A fiction may prescribe imagining that a pig can talk or tell the future. A fiction may prescribe imagining that torturing innocent persons is a good thing. We generally comply with imaginative prescriptions like the former, but not always with prescriptions like the latter: we imagine non-evaluative fictions without difficulty but sometimes resist imagining value-rich fictions. Thus arises the puzzle of imaginative resistance. Most analyses of the phenomenon focus on the content of the relevant imaginings. The present analysis focuses instead (...) on the character of certain kinds of imaginings, arguing that we resist in such cases given the rich evaluative character of the imaginings prescribed, and the agent-dependent constraints on imagining in such ways. (shrink)

Thinking and Perceiving defends the claim that thought not only affects perceiving, thought improves perceiving. It thus defends a malleable architecture of the mind, opposite strong modularist views that claim that perception is informationally encapsulated and thus cognitively impenetrable. The argument for this view centers around cases of perceptual expertise. Experts in a wide variety of domains—radiology, birdwatching, elite athletics, fingerprint examination—have been empirically studied using behavioral, neural-physiological, and computational methods. This convergence of evidence is best explained in terms of (...) cognitively sensitive perceptual improvements. And these improvements amount to epistemic virtue, where the virtue is partly resident in perception and credited to the perceiving agent. The view has far-reaching implications for a wide range of issues, including the epistemology of perception, the contents of perception, theory-ladenness in science and social perception, understanding and self-understanding, and aesthetic taste. (shrink)

This is a reply to the critical commentaries of Zed Adams, Zoe Drayson, Chris Mole, and Aleksandra Mroczko-Wąsowicz. The unifying theme across all four commentaries is the question: just how radical are the ideas contained in, and implied by, Thinking and Perceiving? Does the abandonment of the modularity of mind, and an embrace of the malleability of mind, have wide reaching consequences for empirical studies of sensory perception, for cognitive architecture, for the metaphysics of mind and the epistemology of perception? (...) And which of those consequences are welcomed, and which of those are problematic? These general questions anchor in (at least) the following topics: learning and the role of cognition, object recognition, perceptual expertise, early versus late vision, perception and truth, virtue epistemology, and computational architectures of mind. This reply attempts to address the overarching question from this variety of angles taken in the four commentaries. (shrink)