Plants have minds because their activities disclose a world of things that have significance for them. Following Evan Thompson, we can call this an enactive approach to plant minds. What is it to disclose a world of things that have significance? Focus on the most familiar case of a thing …
Reading my two previous posts, you might complain that perceiving and remembering require concepts, ideas, or even thoughts, which are basically representations, and plants don’t have those, so they don’t perceive or remember. For the same reason, you might add, they don’t have minds. Do plants have representations? Phototropism can …
Centre for Philosophical Psychology and European Network for Sensory Research
Introspection sucks!
Conference with Eric Schwitzgebel, May 30, 2017
This is a call for papers on any aspect of introspection (and not just papers critical of introspection, but also papers defending it)
There are no parallel sections. Only blinded submissions are accepted.
Length: 3000 words. Single spaced!
Deadline: March 30, 2017. Papers should be sent to nanay@berkeley.edu
Call for Submissions: Workshop on Perception and Justified Belief (Bochum, June 2017) We invite submissions of extended abstracts for presentation at the workshop. The aim of the workshop is to discuss the relation between perception and justified belief, and issues relevant to the relation. For instance, we are interested in debates concerning: …
Plants eat animals—at least, some plants, and some animals. Well-known, but still fascinating, the trapping of the Venus flytrap is a case of thigmomorphism, a change of shape in response to touch. Since trapping is not affected by the direction of the stimulus, it is not a tropism, like phototropism …
In What a Plant Knows, Daniel Chamowitz reports what plant biologists apparently have known for a long time: although plants generally stay in one place (they’re sessile), they actively negotiate their environments. Not just their cells, like all living cells, constantly do things, but whole plants and their parts—their roots, …
Plants don’t have minds. At least, that’s what most people think. A few years ago, that’s also what I thought. Then, reflecting on the work of Ruth Millikan and Fred Dretske, I started wondering why it seemed obvious, and whether it should. This led me to write a short book …
