CFP: Call for Papers: Book Symposium on Stokes's "Thinking and Perceiving" (2021, Routledge)

In the second quarter of 2023, Philosophy and the Mind Sciences will publish a book symposium on Dustin Stokes’s Thinking and Perceiving (Routledge 2021). It will include a précis, critical commentaries, and a reply by the author. We hereby invite proposals for commentaries for this symposium.

About the book: 

Human beings are in contact with the world through their minds. One can make sensory perceptual contact with the world: One sees the tree and hears its leaves flutter. And one makes cognitive contact with the world: One forms beliefs about the tree, memories of how it was in the past, and expectations of how it will be in the future. Can the first, perception, be influenced in important ways by the second, cognition? Do cognitive states such as memories, beliefs, and expectations affect what one perceives through the senses? And what is the importance of these possible relations to how we theorize and understand the human mind? 

This book 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 centres around cases of perceptual expertise. Experts in a wide variety of domains—radiology, birdwatching, elite athletics, fingerprint examination—have been empirically studied using behavioural, 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.   

You can find a preprint of the précis here: https://philpapers.org/rec/STOPO_-13.

About the author: Dustin Stokes is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah. He works in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, as well as epistemology and aesthetics. 

About the symposium: The symposium will consist of a précis by the author, short commentaries (approx. 1.000-3.000 words), and a reply by the author.

The symposium will be edited by Regina Fabry and Sascha Benjamin Fink and will, among others, feature invited commentaries by Zoe Drayson and Christopher Mole.

We hereby invite proposals for additional commentaries. Proposals should be 100-300 words, prepared for blind review. Proposals should indicate clearly which aspect(s) of the book the commentary will focus on and outline the argument to be made or the main ideas to be discussed.

Proposals are due by 1st of December, with decisions to be made by 15 December 2022. 

Accepted commentaries (around 1000-3000 words) will be due on 15 February 2023. Those commentaries will be peer reviewed, with an approximate due date of final versions of 15 March 2023.  Publication is predicted to be late April, early May 2023.

Manuscripts will only be sent out for review if the proposal was accepted. However, acceptance of the proposal does not guarantee publication of the full commentary.

Please submit your proposal to [email protected].

Please send any questions you may have about the symposium to [email protected].

About the journal: Philosophy and the Mind Sciences (PhiMiSci) focuses on the intersection between philosophy and the empirical mind sciences. PhiMiSci has an international board of editors and editorial advisors and is a peer-reviewed, not-for-profit, diamond open-access journal that is free of costs for authors and readers. You can read all previous issues at https://philosophymindscience.org/.