Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

Analyses of action-perception matching mechanisms, such as the Mirror Neuron System (MNS), have been prominent in evolutionary accounts of human cognition. Some scholars have interpreted data on the MNS to suggest that the human capacity to acquire and transmit cultural information is a learned product of cultural evolution (the Culture not Biology Account of cultural learning). Others have interpreted results related to the MNS to suggest that cultural learning in humans result from both cultural and biological evolution (the Culture per biology Account of cultural learning). In this paper, we…

The paper addresses the question of whether the representability of high-level properties in the content of perceptual experience is compatible with a purely sensory characterization of high-level perceptual phenomenology. Two positions are distinguished, sensory liberalism and cognitive liberalism, which respectively provide an affirmative and a negative answer to the above question. After presenting the “conceptualist argument” against sensory liberalism and the main challenges that it raises, the paper proceeds to show how sensory liberalism can be defended and why it should be preferred to its main competitor within the liberal…

Tyler Burge (2010) provided a scathing critique of all programs for naturalizing concepts of representation, especially teleological naturalizing programs. He intended to demonstrate that “representational content” is a concept that cannot be reduced to more fundamental biological or physical ideas. According to him, since the 1970s, the concept of representational content has been firmly established in cognitive psychology as a mature science and utilized in adequate explanations. Since Dretske’s program is Burge’s primary objective, this paper concentrates on Dretske’s perspective. Following Burge’s criticisms, I concur that Dretske’s naturalizing program trivializes…

Most philosophers think that phenomenal consciousness is real and that it has two components: an experiential component—a state that is subjectively ‘like something’ for a subject of experience; and a cognitive component—the subject’s awareness of the experiential component and knowledge of what it’s like. Illusionists, by contrast, claim that phenomenal consciousness is an illusion. It does not exist but only seems to exist (Frankish 2016). Although illusionism is highly counterintuitive, I shall claim that it is probably true. For I shall argue that phenomenal realism—the view that phenomenal consciousness is…

This paper explores the problem of the goal of understanding, proposing that understanding may be linked to prediction. The approach taken is functional and evolutionary, and it integrates an epistemological perspective with the insights of the predictive processing models of cognition. I first consider the possible goals of understanding, taking as few epistemological assumptions as possible. I take into account the notions of ends in themselves and of explanations, and I distinguish between internally-oriented goals and externally-oriented goals. Then I present how prediction might be connected with the goal of…

The ability to socialize in early life depends on developing commonalities with others. But what exactly constitutes the “sense of us” or the “we-perspective”? The interaction theory (IT) offers an attractive alternative to mindreading theories, such as theory-theory (TT) and simulation theory (ST), by presenting a further development of enactivism. During embodied interactions, individuals “directly” and “smartly” perceive the mental states of others. Despite the intuitive appeal of direct acquaintance with others’ mental states, IT relies on crude metaphors. We aim to retain IT’s core intuition—the embodied, embedded, enactive, and…

One of the primary objections to the biological approach revolves around what is known as the transplant intuition. That is, the allegedly widely shared intuition that if we had our cerebrum transplanted into a different body, we would be transferred to that body along with our cerebrum. Drawing upon our understanding of brain death, this paper argues that either (1) the transplant intuition should be rejected, and the biological approach has the advantage of being consistent with that rejection; or (2) the psychological approach, the biological approach’s main rival, cannot…

Smith’s Film, Art and the Third Culture is dedicated to developing a naturalized aesthetics of film, and at the heart of his proposal for a methodological “triangulation” is the principle that our research should take serious account of three levels of analysis, each with its respective type of evidence: the phenomenological level, the psychological level, and the neurophysiological level. While Smith addresses many aspects of our perceptual, emotional, and cognitive engagement with movies within this framework, he rarely discusses what underlies our visual engagement with films: the fact that they…

The currently mainstream view is that, in normal conditions, our perceptual representations are largely accurate, as natural selection tends to favor epistemically reliable perceptual systems. This latter assumption has been questioned by Donald Hoffman and his collaborators by drawing on the formal tools of evolutionary game theory. According to their model, an organism whose visual system were tuned to objective reality would be driven to extinction. We argue that their model fails to take environmental modifications into due account, and we show that, once such changes are incorporated into the…