Cognitive Sciences

Authors Nicolas J. Bullot, Rolf Reber Abstract People use their commonsense thinking about the past to inform their decisions. Intuitive historical thinking is therefore pervasive in the social and cognitive lives of humans. This type of cognition, however, has not been systematically researched. Recent philosophical psychology is dominated by works that investigate cognitive tools used by intuitive historical thinking – such as episodic memory, mental time travel, causalreas

Author Nicolas J. Bullot Abstract Research seeking to explain the perpetration of violence and atrocities by humans against other humans offers both social and individualistic explanations, which differ namely in the roles attributed to empathy. Prominent social models suggest that some manifestations of inter-human violence are caused by parochial attitudes (attitudes characterized by interests centred on one's own community) and obedience reinforced by within-group empathy.

Author Nicolas J. Bullot Abstract To introduce the reader to the philosophical debates about the science of the arts, I review existing research and discuss three philosophical theses. As a background claim, I begin with the co-dependence thesis , which states that dependence relations have tied arts and sciences together in the past and continue to interlink them in the current historical context. One area in which the co-dependence thesis is contested is the debate about th

Authors Nicolas J. Bullot, William P. Seeley, and Stephen Davies Abstract To analyze the relations between art and science, philosophers and historians have developed different lines of inquiry. A first type of inquiry considers how artistic and scientific practices have interacted over human history. Another project aims to determine the contributions (if any) that scientific research can make to our understanding of art, including the contributions that cognitive science ca

Authors Anina N. Rich, Nicolas J. Bullot First Paragraph Imagine that you are walking down the street when you see an old acquaintance coming towards you. You are able to recognize her face, recall the last time you saw her, and retrieve memories about how you came to know each other. You even recall hearing gossip that she had been less than truthful with a colleague. All of this happens in the blink of an eye, and yet, on closer inspection, you might wonder how it is that y

Author Nicolas J. Bullot Abstract To introduce the issue of the tracking and identification of human agents, I examine the ability of an agent (“a tracker”) to track a human person (“a target”) and distinguish this target from other individuals: The ability to perform person identification . First, I discuss influential mechanistic models of the perceptual recognition of human faces and people ( the face-recognition program ). Such models propose detailed hypotheses about the

Authors Nicolas J. Bullot Rolf Reber Abstract Critics of the target article objected to our account of art appreciators' sensitivity to art-historical contexts and functions, the relations among the modes of artistic appreciation, and the weaknesses of aesthetic science. To rebut these objections and justify our program, we argue that the current neglect of sensitivity to art-historical contexts persists as a result of a pervasive aesthetic–artistic confound; we further speci