Table of Contents
Foreword v
1 Introduction: What is Demonstrative Thought and How to Explain it? 1
1.1 Four properties of demonstrative thought 1
1.2 Demonstrative thoughts as attention-based mental activities with singular demonstrative contents 5
1.3 The mode/content proposal (and its limits) 8
1.4 Perceptualist approaches to demonstrative thought 12
1.5 Conceptualist approaches to demonstrative thought 17
1.6 An alternative proposal (and the road ahead) 21
2 Perceptualist Approaches to Demonstrative Thought 25
2.1 Perception as natural predication 25
2.2 Direct and indirect reference-fixing mechanisms 29
2.3 Attention-based perceptualism 31
2.4 Non-attentional perceptualism 38
2.5 Final remarks 41
3 Attention-based Perceptualist Theories of Demonstrative Thought 43
3.1 John Campbell 43
3.1.1 Experiential highlighting 43
3.1.2 Attention and feature binding 49
3.1.3 Experiential highlighting again 53
3.2 Wayne Wu 58
3.2.1 Wu's argument against conscious attention as visual selection 58
3.2.2 Synchronic and diachronic phenomenal salience 59
3.2.3 The cognitive view of synchronic phenomenal salience 62
3.2.4 The agentive view of synchronic phenomenal salience 67
3.2.5 Attention as selection for action 71
3.3 James Stazicker 76
3.3.1 Conscious attention without synchronic phenomenal salience 76
3.3.2 Attention to thought 78
3.3.3 Demonstrative thought as cognitive attention 81
4 Non-attentional Perceptualist Theories of Demonstrative Thought 90
4.1 Joseph Levine 90
4.1.1 Intentionally mediated vs. direct meta-semantic mechanisms 90
4.1.2 Multiple object tracking and pre-attentive object representations 95
4.1.3 An attentional account of multiple object tracking 99
4.1.4 The evidence from subitizing 103
4.2 Athanassios Raftopoulos 108
4.2.1 Perception, attention and cognition 108
4.2.2 Three levels of visual processing 113
4.2.3 Proto-objects and the coherence problem 117
4.3 Mohan Matthen 120
4.3.1 Seeing objects versus seeing pictures 120
4.3.2 Motion-guiding vision and visual reference 122
4.3.3 Referring to objects without motion-guiding vision 129
4.3.4 Spatial significance 133
5 The Conceptualist Challenge to Demonstrative Thought 138
5.1 Introduction: the story so far 138
5.2 The conceptualist challenge to perceptualism: preliminaries 142
5.3 The orthodox view of practical knowledge 153
5.4 The conceptualist challenge revisited 157
5.5 On the idea of an 'objective' conception of space 160
5.6 The cognitive map strategy (and its limits) 168
5.7 Campbell on the role of physical objects in spatial thinking 175
6 The Pragmatic View of Demonstrative Thought (I): Practical Knowledge 180
6.1 Introduction: conceptualism and the explanatory gap 180
6.2 Practical and image-like knowledge 188
6.3 Practical knowledge and space 194
6.4 The historical-dispositional account (and its limits) 198
6.5 Two ways of knowing about speed (again) 206
6.6 The cognitive space 210
6.7 Stabilization and movement in cognitive space 215
7 The Pragmatic View of Demonstrative Thought (II): Object Representation 222
7.1 Introduction: practical knowledge and object representation 222
7.2 Bermudez's object properties model of object perception 225
7.3 The graded knowledge approach: beyond perceptual sensitivity 235
7.4 Natural stabilization and the prefrontal cortex 239
7.5 A pragmatist answer to the conceptualist challenge 244
7.6 Natural de-stabilization 251
7.7 A new role for sortal concepts 255
7.8 Final considerations 259
Bibliography 263
Index 273
