Affordances and Motivation

The study of emotions, the so-called affective turn, allows us to rethink crucial elements in psychology and philosophy of mind. There has been a concurrent surge in creative research and theory in the field of ecological psychology.[1] In our book, we seek to clarify the function of affective sentience in …

Blindsight and Super-Blindsight

This week, I’m blogging about my new book, The Epistemic Role of Consciousness (Oxford University Press, September 2019). Today, I’ll discuss the epistemic role of consciousness in perception. Human perception is normally conscious: there is something it is like for us to perceive the world around us. And yet there …

Symposium on Fischer et. al. ‘Experimental Ordinary Language Philosophy’

In ‘Experimental ordinary language philosophy: a cross-linguistic investigation of default inferences’, (Synthese, 2019) Eugen Fischer, Paul Engelhard, Joachim Horvath and Hiroshi Ohtani seek to take experimental philosophy beyond the study of intuitions and highlight links to one of its historical precursors. They show how experimental methods and findings from psycholinguistics …

4. Political and Perceptual Differences

Last December, The Washington Post resurfaced a short video clip of Heather Nauert, nominee for US Ambassador to the United Nations. In the video Nauert attempted to make the case that there was a strong historical relationship between the United States and Germany. The Post described her as citing the …

3. Learning to Perceive in a Multisensory Way

Suppose you are at a live jazz show. The drummer begins a drum solo. You see the cymbal jolt. You hear a clang. And you are aware that the jolt and the clang are part of the same event. This is a case of multisensory perception. In my book, I …

2. Do Experts Really Perceive the World Differently from Non-Experts?

People sometimes say things like the following: Cabernet Sauvignon tastes different to an expert wine taster than to a novice; or, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony sounds different to a seasoned conductor than it does to someone just hearing it for the first time. But does wine literally taste differently (or the …

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