Demonstrative Thought: A Pragmatic View

Description

How can we explain our capacity to think about particulars in our external environment? Many philosophers have answered this question in terms of a sophisticated conception of space and time and the movement of objects therein. A more recent reaction against this view sought to explain this capacity solely in terms of perceptual mechanisms of object individuation. Neither explanation remains fully satisfactory. This book argues for a more desirable middle ground in terms of a pragmatist approach to demonstrative thought, where this capacity is explained through graded practical knowledge of objects. This view allows us to do justice to important insights put forward by both positions criticized in the book, while avoiding their potential shortcomings. It also paves the way to a more pragmatist approach to the theory of mental representation, where the notion of practical knowledge is allowed to play a central role in our cognitive life. Finally, it shows how practical knowledge may be firmly rooted in neurobiological processes and mechanisms that conform to what the empirical sciences tell us about the mind. Foreword Contents 1 Introduction: What is Demonstrative Thought and How to Explain it? 1.1 Four properties of demonstrative thought 1.2 Demonstrative thoughts as attention-based mental activities with singular demonstrative contents 1.3 The mode/content proposal (and its limits) 1.4 Perceptualist approaches to demonstrative thought 1.5 Conceptualist approaches to demonstrative thought 1.6 An alternative proposal (and the road ahead) 2 Perceptualist Approaches to Demonstrative Thought 2.1 Perception as natural predication 2.2 Direct and indirect reference-fixing mechanisms 2.3 Attention-based perceptualism 2.4 Non-attentional perceptualism 2.5 Final remarks 3 Attention-based Perceptualist Theories of Demonstrative Thought 3.1 John Campbell 3.1.1 Experiential highlighting 3.1.2 Attention and feature binding 3.1.3 Experiential highlighting again 3.2 Wayne Wu 3.2.1 Wu’s argument against conscious attention as visual selection 3.2.2 Synchronic and diachronic phenomenal salience 3.2.3 The cognitive view of synchronic phenomenal salience 3.2.4 The agentive view of synchronic phenomenal salience 3.2.5 Attention as selection for action 3.3 James Stazicker 3.3.1 Conscious attention without synchronic phenomenal salience 3.3.2 Attention to thought 3.3.3 Demonstrative thought as cognitive attention 4 Non-attentional Perceptualist Theories of Demonstrative Thought 4.1 Joseph Levine 4.1.1 Intentionally mediated vs. direct meta-semantic mechanisms 4.1.2 Multiple object tracking and pre-attentive object representations 4.1.3 An attentional account of multiple object tracking 4.1.4 The evidence from subitizing 4.2 Athanassios Raftopoulos 4.2.1 Perception, attention and cognition 4.2.2 Three levels of visual processing 4.2.3 Proto-objects and the coherence problem 4.3 Mohan Matthen 4.3.1 Seeing objects versus seeing pictures 4.3.2 Motion-guiding vision and visual reference 4.3.3 Referring to objects without motion-guiding vision 4.3.4 Spatial significance 5 The Conceptualist Challenge to Demonstrative Thought 5.1 Introduction: the story so far 5.2 The conceptualist challenge to perceptualism: preliminaries 5.3 The orthodox view of practical knowledge 5.4 The conceptualist challenge revisited 5.5 On the idea of an ‘objective’ conception of space 5.6 The cognitive map strategy (and its limits) 5.7 Campbell on the role of physical objects in spatial thinking 6 The Pragmatic View of Demonstrative Thought (I): Practical Knowledge 6.1 Introduction: conceptualism and the explanatory gap 6.2 Practical and image-like knowledge 6.3 Practical knowledge and space 6.4 The historical-dispositional account (and its limits) 6.5 Two ways of knowing about speed (again) 6.6 The cognitive space 6.7 Stabilization and movement in cognitive space 7 The Pragmatic View of Demonstrative Thought (II): Object Representation 7.1 Introduction: practical knowledge and object representation 7.2 Bermudez’s object properties model of object perception 7.3 The graded knowledge approach: beyond perceptual sensitivity 7.4 Natural stabilization and the prefrontal cortex 7.5 A pragmatist answer to the conceptualist challenge 7.6 Natural de-stabilization 7.7 A new role for sortal concepts 7.8 Final considerations Bibliography Index