Berit Brogaard

University of Miami, Philosophy, Faculty Member

Followers

1,835

Following

Co-authors

Public Views

Interests

Uploads

Papers by Berit Brogaard

Sex by Deception

The Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology, Edited by: Manuel Vargas and John M. Doris, 2022

In this chapter I will use sex by deception as a case study for highlighting some of the trickies... more 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, consen sual sex, sexual rights, sexual autonomy, sexual individuality, and disrespectful sex. I be gin with a discussion of morally wrong sex as rooted in the breach of five sexual liberty rights that are derived from our fundamental human liberty rights: sexual self-possession, sexual autonomy, sexual individuality, sexual dignity, and sexual privacy. In light of this discussion, I then examine a puzzle about sex by deception-a puzzle which at first may seem to compel us to define 'rape' strictly in terms of 'physical force or threat' rather than 'sexual autonomy'. I proceed by presenting an argument against the view that, as a rule, sex by deception undermines consent. Even when sex by deception does not compro mise consent, I argue that it nonetheless is inimical to the respect we owe all persons, not because it vitiates sexual autonomy and thereby obstructs the possibility of consent, but because it fails to respect other sexual rights that we have, such as our rights to sexual dignity, individuality, or privacy.

Download

Disputatio’s Symposium on Berit Brogaard’s Transient Truths Oxford University Press, 2012 Replies to Giuliano Torrengo

I would like to start by thanking my commentators for their insightful comments, suggestions and ... more I would like to start by thanking my commentators for their insightful comments, suggestions and objections. Their insights will no doubt help further discussion of temporalism and eternalism in the future and have already helped me make my own thoughts more precise. I will reply to their objections in the order that seemed most natural to me. Torrengo addresses the issue of whether temporalism has metaphysical implications, Zeman sets forth concerns of a methodological type and Tsompanidis raises objections to the book’s main positive arguments. I will reply to my commentators in this order. Torrengo addresses the interesting and very current question of whether the debate about temporalism versus eternalism has any bearing on the debate about presentism versus metaphysical eternalism. In the book I address this issue in a couple of places. One thing I say is that semantic eternalism seems inconsistent with presentism, a particular version of the A-theory. The argument is this. Pre...

format_quoteThe book contends that if presentism is true, certain eternal propositions like scheduled events do not currently exist, challenging presentism.format_quote

Download

Consciousness and Knowledge

The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness, 2020

This chapter focuses on the relationship between consciousness and knowledge, and in particular o... more This chapter focuses on the relationship between consciousness and knowledge, and in particular on the role perceptual consciousness might play in justifying beliefs about the external world. A version of phenomenal dogmatism is outlined according to which perceptual experiences immediately, prima facie justify certain select parts of their content, and do so in virtue of their having a distinctive phenomenology with respect to those contents. Along the way various issues are considered in connection with this core theme, including the possibility of immediate justification, the dispute between representational and relational views of perception, the epistemic significance of cognitive penetration, the question of whether perceptual experiences are composed of more basic sensations and seemings, and questions about the existence and epistemic significance of high-level content. A concluding section briefly considers how some of the topics pursued here might generalize beyond percept...

Download

Multisensory Consciousness and Synesthesia

The Routledge Handbook Of Consciousness, 2018

Download

The Philosophy and Psychology of Ambivalence

The Philosophy and Psychology of Ambivalence, 2020

This book collects original essays by top scholars that address questions about the nature, origi... more This book collects original essays by top scholars that address questions about the nature, origins, and effects of ambivalence. While the nature of agency has received an enormous amount of attention, relatively little has been written about ambivalence or how it relates to topics such as agency, rationality, justification, knowledge, autonomy, self-governance, well-being, social cognition, and various other topics. Ambivalence presents unique questions related to many major philosophical debates. For example, it relates to debates about virtues, rationality, and decisionmaking, agency or authenticity, emotions, and social or political metacognition. It is also relevant to a variety of larger debates in philosophy and psychology, including nature vs. nature, objectivity vs. subjectivity, or nomothetic vs. idiographic. The essays in this book offer novel and wide-ranging perspectives on this emerging philosophical topic. They will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in ethics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, and social cognition.

Download

Implicit biases in visually guided action

Synthese, 2020

For almost half a century dual-stream advocates have vigorously defended the view that there are ... more 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 perceptual and memory systems in the ventral stream are relatively shielded from the action system in the dorsal stream. In recent years, this view has come under scrutiny. Evidence points to two overlapping action pathways: a dorso-dorsal pathway that calculates features of the object to be acted on, and a ventro-dorsal pathway that transmits stored information about skilled object use from the ventral stream to the dorso-dorsal pathway. This evidence suggests that stored information may exert significantly more influence on visually guided action than hitherto assumed. I argue that this, in turn, supports the notion of skilled automatic action that is nonetheless agential. My focus here will be on actions influenced by implicit biases (stereotypes/prejudices). Action that is biased in this way, I argue, is in an important sense intentional and agential.

format_quoteEvidence now suggests overlapping action pathways in the brain, conflicting with the traditional dual-stream hypothesis.format_quote

Download

Replies to Giuliano Torrengo, Dan Zeman and Vasilis Tsompanidis

Disputatio, 2013

Download

Précis

Disputatio, 2013

Transient Truths is a part of a larger philosophical project that I have been interested in since... more Transient Truths is a part of a larger philosophical project that I have been interested in since I first started thinking about philosophical issues relating to the reality of time and tense. One issue having to do with the reality of time and tense is metaphysical. Some hold that tense is a feature of language but not of propositions, mental content or the world. On this B-theoretical view, the present moment is socalled, not because it is special, but because we perceptually experience only present entities. Others think that tense can be a feature of all of these entities. If the world is tensed, then the present has a different ontological status than the past and the future. I fall into the latter camp of 'serious tensers'. In previous work I have defended presentism, a form of serious tensism that implies that only present entities exist (e.g. Brogaard 2013a). The main goal of Transient Truths, however, was not to defend the view that the present moment is special but to provide a book-length defense of a particular theory of propositions known as 'temporalism'. To a first approximation, temporalism is the view that there are propositions that can change their truth-values across time. There is no straightforward argumentative route from this view to A-theoretical views about time and tense. In fact, as I argue in Chapter 7, there is some reason to think that a B-theorist cannot adequately express her views if she rejects the temporalist approach to language. Although temporalism does not imply that the A-theory is correct, I do think that the debate has potential metaphysical implications. (Semantic) eternalism, the opponent view to the effect that all propositions have their truth-values eternally, together with some widely held assumptions, appears to have B-theoretical implications. One argument may run as follows. Propositions that are eternally true are not tensed. For any true fact there is at least one corresponding true

Download

Deaf hearing: Implicit discrimination of auditory content in a patient with mixed hearing loss

Philosophical Psychology, 2017

We describe a patient LS, profoundly deaf in both ears from birth, with underdeveloped superior t... more 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 forcedchoice paradigm in which he is asked to consciously respond, he is unable to make above-chance judgments about the presence or location of sounds. However, he is able to make abovechance judgments about the content of sounds presented to him under forced-choice conditions. We demonstrated that LS has faint sensations from auditory stimuli, but questionable awareness of auditory content. LS thus has a form of type-2 deaf hearing with respect to auditory content. As in the case of a subject with acquired deafness and deaf hearing reported on a previous occasion, LS's condition of deaf hearing is akin in some respects to type-2 blindsight. As for the case of type 2 blindsight the case indicates that a form of conscious hearing can arise in the absence of a fully developed auditory cortex.

Download

Pre-cueing, Perceptual Learning and Cognitive Penetration

Frontiers in psychology, 2017

: "If a cognitive system contains information R such that vision computes over R where this compu... more

Download

Is Color Experience Cognitively Penetrable?

Topics in cognitive science, Jan 31, 2016

Is color experience cognitively penetrable? Some philosophers have recently argued that it is. In... more 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 perceptual content by non-perceptual principles and genuine cognitive penetration. We use this distinction to show that studies suggesting that color experience can be modulated by factors of the cognitive system do not establish that color experience is cognitively penetrable. Additionally, we argue that even if color experience turns out to be modulated by color-related beliefs and knowledge beyond non-perceptual principles, it does not follow that color experience is cognitively penetrable since the experiences of determinate hues involve post-perceptual processes. We conclude with a brief discussion of the implications that these ideas ma...

Cortical Color and the Cognitive Sciences

Topics in cognitive science, Jan 21, 2016

Back when researchers thought about the various forms that color vision could take, the focus was... more 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 to early vision but extend to cognition. Direct cortical connections from higher-level areas to lower-level areas have been found throughout the brain. One of the classic questions in cognitive science is whether perception is influenced, and if so to what extent, by cognition and whether a clear distinction can be drawn between perception and cognition. Since perception is seen as providing justification for our beliefs about properties in the external world, these questions also have metaphysical and epistemological significance. The aim of this paper is to highlight some of the areas where research on color perception can shed new ligh...

Against Emotional Dogmatism

Philosophical Issues, 2016

It may seem that when you have an emotional response to a perceived object or event that makes it... more 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 about emotional justification’. We defend a view of the structure of emotional awareness according to which the objects of emotional awareness are derived from other experiences such as bodily sensation, inner awareness, sensory perception, memory, and imagination. On this basis, we argue that dogmatism about emotional justification is an untenable position, regardless of whether the special feature of an immediate justifier that makes it an immediate justifier is its presentational phenomenology or its evidence insensitivity.

What Can Neuroscience Tell Us about the Hard Problem of Consciousness?

Frontiers in Neuroscience, 2016

Download

Parenting and the loss of autonomy

The Philosophers' Magazine, 2016

Download

Introduction: Epistemic Modals

Topoi, 2016

you are upset'' and can be used to convey different types of modality depending on contextual fac... more you are upset'' and can be used to convey different types of modality depending on contextual factors. When used epistemically, these expressions mark the necessity or possibility of an underlying or prejacent proposition relative to a body of evidence or knowledge. Consider, for example, the following exchange between three colleagues who are having lunch in the office break room:

Download

Descriptions: Predicates or Quantifiers?

In this paper I revisit the main arguments for a predicate analysis of descriptions in order to d... more In this paper I revisit the main arguments for a predicate analysis of descriptions in order to determine whether they do in fact undermine Russell&amp;#x27;s theory. I argue that while the arguments without doubt provide powerful evidence against Russell&amp;#x27;s original theory, it is far from clear that they tell against a quantificational account of descriptions.

Do Synesthetic Colors Grab Attention in Visual Search?

Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2015

Recent research on synesthesia has focused on how the condition may depend on selective attention... more 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 to the location of the inducer or whether selective attention is required to act as a unique feature during visual search. If synesthetic experiences are elicited by inducers (e.g., digits) without selective attention, then a target that is distinct from the distractors by virtue of its unique synesthetic color should capture attention. This should lead to efficiency in the search that is analogous to the efficiency in searches involving unique display colors (e.g., a display of red digits among black). If, however, an inducer does not elicit a synesthetic color until the subject selectively attends to it, then the search should be as inefficient as for control subjects. We found that, not only does synesthesia not provide an advantage in complicated visual search tasks, it offers a slight disadvantage, supporting the re-entrant processing hypothesis about the mechanism underlying synesthesia.

The Center Must Not Hold: White Women Philosophers on the Whiteness of Philosophy

African American Review, 2011

Visual for Action and the Contents of Perception

The Journal of Philosophy

Berit Brogaard

Uploads

Papers by Berit Brogaard

Log In