{"title":"Dynamic attentional mechanisms of creative cognition","authors":"Shadab Tabatabaeian, C. Jennings","doi":"10.33735/phimisci.2023.10020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33735/phimisci.2023.10020","url":null,"abstract":"In popular imagination creativity requires us to surrender control. Yet, attention is at the heart of control, and many studies show attention to play a key role in the creative process. This is partly due to the selective nature of attention—creative cognition consists of two phases, idea generation and idea evaluation, and selective processes are essential for both phases. Here, we investigate attentional (i.e., selective) mechanisms underlying each phase, using the framework of two major attention taxonomies: top-down/bottom-up and internal/external attention. We argue that creative cognition is supported by a dynamic interplay between the typically opposing sides of each taxonomy. Further, we argue that this dynamic relationship is reflected in interactions across three large-scale brain networks: the default mode (DMN), frontoparietal control (FPN), and salience (SN) networks. Our review of the evidence suggests that creative cognition is best achieved through the flexible use of multiple forms of attention, rather than through reduced attention. We thus propose a two-dimensional space, including one dimension for top-down/bottom-up attention and another for internal/external attention, which can sufficiently capture the flexibility and diversity of attentional mechanisms underlying different stages and components of creative cognition.","PeriodicalId":340575,"journal":{"name":"Philosophy and the Mind Sciences","volume":"65 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124849943","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Are concepts a natural kind? On concept eliminativism","authors":"G. Löhr","doi":"10.33735/phimisci.2023.9632","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33735/phimisci.2023.9632","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000\u0000\u0000Concept eliminativists argue that we should eliminate the term ‘concept’ from our vocabulary in psychology because there is no single natural kind that is picked out by it. I argue that the most developed version of concept eliminativism by Edouard Machery depends on the assumption that concepts are defined as stable and context-independent bodies of information. It is this assumption that leads Machery to eliminativism and it is an assumption we have reason to reject. Another assumption that leads to the eliminativist conclusion and that we have reason to reject is that the type of content represented in long-term memory is the relevant property based on which we should individuate certain natural kinds in cognitive psychology. Finally, I argue that certain pieces of information are functionally integrated enough to meet the conditions for being a natural kind.\u0000\u0000\u0000","PeriodicalId":340575,"journal":{"name":"Philosophy and the Mind Sciences","volume":"319 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133340058","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Emotions as emergent properties","authors":"E. Walsh","doi":"10.33735/phimisci.2023.9965","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33735/phimisci.2023.9965","url":null,"abstract":"In recent decades, affective scientists have begun using concepts and tools from dynamical systems theory (DST) to characterise emotional processes. This article considers how the concept of emergence might be used to develop this approach. Emotions are explicated as ‘emergent products’ that diachronically constrain the operations of their parts in virtue of feedback loops (a classical feature of nonlinear dynamical systems). The explication is shown to be broadly consistent with what is sometimes called ‘pattern’ emergence. Casting emotions as emergent patterns is shown to shed light on a major conceptual and empirical challenge emotion theorists have faced over the past century: identifying and measuring the presence of emotional episodes (Lindquist et al., 2012; Hollenstein & Lanteigne, 2014), dubbed here the ‘boundary problem’ (following Colombetti, 2014). In particular, the explication suggests seeing the emotional ‘signatures’ thought to accompany emotional episodes as fragile and context-bound: likely to hold under a relevant class of interventions (Woodward, 2005), but not without exception beyond that class. This in turn may suggest a need to significantly revise the statistical methods currently used to measure the presence of emotional ‘signatures’. The casting of emotions as emergent patterns also functions as a further case study supporting the value of ‘pattern emergence’ (Winning & Bechtel, 2019) as a powerful vehicle for characterising the objects of investigation — compound and context-sensitive — ubiquitous in the biological sciences.","PeriodicalId":340575,"journal":{"name":"Philosophy and the Mind Sciences","volume":"232 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123257424","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How radical is perceptual malleability? A reply to commentators","authors":"D. Stokes","doi":"10.33735/phimisci.2023.10954","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33735/phimisci.2023.10954","url":null,"abstract":"The unifying theme across all four commentaries is the question: just how radical are the ideas contained in, and implied by, Thinking and Perceiving? Does the abandonment of the modularity of mind, and an embrace of the malleability of mind, have wide reaching consequences for empirical studies of sensory perception, for cognitive architecture, for the metaphysics of mind and the epistemology of perception? And which of those consequences are welcomed, and which of those are problematic? These general questions anchor in (at least) the following topics: learning and the role of cognition, object recognition, perceptual expertise, early versus late vision, perception and truth, virtue epistemology, and computational architectures of mind. This reply attempts to address the overarching question from this variety of angles taken in the four commentaries.","PeriodicalId":340575,"journal":{"name":"Philosophy and the Mind Sciences","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125384709","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Book Symposium: Thinking and Perceiving","authors":"R. Fabry, S. Fink","doi":"10.33735/phimisci.2023.10948","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33735/phimisci.2023.10948","url":null,"abstract":"This symposium focuses on Thinking and Perceiving by Dustin Stokes (2021), published by Routledge. In his précis, Stokes (2023a) provides an overview of the key arguments of his book, which lead to a new descriptive and normative account of the relationship between cognition and perception. Four commentaries examine the scope and implications of this account. Zoe Drayson (2023) and Christopher Mole (2023) examine the epistemological force of Stokes’s claims about the organisation of the human mind. Furthermore, the implications of philosophical and empirical research on object recognition are discussed by Aleksandra Mroczko-Wasowicz (2023) and on perceptual learning by Zed Adams (2023). The symposium concludes with a reply by Stokes to these commentaries (Stokes, 2023b).","PeriodicalId":340575,"journal":{"name":"Philosophy and the Mind Sciences","volume":"54 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124373194","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Perceptual expertise and object recognition","authors":"Aleksandra Mroczko-Wasowicz","doi":"10.33735/phimisci.2023.10247","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33735/phimisci.2023.10247","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000\u0000\u0000Dustin Stokes’s book contributes to one of the continuing debates in empirically informed philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences which concerns the relation between thought and perception. The book sheds new light on such questions as: whether vision is modular, informationally encapsulated, and thus cognitively impenetrable or rather the opposite – whether it is malleable and sensitive to further improvements by cognitive states. Stokes supports the latter by referring to empirical evidence on perceptual expertise. Proponents of the modular and malleable architectures of the mind offer different explanations of the phenomena involved in perceptual expertise, viz. object identification and categorization. Interestingly, both views assume some kind of automaticity of the recognitional capacities for identifying and categorizing objects. In this article, I examine the influence of perceptual expertise on object recognition and how the seeming automaticity of object recognition may be approached from the modularist and antimodularist (malleabilist) perspectives.\u0000\u0000\u0000","PeriodicalId":340575,"journal":{"name":"Philosophy and the Mind Sciences","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133986126","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Truth, success, and epistemology","authors":"Zoe Drayson","doi":"10.33735/phimisci.2023.10250","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33735/phimisci.2023.10250","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000\u0000\u0000In Thinking and Perceiving, Stokes challenges “the pernicious cognitive effects assumption”: the assumption that it would be epistemically problematic if our thoughts were to directly influence our perceptual experience. In doing so, Stokes takes himself to be supplementing the epistemological claims of philosophers like Siegel and Lyons with descriptive claims about human psychology. I argue that his conclusions are more radical than they first appear, to the extent that Stokes’s project is at odds with the standard epistemological discussions of cognitive penetration.\u0000\u0000\u0000\u0000 ","PeriodicalId":340575,"journal":{"name":"Philosophy and the Mind Sciences","volume":"45 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117124172","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Varieties of perceptual improvement","authors":"Zed Adams","doi":"10.33735/phimisci.2023.10264","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33735/phimisci.2023.10264","url":null,"abstract":"In this short comment on Dustin Stokes's Thinking and Perceiving, I attempt to clarify what is at stake in the debate between Fodorian modularists and Stokean anti-modularists. ","PeriodicalId":340575,"journal":{"name":"Philosophy and the Mind Sciences","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127262011","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Stokes’s malleability thesis and the normative grounding of propositional attitudes","authors":"C. Mole","doi":"10.33735/phimisci.2023.10226","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33735/phimisci.2023.10226","url":null,"abstract":"The position that Stokes’s Thinking and Perceiving aims to overthrow is committed to the idea that the facts about one’s propositional attitudes and the facts about one’s perceptual experiences are alike grounded in facts about representations (in various formats) that are being held in a short or long term memory store, so that computations can be performed upon them. Claims about modularity are claims about the distinctness of these memory stores, and of these representations. One way in which to reject those claims is to deny only that distinctness. A more radical way would be to reject the underlying idea that facts about perception and facts about propositional attitudes are alike grounded in facts about stored representations. Although the more radical approach might seem to face a problem concerning causal efficacy, I suggest that the way is open for Stokes to take it.","PeriodicalId":340575,"journal":{"name":"Philosophy and the Mind Sciences","volume":"105 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125276610","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dimensions of animal wellbeing","authors":"L. Dung","doi":"10.33735/phimisci.2023.9878","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33735/phimisci.2023.9878","url":null,"abstract":"Whether animals fare well or not is of ethical significance. For this reason, their capacity for wellbeing, i.e., how good or bad the lives of animals can go, is of ethical significance as well. I assume that the wellbeing of most animals is mainly determined by their phenomenally conscious experiences. If consciousness differences between species determine wellbeing differences, then the kinds of conscious experience species are capable of may entail that some species systematically (can) have higher or lower wellbeing than others. Then, I argue that not all phenomenally conscious states contribute to wellbeing equally. I discuss which features of consciousness are constituents of wellbeing and which can, for ethical purposes, be ignored. In addition, I scrutinize how much different features of experience contribute to wellbeing and how their presence can be detected empirically. This way, this paper exemplifies a novel consciousness-centered approach for the empirical investigation of animal wellbeing. The strengths and weaknesses of this approach are analyzed. While subsequent research is needed to refine the framework, I already note some preliminary implications for animal ethics.","PeriodicalId":340575,"journal":{"name":"Philosophy and the Mind Sciences","volume":"72 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122926066","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}