers, and explores key issues including how perception can make the world bear on what we do or think, and what sorts of capacities we draw on in representing something as (being) something.

This study investigated students’ perceptions following a prepared, common presentation regarding academic integrity provided by their residence dons. This peer instruction study utilized both quantitative and qualitative analyses of survey data within a pre-test post-test design. Overall, students reported gains in knowledge, as well as confidence in their knowledge of academic integrity. Notably, students reported increases in their personal value for academic integrity after participating in the presentations. Overall, the quality and content of the presentations were judged positively, and participants’ (...) ratings of the presentation were predictive of increases in personal value of academic integrity, as well as self-reported knowledge and confidence gains. Qualitative analyses supported that the key ideas in the presentation served as the focal material for discussion, but also introduced specific topics that students wanted to explore in greater depth. (shrink)

Commentators agree that the Perception and Attention Deficit (PAD) model is a promising model for accounting for recurrent complex visual hallucinations (RCVH) across several disorders, though with varying detailed criticisms. Its central tenets are not modified, but further consideration of generative models of visual processing and the relationship of proto-objects and memory systems allows the PAD model to deal with variations in phenomenology. The commentaries suggest new ways to generate evidence that will test the model.

Perception is our key to the world. It plays at least three different roles in our lives. It justifies beliefs and provides us with knowledge of our environment. It brings about conscious mental states. It converts informational input, such as light and sound waves, into representations of invariant features in our environment. Corresponding to these three roles, there are at least three fundamental questions that have motivated the study of perception. How does perception justify beliefs and yield (...) knowledge of our environment? How does perception bring about conscious mental states? How does a perceptual system accomplish the feat of converting varying informational input into mental representations of invariant features in our environment? -/- This book presents a unified account of the phenomenological and epistemological role of perception that is informed by empirical research. So it develops an account of perception that provides an answer to the first two questions, while being sensitive to scientific accounts that address the third question. The key idea is that perception is constituted by employing perceptual capacities - for example the capacity to discriminate instances of red from instances of blue. Perceptual content, consciousness, and evidence are each analyzed in terms of this basic property of perception. Employing perceptual capacities constitutes phenomenal character as well as perceptual content. The primacy of employing perceptual capacities in perception over their derivative employment in hallucination and illusion grounds the epistemic force of perceptual experience. In this way, the book provides a unified account of perceptual content, consciousness, and evidence. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the causal requirements on perceptual success in putative cases of the perception of absence – in particular, in cases of hearing silence and seeing darkness. It is argued that the key to providing the right account of the respect in which we can perceive silence and darkness lies in providing the right account of the respect in which we can have conscious perceptual contact with intervals of time and regions of space within which objects can potentially (...) be perceived. In this account, a significant explanatory role is assigned to comparatively invariant structural features of our conscious experience of regions of space and intervals of time. The chapter discusses how the explanatory role assigned to these structural features affects our view of the causal requirements on perceptual success. (shrink)

This study presents a probabilistic model of melody perception, which infers the key of a melody and also judges the probability of the melody itself. The model uses Bayesian reasoning: For any “surface” pattern and underlying “structure,” we can infer the structure maximizing P(structure|surface) based on knowledge of P(surface, structure). The probability of the surface can then be calculated as ∑ P(surface, structure), summed over all structures. In this case, the surface is a pattern of notes; the structure is (...) a key. A generative model is proposed, based on three principles: (a) melodies tend to remain within a narrow pitch range; (b) note‐to‐note intervals within a melody tend to be small; and (c) notes tend to conform to a distribution (or key profile) that depends on the key. The model is tested in three ways. First, it is tested on its ability to identify the keys of a set of folksong melodies. Second, it is tested on a melodic expectation task in which it must judge the probability of different notes occurring given a prior context; these judgments are compared with perception data from a melodic expectation experiment. Finally, the model is tested on its ability to detect incorrect notes in melodies by assigning them lower probabilities than the original versions. (shrink)

Auditory perception is traditionally conceived as the perception of sounds — a friend’s voice, a clap of thunder, a minor chord. However, daily life also seems to present us with experiences characterized by the absence of sound — a moment of silence, a gap between thunderclaps, the hush after a musical performance. In these cases, do we positively hear silence? Or do we just fail to hear, and merely judge or infer that it is silent? This longstanding question (...) remains controversial in both the philosophy and science of perception, with prominent theories holding that sounds are the only objects of auditory experience and thus that our encounter with silence is cognitive, not perceptual. However, this debate has largely remained theoretical, without a key empirical test. Here, we introduce a novel empirical approach, presenting experimental evidence that silence can be genuinely perceived (not just cognitively inferred). We ask whether silences can ‘substitute’ for sounds in event-based auditory illusions — empirical signatures of auditory event representation in which auditory events distort perceived duration. Seven experiments introduce three new ‘silence illusions’ — the one-silence-is-more illusion, silence-based warping, and the oddball-silence illusion — each adapted from a prominent perceptual illusion previously thought to arise only from sounds. Subjects were immersed in ambient noise interrupted by silences structurally identical to the sounds in the original illusions. In all cases, silences elicited temporal distortions perfectly analogous to the illusions produced by sounds. Our results suggest that silence is truly heard, not merely inferred, introducing a general approach for studying absence perception. (shrink)

A belief in a firm correspondence between objects, ideas, and their representation in language pervaded the works of Anne Robert Jacques Turgot

(1727–1781) in 1750. This conviction is particularly manifest in Turgot’s sharp critique of Berkeley’s philosophical system and his remarks on Maupertuis’s reconstruction of the origin of language. During the 1750s Turgot’s epistemological views underwent a change, apparent in two of his contributions to the Encyclopédie: the entries Existence and Étymologie (1756). These articles included a reassessment of Berkeleyan immaterialism, facing (...) an ultimate crisis of definition and representation. A similar development may be traced in contemporary works by Condillac and Diderot. Turgot’s Encyclopédie entries also envisaged a new science, an archeology of the human mind aided by the examination of linguistic development and change. This entailed the scientific verification of conjectures in any historical account of ideas, turning etymological

and psychological inquiries into what Turgot termed ‘experimental metaphysics’. (shrink)

Among the possible ways of gaining moral knowledge, moral perception figures as a controversial yet fruitful option. If moral perception is possible, moral disagreement is addressed not by appealing to principles but to the process and the objects of perception, and moral progress occurs not through deliberation but by refining one’s perceptual faculties. The possibility of “seeing clearly and justly” is at the heart of Iris Murdoch’s thought, but Murdoch herself does not put forth a systematic argument (...) for this view. In this paper I propose an argument for moral perception based on Murdoch’s philosophy, while engaging with contemporary debates in moral perception. The key idea I take from Murdoch is that perception is conceptually laden, where concepts are understood as ways of grasping the world according to human concerns. Murdoch’s position enables us to solve a difficult tension: explaining the motivating force of perception while maintaining objectivity in ethics. This view of moral perception also constitutes a radical position in the debate, where even the most optimistic defenses appeal to the supervenience of values on facts. If Murdoch is right, however, we perceive complex properties, including values, directly, so that appeal to supervenience becomes unnecessary and some of the grounds for the very distinction between fact and value are put into question. (shrink)

Introduction: Three key principles -- Sense datum theories -- Adverbial theories -- Belief acquisition theories -- Intentional theories -- Disjunctive theories -- Perception and causation -- Perception and the sciences of the mind -- Perception and other sense modalities.

What is the relationship between perception and action, between an organism and its environment, in explaining consciousness? These are issues at the heart of philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences. This book explores the relationship between perception and action from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, ranging from theoretical discussion of concepts to findings from recent scientific studies. It incorporates contributions from leading philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, and an artificial intelligence theorist. The contributions take a range of positions with (...) respect to the view that perception is an achievement by an agent acting in a complex environment in which sensorimotor dynamics constitute an essential ingredient to perceptual experience. A key focus of the book is on the debate about action-oriented theories of visual perception versus the dual-visual systems hypothesis The former champions the role of sensorimotor dynamics in perceptual awareness while the latter favours a functional dichotomy between perception and action. At least on the surface, these two approaches are in conflict. Where one emphasizes the interdependence of action and perception, the other suggests that action and perception are functionally distinct. The dialogue between these two approaches brings out wider theoretical issues underlying the research paradigm of cognitive sciences and philosophy of mind. Exploring one of the major debates in the philosophy and psychology, this book is fascinating reading for all those in the cognitive sciences and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Categorical perception (CP) refers to how similar things look different depending on whether they are classified as the same category. Many studies demonstrate that adult humans show CP for human emotional faces. It is widely debated whether the effect can be accounted for solely by perceptual differences (structural differences among emotional faces) or whether additional perceiver-based conceptual knowledge is required. In this review, I discuss the phenomenon of CP and key studies showing CP for emotional faces. I then discuss (...) a new model of emotion which highlights how perceptual and conceptual knowledge interact to explain how people see discrete emotions in others’ faces. In doing so, I discuss how language (emotion words included in the paradigm) contribute to CP. (shrink)

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.

The diverse essays in this volume speak to the relevance of phenomenological and psychological questioning regarding perceptions of the human. This designation, human, can be used beyond the mere identification of a species to underwrite exclusion, denigration, dehumanization and demonization, and to set up a pervasive opposition in Othering all deemed inhuman, nonhuman, or posthuman. As alerted to by Merleau-Ponty, one crucial key for a deeper understanding of these issues is consideration of the nature and scope of perception. (...) class='Hi'>Perception defines the world of the perceiver, and perceptual capacities are constituted in engagement with the world – there is co-determination. Moreover, the distinct phenomenology of perception in the spectatorial mode in contrast to the reciprocal mode, deepens the intersubjective and ethical dimensions of such investigations. -/- Questions motivating the essays include: Can objectification and an inhuman gaze serve positive ends? If so, under what constraints and conditions? How is an inhuman gaze achieved and at what cost? How might the emerging insights of the role of perception into our interdependencies and essential sociality from various domains challenge not only theoretical frameworks, but also the practices and institutions of science, medicine, psychiatry and justice? What can we learn from atypical social cognition, psychopathology and animal cognition? Could distortions within the gazer’s emotional responsiveness and habituated aspects of social interaction play a role in the emergence of an inhuman gaze? -/- Perception and the Inhuman Gaze will interest scholars and advanced students working in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, psychology, psychiatry, sociology and social cognition. -/- Table of Contents -/- Introduction -/- Part I. The Gaze in Classical Phenomenology: Perspectives on Objectification -/- 1. Defending the Objective Gaze as a Self-transcending Capacity of Human Subjects -/- Dermot Moran -/- 2. Two Orders of Bodily Objectification: The Look and the Touch -/- Sara Heinämaa -/- 3. On Eliminativism’s Transient Gaze -/- Timothy Mooney -/- 4. Not wholly human. Reading Maurice Merleau-Ponty with Jacques Lacan. -/- Dorothée Legrand -/- 5. Disclosure and the Gendered Gaze in Simone de Beauvoir's Ethics -/- Christinia Landry -/- Part II. Vision, Perception and Gazes -/- 6. Inside the gaze -/- Shaun Gallagher -/- 7. Perception and its Objects. -/- Maurita Harney -/- 8. Technological Gaze: Understanding How Technologies Transform Perception -/- Richard Lewis -/- 9. The Inhuman Gaze and Perceptual Gestalts: The Making and Unmaking of Others and Worlds -/- Anya Daly -/- Part III. Psychiatry, Psychopathology and Inhuman Gazes -/- 10. Values and Values-based Practice in Psychopathology: Combining Analytic and Phenomenological Approaches -/- G Stanghellini and K.W.M. (Bill) Fulford -/- 11. The Inhuman and Human Gaze in Psychiatry, Psychopathology and Schizophrenia. -/- Matthew Broome -/- 12. Overcoming the Gaze: Psychopathology, Affect, and Narrative. -/- Anna Bortolan -/- 13. From excess to exhaustion : The rise of burnout in a post-modern achievement society. -/- Philippe Wuyts -/- 14. Blackout Rages: The Inhibition of Episodic Memory in Extreme Berserker Episodes -/- John Protevi -/- Part IV. Beyond the Human: Divine, Posthuman and Animal Gazes -/- 15. Wondering at the Inhuman Gaze -/- Sean. D. Kelly -/- 16. What Counts as Human/ Inhuman Right Now? -/- Rosi Braidotti -/- 17. Beyond Human and Animal: Metamorphosis in Merleau-Ponty -/- Dylan Trigg -/- Part V. Sociality and Boundaries of the Human -/- 18. Voice and gaze considered together in ‘languaging’. -/- Fred Cummins -/- 19. Ethics Beyond the Human: Disability and The Inhuman -/- Jonathan Mitchell -/- 20. Social Invisibility and Emotional Blindness -/- James Jardine -/- 21. What are you looking at? Dissonance as a window on the autonomy of participatory sense-making frames. -/- Mark James. (shrink)

Three key ways of updating one’s knowledge are (i) perception of states of affairs, (ii) reception of messages, (iii) drawing new conclusions from known facts. If one represents knowledge by means of Kripke models, the implicit assumption is that drawing conclusions is immediate. This assumption of logical omniscience is a useful abstraction. It leaves the distinction between (i) and (ii) to be accounted for. In current versions of Update Logic (Dynamic Epistemic Logic, Logic of Communication and Change) perception (...) and message reception are not distinguished. We will look at what is needed to distinguish them. (shrink)

Perceptual experience, that paradigm of subjectivity, constitutes our most immediate and fundamental access to the objective world. At least, this would seem to be so if commonsense realism is correct — if perceptual experience is (in general) an immediate awareness of mind-independent objects, and a source of direct knowledge of what such objects are like. Commonsense realism raises many questions. First, can we be more precise about its commitments? Does it entail any particular conception of the nature of perceptual experience (...) and its relation to perceived objects, or any particular view of the way perception yields knowledge? Second, what explains the apparent intuitive appeal of commonsense realism? Should we think of it as a kind of folk theory held by most human adults or is there a sense in which we are pre-theoretically committed to it — in virtue of the experience we enjoy or in virtue of the concepts we use or in virtue of the explanations we give? Third, is commonsense realism defensible, in the face of formidable challenges from epistemology, metaphysics and cognitive science? The project of the present volume is to advance our understanding of these issues and thus to shed light on the commitments and credentials of commonsense realism. As you may have guessed from the title, the volume also aims to highlight the key role the concept of causation plays in these debates. Central issues to be addressed include the status and nature of causal requirements on perception, the causal role of perceptual experience, and the relation between objective perception and causal thinking — issues that, as many chapters in the volume bring out, are inseparable from concerns with the very nature of causation. (shrink)

_Perception_ presents classic essays on the conceptual and theoretical problems in the study of vision. In a style that is accessible to the non-expert, the volume lays out core issues in the theory of vision and then sets up a dialogue on the topics among philosophers and psychologists, past and present. Offers an accessible introduction to perception through key readings. Presents a dialogue among philosophers and psychologists on the science of perception. Contains a comprehensive introduction and provides suggestions (...) for further reading. Useful for readers interested in philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, computer vision, and visual science. (shrink)

I develop a new account of perception on which it is metaphysically and explanatorily prior to illusion, hallucination, and perceptual experience. I argue that this view can rival the mainstream experience-first representationalist approach in explanatory power by using competences as a key theoretical tool: it can help to explain the nature of perception, how illusion and hallucination depend on it, and how cognitive science can help to explain in virtue of what we perceive. According to the Competence View, (...) perception is a kind of target-oriented activity that manifests the agent’s perceptual competence. This characterization of perception helps to explain the role of the subject in perception, as well as how perception has accuracy conditions. Illusion and hallucination are explained as degenerate exercises of perceptual competences. Lastly, I show the Competence View provides a flexible and robust framework for investigation in cognitive science. (shrink)

In order to secure the limits of the critical use of reason, and to succeed in the critique of speculative metaphysics, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) had to present a full account of human cognitive experience. Perception in Kant’s Model of Experience is a detailed investigation of this aspect of Kant’s grand enterprise with a special focus: perception. The overarching goal is to understand this common phenomenon both in itself and as the key to understanding Kant’s views of experience. In (...) the process, the author argues against any such reading of Kant that puts too much emphasis on concepts and understanding in perception. This means that claims of the sort that intuitions cannot play their role without concepts, that sensibility cannot bring anything to cognition without being mediated through the functions of understanding, or that there is no such thing as concept-independent perception, are shown to be either plainly false or misleading at best. Together with the contemporary topics examined by the end of the book, the findings suggest how the role of conceptual thinking in human cognition has been exaggerated partly because of a misplaced interpretation of Kant, which not only makes perception far more intellectual in character than what was intended by Kant himself, but distorts Kant’s account of cognition by overlooking what there is at the heart of his critical philosophy: the revaluation of sensible cognition. (shrink)

Rod photoreceptors are among the most sensitive light detectors in nature. They achieve their remarkable sensitivity across a wide variety of species through a number of essential adaptations: a specialized cellular geometry, a G‐protein cascade with an unusually stable receptor molecule, a low‐noise transduction mechanism, a nearly perfect effector enzyme, and highly evolved mechanisms of feedback control and receptor deactivation. Practically any change in protein expression, enzyme activity, or feedback control can be shown to impair photon detection, either by decreasing (...) sensitivity or signal‐to‐noise ratio, or by reducing temporal resolution. Comparison of mammals to amphibians suggests that rod outer‐segment morphology and the molecules and mechanism of transduction may have evolved together to optimize light sensitivity in darkness, which culminates in the extraordinary ability of these cells to respond to single photons at the ultimate limit of visual perception. (shrink)

Jennifer Church presents a new account of perception, which shows how imagining alternative perspectives and possibilities plays a key role in creating and validating experiences of self-evident objectivity. She explores the nature of moral perception and aesthetic perception, and argues that perception can be both literal and substantive.

According to the cognitive penetrability hypothesis, our beliefs, desires, and possibly our emotions literally affect how we see the world. This book elucidates the nature of the cognitive penetrability and impenetrability hypotheses, assesses their plausibility, and explores their philosophical consequences. It connects the topic's multiple strands (the psychological findings, computationalist background, epistemological consequences of cognitive architecture, and recent philosophical developments) at a time when the outcome of many philosophical debates depends on knowing whether and how cognitive states can influence (...) class='Hi'>perception. All sixteen chapters were written especially for the book. The first chapters provide methodological and conceptual clarification of the topic and give an account of the relations between penetrability, encapsulation, modularity, and cross-modal interactions in perception. Assessments of psychological and neuroscientific evidence for cognitive penetration are given by several chapters. Most of the contributions analyse the impact of cognitive penetrability and impenetrability on specific philosophical topics: high-level perceptual contents, the epistemological consequences of penetration, nonconceptual content, the phenomenology of late perception, metacognitive feelings, and action. The book includes a comprehensive introduction which explains the history of the debate, its key technical concepts (informational encapsulation, early and late vision, the perception-cognition distinction, hard-wired perceptual processing, perceptual learning, theory-ladenness), and the debate's relevance to current topics in the philosophy of mind and perception, epistemology, and philosophy of psychology. (shrink)

This volume addresses key questions related to how content in thought is derived from perceptual experience. It includes chapters that focus on single issues on perception and cognition, as well as others that relate these issues to an important social construct that involves both perceptual experience and cognitive activities: aesthetics. While the volume includes many diverse views, several prominent themes unite the individual essays: a challenge to the notion of the discreet, and non-temporal, unit of perception, a challenge (...) to the traditional divide between perception and cognition, and a challenge to the traditional divide between unconscious and conscious intentionality. Additionally, the chapters discuss the content of perceptual experience, the value of traditional notions of content, disjunctivism, adverbialism, and phenomenal experience. The final section of essays dealing with perception and cognition in aesthetics features work in experimental aesthetics and unique perspectives from artists and gallerists working outside of philosophy. Perception, Cognition and Aesthetics is a timely volume that offers a range of unique perspectives on debates in philosophy of mind surrounding perception and cognition. It will also appeal to scholars working in aesthetics and art theory who are interested in the ways these debates influence our understanding of art. ists and gallerists working outside of philosophy. Perception, Cognition and Aesthetics is a timely volume that offers a range of unique perspectives on debates in philosophy of mind surrounding perception and cognition. It will also appeal to scholars working in aesthetics and art theory who are interested in the ways these debates influence our understanding of art. (shrink)

First published in 1945, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s monumental _Phénoménologie de la perception _signalled the arrival of a major new philosophical and intellectual voice in post-war Europe. Breaking with the prevailing picture of existentialism and phenomenology at the time, it has become one of the landmark works of twentieth-century thought. This new translation, the first for over fifty years, makes this classic work of philosophy available to a new generation of readers. _Phenomenology of Perception _stands in the great phenomenological tradition (...) of Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre. Yet Merleau-Ponty’s contribution is decisive, as he brings this tradition and other philosophical predecessors, particularly Descartes and Kant, to confront a neglected dimension of our experience: the lived body and the phenomenal world. Charting a bold course between the reductionism of science on the one hand and "intellectualism" on the other, Merleau-Ponty argues that we should regard the body not as a mere biological or physical unit, but as the body which structures one’s situation and experience within the world. Merleau-Ponty enriches his classic work with engaging studies of famous cases in the history of psychology and neurology as well as phenomena that continue to draw our attention, such as phantom limb syndrome, synaesthesia, and hallucination. This new translation includes many helpful features such as the reintroduction of Merleau-Ponty’s discursive Table of Contents as subtitles into the body of the text, a comprehensive Translator’s Introduction to its main themes, essential notes explaining key terms of translation, an extensive Index, and an important updating of Merleau-Ponty’s references to now available English translations. Also included is a new foreword by Taylor Carman and an introduction to Merleau-Ponty_ _by Claude Lefort. Translated by Donald A. Landes. (shrink)

This volume addresses key questions related to how content in thought is derived from perceptual experience. It includes chapters that focus on single issues on perception and cognition, as well as others that relate these issues to an important social construct that involves both perceptual experience and cognitive activities: aesthetics. While the volume includes many diverse views, several prominent themes unite the individual essays: a challenge to the notion of the discreet, and non-temporal, unit of perception, a challenge (...) to the traditional divide between perception and cognition, and a challenge to the traditional divide between unconscious and conscious intentionality. Additionally, the chapters discuss the content of perceptual experience, the value of traditional notions of content, disjunctivism, adverbialism, and phenomenal experience. The final section of essays dealing with perception and cognition in aesthetics features work in experimental aesthetics and unique perspectives from artists and gallerists working outside of philosophy. Perception, Cognition and Aesthetics is a timely volume that offers a range of unique perspectives on debates in philosophy of mind surrounding perception and cognition. It will also appeal to scholars working in aesthetics and art theory who are interested in the ways these debates influence our understanding of art. ists and gallerists working outside of philosophy. Perception, Cognition and Aesthetics is a timely volume that offers a range of unique perspectives on debates in philosophy of mind surrounding perception and cognition. It will also appeal to scholars working in aesthetics and art theory who are interested in the ways these debates influence our understanding of art. (shrink)

The main thesis of this paper is that two prevailing theories about cognitive penetration are too extreme, namely, the view that cognitive penetration is pervasive and the view that there is a sharp and fundamental distinction between cognition and perception, which precludes any type of cognitive penetration. These opposite views have clear merits and empirical support. To eliminate this puzzling situation, we present an alternative theoretical approach that incorporates the merits of these views into a broader and more nuanced (...) explanatory framework. A key argument we present in favor of this framework concerns the evolution of intentionality and perceptual capacities. An implication of this argument is that cases of cognitive penetration must have evolved more recently and that this is compatible with the cognitive impenetrability of early perceptual stages of processing information. A theoretical approach that explains why this should be the case is the consciousness and attention dissociation framework. The paper discusses why concepts, particularly issues concerning concept acquisition, play an important role in the interaction between perception and cognition. (shrink)

One key difference between perceptual experience and thought is the distinctly sensory way perception presents things to us. Some philosophers nevertheless suggest this sensory phenomenal character does not exhaust the way things are made manifest to us in perceptual experience. Edmund Husserl maintains that there is also a significant non‐sensory side to perception's phenomenal character. We may experience, for instance, an object's facing surface in a sensory mode and, as part of the same perceptual experience, also that object's (...) out‐of‐view surface in a non‐sensory mode. To the extent that perceptual experience makes things available to us in a non‐sensory mode, Husserl calls it inadequate. Here, I reconstruct four arguments for the conclusion that perceptual experience is inadequately found in various of Husserl's writings and critically evaluated them. My aim is both to showcase the variety and sophistication of Husserl's reasons for thinking perceptual experience is inadequate and to problematize that idea. (shrink)

In his initial lecture course at the Collège de France, Merleau-Ponty attempted to develop a new analysis of rational thought in order to clarify its link with corporeal-perceptive life. The formulation of thought in language as the most elaborate human activity of expression explicitly takes over what we already observe in perception as the implicit and mutual reference between the perceiving subject and that which is perceived.The article reconstructs Merleau-Ponty’s argumentation, based on his preparatory notes for the lectures, and (...) provides an interpretation of the key concepts of “expression” and “body schema”. [In Czech Language]. (shrink)

Black Mirror is full of technologies that manipulate people's sensory perceptions. Philosophers of perception explain that our brains actively construct what we sense based on previous knowledge, expectations, and emotions, without us even being aware of this framing. Many Black Mirror episodes illustrate the mistakes that people can make when they misunderstand this framing process. Some episodes suggest that highly effective virtual reality technology could foil the strategies that Descartes recommended for distinguishing hallucinations and dreams from reality. Yet other (...) episodes warn how powerful institutions can punitively wield the power of control over perception. Yet in rare optimistic moments, Black Mirror demonstrates the value of relying on the help of other people to hold firm to deeper truths in the face of forces that would manipulate us. [Or, a slightly longer version with key episode titles: Black Mirror is full of technologies that manipulate people's sensory perceptions. Philosophers of perception explain that our brains actively construct what we sense based on previous knowledge, expectations, and emotions, without us even being aware of this framing. Video playback of perceptions, as in Arkangel, illustrate the mistakes that people can make when they misunderstand this framing process. Playtest and Bandersnatch suggest that highly effective virtual reality technology could foil the strategies that Descartes recommended for distinguishing hallucinations and dreams from reality. In the hands of government, law enforcement, and the military, the total control of perception can be wielded as tool for punishment, as in Men Against Fire and White Bear. But in more optimistic moments, such as at the conclusions of Nosedive and San Junipero, Black Mirror demonstrates the value of relying on the help of other people to hold firm to deeper truths in the face of forces that would manipulate us.]. (shrink)

Three key ways of updating one’s knowledge are (i) perception of states of affairs, e.g., seeing with one’s own eyes that something is the case, (ii) reception of messages, e.g., being told that something is the case, and (iii) drawing new conclusions from known facts. If one represents knowledge by means of Kripke models, the implicit assumption is that drawing conclusions is immediate. This assumption of logical omniscience is a useful abstraction. It leaves the distinction between (i) and (ii) (...) to be accounted for. In current versions of Update Logic (Dynamic Epistemic Logic, Logic of Communication and Change) perception and message reception are not distinguished. This paper proposes an extension of Update Logic that makes this distinction explicit. The logic deals with three kinds of updates: announcements, changes of the world, and observations about the world in the presence of witnesses. The resulting logic is shown to be complete by means of a reduction to epistemic propositional dynamic logic by a well known method. (shrink)

The research climate plays a key role in fostering integrity in research. However, little is known about what constitutes a responsible research climate. We investigated academic researchers’ perceptions on this through focus group interviews. We recruited researchers from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the Amsterdam University Medical Center to participate in focus group discussions that consisted of researchers from similar academic ranks and disciplinary fields. We asked participants to reflect on the characteristics of a responsible research climate, the barriers they (...) perceived and which interventions they thought fruitful to improve the research climate. Discussions were recorded and transcribed at verbatim. We used inductive content analysis to analyse the focus group transcripts. We conducted 12 focus groups with 61 researchers in total. We identified fair evaluation, openness, sufficient time, integrity, trust and freedom to be mentioned as important characteristics of a responsible research climate. Main perceived barriers were lack of support, unfair evaluation policies, normalization of overwork and insufficient supervision of early career researchers. Possible interventions suggested by the participants centered around improving support, discussing expectations and improving the quality of supervision. Some of the elements of a responsible research climate identified by participants are reflected in national and international codes of conduct, such as trust and openness. Although it may seem hard to change the research climate, we believe that the realisation that the research climate is suboptimal should provide the impetus for change informed by researchers’ experiences and opinions. (shrink)

This study explored the perceptions of ethics among long-term care employees (N275) in order to test two hypotheses. A cohort cross-sectional survey examined employees’ perceptions of an ethics environment, racial-ethnic, and position disparities (HO1; ANOVA), and, secondarily, ethics in relationship to select, research-grounded work features measured as manage disagreements, effectiveness, work satisfaction, and opinions of care, the latter including intention to remain (HO2; Pearson Correlations). Established questionnaires with robust psychometrics were employed. Response rate was 51%. Non-significant differences between sample and (...) population on key variables supported extrapolation of results. Statistically significant differences between racial–ethnic (p < 0.03; F 2.42) and work positions (p <0.0001; F 6.24) were revealed on ethics (3.16; HO1). Statistically significant relationships (p <0.0001; r = 0.26–0.68; HO2) between ethics and employees’ work features also were found, confirming both hypotheses. Perceptions of ethics based on racial-ethnic and position disparities, as well as the robust links with employee work features, offered potential avenues for decreasing disparities at work and improving the quality of long-term care. Noted further on ethics item scoring were relatively low scores indicating less involvement in, and access to, ethics discussions and decisions. In contrast, the literature review substantiated the importance of empowerment and retention, which were enhanced by employee involvement in work, notably, discussions and decisions. Thus, implications of ethics committees in long-term care sites as ways to potentially enhance employees’ work and quality of care, especially work satisfaction and retention, were explored; relevant concerns raised by the Covid pandemic were, briefly, discussed. (shrink)

Rooftop gardens, rooftop greenhouses and indoor farms have been established or planned by activists and private companies in Berlin. These projects promise to produce a range of goods that could have positive impacts on the urban setting but also carry a number of risks and uncertainties. In this early innovation phase, the relevant stakeholders’ perceptions and social acceptance of ZFarming represent important preconditions for success or failure of the further diffusion of this practice. We used the framework of acceptance to (...) investigate the stakeholders’ attitudes and to identify the key factors that might hinder or promote the introduction of ZFarming. The results are based on an analysis of 38 qualitative interviews conducted with key stakeholders in Berlin. As the results show, major perceived benefits of ZFarming include improved consumer awareness, education, and the creation of experimental spaces. Stakeholders further perceive opportunities for resource savings, new business models, repurposing of abandoned buildings and improved aesthetics. Major perceived risks are associated with growing techniques that are considered “unnatural”, health risks, conflicts with images of traditional agriculture, the rejection of animal production in urban areas, the risk of projects being too expensive and too complex or being implemented too early, i.e. before the mechanisms are fully understood. The analysis further reveals which contextual factors—political, legal, market-related, spatial or societal—might negatively or positively influence ZFarming acceptance. (shrink)

The aim of this thematic literature review is to explore nurses' perceptions of ethical issues in the care of older people. Electronic databases were searched from September 1997 to September 2007 using specific key words with tight inclusion criteria, which revealed 17 primary research reports. The data analysis involved repeated reading of the findings and sorting of those findings into four themes. These themes are: sources of ethical issues for nurses; differences in perceptions between nurses and patients/relatives; nurses' personal responses (...) to ethical issues; and the patient—nurse relationship. The findings reveal that ageism is one of the major sources of the ethical issues that arise for nurses caring for older people. Education and organizational change can combat ageist attitudes. Wider training is required in the care of older people, workplace skills, palliative care and pain management for older people. The demands of a changing global demography will necessitate further research in this field. (shrink)

The lingering controversy concerning the usefulness and safety of antidepressants for children and adolescents is likely to confuse clinicians. Recent papers perpetuate the claim that antidepressants are shown to be safe and effective in randomised controlled trials. Others claim that antidepressants have been shown to prevent suicides. In this editorial we address the manipulation of outcomes that result from academics’ alliance with industry. We explain how industry and key opinion leaders have distorted the clinician’s perception of the safety and (...) usefulness of antidepressants for the treatment of depression in children and adolescents through publication bias, poor methodology, and selective reporting. (shrink)

This paper reports the results of a survey of 842 undergraduate business students in four nations - the United States of America, the Peoples' Republic of China, Japan, and the Republic of Korea. This survey asked students to respond to four scenarios with potentially unethical business behavior and a string of questions related to the importance of ethics in business strategy and in personal behaviors. Based on arguments related to differences in recent historical experiences, the authors suggest that student responses (...) may be as different within the East Asian environment as they are between this environment as a whole and the USA. Survey results indicate a greater perception of ethical problems and more importance placed on ethics per se in business practices, as well as less of an emphasis on social harmony on the part of USA students. At the same time, substantial national differences in response are also witnessed within the set of East Asian students. A priori expectations as to the manner in which these East Asian responses should vary based on differences in recent historical experiences are partially, but not fully, supported. The authors argue that the key value of the reported research rests on a demonstration that national differences within a common cultural area can be as great as differences across cultural areas and that practitioners of global business must fine-tune their expectations as to acceptable business and personal actions to accommodate specific national historical experiences to be effective. (shrink)

Perception of Creativity in International Franchising Business Concepts - Comparison Analysis Between Franchisees and Franchisors This paper deals with the topic of creativity and perceived freedom of creativity in international franchising business concepts. It analyses various areas of daily business operations and the franchising business concept as a whole. Its focus is aimed at comparing the perception of level of freedom given in these areas to franchisees by the franchisors and its objective is to find out where these (...) perceptions differ between franchisees one side and franchisors on the other. The model of franchising is not described and the article assumes that the reader is familiar with this business model. The purpose of this article is to analyse and present the situation of creativity in the sector of international franchise businesses. As international franchising is in the focus of this article, topics such as cross-cultural environment in franchising models and creativity across cultures are covered. The method used to collect the data for further analysis is running an empirical research among two populations - franchisees and franchisors from several franchising business concepts active in international environment. Representatives from the two populations were asked to evaluate the level of freedom of creativity given or applied in their franchising business concepts. Respondents were answering an online survey, assessing ten different areas in daily business on a scale from one to five, ranging from no creativity allowed and strict governance by rules defined in the franchise concept to high level of creativity and freedom. Findings from both side of the franchise business partnerships, franchisees and franchisors, are presented including the test of homogeneity of proportions. Therefore some implications exist for further discussions and research, if franchising at all is, in its essence, a method of business concept, which enhances and facilitates creativity, or if creativity is perceived as a danger to franchise system that would harm its global unified approach which is the key principle of the franchis unified brand and concept strategy. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to analyse the concept of moral perception. Moral perception gets characterized as a distinctive, non-inferential moral response to concrete situations. In order to relate moral perception with a suitable model of moral cognition the position labelled morphological rationalism is elaborated. Moral judgment follows a dynamical model of reasons, according to which reasons are situated in an agent’s structured morphological background, chromatically illuminating the judgment. The key claim is that such a model (...) is particularly well-suited to accommodate moral perception. From such a perspective some practical implications are elaborated. (shrink)

Recent developments in virtual reality technology raise a question about the experience of presence and immersion in virtual environments. What is immersion and what are the conditions for inducing the experience of virtual presence? In this paper, we argue that crucial determinants of presence are perception of affordances and sense of embodiment. In the first section of this paper, we define key concepts and introduce important distinctions such as immersion and presence. In the second and third sections, we respectively (...) discuss presence, immersion and their determinants in detail. In the fourth and fifth sections, we argue for the importance of perception of affordances and sense of embodiment in increasing the degree of presence. Finally, we show the consequences of our view and discuss possible future implications. (shrink)

Firm managers play an important role in the implementation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) actions. Education is emerging as the key factor in developing a sense of moral responsibility amongst the business students who will eventually become company managers and decision makers. The aim of this research is, thus, twofold. First, to analyze the existence of a direct positive correlation between university students’ perception of CSR and its impact on business performance; and second, to examine the extent to which (...) two factors (advantages brought by CSR and responsibilities toward stakeholders) act as mediation variables in the aforementioned correlation. The analysis was performed with a sample of 390 business‐related university students. Amongst the potential contributions made by this study we can highlight the possibility of knowing future managers’ way of thinking and of knowing the aspects where educational centers might improve their CSR teaching. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty suggests that to perceive is to be “geared into” the world. In perceiving, we are related to a temporally structured modal space of bodily possibilities that is co-constituted by the body and the world. When we perceive, we are “geared into” this structure and responsive to it; when we misperceive, we are not. In misperceiving, we are unaware of our failure to be geared into the world, and in this respect, we lack awareness of what we are doing. In (...) explaining misperception via this lack of self-awareness, Merleau-Ponty anticipates a key feature of M. G. F. Martin's epistemic disjunctivism: the idea that perceptions and misperceptions can be indiscriminable because of a self-awareness we lack, rather than a set of positive phenomenal features that two experiences share. However, because Merleau-Ponty's account of self-awareness imposes relatively few cognitive demands, he is able to explain how adults, infants, and dogs can be self-aware in the same sense, and how they can fail to discriminate between their experiences in the same way. This provides Merleau-Ponty with the resources to answer Susanna Siegel's objection to epistemic disjunctivism on the basis of “cognitively unsophisticated hallucinators.”. (shrink)

This article views face perception as the ideal case study example for understanding the deeper principles underlying human neurodevelopment. It illustrates how face perception has been one of oldest battlegrounds for resolving key issues in human development. It argues that taking a developmental approach to face perception can resolve some of the major current debates in the adult face perception and cognitive neuroscience literature. Thus, face perception and development continue to be mutually informative domains of (...) study. The work on newborns designed to test the “innate knowledge” of faces, studying the development of face perception skills during infancy and childhood, has proved to be fertile ground for domain-general theories of perceptual and cognitive development. The study reviews recent literature on the factors that contribute to the specialization of certain cortical areas for face processing. It suggests an intriguing alternative middle-ground view in this polarized debate. (shrink)

The overall goal of speech perception research is to explain how spoken language is recognized and understood. In the current research framework it is assumed that the key to achieving this overall goal is to solve the lack of invariance problem. But nearly half a century of sustained effort in a variety of theoretical perspectives has failed to solve this problem. Indeed, not only has the problem not been solved, virtually no empirical candidates for solving the problem have been (...) produced. One explanation for this lack of progress is simply that no theory has yet hit upon the correct set of invariant properties. Another explanation is that the goal of solving the lack of invariance problem is itself misguided. The most basic claim of this dissertation is that the latter explanation is correct. ;The lack of progress in explaining speech perception exhibited by the current research framework, I argue, is not, in the first instance, due to the failure of individual theories to solve the lack of invariance problem, but rather to the common background assumption that doing so is in fact the key to explaining speech perception. ;My overall argument in support of this basic claim has three main components: criticism of the empirical results of research in the current framework; criticism of the formulation of theories generated in the current research framework; and the availability of an alternative account of phonetic structure. ;The heart of my argument is an analysis of the character of the theoretical weaknesses of three theories of speech perception: the motor theory of speech perception, the ecological theory of speech perception, and the theory of acoustic invariance. I show that, in each case, the particular theoretical problems result from trying to satisfy the common goal of identifying invariant properties of phonetic percepts. ;I analyze the methodological error embodied in the current approach to explaining speech perception as, in general, one of abstracting the wrong kinds of properties from the detail of the speech event, and, in particular, of abstracting away from dynamic and context-dependent properties. (shrink)