2023/07/05 by Aleksandra Mroczko-Wąsowicz · 1 voice
Neuroscience · Arts and Humanities · #Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment #Face Recognition and Perception #Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics
paper · pdf · doi:10.33735/phimisci.2023.10247
openalex publication_date 2023/07/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Dustin Stokes’s book contributes to one of the continuing debates in empirically informed philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences which concerns the relation between thought and perception. The book sheds new light on such questions as: whether vision is modular, informationally encapsulated, and thus cognitively impenetrable or rather the opposite – whether it is malleable and sensitive to further improvements by cognitive states. Stokes supports the latter by referring to empirical evidence on perceptual expertise. Proponents of the modular and malleable architectures of the mind offer different explanations of the phenomena involved in perceptual expertise, viz. object identification and categorization. Interestingly, both views assume some kind of automaticity of the recognitional capacities for identifying and categorizing objects. In this article, I examine the influence of perceptual expertise on object recognition and how the seeming automaticity of object recognition may be approached from the modularist and antimodularist (malleabilist) perspectives.