The Department of Philosophy will be holding a talk titled “Unorthodox! Cognitive Reflection and Folk Moral Classification” by Ross Colebrook, who is currently an instructor in our department and recently received his PhD in Philosophy from the City University of New York. His research brings experimental methodology to bear on questions in moral psychology and metaethics. Here is a brief description of the talk:
Social domain theory holds that people draw a conceptual distinction between moral judgments and other types of judgments. But recent evidence suggests that people often decline to label obviously moral judgments as moral. During the talk, Prof. Colebrook will consider the implications and explore possible explanations for these surprising “unorthodox” classifications.
When: October 29, 2021, 4:00-5:00 pm
Where: Wyatt Hall 109
Due to campus Covid protocols this event is restricted to campus members or registered guests only. If interested in attending but are not a member of the campus community, please email the Department of Philosophy for guidance.
Professor Liao, Associate Professor of Philosophy, received a 2021 Bartanen Faculty Research Award. This award is given each year to faculty who have shown remarkable accomplishments in research and professional development.
Professor Liao says:
I am interested in interactions between minds and social realities. In practice, this broad interest gets me to explore connections between imagination, cognition, values, art, and more.
For more information on Professor Liao’s significant research, go to his webpage. To get a sense of some of his work, read a recent article aimed at a general audience and focused on the way in which racism can interact with medical technology.
Congratulations Prof. Liao!
Prof. Liao giving a talk, “Racist Things: How Biases get Materialized in the World,” at the University of Puget Sound in September 2016
Hannah Stockton ’22, a Philosophy major minoring in Mathematics and Politics & Government, took on a research project this summer, directed by Professor Sam Liao, that Evaluates the role of thought in sensorimotor enactivism (For more information on Summer Research Grants in Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, look here!)
Hannah sent us the following description of the project from Edinburgh, where she is studying abroad:
Sensorimotor Enactivism (SSM) was first introduced by philosophers O’Regan and Noë in their 2001 paper, ‘A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness.’ Consistent with the initial enactivist theory laid out by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch in their 1991 book, ‘the Embodied Mind,’ SSM posits that perceptual experience is enacted iteratively through an agent’s embodied interactions with their environment. The theory rejects the popular view that cognition is constituted by internal re-presentations of a predefined external world. Instead, it argues that the apparent richness of our phenomenal experience is illusory, and that perceptual detail, although limited in a given moment, is accessible through the active exploration or our surroundings.
My summer research project centers on the intersection of embodied cognition, temporal experience, and thought in sensorimotor theory. It is natural for us to hesitate and think about our movements in times when we cannot instinctually navigate an environment. Yet, if thought inhibits action, why might an SSM theorist consider it essential in active perception and the enaction of conscious experience? Although enactivists have previously described thought and reflection as “exercises of skillful know-how” (Gallagher, 2017), my goal is to demonstrate a clear link between implicit bodily knowledge and explicit (language-driven) thought. Specifically, I argue that thought can be motivated by unfulfilled expectations regarding sensorimotor contingencies (SMCs), and that it ultimately serves to refine our implicit knowledge of these contingencies. Here, SMCs refer to the way our bodies react to and produce relative changes in stimuli. We tend to think about our actions when our implicit mastery over SMCs is insufficient, such as when we learn a new skill or find ourselves navigating a particularly tricky environment. When we first learn how to walk or type, for instance, we frequently pause to ensure that our bodies are positioned correctly or applying the correct amount of force. In these cases, our implicit expectations regarding sensorimotor changes are unfulfilled, thereby interrupting our instinctual flow of activity. Here, thought regulates our actions and prevents us from continuing with ineffective behaviors (such as pressing the wrong ‘m’ key on a keyboard). As we refine our implicit mastery of sensorimotor contingencies, we benefit from (but no longer rely on) the mental regulation that comes from thinking about our actions.
Framing my argument in the context of temporal experience, I refer to Husserl’s tripartite structure of time consciousness. Husserl’s model illustrates our experience of the present moment as consisting of three parts: retention (recalling the just-past moment), primal impression (perceiving the fleeting now), and protention (anticipating the upcoming moment) (Gallagher, 2017). With this model, we experience ‘now’ as a continuous duration-block, such that perception and movement are both temporally fluid. Importantly, this also implies that our perceptual experiences are affected by just-past impressions, thereby enabling us to experience temporal qualities of an object or property. Protentions, I argue, are informed by our mastery of sensorimotor contingencies, which are likewise informed by past environmental interactions. From this, I argue that thought initiated by unfulfilled protentions serves as a way to recognize temporal duration; and when we encounter an unchanging stimulus (relative to us) we need not rely on exploration to have a sense of its temporal duration.
O’Regan, J. Kevin, and Alva Noë. “A Sensorimotor Account of Vision and Visual Consciousness.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24, no. 5 (2001): 939–73. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x01000115.
Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.
Logan Canada-Johnson ’22, a double major in Philosophy and Communication studies, embarked on a research project this summer, supervised by Philosophy Professor Sara Protasi, that delved into the possible correlation of film and street art. (For more information on Summer Research Grants in Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, look here!) Here is Logan’s own description of the project:
Street art is a fairly recent phenomena in the canon of art, originating with the practice of graffiti in the late-1970s. What began as “tags”, or signatures from local artists, has grown immensely since then into a diverse range of street art practices. These practices include, but are not limited to, sculpturing, wheatpaste adhesives, yarn-bombing, seed-bombing, and even breakdancing! If all of these disparate practices count as street art, then how could film (what I call cinematic street art) fit into the picture?
First, we need to define street art. When we say street art, we’re not always talking about the same thing. For the street art scholar Nicholas Riggle, street art is art that makes the street “internal to its meaning.” Yet, Riggle himself never explicitly defines the street. Sondra Bacharach suggests instead that define street art in terms of its essential aconsensuality. Aconsensuality is the fancy word that Bacharach uses to denote artworks wherein the artist has not sought the consent of the property-owner. When an artists asks for and receives the consent of a property owner, their artwork then becomes public art. Andrea Baldini thinks that the previous two ontologies of street art focus far too much on the object and not so much the performance (e.g. “Wow, how did someone manage to get up there and make that tag?”). In light of criticisms that I discuss in my article, I find Baldini and Riggle’s ontologies to be unreliable and Bacharach’s to be most promising.
Example of street art on the side of a house in Tacoma
Next, we need to figure out what counts as film. First, I’d like to address an attribute of film that helps circumscribe the definitional parameters a bit. Kendall Walton famously contends that photographs, and by proxy film, are transparent (also known as the transparency thesis) — when we see an object in a photograph, we see the thing itself and not a depiction or representation of the object. This thesis falters in a number of ways, but most notably in that we do not have the same access about the space around us when we look at an object in a photo were we to look at the object in real life. For this reason, we need a more comprehensive definition than that film is just a portal through the image. I chose Noel Carroll’s defintion of film, which lays out five requirements for what makes a film. I won’t go in depth about them here, but they were crucial in considering what extant street artworks, if any, may be classified as film.
Long story made short: I don’t think that we’ve seen any cinematic street art out in the wild yet!
Logan presenting his cinematic street art project
I provide two examples of what I believe would count as cinematic street art, both in terms of adhering to aconsensuality and Carroll’s requirements for film. The first is simply a zoetrope or Mutoscope that has been aconsensually installed on the street. These are pre-projection film devices that were developed in the late 1800s and are now obsolete, but they are nonetheless film devices. The second involves a projected film. Imagine that there is a man who opens his apartment window every night to let some air in. In that apartment building, someone once fell out of a window to their death, maybe even that same room. We film someone falling and then project it onto the surface of the apartment building when the man has his actual window open, creating the illusion of a man falling out of the window to his death. Not only can we aconsensually place this artwork, we can ensure that it fits the requirements for a film and that it even makes the street internal to its meaning.
Given the incredibly limited scope of what cinematic street art can be, I believe that scholars have fundamentally neglected film in the street art discourse. If we want to remedy this, then perhaps these aestheticians ought to revise their ontologies for street art and create something more inclusive. Beyond academia, what I hope that my research accomplishes in some capacity is that it inspires people to try some of these street art practices in their own life.
PUGET SOUND PHILOSOPHY 