The Brains Blog

Dustin Stokes Again I want to thank Becko, Jonna, and John. I truly respect their research and it’s flattering that they each took the time to read the book and offer such insightful commentary. It has given me a lot to think about. The comments are distinctive, each taking up …

John Zeimbekis It’s a relief to see a new book about how perception interacts with thought. Decades of work on modularity and other distinguishing traits of perception (perception as nonconceptual, analog, iconic, unstructured) leave us with a picture of thought as informationally separate from perception, but few suggestions about how …

Jonna Vance (she/her) Northern Arizona University jonnavance.com [Note: All citations are to Stokes (2021) Thinking and Perceiving (Routledge), unless otherwise noted.] In the final few chapters of Thinking and Perceiving, Stokes turns to perceptual expertise: an enhanced capacity for perceptual recognition or discrimination. In Chapter 6, Stokes offers a pluralistic …

Becko Copenhaver Washington University, St. Louis “We are, all of us, potential perceptual experts.”  (Dustin Stokes, Thinking and Perceiving, p. 234) I’m grateful to discuss Dustin’s Thinking and Perceiving. I agree with him so much, about so much, that I hope our points of departure will be revealing. For example, …

Dustin Stokes-University of Utah dustin.stokes[@]utah.edu The broad, probably overly ambitious, agenda of the book is to shift scientific and philosophical theories of perception away from one current orthodoxy. The orthodoxy I have in mind is modularity. The alternative I favor is malleability. Anyone familiar with relevant literature knows that the …