Some visual artworks constitute hate speech because they can perform oppressive illocutionary acts. This illocution-based analysis of art reveals how responsive curation and artmaking undermines and manages problematic art. Drawing on the notion of counterspeech as an alternative tool to censorship to handle art-based hate speech, this article proposes aesthetic blocking and aesthetic spotlighting. I then show that under certain conditions, this can lead to eventual metaphysical destruction of the artwork; a way to destroy harmful art without physically destroying it.
Should Slavery’s Statues be Preserved? On Transitional Justice and Contested Heritage
What should we do with statues and place-names memorializing people who committed human-rights abuses linked to slavery and postslavery racism? In this article, I draw on UN principles of transitional justice to address this question. I propose that a successful approach should meet principles of transitional justice recognized by the United Nations, including affirming rights to justice, truth, reparations, and guarantees of nonrecurrence of human rights violations. I discuss four strategies for handling contested heritage, examining strengths and weaknesses of each strategy. Examples from Bristol, England, highlight common challenges and positive lessons.
Experiential Blindness Revisited: In Defence of a Case of Embodied Cognition
The sensorimotor theory (Noë, 2004, Noë, in press) discusses a special instance of lack of perceptual experience despite no sensory impairment. The phenomenon dubbed “experiential blindness” is cited as evidence for a constitutive relation between sensorimotor skills and perceptual experience. Recently it has been objected (Adams and Aizawa, 2008, Aizawa, 2007) that the cases described by Noë as experiential blindness are cases of pure sensory deficit. This paper argues that while the objections bring out limitations of Noë’s sensorimotor theory they do not do enough to challenge a robust perception–action interdependence claim. There are genuine cases of experiential blindness and these are better explained by the hypothesis of the interdependence of perception and action rather than by a passive vision approach. The cases provide support for a strong thesis of embodied cognition where ongoing sensorimotor dynamics non-trivially constrain perceptual content.
Explaining Emotions
Sometimes our emotions change straightaway when we learn that what we believed is not true. The grieving husband recovers when he learns that, because she missed her plane, his wife did not die in the fatal plane crash. But often changes in emotions do not appropriately follow changes in belief. Their tenacity, their inertia, suggests that there is akrasia of the emotions; it reveals the complex structure of their intentionality.’
Startle
Philosophers tend to take very sophisticated and culture bound emotions as their paradigms for emotion in general. So Gilbert Ryle discusses an interest in symbolic logic; William Lyons discusses being awestruck by the beauty of a golden eagle; Patricia Greenspan talks about being warily suspicious of an insurance salesman; and Robert Gordon talks about being embar rassed about the publicity for one’s wedding.’ Psychologists, on the other hand, tend to stick to very different examples; several of them have studied the startle reaction as an example of an emo tion, a suggestion most philosophers would consider laughable. I shall argue that startle does belong on the spectrum of emotional response, and that indeed, if we abstract from the startle response, we can come up with a useful model of emotional response in general.
Playfulness, “World”-Travelling, and Loving Perception
A paper about cross-cultural and cross-racial loving that emphasizes the need to understand and affirm the plurality in and among women as central to feminist ontology and epistemology. Love is seen not as fusion and erasure of difference but as incompatible with them. Love reveals plurality. Unity -not to be confused with solidarity – is understood as conceptually tied to domination.
Escaping from the Chinese Room
John Searle, in his paper on ‘Minds, Brains, and Programs’ (1980), argues that computational theories in psychology are essentially worthless. He makes two main claims: that computational theories, being purely formal in nature, cannot possibly help us to understand mental processes; and that computer hardware-unlike neuroprotein-obviously lacks the right causal powers to generate mental processes. I shall argue that both these claims are mistaken.
Why AI is Harder Than We Think
Since its beginning in the 1950s, the field of artificial intelligence has cycled several times between periods of optimistic predictions and massive investment (“AI spring”) and periods of disappointment, loss of confidence, and reduced funding (“AI winter”). Even with today’s seemingly fast pace of AI breakthroughs, the development of long-promised technologies such as self-driving cars, housekeeping robots, and conversational companions has turned out to be much harder than many people expected. One reason for these repeating cycles is our limited understanding of the nature and complexity of intelligence itself. In this paper I describe four fallacies in common assumptions made by AI researchers, which can lead to overconfident predictions about the field. I conclude by discussing the open questions spurred by these fallacies, including the age-old challenge of imbuing machines with humanlike common sense.
Perceptual Content Defended
Recently, the thesis that experience is fundamentally a matter of representing the world as being a certain way has been questioned by austere relationalists. I defend this thesis by developing a view of perceptual content that avoids their objections. I will argue that on a relational understanding of perceptual content, the fundamental insights of austere relationalism do not compete with perceptual experience being representational. As it will show that most objections to the thesis that experience has content apply only to accounts of perceptual content on which perceptual relations to the world play no explanatory role. With austere relationalists, I will argue that perceptual experience is fundamentally relational. But against austere relationalists, I will argue that it is fundamentally both relational and representational.
What Kind of Monist is Anne Finch Conway?
One of the most basic questions an ontology can address is: How many things, or substances, are there? A monist will say, ‘just one’. But there are different stripes of monism, and where the borders between these different views lie rests on the question, ‘To what does this “oneness” apply?’ Some monists apply ‘oneness’ to existence. Others apply ‘oneness’ to types. Determining whether a philosopher is a monist and deciphering what this is supposed to mean is no easy task, especially when it comes to those writing in the early modern period because many philosophers of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries include God in their ontologies. In The Principles, Anne Finch Conway offers an ontology that is often described as being both ‘vitalist’ and ‘monist’. I take this to mean that, for Conway, all that exists is in some way alive and that if asked ‘How many things, or substances, are there?’ Conway would say, ‘Just one’. But to what does this ‘oneness’ apply? And where does the point of disagreement between Conway and her interlocutors, Hobbes, Spinoza, More, and Descartes lie? In this paper, I argue that determining the answer to this first question turns out to be quite difficult. Nevertheless, we can still make sense of the second.