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Authors Nicolas J. Bullot and 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 s

Abstract This chapter outlines a theory grounded on the so-called attentional constitution principle (ACP). The ACP contends that attention is constitutive of humans’ perceptual knowledge about individuals. It expands research on perception and demonstrative identification, and is grounded in the idea that the epistemology of empirical beliefs should fit together with the psychobiology of attention in order to explain how human agents navigate and analyze their environment. I

Authors Nicolas J. Bullot and Paul Égré First Paragraph Philosophical and scientific debates on perception have been largely dominated by research on vision (see Bennett 1966, p. 30; Casati and Dokic 1994; Spence and Driver 2004; Calvert et al. 2004). However, our perceptual knowledge of physical objects, like our actions, depends on the connections between distinct perceptual modalities and a number of cognitive systems besides vision. Among the latter, audition appears most

Author Nicolas J. Bullot Abstract How do humans manage to keep track of a gradually changing object or person as the same persisting individual despite the fact that the extraction of information about this individual must often rely on heterogeneous information sources and heterogeneous tracking methods? The article introduces the Empirical Tracking of Individuals (ETI) theory to address this problem. This theory proposes an analysis of the concept of integrated tracking, wh

Author Nicolas J. Bullot Abstract Many scholars view artworks as the products of cultural history and arbitrary institutional conventions. Others construe art as the result of psychological mechanisms internal to the organism. These historical and psychological approaches are often viewed as foes rather than friends. Is it possible to combine these two approaches in a unified analysis of the perception and consciousness of artworks? I defend a positive answer to this question

Authors Nicolas J. Bullot and Jacques Droulez Abstract In contrast to Constructivist Views, which construe perceptual cognition as an essentially reconstructive process, this article recommends the Deictic View, which grounds perception in perceptual-demonstrative reference and the use of deictic tracking strategies for acquiring and updating knowledge about individuals. The view raises the problem of how sensory-motor tracking connects to epistemic and integrated forms of tr

Authors Nicolas J. Bullot and Patrick Rysiew Abstract This article compares the ability to track individuals lacking mental states with the ability to track intentional agents. It explains why reference to individuals raises the problem of explaining how cognitive agents track unique individuals and in what sense reference is based on procedures of perceptual-motor and epistemic tracking. We suggest applying the notion of singular-files from theories in perception and semanti

Author Nicolas J. Bullot Abstract This commentary suggests that understanding the “Folk Psychology of Souls” requires studying a problem articulating ontology with psychology: How do human beings, both as perceivers and thinkers, track and refer to (1) living and dead intentional agents and (2) supernatural agents? The problem is discussed in the light of the principle of the ontological commitment in agent tracking. Link https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X0627910X

Authors Nicolas J. Bullot, Roberto Casati, Jerome Dokic Abstract The purpose of this article is to analyze a traditional philosophical thesis that has fundamental consequences for any study of the cognition ef space and objects. This thesis relates our representations, at the level ef conceptual thought, of physical objects with our representations of the locations occupied by objects. It upholds the existence ef a two-waydependence between identifying physical objects and id