Error Comes With Imagination: A Probabilistic Theory of Mental Content

Thesis (PhD) - Indiana University, Philosophy, 2006In this dissertation, I develop a probabilistic theory of mental content that accounts for fundamental properties of mental representation. The theory that I develop falls under the category of causal/informational approaches. In contemporary philosophy, causal/informational approaches for explaining mental representation have been around since the 1950s. The main success of these approaches is to explain the link between the external world and mental entities. On the other hand, it turns out that accounting for misrepresentation cases presents an insurmountable problem for these approaches. The probabilistic theory that I develop keeps the positive features of causal/informational approaches and provides grounds for solving the problem of misrepresentation. The theory that I offer heavily draws from Dretske's 1981 framework. His framework borrows some notions such as entropy from Shannon & Weaver's Mathematical Theory of Communication which is a very successful formalism for engineering purposes. Dretske tries to explain mental representation, belief and knowledge by using the notion of informational content. Despite all of its appeals, however, the problem of misrepresentation also afflicts his framework. In this dissertation, I identify the reasons that cause problems in Dretske's framework. Identifying these reasons provides enough grounds for solving the problem of misrepresentation in the theory that I construct. I claim that the theory that I offer not only solves the problem of misrepresentation but also provides a research program for Cognitive Science and Neuroscience

Peirce and Sellars on Nonconceptual Content

Whereas Charles Peirce’s pragmatist account of truth has been much discussed, his theory of perception still offers a rich mine of insights. Peirce presented a ‘two-ply’ view of perception, which combines an entirely precognitive ‘percept’ with a ‘perceptual judgment’ that is located in the space of reasons. Having previously argued that Peirce outdoes Robert Brandom in achieving a hyper-inferentialism (“Making it Explicit and Clear”, APQ, 2008), I now wish to examine his philosophy in the light of inferentialism’s ‘original fount’ – Wilfrid Sellars. Does Peirce’s percept commit him to the Myth of the Given? I argue that it does not, because although the percept is understood as nonepistemic, it is not understood to justify the perceptual judgment. Rather, the perceptual judgement indexes the percept. I explain this original view, then argue that Peirce and Sellars actually have a great deal in common in their rare diachronically mediated yet at the same time direct perceptual realism, and the ‘critical commonsensist’ epistemology to which it gives rise

Depth cues and perceived audiovisual synchrony of biological motion

Due to their different propagation times, visual and auditory signals from external events arrive at the human sensory receptors with a disparate delay. This delay consistently varies with distance, but, despite such variability, most events are perceived as synchronic. There is, however, contradictory data and claims regarding the existence of compensatory mechanisms for distance in simultaneity judgments. Principal Findings: In this paper we have used familiar audiovisual events – a visual walker and footstep sounds – and manipulated the number of depth cues. In a simultaneity judgment task we presented a large range of stimulus onset asynchronies corresponding to distances of up to 35 meters. We found an effect of distance over the simultaneity estimates, with greater distances requiring larger stimulus onset asynchronies, and vision always leading. This effect was stronger when both visual and auditory cues were present but was interestingly not found when depth cues were impoverished. Significance: These findings reveal that there should be an internal mechanism to compensate for audiovisual delays, which critically depends on the depth information available.FEDERFundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT

Seeing Right from Wrong: A Defense of A Posteriori Ethical Intuitionism

This dissertation develops and defends the claim that our epistemic access to moral properties is grounded in a posteriori perceptual experiences. It is divided into two parts. In part I, I present the epistemic access problem for realist moral epistemology, and then argue against several a priori attempts to resolve the problem. I begin by defending an understanding of evolutionary debunking arguments according to which the problem is grounded in a lack of epistemic access to sui generis, non-causal moral facts. Next, I argue that even the most sophisticated versions of reflective equilibrium fall victim to the “garbage in, garbage out” objection which besets coherentist theories more generally. I then survey the most influential other a priori approaches to epistemic access. I conclude that each of them is victim to some variation of the same dilemma: Either they fail to ensure epistemic access, or they succeed by providing epistemic access to the wrong properties—viz. not the robustly normative ones. In part II, I defend a wholly a posteriori moral epistemology according to which our epistemic access to the moral properties is via perceptual experience. I begin with a positive argument that moral properties figure in the contents of perceptual experience, making use of the “method of contrast” found in the philosophy of perception literature. Next, I defend the foundationalist credentials of the perceptualist view in light of the objection that moral experiences will be epistemically dependent on prior background (moral) beliefs. I claim that the epistemic dependence of these moral experiences depends on the nature of influence the prior beliefs have and that the influence is not of the problematic sort. I then discuss the role of emotions in generating moral perceptions. I argue that emotions play an essential role in moral perceptual experiences, but that this is compatible with foundationalism and perceptualism. Finally, I return to the issue of epistemic access, arguing that the perceptual view provides an explanation of our epistemic access to the moral properties

A Naturalistic Theory of Perceptual Representation

I propose a theory of representation concerning the perceptual events that are posited and studied by the cognitive and neuro-sciences. The theory is intended to help explain relationships between the perceptual and executive systems, and to place metasemantic constraints on future accounts of the semantics of natural languages. I begin by setting out desiderata for the theory. In particular, I intend the theory to be naturalistic at least in accordance with a specified kind of epistemological naturalism, to give priority to explaining the properties of the representing events themselves rather than their contents, to avoid the widespread lack of clarity among similar theories when it comes to identifying contents, to apply to human-like systems with executive functions and language, to be compatible with constraints imposed by natural selection, and to posit narrow contents that are capable of figuring in a certain kind of autonomous causal explanation. The suggested theory for meeting these desiderata is based on a definition of perceptual states by ceteris paribus effects on the motor control system, which contrasts with the orthodox description of tokened perceptual states as carrying information about their external causes. I then propose that the representational content of a perceptual event is specified by the motor control system effects that define the state it tokens, but only when this event affects the executive systems. Intuitively, these representations are constructions out of the behavioural dispositions that are mediated by perceptual events, such that these constructions are used by the executive systems in the trialling of potential behavioural outputs. While this behavioural model theory of perceptual representation satisfies the desiderata, I argue that it warrants scepticism about manifest objects and their properties. I conclude with a brief discussion of the implications of the theory

Diachronic Metaphysical Building Relations: Towards the Metaphysics of Extended Cognition

In the thesis I offer an analysis of the metaphysical underpinnings of the extended cognition thesis via an examination of standard views of metaphysical building (or, dependence) relations. In summary form, the extended cognition thesis is a view put forth in naturalistic philosophy of mind stating that the physical basis of cognitive processes and cognitive processing may, in the right circumstances, be distributed across neural, bodily, and environmental vehicles. As such, the extended cognition thesis breaks substantially with the still widely held view in cognitive science and philosophy of mind, namely that cognitive processes and cognitive processing take place within the skin-and-skull of individual organisms. The standard view of metaphysical building relations can be expressed as the conjunction of two theses. First, that a metaphysical building relation – such as composition, constitution, realization, supervenience or emergence – is a relation of ontological dependence, because if a metaphysical building relation holds between X (or the Xs) and Y, then it is in virtue of X (or the Xs) that Y exists. Second, metaphysical building relations are synchronic (durationless) relations of ontological dependence. In the thesis, I propose an alternative diachronic framework by which to extend the standard synchronic accounts of metaphysical dependence relations, and by which to reformulate the metaphysical foundation of the extended cognition thesis. The project fills an important gap between analytical metaphysics (in particular, the metaphysics of dependence relations) and naturalistic philosophy of mind (especially the extended cognition thesis). To my knowledge there has been no attempt to establish a robust diachronic account of metaphysical building (or, dependence) relations such as, e.g., composition and constitution. However, this is precisely what I argue is required to properly advance and ground the metaphysics of extended cognition. Ultimately, my aim of reformulating the metaphysics of extended cognition consists in taking several steps toward a third-wave of extended cognition

Cognitive penetrability and ethical perception

In recent years there has been renewed philosophical interest in the thesis that perceptual experience is cognitively penetrable, i.e., roughly, the view that the contents and/or character of a subject's perceptual experience can be modified by what a subject believes and desires. As has been widely noted, it is plausible that cognitive penetration has implications for perception's epistemic role. On the one hand, penetration could make agents insensitive to the world in a way which epistemically 'downgrades' their experience. On the other hand, cognitive penetration may sometimes be epistemically beneficial by making agents more sensitive to the way the world is, i.e., by enabling them to see things that others cannot. For example, penetration could ground a 'high-level' view of perceptual content, according to which agents can have experiences as of 'complex' properties, e.g., natural kind and aesthetic properties. Relatedly, it could elucidate the view that agents can gain perceptual expertise by learning. A type of sophisticated perception (and associated 'perceptual expertise') which has hitherto received little attention in relation to cognitive penetration is ethical perception. In this paper I examine the significance of cognitive penetration for 'Perceptualist' views in ethics which appeal to a notion of 'ethical perception'. Although cognitive penetration could ground a literalist model of Ethical Perception according to which agents can have perceptual experiences of the instantiation of ethical properties, the results are otherwise somewhat mixed: cognitive penetrability does not support Perceptual Intuitionism, although it may provide some limited support for Virtue Ethics and Cornell Realism. However, as I stress, the significance of cognitive penetration for Perceptualism should not be overstated

Perceptual Characterization: On Perceptual Learning and Perspectival Sedimentation

In her analysis of perspectival effects on perception, Susanna Siegel has argued that perceptual experience is directly rationally assessable and can thereby justify perceptual beliefs, save for in cases of epistemic downgrade or perceptual hijacking; I contend that the recalcitrance of known illusions poses an insurmountable problem for Siegel’s thesis. In its place, I argue that a model of perceptual learning informed by the dual-aspect framework of base-level cognitive architecture proposed by Elisabeth Camp successfully answers the questions motivating Siegel’s project in a manner that avoids such issues

Emergence of Self-Organized Symbol-Based Communication \ud in Artificial Creatures

In this paper, we describe a digital scenario where we simulated the emergence of self-organized symbol-based communication among artificial creatures inhabiting a \ud virtual world of unpredictable predatory events. In our experiment, creatures are autonomous agents that learn symbolic relations in an unsupervised manner, with no explicit feedback, and are able to engage in dynamical and autonomous communicative interactions with other creatures, even simultaneously. In order to synthesize a behavioral ecology and infer the minimum organizational constraints for the design of our creatures, \ud we examined the well-studied case of communication in vervet monkeys. Our results show that the creatures, assuming the role of sign users and learners, behave collectively as a complex adaptive system, where self-organized communicative interactions play a \ud major role in the emergence of symbol-based communication. We also strive in this paper for a careful use of the theoretical concepts involved, including the concepts of symbol and emergence, and we make use of a multi-level model for explaining the emergence of symbols in semiotic systems as a basis for the interpretation of inter-level relationships in the semiotic processes we are studying