Berit Brogaard

Berit Brogaard
University of Miami | UM · Department of Philosophy

Doctor of Philosophy

About

132
Publications
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Introduction
Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Language, Philosophical Psychology, Cognitive Science, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience

Publications

Publications (132)
Article
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Molyneux’s question is, very roughly, that of whether a blind person's prior acquaintance with shape properties by touch alone would suffice for visually identifying those properties, if her sight were restored. The question is at least in part an empirical one, and various scientific attempts have been made to answer it not only for sight and hapt...
Chapter
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A recent wave of research in psychiatry and neuroscience has re-examined the properties of ‘classic’ psychedelic substances—also known as serotonergic hallucinogens—such as psilocybin, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), and N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT). Evidence to date suggests that psychedelics can be given safely in controlled conditions, at mode...
Chapter
There has been a long-standing debate in philosophy and psychology about the role of representation in visual perception. Here, we argue based on evidence from philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience that episodic and schematic memory representations are pivotal to the visual perception of objects and scenes. In the visual perception of objects an...
Chapter
The question of the roles of representation in visual perception – the inspiration for the title of this volume – has witnessed a rapid growth in interest in the philosophy of perception in recent decades. Despite its utter familiarity, the notion of representation that lies at the center of this query remains somewhat illusive. For the purposes of...
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This chapter presents findings indicating that psilocybin-induced visual distortions and impaired executive functioning originate in temporary disruptions of attentional mechanisms. It then revisits a predictive processing account of neural processing and argues that this lacks the resources to provide a unified model of the perceptual mechanisms u...
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The question of whether blindsight is a form of unconscious perception continues to spark fierce debate in philosophy and psychology. One side of the debate holds that while the visual information categorized in blindsight is not access conscious, it is nonetheless a form of perception, albeit a form of unconscious perception. The opposition, by co...
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In this paper, I make a case for the view that we have special relationship duties (also known as “associative duties”) that are not identical to or derived from our non-associative impartial moral obligations. I call this view “moral partialism”. On the version of moral partialism I defend, only loving relationships can normatively ground special...
Article
Moral realism and ethical naturalism are both highly attractive ethical positions but historically they have often been thought to be irreconcilable. Since the late 1980s defenders of Cornell Realism have argued that the two positions can consistently be combined. They make three constitutive claims: (i) Moral properties are natural kind properties...
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In this chapter I will use sex by deception as a case study for highlighting some of the trickiest concepts associated with sexuality and moral psychology, including rape, consensual sex, sexual rights, sexual autonomy, sexual individuality, and disrespectful sex. I begin with a discussion of morally wrong sex as rooted in the breach of five sexual...
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In this paper, we argue that the neo-Aristotelian conception of “friendships of character” appears to misrepresent the essential nature of "genuine", or "true", friendship. We question the neo-Aristotelian imperative that true friendship entails disinterested love of the other “for their own sake” and strives at enhancing moral virtue. We propose a...
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The cliché, "if you haven't loved, you haven't lived" conjures up about 512 million Google search results. The cliché's popularity attests to the importance and diversity of roles that love plays in our lives. Love is thought to be a fulfilling experience not only because it is often pleasant (when it isn't excruciatingly painful) but also because...
Book
This volume contains chapters from philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists, presenting their latest work on the nature of love, and the relationship between love and norms. Co-edited with Berit Borgaard, it is part of the series of the Moral Psychology of Emotions by Mark Alfano.
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The evidential role of experience in justifying beliefs has been at the center of debate in philosophy in recent years. One view is that experience, or seeming, can confer immediate (defeasible) justification on belief in virtue of its representational phenomenology. Call this view “representational dogmatism.” Another view is that experience confe...
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For almost half a century dual-stream advocates have vigorously defended the view that there are two functionally specialized cortical streams of visual processing originating in the primary visual cortex: a ventral, perception-related ‘conscious’ stream and a dorsal, action-related ‘unconscious’ stream. They furthermore maintain that the perceptua...
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This paper defends the view that we have special relationship duties that do not derive from our moral duties. Our special relationship duties, I argue, are grounded in what I call close relationships . Sharing a close relationship with another person, I suggest, requires that both people conceive of themselves as being motivated to promote the oth...
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Integration information theories posit that the integration of information is necessary and/or sufficient for consciousness. In this paper, we focus on three of the most prominent information integration theories: Information Integration Theory (IIT), Global Workspace Theory (GWT), and Attended Intermediate-Level Theory (AIR). We begin by explicati...
Chapter
Far-right supporters paint a rosy image of the luxurious lifestyle of the 1950s white middle-class families or the Southern family living in peaceful agrarian communities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In each imagined society traditional white American families lead satisfying, stress-free lives, which they built through honest hard w...
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There is a strong sentiment in the general population that we need to put an end to the hate crisis in our society. Politicians and policymakers have it in their power to prevent this crisis from escalating further by regulating not only (physical) hate crimes but also hate speech. This has already been done in many European countries, where hate s...
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In his landmark essay “Freedom and Resentment,” the philosopher Peter Strawson coined the term “reactive attitude” to refer to our emotional reactions to wrongdoing or acts of goodwill in the context of social relationships, such as your resentment toward a person who wronged you or gratitude toward a person who did you a favor. These emotional rea...
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In its new guidelines to help psychologists address male violence, sexism, and misogyny, the American Psychological Association suggests that misogyny stems from the masculinity ideology our culture adheres to. While the masculinity dogma is part of what inspires men to hate women, two other ideologies are needed to explain the misogyny incarnate i...
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When Myrtle Vance, the three-year-old daughter of the town sheriff, was found strangled in Paris, Texas, in 1893, suspicion fell on Henry Smith, a young black man. He had been beaten up by the sheriff prior to the child’s disappearance, and it was rumored that he wanted revenge and that he had been seen with the girl on the day of her disappearance...
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This chapter grapples with the nature of group hate and collective hate. Group hate is hate targeted at groups or individuals because of their group membership. Collective hate is hate that a group has toward a common target or that group members have toward a target on behalf of their group. Collective hate is a special case of collective intentio...
Book
The book explores how personal hatred can foster domestic violence and emotional abuse; how hate-proneness is a main contributor to the aggressive tendencies of borderlines, narcissists, psychopaths, and hatemongers; how seemingly ordinary people embark on some of history’s worst hate crimes; and how cohesive groups can develop extremist viewpoints...
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Hate and contempt are emotions. But hate- and contempt-proneness are personality traits, traits that are particularly common in borderlines, narcissists, and psychopaths, but also in far-right extremists and others who hate people on account of their group membership. Although both hate and contempt are sometimes morally defensible, the failure of...
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We expect a lot from strangers, for instance, that the valet guy doesn’t steal our wheels, that the babysitter doesn’t abduct our children, and that the barista at Starbucks doesn’t poison our white chocolate mocha. But romantic relationships, friendships, parent-child relationships, and other varieties of intimate relationships introduce a whole n...
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In common parlance, “contempt” is often subsumed under “hate.” When we speak of group hate, hate groups, hate crimes, hate speech, hate campaigns, and hate mail, this is the sense of “hate” we have in mind. We can call this the “wide sense” of hate. This chapter offers an analysis of hate and contempt as complex emotions that have other emotions as...
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Cognitive dissonance is a kind of ambivalence in which your apprehension of the fact that you performed or want to perform an action of which you disapprove gives rise to psychological distress. This, in turn, causes you to solicit unconscious processes that can help you reduce the distress. Here we look at the role that cognitive dissonance plays...
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This volume provides novel approaches to a variety of questions about ambivalence and the role it plays in our lives. As the contributions illustrate, ambivalence finds its way into a gamut of philosophical and psychological debates about rationality, skepticism, emotions, intentionality, racism, global justice, well-being, mindfulness, and intersu...
Chapter
The aim of this chapter is to shed new light on the question of what newly sighted subjects are capable of seeing on the basis of previous experience with mind-independent, external objects and their properties through touch alone.This question is also known as “Molyneux’s question.” Much of the empirically driven debate surrounding this question h...
Chapter
It has been argued that dogmatism, the view that experience alone can justify belief, has no way of explaining why experiences that are epistemically downgraded by irrational thinking should not play the same justificatory role as experiences that haven’t suffered this fate. In this paper I argue that a recent, initially promising response to this...
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This chapter first discusses what it would be for something to be supernatural. I argue that there are good reasons not to reject supernaturalism. The essay then considers whether there is an interesting connection between atheism and the supernatural. One topic central to this question is that of whether atheistic belief can be rationally tied to...
Chapter
Let ‘strong normative evidentialism’ be the view that a belief is doxastically justified just when (i) the belief is (properly) based on evidence in the agent’s possession, and (ii) the evidence constitutes a good reason for the belief. Strong normative evidentialism faces two challenges. One is that of explaining which kinds of evidence can serve...
Preprint
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According to the inferential view of language comprehension, we hear a speaker’s utterance and infer what was said, drawing on our competence in the syntax and semantics of the language together with background information. On the alternative perceptual view, fluent speakers have a non-inferential capacity to perceive the content of speech. On this...
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Book
We often communicate with each other about how the things we see visually appear to us when we want to achieve a goal like finding the perfect end table, deciding what to eat or issuing a warning. But what do we say when we talk about how things visually appear to us? Can our talk about appearances tell us anything about the nature of visual percep...
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In ‘The Epistemic Significance of Perceptual Learning’ (this issue Chudnoff, E. forthcoming. “The Epistemic Significance of Perceptual Learning.” Inquiry. [Google Scholar]) Elijah Chudnoff argues that cases from perceptual learning show that perception not only generates reasons for beliefs but also preserves those reasons over time in perceptual l...
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Traditionally, philosophers have appealed to the phenomenological similarity between visual experience and visual imagery to support the hypothesis that there is significant overlap between the perceptual and imaginative domains. The current evidence, however, is inconclusive: while evidence from transcranial brain stimulation seems to support this...
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Two of the main debates in philosophy of language concerning time and tense are the debate about the semantics of the tenses in the English language and the debate over whether propositions can be transiently true or false as opposed to always being eternally true or false. The latter quarrel is also known as the 'temporalism-eternalism debate'. Th...
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We describe a patient LS, profoundly deaf in both ears from birth, with underdeveloped superior temporal gyri. Without hearing aids, LS displays no ability to detect sounds below a fixed threshold of 60 dBs, which classifies him as clinically deaf. Under these no-hearing-aid conditions, when presented with a forced-choice paradigm in which he is as...
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Back when researchers thought about the various forms that color vision could take, the focus was primarily on the retinal mechanisms. Since that time, research on human color vision has shifted from an interest in retinal mechanisms to cortical color processing. This has allowed color research to provide insight into questions that are not limited...
Article
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Is color experience cognitively penetrable? Some philosophers have recently argued that it is. In this paper, we take issue with the claim that color experience is cognitively penetrable. We argue that the notion of cognitive penetration that has recently dominated the literature is flawed since it fails to distinguish between the modulation of per...
Article
It may seem that when you have an emotional response to a perceived object or event that makes it seem to you that the perceived source of the emotion possesses some evaluative property, then you thereby have prima facie, immediate justification for believing that the object or event possesses the evaluative property. Call this view ‘dogmatism abou...
Chapter
Ignorance is a neglected issue in philosophy. This is surprising for, contrary to what one might expect, it is not clear what ignorance is. Some philosophers say or assume that it is a lack of knowledge, whereas others claim or presuppose that it is an absence of true belief. What is one ignorant of when one is ignorant? What kinds of ignorance are...
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A main research goal within neuroscience is to explain the relation between neurophysiological processes and conscious experiences. One approach involves focusing on problems such as the integration of information, the deliberate control of behavior, the ability to discriminate and categorize environmental stimuli, etc. These problems have been dub...
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Synesthesia is a condition in which features that ordinarily are processed by distinct perceptual or cognitive streams are bound together in a single stream, yielding an aberrant perceptual, image-like or thought-like experience. One of the most common forms of synesthesia is grapheme-color synesthesia. It is divided into two distinct forms: Projec...
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Studies have shown that both serotonin and glutamate receptor systems play a crucial role in the mechanisms underlying drug-induced synesthesia. The specific nature of these mechanisms, however, continues to remain elusive. Here we propose two distinct hypotheses for how synesthesia triggered by hallucinogens in the serotonin agonist family may occ...
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I distinguish in this chapter between a weak and a strong form of ontological naturalism. Strong ontological naturalism is the view that all truths can be deduced, at least in principle, from truths about physical entities at the lowest level of organization, for example, truths about the elementary particles and forces. Weak ontological naturalism...
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“The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute”, wrote Honoré de Balzac (1996). De Balzac has a point. Life changes after you have a child. Hormones rage, chores and burdens multiply and social roles change. Losing the freedom you used to have is a major life-altering event....
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Perceptual appearances of personality can be highly inaccurate, for example, when they rely on race, masculinity, and attractiveness, factors that have little to do with personality, as well as when they are the result of perceiver effects, such as an idiosyncratic tendency to view others negatively. This raises the question of whether these types...
Article
There has been a recent surge in interest in two questions concerning the nature of perceptual experience; viz. the question of whether perceptual experience is sometimes cognitively penetrated and that of whether high-level properties are presented in perceptual experience. Only rarely have thinkers been concerned with the question of whether the...
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According to the hierarchical model of sensory information processing, sensory inputs are transmitted to cortical areas, which are crucial for complex auditory and speech processing, only after being processed in subcortical areas (Hickok and Poeppel, 2007; Rauschecker and Scott, 2009). However, studies using electroencephalography (EEG) indicate t...
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Recent research on synesthesia has focused on how the condition may depend on selective attention, but there is a lack of consensus on whether selective attention is required to bind colors to their grapheme inducers. In the present study, we used a novel change detection paradigm to examine whether synesthetic colors guide the subject’s attention...
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The paper reviews the empirical evidence for highly significant variation across perceivers in hue perception and argues that color physicalism cannot accommodate this variability. Two views that can accommodate the individual differences in hue perception are considered: the self-locating property theory, according to which colors are self-locatin...
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In this paper I begin by considering Travis’s main argument against a representational view of experience. I argue that the argument succeeds in showing that representation is not essential to experience. However, I argue that it does not succeed in showing that representation is not an essential component of experience enjoyed by creatures like us...
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The phenomenon of synesthesia has undergone an invigorationof research interest and empirical progress over the past decade. Studies investigating the cognitive mechanisms underlying the condition have yielded insight into neural processes behind such cognitive operations as attention, memory, spatial phenomenologyand cross-modal processes. However...
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Philosophers and cognitive scientists address the relationships among the senses and the connections between conscious experiences that form unified wholes. In this volume, cognitive scientists and philosophers examine two closely related aspects of mind and mental functioning: the relationships among the various senses and the links that connect d...
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The paper starts out by distinguishing two closely related hypotheses about extended cognition. According to the strong hypothesis, there are no intrinsic representations in the brain. This is a version of the extended-mind view defended by Andy Clark and Richard Menary. On the weak hypothesis, there are intrinsic representations in the brain but s...
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The article provides the state of the art on the debate about whether the semantics of ‘look’ statements commits us to any particular theory of perceptual experience. The debate began with Frank Jackson's argument that ‘look’ statements commit us to a sense-datum theory of perception. Thinkers from different camps have since then offered various re...
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In her response to my “Seeing as a Non-Experiental Mental State: The Case from Synesthesia and Visual Imagery” Ophelia Deroy presents an argument for an interesting new account of synesthesia. On this account, synesthesia can be thought of as “a perceptual state (e.g. of a letter)” that is “changed or enriched by the incorporation of a conscious me...
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There is little doubt that we perceive the world as tensed—that is, as consisting of a past, present and future each with a different ontological status—and transient—that is, as involving a passage of time. We also have the ability to execute precisely timed behaviors that appear to depend upon making correct temporal judgments about which changes...
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This chapter is about the science of vision and memory in relation to virtue epistemology. My argument will turn on the point that the mechanisms underlying vision and knowledge that, according to current neuroscience, remain non-conscious can’t be considered virtuous mechanisms even if they are highly reliable. Hence, I argue, virtue epistemology...
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Newell & Shanks (N&S) argue that an explanation for blindsight need not appeal to unconscious brain processes, citing research indicating that the condition merely reflects degraded visual experience. We reply that other evidence suggests blindsighters' predictive behavior under forced choice reflects cognitive access to low-level visual informatio...
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The paper argues that the English verb ‘to see’ can denote three different kinds of conscious states of seeing, involving visual experiences, visual seeming states and introspective seeming states, respectively. The case for the claim that there are three kinds of seeing comes from synesthesia and visual imagery. Synesthesia is a relatively rare ne...
Article
Scott Soames has recently argued that traditional accounts of propositions as n-tuples or sets of objects and properties or functions from worlds to extensions cannot adequately explain how these abstract entities come to represent the world. Soames' new cognitive theory solves this problem by taking propositions to be derived from agents represent...
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Though synesthesia research has seen a huge growth in recent decades, and tremendous progress has been made in terms of understanding the mechanism and cause of synesthesia, we are still left mostly in the dark when it comes to the mechanistic commonalities (if any) among developmental, acquired and drug-induced synesthesia. We know that many forms...
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Tensism holds that the present moment has a special status that sets it apart from the past and the future, independently of perceivers. One of the main objections to this view has been Einstein's argument from special relativity, which aims at showing that absolute simultaneity is a myth. We argue that the moving observer in a causal variant of Ei...

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E.g., neutral or affective?

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