Historical Thinking

The Distributed Truth-Telling Model Authors Nicolas J Bullot, Stephen W Enciso Abstract This article provides a philosophical response to the need for truth-telling about colonial history, focusing on the Australian context. The response consists in inviting philosophers and the public to engage in social-justice practices specified by a model called Distributed Truth-Telling (DTT), which integrates the historiography of injustices affecting Indigenous peoples with insights f

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

Authors William Forde Thompson, Nicolas J. Bullot, and Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis Abstract Research has investigated psychological processes in an attempt to explain how and why people appreciate music. Three programsof research have shed light on these processes. The first focuses on the appreciation of musical structure. The second investigates self-oriented responses to music, including music-evoked autobiographical memories, the reinforcement of a sense of self, and ben

Authors Lee Harrop, Nicolas J. Bullot First and Second Paragraphs The audience of a work of art typically offers a plurality of interpretations of the work. Some of them enrich our connections with the work and its historical context. Other interpretations are problematic because they elicit responses that thwart fundamental artistic freedoms and human rights. The latter include responses promoting the destruction of cultural heritage and the persecution of artists acting as

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 and Rolf Reber Abstract The Distancing-Embracing model does not have the conceptual resources to explain artistic misunderstandings and the emotional consequences of historical learning in the arts. Specifically, it suggests implausible predictions about emotional distancing caused by art schemata (e.g., misunderstandings of artistic intentions and contexts). These problems show the need for further inquiries into how historical contextualization mod

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

Author Nicolas J. Bullot Abstract To explain agent-identification behaviours, universalist theories in the biological and cognitive sciences have posited mental mechanisms thought to be universal to all humans, such as agent detection and face recognition mechanisms. These universalist theories have paid little attention to how particular sociocultural or historical contexts interact with the psychobiological processes of agent-identi-fication. In contrast to universalist the

Authors Nicolas J. Bullot, Rolf Reber Abstract Research seeking a scientific foundation for the theory of art appreciation has raised controversies at the intersection of the social and cognitive sciences. Though equally relevant to a scientific inquiry into art appreciation, psychological and historical approaches to art developed independently and lack a common core of theoretical principles. Historicists argue that psychological and brain sciences ignore the fact that artw