This book offers an account of perceptual experience—its intrinsic nature, its engagement with the world, its relations to mental states of other kinds, and its role in epistemic norms. One of the ...book’s main claims is that perceptual experience constitutively involves representations of worldly items. A second claim is that the relevant form of representation can be explained in broadly biological terms. After defending these foundational doctrines, the book proceeds to give an account of perceptual appearances and how they are related to the objective world. Appearances turn out to be relational, viewpoint dependent properties of external objects. There is also a complementary account of how the objects that possess these properties are represented. Another major concern is the phenomenological dimension of perception. The book maintains that perceptual phenomenology can be explained reductively in terms of the representational contents of experiences, and it uses this doctrine to undercut the traditional arguments for dualism. This treatment of perceptual phenomenology is then expanded to encompass cognitive phenomenology, the phenomenology of moods and emotions, and the phenomenology of pain. The next topic is the various forms of consciousness that perceptual experience can possess. A principal aim is to show that phenomenology is metaphysically independent of these forms of consciousness, and another is to de-mystify the form known as phenomenal consciousness. The book concludes by discussing the relations of various kinds that perceptual experiences bear to higher level cognitive states, including relations of format, content, and justification or support.
I argue for three claims. (1) The phenomenology of visual experience is exhausted by awareness of appearance properties (i.e., certain constantly changing characteristics of external objects that are ...relational and viewpoint‐dependent). (2) Cognition differs from perception in that it has a purely discursive or linguistic dimension, whereas perception is pervasively analog and iconic; but this does not determine a border between the two domains, for cognition also has a massive iconic dimension. And (3) certain raging debates in teleosemantics can be resolved by acknowledging that perceptual representations in more primitive organisms tend to have dual contents (e.g., both small, moving black object, and food).
There are two main accounts of what it is for external objects to be presented in visual experience. According to
particularism
, particular objects are built into the representational contents of ...experiences.
Existentialism
is a quite different view. According to existentialism, the representational contents of perceptual experiences are general rather than particular, in the sense that the contents can be fully captured by existentially quantified statements. The present paper is a defense of existentialism. It argues that existentialism is much better equipped than particularism to explain the contents of hallucinations, and it defends existentialism against three objections.
Abstract This note is concerned with Ned Block's claim that cognition differs from perception in being paradigmatically conceptual, propositional, and non-iconic. As against Block, it maintains that ...large stretches of cognition constitutively involve, or depend on, iconic representations.
Susanna Schellenberg on perception Hill, Christopher S.
Mind & language,
April 2022, 2022-04-00, 20220401, Volume:
37, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Schellenberg's book The unity of perception is full of innovative ideas and challenges to preconceptions. This discussion endorses several of Schellenberg's main contentions, but it also challenges ...her handling of several key topics, such as hallucinations and perceptual awareness of particulars, and it expresses doubts about the informativeness of her main analytic tool, the notion of a perceptual capacity.
We propose a new experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that offers a powerful and model-independent probe for milli-charged particles. This experiment could be sensitive to charges in the ...range 10−3e–10−1e for masses in the range 0.1–100 GeV, which is the least constrained part of the parameter space for milli-charged particles. This is a new window of opportunity for exploring physics beyond the Standard Model at the LHC. The key new ingredients of the proposal are the identification of an optimal location for the detector and a telescopic/coincidence design that greatly reduces the background.
Unrevisability Hill, Christopher S.
Synthese (Dordrecht),
04/2021, Volume:
198, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Opposing Quine, I defend the view that some of the statements we accept are immune to empirical revision. My examples include instances of Schema (T) and abbreviative definitions. I argue that it ...serves important cognitive purposes to hold statements of these kinds immune to revision, and that it is epistemically permissible for us to do so. At the end, I briefly consider the question of whether the rationale for these claims might be extended to show that additional statements are unrevisable.
Despite the low level of evidence supporting the correction of tongue-tie for breastfeeding problems, recognition and treatment has increased substantially over the past 15 years. Prevalence ...reporting of tongue-tie is variable. The purpose of this study was to quantitatively synthesize the prevalence of tongue-tie in children aged <1 year and to examine the psychometric properties of the assessment tools used for diagnosing tongue-tie in these studies.
PRISMA and MOOSE guidelines were followed, with selection of studies and data extraction verified by two authors. Random-effects meta-analyses were performed to determine an overall prevalence rate, prevalence by infant sex, and prevalence by diagnostic method.
There were 15 studies that met inclusion criteria. Overall prevalence of tongue-tie (N = 24,536) was 8% (95% CI 6-10%, p < 0.01). Prevalence was 7% in males and 4% in females. Prevalence was 10% when using a standardized assessment tool compared to 7% when using visual examination alone (p = 0.16). Available assessment tools for diagnosis of tongue-tie do not have adequate psychometric properties.
Tongue-tie is a common anomaly, which has the potential to impact infant feeding. Development of a psychometrically sound assessment of tongue-tie is needed.
The overall prevalence of tongue-tie in infants aged <1 year is 8%. Available diagnostic tools for tongue-tie do not have adequate psychometric testing. Prevalence data can assist health care providers in the recognition of tongue-tie as a potential barrier to infant feeding to promote maternal breastfeeding success.
Although the global incidence of cutaneous melanoma is increasing, survival rates for patients with metastatic disease remain <10%. Novel treatment strategies are therefore urgently required, ...particularly for patients bearing BRAF/NRAS wild-type tumors. Targeting autophagy is a means to promote cancer cell death in chemotherapy-resistant tumors, and the aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that cannabinoids promote autophagy-dependent apoptosis in melanoma. Treatment with Δ9-Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) resulted in the activation of autophagy, loss of cell viability, and activation of apoptosis, whereas cotreatment with chloroquine or knockdown of Atg7, but not Beclin-1 or Ambra1, prevented THC-induced autophagy and cell death in vitro. Administration of Sativex-like (a laboratory preparation comprising equal amounts of THC and cannabidiol (CBD)) to mice bearing BRAF wild-type melanoma xenografts substantially inhibited melanoma viability, proliferation, and tumor growth paralleled by an increase in autophagy and apoptosis compared with standard single-agent temozolomide. Collectively, our findings suggest that THC activates noncanonical autophagy-mediated apoptosis of melanoma cells, suggesting that cytotoxic autophagy induction with Sativex warrants clinical evaluation for metastatic disease.
The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) proposed the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) initiative as an alternate way to organize research of mental illnesses, by looking at dimensions of ...functioning rather than being tied to categorical diagnoses. This paper briefly discusses the motivation for and organization of RDoC, and then explores the NIMH portfolio and recent work to monitor the utility and progress that RDoC has afforded developmental research. To examine how RDoC has influenced the NIMH developmental research portfolio over the last decade, we employed a natural language processing algorithm to identify the number of developmental science grants classified as incorporating an RDoC approach. Additional portfolio analyses examine temporal trends in funded RDoC‐relevant grants, publications and citations, and research training opportunities. Reflecting on how RDoC has influenced the focus of grant applications, we highlight examples from research on Attention‐Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), childhood irritability, and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Lastly, we consider how the dimensional and transdiagnostic approaches emphasized in RDoC have facilitated research on personalized intervention for heterogeneous disorders and preventive/early interventions targeting emergent or subthreshold psychopathology.
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