… at 3:AM Magazine. An excerpt:
3:AM: I presume much of your work connects with other fields in psychology, cognitive science, perceptual science, biology and so on. Are you signed up to the inter-disciplinarian nature of philosophy and would you agree with the xphi crew that actually this is much closer to what traditional philosophy looked like with Hume and Kant and Aristotle etc than perhaps what the last century’s philosophy looked like?
SS: Definitely. The idea that philosophical work on perception need not be informed by the work on perception in psychology, cognitive science, and biology is preposterous. I see the borders between these fields as fluid and somewhat arbitrary. The questions I think about are very similar to the questions that, say, Zenon Pylyshyn and Brian Scholl think about. I’m much more influenced by vision science, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology than byxphi. At least currently, xphi is largely devoted to collecting empirical data gathered through surveys that probe intuitions of people. That may change as xphi expands as a movement within philosophy. While collecting empirical data gathered through surveys that probe intuitions of people generates interesting data, my work is more influenced by the empirical data developed in psychology and neuroscience labs. I’m affiliated with RuCCS and am very lucky to have the opportunity to talk to all the wonderful people at RuCCS on a regular basis.