Historical undecidability: The Kantian background to Derrida’s politics1

This paper deals with Derrida’s analysis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment in his essay ‘Economimesis’. I argue that Derrida’s analysis of Kant’s aesthetics can be used to describe the aporia within Kantian politics between rebellion and progressive revolutionary acts. The focus of my argument falls on examining how the recent debate over Derrida’s ethics can be usefully considered from the background of this treatment of Kant. In particular, the analysis Derrida gives of Kant’s aesthetics commits him to a series of conceptual constraints that can be detected in his recent commentaries on ‘forgiveness’ and ‘hospitality’. I suggest that these recent commentaries on political topics also depart from his earlier practice of ethics in ‘Economimesis’ as a ‘witnessing’ of the particular. This departure can be clearly seen once the Kantian background to Derrida’s recent writing is set out.     

Is Perception the Canonical Route to Aesthetic Judgment?

It is commonplace amongst philosophers of art to make claims that postulate important links between aesthetics and perception. In this paper, I focus on one such claim—that perception is the canonical route to aesthetic judgment. I consider a range of prima facie plausible interpretations of this claim, and argue that each fails to identify any important link between aesthetic judgment and perception. Given this, I conclude that we have good reason to be sceptical of the claim that perception is in any way privileged as a source of aesthetic judgment.     

Valuing time: Moderate download times can improve online goal pursuit

This research examines how the length of time for which a goal is interrupted affects goal pursuit, in an online context. Goal interruption duration in the form of long download time duration has been identified as a significant impediment to electronic commerce. It is believed that a faster download time is always better to motivate web users to keep surfing. We challenge this belief. In three studies, we find that, under certain circumstances, longer rather than shorter download times motivate web users to keep surfing longer. The counterintuitive pattern of effects can be explained by web users' fit experiences (Higgins, 2000) while surfing. In particular, our findings suggest that when online surfing “feels right”, web users think that online information is right.     

Scylla and Charybdis: the purist’s dilemma

This paper explores the view that, on Mumford’s account of the purist, to the degree that the purist adopts an aesthetic perspective, he or she doesn’t watch the sport in question, and to the degree that he or she does watch the sport, there is a loss of aesthetic appreciation. The idea that spectators oscillate between partisanship and purism means that the purist is unable to avoid either the Scylla of not actually watching the sport, or the Charybdis of loss of aesthetic appreciation at any given point. Ultimately there seems to be both a sport-shaped hole and an aesthetic-shaped hole in Mumford’s account of the purist. It is argued that oscillation is incapable of dealing with the problem precisely because it is disjunctive in nature and entails the spectator either watching sport from an aesthetic perspective or from a partisan perspective at any given time. An alternative conception of the aesthetic is considered that offers one way of dissolving the purist’s dilemma.     

Internal feature saliency as a marker of familiarity and configural processing

Two experiments that explore the internal feature advantage (IFA) in familiar face processing are reported. The IFA involves more efficient processing of internal features for familiar faces over unfamiliar ones. Experiment 1 examined the possibility of a configural basis for this effect through use of a matching task for familiar and unfamiliar faces presented both upright and upside-down. Results revealed the predicted IFA for familiar faces when stimuli were upright, but this was removed when stimuli were inverted. Experiment 2 examined the degree of training required before the IFA was demonstrated. Latency results revealed that whilst 90–180 s of exposure was sufficient to generate an IFA of intermediate magnitude, 180–270 s of exposure was required before the IFA was equivalent to that demonstrated for a familiar face. Taken together, these results offer three conclusions: First, the IFA is reaffirmed as an objective indicator of familiarity; second, the IFA is seen to rest on configural processing; and finally, the development of the IFA with familiarity indicates a development of configural processing with familiarity. As such, insight is gained as to the type of processing changes that occur as familiarity is gradually acquired.     

Self-awareness as conscious meta-representation

Citing the phenomenon of transparency, some philosophers argue that we cannot become aware of the intrinsic properties of our experiences. When we introspect, they argue, our experiences always seem as if they are exhausted by their intentional contents. They conclude that introspection does not reveal any properties that seem intrinsic to experience. In order to answer this argument, we must show how it could seem as if we are simultaneously aware of external objects and our experience of those objects. I explain how this is possible by introducing the notion of conscious meta-representation. Conscious meta-representation occurs when we consciously conceive of represented objects as being merely putative. This sort of conceiving sometimes involves a distinctive phenomenology, and it explains how certain features of an experience can simultaneously seem as if they belong to external objects and to our experiences of those objects. We can, I conclude, look ‘at’ our experiences even as we are looking ‘through’ them.     

Making Sense of the Philosophy of Sport

Beginning from an earlier claim of mine that there was really no such area of study as the philosophy of sport, Part One of the paper reconsiders the place previously given to David Best’s distinction between purposive sports and aesthetic sports. In light of a famous cricketing event in the 1977 contest between England and Australia (‘The Ashes’), in which Derek Randall turned a cartwheel after taking the winning catch, the paper clarifies that not all aesthetically-pleasing events taking place in sporting competitions can be understood as the aesthetic in sport. Then, in Part Two, the force of the claim that philosophy is one subject is explored. The conclusion is that a focus just on the philosophy of sport is necessarily inappropriate, since it will present the student with only cases from sport to then apply to sport. Rather, one’s understanding must be informed by (much of) the breadth of philosophy. Charles Travis’s view of occasion-sensitivity provides a clear example of appropriately contextual appeal. Part Three of the paper returns to the need for an institutional account of sport, one recognizing that there is no one occasion on which a particular sport is played; and hence no single set of conditions which can uniquely identify that sport. Thus, soccer played with one’s children typically differs from elite soccer: but both are (genuinely) soccer. When one turns to the appreciation of sport (in the light of Stephen Mumford’s excellent Watching Sport: Aesthetics, Ethics and Emotion [2012a]), one recognizes that, in order to genuinely appreciate sport, one cannot detach oneself from the outcome as completely as Mumford’s extreme purist seems to. But reflection on that case may also return us to contextualism by moving us away from attachments to the complete or the exceptionless in our accounts of spectating as of sport: maybe there is no one thing that occurs in all the relevant cases.     

Political Psychology as Social Aesthetics

Political psychology may be legitimately developed as a "social aesthetic.&;rdquo; Its activities generate social forms, much as in the arts. While logic works within the confines of society's language, aesthetic forms work with its sensibility, in the understanding that significance lies within the unitary wholes. In this sense, political psychology cannot be separated from psychology in general. In both cases we participate in the generation of form. However, because these forms enter society in significant ways, reflexive attention must be given to what it is we create. Mechanical forms, which are common to the field and to society generally, contribute to a condition of social alienation; in contrast, the form of a game is more closely related to the spontaneous creation of community.     

面孔吸引力的整体表征及其动态性增强

面孔作为一种高级的视觉刺激,在人际交往中有着无可替代的作用。其中,面孔吸引力更是影响着日常生活的重要社交决策,如择偶、交友、求职、社会交换等。长久以来,研究者们从面孔特征、社会信息和观察者因素等角度不断探索着人们对静态面孔吸引力的感知,且多从进化角度加以解释。但是,人们如何表征面孔吸引力以及其动态性增强机制仍未可知。本项目通过两个研究,分别从面孔吸引力的整体表征,以及面孔动态性通过影响整体加工、影响对整体信息和特征信息的注意、以及影响社会信息来增强吸引力,从这两个角度尝试回答这一问题。在研究1中,本项目从整体加工的角度探索了面孔吸引力的认知表征。研究1.1通过评分任务和适应范式探索高空间频率（更多局部特征）和低空间频率（更多整体特征）对面孔吸引力的影响,旨在从空间频率探讨面孔吸引力的整体表征。研究1.2通过操纵面孔对称性和面孔常态性探索面孔常态性在面孔对称性和面孔吸引力间的中介作用,探讨面孔吸引力的常态构型表征。研究1.3引入“三庭五眼”这一中国传统面孔审美理论,通过评分任务和适应范式研究“三庭五眼” 构型是否符合中国人对高吸引力中国面孔的表征,以此探讨面孔吸引力的整体表征。研究1.4通过评分任务和适应范式考察局部面孔遮挡是否促进整体面孔吸引力,以及这种促进作用是否由于人们通过局部特征“脑补”出了完整面孔。研究2从整体加工、注意和生命力的角度探讨面孔吸引力的动态性增强机制。研究2.1使用合成效应范式测量动态面孔吸引力的整体加工,探索动静态面孔的吸引力差异是否源于其整体加工程度的不同。研究2.2使用注意分散范式,并结合眼动技术,探讨人们对动静态面孔的注视模式是否存在差异,这种差异是否能解释动态面孔吸引力的增强。研究2.3结合问卷法、实验法和结构方程模型,考察了生命力这一社会因素对动静态面孔吸引力的影响。本项目探讨了面孔吸引力的认知表征以及其动态性增强机制,有助于我们进一步理解人们对面孔吸引力的认知加工以及人类欣赏美这一高级智能。同时,本项目的结果对于日常人际交往和面孔吸引力相关算法的优化等方面也有潜在的应用价值。     

Societal risks as seen by a Norwegian public

In two studies, questionnaires originally developed to study risk perception in the United States were administered to Norwegian students. Level of perceived risk in Norway was clearly below American scores for most hazards, but slightly above what has been found in a parallel Hungarian study. Norwegians were more concerned than both Hungarians and Americans about narcotics, but less than Americans about chemicals used in food and agriculture, and less than Hungarians about a number of common, everyday hazards. When ratings on nine risk characteristics were factor analyzed, a two dimensional solution was found with Fatal risk and Involuntary risk as the two most important dimensions. Ratings of general death risk, harm risk, and death risk for those exposed were highly correlated, but appeared to be unrelated to the number of people believed to be exposed to the hazard.     

The Epistemological Status of Vision and its Implications for Design

Computational theories of vision typically rely on the analysis of two aspects of human visual function: (1) object and shape recognition (2) co-calibration of sensory measurements. Both these approaches are usually based on an inverse-optics model, where visual perception is viewed as a process of inference from a 2D retinal projection to a 3D percept within a Euclidean space schema. This paradigm has had great success in certain areas of vision science, but has been relatively less successful in understanding perceptual representation, namely, the nature of the perceptual encoding. One of the drawbacks of inverse-optics approaches has been the difficulty in defining the constraints needed to make the inference computationally tractable (e.g. regularity assumptions, Bayesian priors, etc.). These constraints, thought to be learned assumptions about the nature of the physical and optical structures of the external world, have to be incorporated into any workable computational model in the inverse-optics paradigm. But inference models that employ an inverse optics plus structural assumptions approach inevitably result in a naïve realist theory of perceptual representation. Another drawback of inference models for theories of perceptual representation is their inability to explain central features of the visual experience. The one most evident in the process and visual understanding of design is the fact that some visual configurations appear, often spontaneously, as perceptually more coherent than others. The epistemological consequences of inferential approaches to vision indicate that they fail to capture enduring aspects of our visual experience. Therefore they may not be suited to a theory of perceptual representation, or useful for an understanding of the role of perception in the design process and product.     

Dreaming as a 'curtain of illusion': Revisiting the 'royal road' with Bion as our guide

One of Bion's most unique contributions to psychoanalysis is his conception of dreaming in which he elaborates, modifies, and extends Freud 's ideas. While Freud dealt extensively with dream-work, he showed more interest in dreams themselves and their latent meaning and theorized that dreams ultimately constituted wish-fulfillments originating from the activity of the pleasure principle. Bion, on the other hand, focuses more on the process of dreaming itself and believes that dreaming occurs throughout the day as well as the night and serves the reality principle as well as the pleasure principle. In order for wakeful consciousness to occur, dreaming must absorb (contain) the day residue, and transfer it to System Ucs . from System Cs . for it to be processed (transformed) and then returned to System Cs . through the selectively-permeable contact-barrier. Dreaming, consequently, allows the subject to remain awake by day and asleep by night by its processing of the day's residue. Bion seems to conceive of dreaming as an ever-present invisible filter that overlays much of our mental life, including perception, as well as attention itself. He further believes that dreaming is a form of thinking that normally involves the collaborative yet oppositional (not conflictual) activity of the reality and pleasure principles as well as the primary and secondary processes. He also conflates Freud 's primary and secondary processes into a single 'binary–oppositional' structure ( Lévi-Strauss, 1958, 1970 ) that he terms 'alpha-function', which constitutes a virtual model that corresponds to the in-vivo activity of dreaming. He further believes that the analyst dreams as he or she listens and interprets and that the analysand likewise dreams while he or she freely associates.     

Consciousness as sensory quality and as implicit self-awareness

When a mental state is conscious – in the sense that there is something it is like for the subject to have it – it instantiates a certain property F in virtue of which it is a conscious state. It is customary to suppose that F is the property of having sensory quality. The paper argues that this supposition is false. The first part of the paper discusses reasons for thinking that unconscious mental states can have a sensory quality, for example in cases of absent-minded perception. If unconscious mental states can have a sensory quality, then sensory quality is an insufficient condition for consciousness. The second part of the paper argues that there are even better reasons to think that sensory quality is an unnecessary condition for consciousness. The idea is that mental states can be conscious even when they lack sensory quality, for example, in the case of certain conscious propositional attitudes. In the third part of the paper, an alternative to the rejected supposition, drawn from the phenomenological tradition, is offered: that consciousness is a matter of implicit self-awareness, rather than of sensory quality. According to this alternative, a mental state is conscious when, and only when, it involves implicit self-awareness.     

Event perception as a control process for visual awareness

ABSTRACT

We present evidence demonstrating that the structure of everyday events guides attention to and representation of visual properties. Incidental change detection increases dramatically at the boundaries between events, whereas individuals are largely unaware of the sequence of actions within a single event. Observers demonstrate a limited capacity for representing events, and inducing cognitive load by presenting two simultaneous events decreases detection of sequence errors. These studies support emerging evidence that the event perception network operates as a control process that guides attention and awareness in real-world settings.     

Intuition as a Basic Source of Moral Knowledge

The idea that intuition plays a basic role in moral knowledge and moral philosophy probably began in the eighteenth century. British philosophers such as Anthony Shaftsbury, Francis Hutcheson, Thomas Reid, and later David Hume talk about a “moral sense” that they place in John Locke’s theory of knowledge in terms of Lockean reflexive perceptions, while Richard Price seeks a faculty by which we obtain our ideas of right and wrong. In the twentieth century intuitionism in moral philosophy was revived by the works of G. E. Moore, H. A. Prichard, and W. D. Ross. These philosophers reject Kantian deontological ethics and utilitarianism insisting that intuition is the only source of moral knowledge. Recently, there is a renewed interest in intuition by philosophers doing meta-philosophy by reflecting on what philosophers do, and why they disagree. In this essay we plan to take some of this recent literature on intuition and apply it to moral philosophy. We will proceed by (1) defining a conception of intuition, (2) answering some skeptical challenges, (3) delimiting its target, and (4) arguing that intuition is often a source of moral knowledge.

Peak velocity as a cue in audiovisual synchrony perception of rhythmic stimuli

This study investigated audiovisual synchrony perception in a rhythmic context, where the sound was not consequent upon the observed movement. Participants judged synchrony between a bouncing point-light figure and an auditory rhythm in two experiments. Two questions were of interest: (1) whether the reference in the visual movement, with which the auditory beat should coincide, relies on a position or a velocity cue; (2) whether the figure form and motion profile affect synchrony perception. Experiment 1 required synchrony judgment with regard to the same (lowest) position of the movement in four visual conditions: two figure forms (human or non-human) combined with two motion profiles (human or ball trajectory). Whereas figure form did not affect synchrony perception, the point of subjective simultaneity differed between the two motions, suggesting that participants adopted the peak velocity in each downward trajectory as their visual reference. Experiment 2 further demonstrated that, when judgment was required with regard to the highest position, the maximal synchrony response was considerably low for ball motion, which lacked a peak velocity in the upward trajectory. The finding of peak velocity as a cue parallels results of visuomotor synchronization tasks employing biological stimuli, suggesting that synchrony judgment with rhythmic motions relies on the perceived visual beat.     

Faces as forms in the world of the newborn

A number of recent studies have indicated that newborns can learn to recognize mother's face within a few hours of birth. Two of the present authors suggested that a simple auto-associative net might explain that rapid learning. This paper reports three experiments in which the newborn's ability to recognize a learned face over three transformations was tested. The transformations were: (1) a photonegative transformation, (2) a size change and (3) rotation in the third dimension of visual space. Existing auto-associative nets cannot maintain identification across these transformations. The newborns succeeded with all three. An alternative proposal based on the idea that there is a built-in specification of the true shape of a face in the frontal parallel plane is outlined. These data present a challenge not only to associationist theories but also to their main rival, differentiation theory.