This paper examines the problem of how we distinguish, phenomenologically, sensory imagination from perception. I suggest that philosophical discussions of this issue have been hampered by a surprising failure to carefully distinguish what is involved in our awareness of being in a state of imagining, from our awareness of the imagistic content. Rectifying this allows us, first, to gain a clearer insight into the problem at issue, and it also allows for a new interpretation of the so-called ‘Perky effect’, whereby subjects supposedly confuse imagining for perceiving. Second, it allows us to give a more nuanced account of reality monitoring and of the metacognitive mechanisms underpinning the phenomenal features we rely upon to distinguish state from content.

This paper examines two phenomena that are usually treated separately but which resemble each other insofar as they both raise questions concerning the difference, if there is one, between so-called ‘real’ and ‘as if’ emotions: affective memory and imagined emotion. The existence of both states has been explicitly denied, and there are very few positive accounts of either. I will argue that there are no good grounds for scepticism about the existence of ‘as if’ emotions, but also that the existing positive accounts of them are all explanatorily inadequate. Comparing the two phenomena directly, I contend, allows us to defend the existence of both by showing how they essentially involve the same ‘affective bodily imagery’. The final part of the paper offers an original, empirically informed account of the nature of this imagery, the role it plays in ‘as if’ emotions, and how it may help illuminate some important connections between memory, imagination, and emotion.

The present chapter focuses on the role of imagery in scientific reasoning. The main questions to be considered, are: 1) what role does visualisation play in scientific reasoning? and hence 2) what epistemic credentials, if any, does visualising have in scientific reasoning? In addressing these issues, we will look at fictional accounts of scientific models, the transparency of imagining, and the nature of epistemic and aesthetic feelings. In brief, two key moves need to be made to secure the epistemic standing of sensory imagining in science. First, in exploring the differences between the transparency of perceptual and imaginative experiences, we need a proper appraisal of the relationship between sensory imagining and affect, and in particular the affective feelings that are manifestations of aesthetic experience. Second, we need to focus our attention on the notion of understanding, rather than truth or knowledge.

This paper explores some connections between flavour perception, emotion, and temporal experience. Focussing on the question, If you like that taste of X and I do not, are we tasting the same thing X?, I will approach it by looking at some differences between how experts and nonexperts 'taste'. I will eventually answer that if by 'the same thing' we mean the overall flavour profile of a complex sensory object, then the answer must be negative. I will argue that there is indeed a relatively trivial sense in which one tastes the same thing, but that this is not an experience of flavour. In the process I will reject the view that there are real emergent flavour properties.

This paper explores the role of aesthetic judgements in mathematics by focussing on the relationship between the epistemic and aesthetic criteria employed in such judgements, and on the nature of the psychological experiences underpinning them. I claim that aesthetic judgements in mathematics are plausibly understood as expressions of what I will call 'aesthetic-epistemic feelings' that serve a genuine cognitive and epistemic function. I will then propose a naturalistic account of these feelings in terms of sub-personal processes of representing and assessing the relation between cognitive processes and certain properties of the stimuli at which they are directed.

Hamvas, Béla. 2016. The Philosophy of Wine (trans. Peter Sherwood). Budapest: Medio Kiadó. 115 pp.

The nature of the general connection between emotion and value, and of the various connections between specific emotions and values, lies at the heart of philosophical discussion of the emotions. It is also central to some accounts of the nature of value itself, of value in general but also of the specific values studied within particular philosophical domains. These issues all form the subject matter of this article, and they in turn are all connected by two main questions: (i) How do emotions disclose or create values? (ii) What are the epistemic credentials of emotion in justifying evaluative thought and discourse? This second question obviously presupposes some answer to the first question concerning the way in which emotions reveal, constitute, or create value.

Why are we willing to put ourselves through the painful, sometimes harrowing experiences that certain works of art provide? This way of putting the problem perhaps lacks the punchy paradoxical-sounding formulation responsible for spilling so much philosophical ink -'How can we find pleasure in such painful experiences?' — yet in avoiding the simplistic pleasure-in-pain dichotomy responsible for the so-called 'paradox of tragedy', it allows us to focus more intently on understanding the nature of the negative experiences that we are thus motivated to pursue.

Philosophers have long been interested in the various similarities and differences between perception and imagination. One of the most interesting purported differences is the relationship that attention bears to each. Colin McGinn (2004), especially, has provided a comprehensive discussion of these relations, pointing out that imagery, unlike perceptual experiences (percepts), essentially requires attention, presents no equivalent of the visual field for attention to explore, lacks saturation, and cannot provide new information about what is imagined. Moreover, McGinn and others have also maintained that images, like percepts, are transparent. In this paper I will examine all of these claims, arguing first that there are few good reasons to accept the differences between imagery and perceptual experiences in respect of the role that attention is supposed to play in each, and secondly, that in any case the transparency claim is in tension with the other claims made about imagery. I conclude that the most salient difference between imagination and perception consists in the non-attributive phenomenology of the former. Finally, I turn briefly to some implications of this characteristic of imagining for the nature of pictorial depiction, arguing against the plausibility of accounts that attempt to explain it by appealing to the imagination.

This paper provides an account of the nature of our appreciation of wine, and a defence of the aesthetic value of tastes and smells. Focusing primarily on Roger Scruton's recent claims, I argue against him that our appreciation of wine meets his own constraints on aesthetic interest and, moreover, that the cultural significance he grants to wine is in large part grounded in its aesthetic value. I show that Scruton's claims are thus in tension with each other, not because he has misunderstood the nature of aesthetic interest, but because he fails to appreciate the aesthetic capabilities of wine. Appealing to a well-known argument of Kendall Walton's, I defend the aesthetic interest and value of tastes and smells by demonstrating that our judgements of wine can be correct or incorrect relative to the categories that govern its production and proper appreciation and understanding. I thereby show that tastes and smells can attain aesthetic significance in virtue of the types of objects they constitute. In particular, I hold that this significance, in the case of wine, rests in large part on its ability to be expressive and to embody certain kinds of meaning.

The issue of Fitting Attitudes inherit the much-discussed 'wrong kind of reason' problem (WKR) that afflicts some accounts. The problem remained to attempts to give an account of FA is to specify the right kinds of reasons, to specify the right notion of fittingness. A number of solutions have been proposed to solve WKR. 'Conceptual thesis' about attitude formation and the 'psychological thesis'. The text discusses both of it, raising some questions about them, but also wish to emphasize that the understanding of FA that is supposed to lead to WKR is problematic. An important thing to be brought seems to be that, when applied to essentially contestable concepts, fitting attitude analyses, understood properly (i.e. without unwarranted presuppositions about the very value in dispute) will not result in WKR as conceived in the kinds of examples given earlier. Exploring the issue of Fitting Attitudes and giving to it an alternative account is the main goal of the present paper.

Philosophers have long been concerned with what is generally known as the paradox of fiction. This is the prima facie puzzling phenomenon that we appear to have emotional responses to fictional characters, events and situations that we know to be fictional, and yet our ordinary, everyday emotional responses in non-fictional contexts appear to possess as essential components various features that preclude their being directed at fiction. The two such features generally cited are (a) existential beliefs about the relevant objects and their properties and (b) connections to behaviour and action. Henceforth I will normally refer to the relevant responses as ‘F-emotions,’ where this is shorthand for ‘fiction-directed emotions.’ The paradox has spawned a large literature and there are a number of more or less plausible explanations of it on the market. Nonetheless, to my mind no account has yet succeeded in providing a comprehensive resolution, primarily because the paradox raises some deep and complex issues about the nature of our engagement with fiction, the relationship between imagination, belief and emotion, and different modes of attention, that have yet to be adequately recognised by philosophers working on this topic, let alone discussed. This paper aims to make some progress in exploring these issues by addressing and offering a solution to one central problem for which no other account of the paradox has yet provided an adequate solution. I shall refer to it as the ‘Knowledge Problem’: