Philosophy

Intellectual humility and argumentation

INTELLECTUAL HUMILITY AND ARGUMENTATION ANDREW ABERDEIN∗ In this chapter I argue that intellectual humility is related to argumentation in several distinct but mutually supporting ways. I begin by drawing connections between humility and two topics of long-standing importance to the evaluation of informal arguments: the ad verecundiam fallacy and the principle of charity. I then explore the more explicit role that humility plays in recent work on critical thinking dispositions, deliberative virtues, and virtue theories of argumentation. 1. Argumentum ad Verecundiam Modern textbook treatments of informal fallacies offer "argumentum ad verecundiam" as an alternative name for "appeal to illegitimate authority" (for example, Copi et al., 2007, p. 51). However, "verecundiam" is not Latin for illegitimate authority; it is Latin for modesty, reverence, shame, or, perhaps, humility. Together with argumentum ad hominem and argumentum ad ignorantiam, argumentum ad verecundiam owes its name to John Locke. Locke does not explicitly characterize any of these arguments as fallacies, but he does say that they are "arguments, that men, in their reasonings with others, do ordinarily make use of, to prevail on their assent; or, at least, so to awe them, as to silence their opposition" (Locke, 1836, IV.xvii.19). As Locke explains, the trick to ad verecundiam argumentation, is to allege the opinions of men, whose parts, learning, eminency, power, or some other cause has gained a name, and settled their reputation in the common esteem with some kind of authority. When men are established in any kind of dignity, it is thought a breach of modesty for others to derogate any way from it, and question the authority of men, who are in possession of it. This is apt to be censured as carrying with it too much of pride, when a man does not readily yield to the determination of approved authors, which is wont to be received with respect and submission by others: and it is looked upon as insolence for a man to set up and adhere to his own opinion against the current stream of antiquity, or to put it in the balance against that of some learned doctor, or otherwise approved writer. Whoever backs his tenets with such authorities, thinks he ought thereby to carry the cause, and is ready to style it "impudence" in any one who shall stand out against them. This I think may be called argumentum ad verecundiam (ibid.). Locke diagnoses the weakness of such argumentation as taking "another man's opinion to be right, because I, out of respect, or any other consideration but that of conviction, will not contradict him" (ibid.). In modern treatments of this argument, as the fallacy of appeal to illegitimate authority, it is implicitly contrasted with a non-fallacious pattern of argument: appeal to legitimate authority, or more commonly, appeal to expert opinion. Hence modern treatments of the ∗School of Arts & Communication, Florida Institute of Technology, Melbourne FL. Date: July 7, 2019. 1 2 ANDREW ABERDEIN fallacy are often much concerned with the recognition of legitimate expertise. In this respect, the ad verecundiam, like several other well-established fallacies, has somewhat drifted from its original designation. Firstly, Locke, as a good empiricist, is prepared to throw doubt on any appeal to authority. Secondly, Locke goes further than recent accounts into the psychological mechanism whereby ad verecundiam arguments succeed. This is the point at which humility becomes relevant. Although Locke does not directly invoke humility in his brief discussion of the ad verecundiam, he is clearly in the near vicinity: indeed, he does employ cognate terms, such as modesty, and antonyms, such as pride. Ian James Kidd defends an account of intellectual humility as "a virtue for the management of intellectual confidence" (Kidd, 2016, p. 396). The intellectually humble would thereby manifest appropriate levels of intellectual confidence, avoiding both the overand under-valuation of their intellectual circumstances (succumbing neither to the Dunning-Kruger Effect nor to Imposter Syndrome, as it were). On such an account, at least some instances of appeal to illegitimate authority may be seen as manifesting the associated vice of deficiency in deferring to someone else's arguments, since lacking confidence in your own. The corresponding vice of excess would represent overconfidence in the face of legitimate authority. This has received less attention in discussion of fallacies. However, the problems it can cause have been addressed by Michelle Ciurria and Khameiel Altamimi, who observe that standard treatments of ad verecundiam are silent "when an appeal to authority has been illegitimately dismissed due to the operation of epistemic injustice or epistemic irresponsibility on the part of a judge or community" (Ciurria and Altamimi, 2014, p. 451). As I have observed elsewhere, such cases may best be understood as a distinct fallacy, dual to the ad verecundiam (Aberdein, 2016a, p. 421). At least on Kidd's account of the virtue, instances of both the ad verecundiam and its dual could be attributed to their proponents' lack of intellectual humility. 2. Principle of Charity Thomas Aquinas maintained that "humility necessarily accompanies charity" (quoted in Overmyer, 2015, p. 658). Nonetheless, the sense in which charity is invoked in argumentation may initially seem somewhat distant from humility. As with the ad verecundiam, it is possible to precisely date the inception of the "principle of charity": it originates in an otherwise obscure article by the philosopher Neil Wilson, from which it was swiftly raised to much greater fame by W. V. O. Quine.1 For Wilson, the principle of charity requires that we favour that interpretation of a word "which will make the largest possible number of [the speaker's] statements true" (Wilson, 1959, p. 532). Quine applies it to somewhat broader purpose, as embodying the "common sense" that "one's interlocutor's silliness, beyond a certain point, is less likely than bad translation" (Quine, 1960, p. 59). In the hands of Donald Davidson, the principle of charity was to become a major methodological maxim: one that "counsels us quite generally to prefer theories of interpretation that minimize disagreement" (Davidson, 1984, p. xvii). Unsurprisingly, the attention paid to the principle of charity in the philosophy of language soon crossed over into logic. In a useful survey, the argumentation theorist Ralph Johnson traces the earliest appeal to a principle of charity in a logic textbook to three works published in the mid-1970s. (I have been unable to find any earlier.) However, as Johnson complains, these three works already employ 1It should be noted that, although the explicit invocation of a principle of charity can be dated with confidence to the 1950s, the underlying sense of charity is manifestly older: Thomas Carlyle, for one, could write of a "charitable reading" almost a century earlier (Carlyle, 1865, p. 560). INTELLECTUAL HUMILITY AND ARGUMENTATION 3 the principle in distinct ways. For Stephen Thomas, charity mandates that we read a passage as non-argumentative rather than ascribe bad reasoning to its author (Thomas, 1973, p. 9). Robert Baum applies the principle to the evaluation of enthymemes, and construes it as requiring us "to add whatever premises are needed to make the argument as good as possible" (Baum, 1975, p. 15). Michael Scriven offers a much more sweeping definition. For him, the "Principle of Charity requires that we make the best, rather than the worst, possible interpretation of the material we're studying" (Scriven, 1976, p. 71). He glosses this in explicitly ethical terms, as requiring fairness or justice in criticism. Johnson's own definition hews closest to Scriven: "The Principle of Charity which governs all levels of argument analysis is that the critic should provide the best possible interpretation of the material under consideration" (Johnson, 1984, p. 5). He moderates this definition with a restriction on the circumstances in which the critic is so obligated: "the heavy artillery of argument analysis, monitored by the requirements of the Principle of Charity, is to be pressed into service only when one confronts (i) a fully expressed argument (ii) from a serious arguer (iii) on a serious matter" (Johnson, 1984, p. 8). The critical thinking theorist Richard Paul, to whose work we will shortly turn, proposes a similar definition to Johnson's, but makes the connection to humility explicit: "We must feel obliged to hear [views we oppose] in their strongest form to ensure that we do not condemn them out of our own ignorance and bias. At this point we come full circle back to where we began: the need for intellectual humility" (Paul, 2000, p. 170). Here Paul explicitly invokes humility in implicit support of a thesis familiar from Mill's On Liberty: "there is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides: it is when they attend only to one that errors harden into prejudices" (Mill, 1977, p. 257). And, if we should listen to the other side, we should listen to them at their best. As with the ad verecundiam, the principle of charity may be understood as a mean between complementary vices, here with respect to interpretation of another's arguments rather than acceptance of their premisses. The vice of deficiency may take the form of wilfully obtuse misinterpretation, as in the straw man fallacy; the vice of excess what Scott Aikin and John Casey have characterized as "a little noticed variety of straw man-the distortion which results in being overly charitable to someone's argument, or, as we shall call it, the iron man" (Aikin and Casey, 2016, p. 432). Once again we have uncovered an unfamiliar fallacy dual to a more familiar fallacy. In Kidd's terms, these extremes may also be seen as manifesting the underor over-regulation of intellectual confidence, whether arrogantly twisting an argument into a straw man or obsequiously striving to reinterpret it as an iron man. Thereby each exhibits a failure of humility. 3. Critical Thinking Dispositions Modern argumentation theory is a synthesis of several older research programmes; one of the most important of these is the critical thinking movement. From a trickle at mid century, by the 1980s this had grown into a major programme of educational reform, focussed on improving the thinking abilities of schoolchildren, students, and society at large. For most theorists of critical thinking, such abilities comprise not just a skillset, but also "tendencies, propensities, or inclinations people have to think in particular ways in particular contexts . . . [which] are not the same as, or reducible to, either formal rules of good thinking or specific behaviors or patterns of behavior" (Siegel, 1999, p. 220). Such dispositions are seen as essential to the successful internalization of critical thinking techniques: they present a response to the "transfer problem", that of ensuring 4 ANDREW ABERDEIN that learners go on to use their newly acquired skills outside the classroom (Bereiter, 1995; Bowell and Kingsbury, 2015). Different theorists propose different lists of dispositions, but most such lists include "open-mindedness, fair-mindedness, independent-mindedness, an inquiring attitude, and respect for others in group inquiry and deliberation" (Bailin and Siegel, 2003, p. 183). These dispositions sound more than a little like virtues, an identity some theorists make explicit. Indeed Sharon Bailin and Mark Battersby argue that intellectual virtues are superior to dispositions in a characterization of critical thinking, since "virtues are not psychological reifications added on to the skills of reasoning, but are inherent to the practice of inquiry and come out of appreciation of the nature of the practice" (Bailin and Battersby, 2007, p. 113). They conclude that virtues are better placed to capture the intrinsic value of reason. However, none of the virtues they propose sounds that much like humility. Perhaps the most overt invocation of virtue language by a major proponent of critical thinking lies in the work of Richard Paul. Paul draws a distinction between weak and strong sense critical thinking. The latter comprises "a) an ability to question one's own framework of thought, b) an ability to reconstruct sympathetically and imaginatively the strongest versions of points of view and frameworks of thought opposed to one's own, and c) an ability to reason dialectically (multilogically) to determine when one's own point of view is weakest and when an opposing point of view is strongest" (Paul, 1990, p. 185). As we saw in the previous sections, such abilities can plausibly be seen to depend, amongst other virtues, upon intellectual humility. Indeed, this is a relationship which Paul makes explicit: "To cultivate the kind of intellectual independence implied in the concept of strong sense critical thinking, we must foster intellectual (epistemological) humility, courage, integrity, perseverance, empathy, and fairmindedness" (Paul, 2000, p. 166). Paul defines intellectual humility as "a consciousness of the limits of one's knowledge, including a sensitivity to circumstances in which one's native egocentrism is likely to function self-deceptively; sensitivity to bias, prejudice and limitations of one's viewpoint" and a "lack of intellectual pretentiousness, boastfulness, or conceit, combined with insight into the logical foundations, or lack of such foundations, of one's beliefs" (ibid.). In a helpful comparative survey of several distinct sets of critical thinking dispositions, the educational theorist Ron Ritchhart proposes six groups of dispositions: "the disposition to be open-minded, to be curious, to be metacognitive, to be strategic, and to be investigative and inquiring, and to reason and use evidence" (Ritchhart, 2001, p. 148). Paul is the only theorist in Ritchhart's survey to propose intellectual humility as a critical thinking disposition. Ritchhart classifies it as borderline between two of his categories: the dispositions to be "metacognitive" and "a truth seeker" (Ritchhart, 2001, p. 149). Paul's conception of strong sense critical thinking certainly stresses metacognitive factors: indeed questioning, or at least reflecting upon, one's own framework of thought is close to a definition of metacognition. Nor is Paul alone in linking metacognition with intellectual humility. Kidd's understanding of intellectual humility requires individuals to reflect upon their own cognition, since they must be "alert to the ways that . . . complex agential, collective, and deep conditions underlie and shape their intellectual confidence" (Kidd, 2016, p. 396). Some virtue epistemologists have made stronger claims for metacognition. For Jerry Green, it is a virtue in its own right (Green, 2019, p. 120). But for Christopher Lepock metacognition is a necessary component of any intellectual virtue-and specifically of intellectual humility (Lepock, 2014, p. 43). Metacognition also has much in common with INTELLECTUAL HUMILITY AND ARGUMENTATION 5 Jonathan Adler's account of open-mindedness, as "an appreciation of our fallibility" that takes the form of "a second-order (or "meta") attitude toward one's beliefs as believed, and not just toward the specific proposition believed, just as fallibilism is a second-order doubt about the perfection of one's believing, not a doubt about the truth of any specific belief" (Adler, 2004, p. 130). But James Spiegel argues, I think convincingly, that Adler's account should be understood as defining humility rather than open-mindedness (Spiegel, 2012, p. 34). Without taking a stance on any of these specific claims, it does seem reasonable to conclude that the traditional virtue of intellectual humility is closely allied to metacognition, and thereby to critical thinking. 4. Deliberative Virtues Another argumentative context in which the virtue of intellectual humility has been explicitly invoked is the analysis of group deliberation. Scott Aikin and Caleb Clanton have argued that success in group deliberation, and thereby in democratic forms of political decision making, depends on the individual participants manifesting what they call "group-deliberative virtues" (Aikin and Clanton, 2010, p. 413). They stress that such virtues differ from epistemic virtues since they are not just truth-conducive, but also "conducive to cooperation and good sentiments among the deliberators in a group" (Aikin and Clanton, 2010, p. 421). Of course, such well-conducted deliberation may in turn be more likely to settle on the truth. One of Aikin and Clanton's virtues is deliberative humility, which they define as "the willingness to hold one's view fallibly and in such a way as to admit that one might be shown to be wrong in light of better reasons, evidence, and argument" (Aikin and Clanton, 2010, p. 419). They situate deliberative humility as a mean between two vices they term "deliberative hubris" and "deliberative insecurity": the former "the unwillingness to even consider that one's view could be refined or refuted by others", the latter "the inability to think that one could ever be on target about an issue" (Aikin and Clanton, 2010, p. 420). This approach to humility bears an obvious similarity to Kidd's confidence management account. Aikin and Clanton go further than Kidd, however, in arguing that the "epistemic norm of humility is . . . embedded in the very practice of holding any belief whatsoever", since to hold a belief is to be willing to defend it, and to defend it adequately is to give a fair hearing to such challenges as may be raised against it (ibid.).2 This makes intellectual humility pivotal to the practice of group deliberation: without it deliberation cannot be expected to proceed in good faith, but with it belief in all but the safest of claims ought, at least in principle, to lead to group deliberation. The political scientist Kyle Scott takes this point further, arguing that Aikin and Clanton's seven other deliberative virtues (deliberative wit, friendliness, empathy, charity, temperance, courage, and sincerity) all critically depend on humility, which makes humility essential for group deliberation, and thereby for any feasible concept of deliberative democracy (Scott, 2014, p. 230). There is some empirical support for these positive conclusions about the value of intellectual humility for deliberation. There is, as one recent survey has it, an embarrassment of riches in the empirical measurement of humility (McElroyHeltzel et al., 2018). That survey compares 22 different measures, of which four are specifically measures of intellectual humility (McElroy et al., 2014; Hoyle et al., 2016; Krumrei-Mancuso and Rouse, 2016; Leary et al., 2017). Yet more such measures have been published since the data collection period of this survey (Alfano et al., 2017; Haggard et al., 2018; Porter and Schumann, 2018). For example, 2The rhetorician John Duffy makes a complementary point: "to provide evidence is to subject one's self to the authority and judgment of another, which is a form of humility" (Duffy, 2014, p. 220). 6 ANDREW ABERDEIN the psychologists Tenelle Porter and Karina Schumann have developed one of the simpler measures of intellectual humility, consisting of an inventory of nine questions, each to be answered on a seven-point Likert scale (Porter and Schumann, 2018, p. 143). This includes both positively worded questions, such as "I am willing to admit it if I don't know something" and "I like to compliment others on their intellectual strengths", and (reverse scored) negatively worded questions, such as "I feel uncomfortable when someone points out one of my intellectual shortcomings" and "I don't like it when someone points out an intellectual mistake that I made". Porter and Schumann's factor analysis suggests that this measure is one-dimensional, by contrast with some other studies (for example, Alfano et al., 2017; Haggard et al., 2018, whose studies yielded four and three factors, respectively). Porter and Schumann found that "participants who were higher in intellectual humility were more respectful of and more interested in trying to learn about opposing perspectives" both in classroom debates and on emotive public policy issues, such as gun control or same-sex marriage (Porter and Schumann, 2018, pp. 145 ff.). They also demonstrated that "those higher in intellectual humility read a greater proportion (and higher number) of opposing vs. matching reasons than those lower in intellectual humility" (Porter and Schumann, 2018, p. 153). Other studies using different measures have found similar results. For example, Elizabeth Krumrei-Mancuso and colleagues found that intellectual humility "was associated with more reflective thinking, need for cognition, intellectual engagement, intellectual curiosity, intellectual openness, and open-minded thinking" and "also associated with less social vigilantism, which may promote collaborative and cooperative learning" (Krumrei-Mancuso et al., 2019, p. 14). The results of these studies are consistent with Aikin and Clanton's conclusion that intellectual humility in participants is a crucial, perhaps indispensable, asset in group deliberation. 5. Virtue Theories of Argumentation Although, as we have seen, virtues have been invoked for some time in theories of argument, an explicit virtue theory of argumentation (VTA) is a more recent innovation (for a brief survey, see Aberdein and Cohen, 2016). One of the difficulties that besets argumentation theory as a whole is that it is massively interdisciplinary: it brings together work from many different disciplines, including logic, epistemology, both cognitive and social psychology, communication, management, rhetoric, decision theory, law, computer science, education, economics, and others. This is, of course, a tremendous opportunity, but it also presents a massive coordination problem: it can be difficult for the minority of people in each discipline who focus on argumentation to find each other (and avoid duplicating each other's work). That problem is exacerbated for sub-disciplines of argumentation theory, such as VTA, since the numbers involved are even smaller. Perhaps for this reason, VTA has mostly drawn inspiration from the familiar fields of virtue ethics and virtue epistemology; there has as yet been much less interaction with virtue jurisprudence or virtue-theoretic work in rhetoric and economics, although there is an independent interest in applying virtues (including humility) to argumentation in all of these areas (for example, de Bruin, 2013; Agnew, 2018; Amaya, 2018). A crucial question for VTA is whether its virtues are argumentation-specific or whether it just applies generic intellectual (or moral) virtues to argumentation. For present purposes, this is to ask whether there is any such thing as argumentative humility, distinct from, or a special case of, intellectual humility. If we concede as much, perhaps we should also recognize deliberative humility INTELLECTUAL HUMILITY AND ARGUMENTATION 7 and critical thinking humility as further subdivisions. We have already seen that Aikin and Clanton distinguish deliberative from epistemic virtues, since being conducive to truth need not be conducive to the optimal conduct of deliberation. In other words, deliberation and belief formation have a different telos. Elsewhere, I have argued that the telos of argumentation is the propagation of truth: "where virtuous knowers are disposed to act in a way that leads to the acquisition of true beliefs, virtuous arguers are disposed to spread true beliefs around" (Aberdein, 2010, p. 173). Katharina Stevens has a more sweeping proposal: "the good of argumentation is the bettering of belief-systems-furthering of knowledge, extension of justificatory inferences, gaining of information and understanding etc." (Stevens, 2016, p. 377). However, the same virtue may contribute to the successful pursuit of different activities with different ends. So, it need not follow that argumentation (let alone deliberation or critical thinking) requires a distinct set of virtues just because it has its own telos. On this basis, at least on Kidd's confidence-calibration account, I think it is reasonable to see intellectual humility as contributing to all of these goals. If intellectual humility is a virtue of argument, how is it related to other such virtues-and what are these other virtues? One radical perspective would be to argue that traditional character virtues, such as intellectual humility, are all that is needed for argumentation. Against such a position, Olivier Morin maintains that "mere civil virtues (respect, humility or honesty) do not suffice: we need virtues that specifically attach to the practice of making conscious inferences" (Morin, 2014, p. 499). I shall not attempt to adjudicate this issue here, although in my own work I follow Daniel Cohen, an early advocate of VTA, in proposing four basic virtues of argument: willingness to engage in serious argumentation; willingness to listen to others; willingness to modify one's own position; and willingness to question the obvious (Cohen, 2005, p. 64). Each of these is to be understood as a mean between a pair of vices. I complicate Cohen's typology by subdividing each of his virtues (and vices) to make room for many of the more traditional, character-based virtues and vices, especially those invoked in the responsibilist approach to virtue epistemology (Aberdein, 2010, 2016a). Specifically, I list intellectual humility as a subtype of willingness to modify one's own position. Perhaps it might with equal justice have been treated as a subtype of willingness to listen to others. Certainly, if one modifies one's own position after carefully listening to another's arguments, one has exercised humility at each step; which step took the greater humility is presumably specific to the individual case.3 More generally, no typology of this kind can be more than suggestive, since the relationship between the virtues is too multi-dimensional to be fully captured by a simple hierarchical classification. Some scholars argue that intellectual humility is not just a virtue of argument, but the virtue of argument-that it has a significance more profound than other such virtues. For example, Lois Agnew maintains that intellectual humility is "a guiding principle of public discourse", central to the discipline of rhetoric (Agnew, 2018, p. 335). And we have already noted Kyle Scott's argument that "humility is pivotal to the proper functioning of the other virtues" (Scott, 2014, p. 230). The concept of a higher-order virtue that is necessary for the regulation of the others is an ancient one. For Aristotle this is the virtue of phronesis, variously translated as wisdom or common sense. A number of virtues of 3On this basis, I am unconcerned by the apparent tension between the discussion of the ad verecundiam fallacy above as a failure of humility and my earlier treatment of it as primarily a failure of recognition of reliable authority, treated as a subtype of willingness to listen to others (Aberdein, 2016a, p. 420). As I argue in that paper, we should not expect fallacies to map neatly to vices: which of these vices is uppermost will turn on features of the individual fallacious argument. 8 ANDREW ABERDEIN argument have been proposed as candidates for a higher-order role in VTA, notably "willingness to inquire" (Hamby, 2015) and "willingness to be rationally persuaded" (Baumtrog, 2016), Elsewhere, I have suggested that intellectual humility may function in this role (Aberdein, 2016b, p. 8). We have already noted the close affinity between intellectual humility and metacognition, which is naturally implicated in any project of higher-order regulation of thinking dispositions. Moreover, the other candidates appear to be subordinate to intellectual humility: if one's level of intellectual confidence is appropriately calibrated, then one should also be both willing to inquire and willing to be rationally persuaded; but if it isn't, one won't be. 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The Journal of Positive Psychology Forthcoming. Krumrei-Mancuso, Elizabeth J. and Steven V. Rouse. 2016. The development and validation of the comprehensive intellectual humility scale. Journal of Personality Assessment 98(2): 209-221. Leary, Mark R., Kate J. Diebels, Erin K. Davisson, Katrina P. Jongman-Sereno, Jennifer C. Isherwood, Kaitlin T. Raimi, Samantha A. Deffler, and Rick H. Hoyle. 2017. Cognitive and interpersonal features of intellectual humility. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 43(6): 793-813. Lepock, Christopher. 2014. Metacognition and intellectual virtue. In Virtue Epistemology Naturalized: Bridges Between Virtue Epistemology and Philosophy of Science, ed. Abrol Fairweather, 33-48. Cham: Springer. Locke, John. 1836. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. London: Tegg. McElroy, Stacey E., Kenneth G. Rice, Don E. Davis, Joshua N. Hook, Peter C. Hill, Everett L. Worthington Jr., and Daryl R. Van Tongeren. 2014. 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Paul, Richard. 2000. Critical thinking, moral integrity and citizenship: Teaching for the intellectual virtues. In Knowledge, Belief and Character: Readings in Virtue Epistemology, ed. Guy Axtell, 163-175. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Porter, Tenelle and Karina Schumann. 2018. Intellectual humility and openness to the opposing view. Self and Identity 17(2): 139-162. Quine, Willard Van Orman. 1960. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ritchhart, Ron. 2001. From IQ to IC: A dispositional view of intelligence. Roeper Review 23(3): 143-150. Scott, Kyle. 2014. The political value of humility. Acta Politica 49(2): 217-233. Scriven, Michael. 1976. Reasoning. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. Siegel, Harvey. 1999. What (good) are thinking dispositions? Educational Theory 49(2): 207-221. Spiegel, James S. 2012. Open-mindedness and intellectual humility. Theory and Research in Education 10(1): 27-38. Stevens, Katharina. 2016. The virtuous arguer: One person, four roles. Topoi 35(2): 375-383. Thomas, Stephen N. 1973. Practical Reasoning in Natural Language. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Wilson, N. L. 1959. Substances without substrata. The Review of Metaphysics 12(4): 521-539.


Philosophy

Review Of Joseph C. Pitt, Heraclitus Redux: Technological Infrastructures and Scientific Change

ISSN: 2471-9560 Review of Joseph C. Pitt, Heraclitus Redux: Technological Infrastructures and Scientific Change Andrew Aberdein, Florida Institute of Technology,  ------------------ Aberdein, Andrew. 2020. "Review of Joseph C. Pitt, Heraclitus Redux: Technological Infrastructures and Scientific Change." Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 9 (7): 18-22. . 18 9 (7): 18-22. 2020.  Heraclitus Redux: Technological Infrastructures and Scientific Change Joseph C. Pitt Rowman & Littlefield, 2019 128 pp. A sawing job that would be just ridiculously hard and lengthy using a hand saw would be accomplished with a power saw. Likewise, certain cuts and materials would cause the smaller power saws to overheat or seize up altogether and therefore called for larger power saws. But even with the biggest power saw in the shop, Bobby Shaftoe always got the sense that he was imposing some kind of stress on the machine. It would slow down when the blade contacted the material, it would vibrate, it would heat up, and if you pushed the material through too fast it would threaten to jam. But then one summer he worked in a mill where they had a bandsaw. The bandsaw, its supply of blades, its spare parts, maintenance supplies, special tools and manuals occupied a whole room. It was the only tool he had ever seen with infrastructure. - Stephenson 2000, 270 (emphasis in original) Bobby Shaftoe, one of the protagonists of Neal Stephenson's sprawling epic Cryptonomicon, learns that some tools have infrastructure: the systems necessary for their successful operation far exceed what any one individual could hope to control. But the potential of such tools also far outstrips individual effort: "the most noteworthy thing about the bandsaw was that you could cut anything with it and not only did it do the job quickly and coolly but it didn't seem to notice that it was doing anything. It wasn't even aware that a human being was sliding a great big chunk of stuff through it" (270). Joseph C. Pitt, in his new book Heraclitus Redux, makes a related observation about the tools necessary for modern science: it "relies on this technological infrastructure, in which large components involve work in which engineers play a major role" (38). The technological infrastructure is "an historically determined set of mutually supporting artifacts and structures that enable human activity and provide the means for its development" (36). In other words, it encompasses not just heavy engineering, but also "the range of things that make science possible: funding agencies, universities, private corporations, technicians, labs, graduate students, journals, and so on" (34). (Hence the National Science Foundation, for example, is in Pitt's terms, a social technology (4).) Unless these components are in place and suitably coordinated, then modern scientific research cannot get off the ground. This is a crucial observation for any philosophy of science that hopes to engage with contemporary scientific practice. Although this is not a novel perspective, it is useful to have a selfcontained, concise and trenchantly argued volume to make the case for it. One ostensibly paradoxical consequence of Pitt's perspective is that "engineering research is more fundamental than scientific research" (33). This thesis has wide-ranging implications for the philosophy of science. Pitt argues that "we have the sciences we do because they are embedded in certain technological infrastructures that facilitate certain ways of doing things and discourage others" (15). As a result, "basic notions we associate with science like A. Aberdein 19 'evidence,' 'observation,' and 'explanation' also change over time and are science specific" (4). It is this emphasis on change, not just at the first-order level of ongoing scientific research and its output, but also of the means of understanding such research and its implications, that underpins Pitt's choice of title. His vision of science is "Heraclitian" since "what we call 'science' is a set of multifaceted social processes in a constant state of change" (1). Indeed, philosophy itself is for Pitt also a technological infrastructure, since "it provides the techniques and criteria for critical inquiry regarding our place in the world" (101). Embracing the Problematic Pitt rejects the Kuhnian account of scientific change as insufficiently Heraclitian in suggesting the survival of some more or less unchanged criteria throughout the lifespan of a given paradigm. Kuhn's broader influence has led to increased philosophical focus on case studies, but Pitt also cautions that "we don't really know what constitutes a case study" (8). Echoing an earlier article, he argues that case studies do no real philosophical work: even if they are not cherrypicked to support the author's thesis, they are insufficient to support an inductive generalization (Pitt 2001). (For one rejoinder, see Rittberg and Van Kerkhove 2019.) Instead of either the paradigm or the case study, he advocates the "problematic": "an issue or a set of related issues that have attracted the attention of a number of thinkers over a period of time" (9). The problematic avoids the rigidity of the paradigm and the inanity of the case study, if at the expense of requiring heroic amounts of historical contextualization. Pitt pursues the implications of his Heraclitian account beyond philosophy of science into "the incredible complexity of our contemporary society and how viewing it in terms of technological infrastructures helps to expose that complexity" (91). He works through some of the consequences of the U.S. federal government shutdown of 2018-19 as an illustration of "the extent to which we are captives of our technological infrastructures" (105). Events in 2020 have provided us all with a similar example of vastly greater scale: few people would now dispute that "This shutdown is an excellent example of the interrelatedness of things. It also shows, in the modern world, how complicated it all is and how tied up with our technologies we are" (96). Shutdowns also demonstrate that Luddism can be no solution to the social problems posed by the ubiquity of technological infrastructures: "If we were to live our lives acting only on that about which we could be absolutely certain, we wouldn't live our lives" (60). Instead, Pitt offers some directions in which a solution might be pursued. One answer would be to turn the problem against itself, by developing a technological infrastructure to cope with the complex problems posed by our dependence on technological infrastructures: "one way to anticipate unintended consequences is to model it using the increasingly powerful computers we are building" (103). A more fundamental response is educational. We cannot hope to respond adequately to the challenges posed by technological infrastructures if we do not understand how they work: "the more complicated the science and the more simplified the public explanations, the more readily we tend to accept those fantasies" (50). Hence our dependency on technological infrastructure makes public understanding of science, and the philosophy of science, all the more urgent. Indeed, one of the principal strengths of the book is pedagogic. In particular, Pitt makes effective use of examples drawn from contemporary science. Hence we learn not only of 20 9 (7): 18-22. 2020.  Galileo's use of the telescope (Chapter 3) and of scanning tunneling electron microscopes (Chapter 5) but also of the spherical aberration in the main mirror of the Hubble telescope and the complicated systemic failings that led to its being launched with this defect (Chapter 6) and of KATRIN, the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino experiment, an exemplary piece of twenty-first century Big Science (Chapter 7). Pitt works through these examples with care, thereby reinforcing not only familiar concerns about the theoreticity of observation, but also his deeper point that the theories at issue continue to change in profound ways. His discussion of the role of artificial intelligence in science demonstrates this point effectively (Chapter 9). What are we to make of research in the biosciences in which "a computer program designed the experiment. The scientist in charge does not know what the experiment is supposed to do" (86)? Or the use of machine learning techniques, such as generative adversarial networks, to improve the output from scientific instruments? Unlike more conventional computer software, these methods are effectively black boxes, their inner workings in principal inscrutable to the scientists who develop them-let alone the scientists who employ them in other fields. All of these examples are thought provoking and calculated to catch the imagination of philosophy of science students-and their instructors. There are a few regrettable errors, some trivial, some more consequential. The "immortal words ... 'Follow the money'" (104) are of course from All the President's Men (1976) not The Graduate (1967). It was not Georg Joachim Rheticus who "wrote a preface [to Copernicus's De Revolutionibus] in which he described the theory as a purely mathematical account" (30), but Andreas Osiander, much to Rheticus's disgust. Indeed, Rheticus is known to have defaced multiple copies of De Revolutionibus by striking out Osiander's preface (Danielson 2006, 112). And, in the context of a discussion of carbon emissions, it seems doubly confused to refer to "bright spots such as ... the decision by France to phase out its nuclear plants" (104). Firstly, France has made no such decision, although there have been some inconsistent moves to reduce France's uniquely high level of nuclear power generation; Pitt perhaps intended to refer to Germany, which made such a decision in 2011. But, more importantly, from the perspective of climate change remediation, the German nuclear phaseout has been a disaster: it is estimated to have led to an increase in "CO2 emissions of 36.3 Mt per year" (not to mention "more than 1,100 additional deaths per year" from increased air pollution) (Jarvis et al. 2019, 25). Since nuclear power has never produced as much as a quarter of German electricity but consistently produces more than two thirds of French electricity, a similar phase-out in France would be even more catastrophic for climate and public health. Broader Applications Pitt's book should be of value to a broad range of philosophers of science. As a case in point, my own specialism is the philosophy of mathematics, which Pitt does not address directly. Yet his work holds much interest for the philosopher of mathematics-indeed he echoes several recent developments (and philosophers of mathematics have made use of his earlier work: e.g. Rittberg and Van Kerkhove 2019). Technological infrastructure in mathematics can be understood in several distinct ways and Pitt's work holds potential for all of them. A. Aberdein 21 Firstly, and perhaps most obviously, computers have in recent decades come to be used in more and more fundamental ways by mathematicians. The rise of "computer assisted" proofs in turn gave rise to a philosophical debate over the legitimacy of such results which directly parallels debates in (philosophy of) the empirical sciences over the legitimacy of computer assisted observations (MacKenzie 2001). Secondly, progress in mathematics itself can be understood in terms of the development of purely mathematical tools of ever greater complexity (Marquis 1997). Mathematical tools, such as Galois theory or K-theory, provide relationships between mathematical objects of apparently quite different kinds. Once such a relationship has been rigorously established, it is possible to prove results about objects of one kind by studying the related, presumably more tractable, objects of the other kind. In recent decades, the scale and scope of such innovations has come to dwarf much of the previous history of mathematics (Zalamea 2012). Lastly, but perhaps most directly in the spirit of Pitt's work, some recent research into mathematical practice has drawn out the significance of social machines, combinations of people and computers understood as unified problem-solving entities (Martin and Pease 2013; Shadbolt et al. 2019). The computers within mathematical social machines are generally not doing the mathematics (although that is a foreseeable development, at least for routine computation). Rather they facilitate the collaboration and interaction of human mathematicians by providing an appropriate infrastructure. In recent decades, this has helped to transform the way much mathematical research is conducted. In sum, attention to mathematical practice reveals multiple instances of increasingly indispensable and innovative infrastructure. Doubtless close attention to the recent practice of many other sciences would yield similar insights. Heraclitus Redux is a valuable roadmap for philosophers of science setting out to explore such developments. References Danielson, Dennis. 2006. The First Copernican: Georg Joachim Rheticus and the Rise of the Copernican Revolution. New York, NY: Walker. Jarvis, Stephen, Olivier Deschenes, and Akshaya Jha. 2019. "The Private and External Costs of Germany's Nuclear Phase-Out." Working Paper 26598, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA. MacKenzie, Donald. 2001. Mechanizing Proof: Computing, Risk, and Trust. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Marquis, Jean-Pierre. 1997. "Abstract Mathematical Tools and Machines for Mathematics." Philosophia Mathematica 5 (3): 250-272. Martin, Ursula and Alison Pease. 2013. "Mathematical Practice, Crowdsourcing, and Social Machines." In Intelligent Computer Mathematics edited by Jacques Carette, David Aspinall, Christoph Lange, Petr Sojka, and Wolfgang Windsteiger, 98-119, vol. 7961 of LNAI. Berlin: Springer. Pitt, Joseph C. 2001. "The Dilemma of Case Studies: Toward a Heraclitian Philosophy of Science." Perspectives on Science 9 (4): 373-382. Rittberg, Colin Jakob and Bart Van Kerkhove. 2019. "Studying Mathematical Practices: The Dilemma of Case Studies." ZDM Mathematics Education 51 (5): 857-868. 22 9 (7): 18-22. 2020.  Shadbolt, Nigel, Kieron O'Hara, David De Roure, and Wendy Hall. 2019. The Theory and Practice of Social Machines. Cham: Springer. Stephenson, Neal. 2000. Cryptonomicon. London: Arrow. Zalamea, Fernando. 2012. Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics. Falmouth: Urbanomic.


This book has three principle aims: to show that neither vision nor mental imagery involves the creation or inspection of picture-like mental representations; to defend the claim that our visual processes are, in significant part, cognitively impenetrable; and to develop a theory of “visual indexes”. In what follows, I assess Pylyshyn’s success in realising each of these aims in turn. I focus primarily on his arguments against “picture theories” of vision and mental imagery, to which approximately half the book is devoted. I argue that Pylyshyn adopts an unnecessarily restricted interpretation of what it would be for mental representations to be picture-like, and that this leads him prematurely to reject the possibility of explaining the introspective evidence concerning the nature of mental imagery

Philosophy

Review of Zenon Pylyshyn's Seeing and Visualizing: It's Not What You Think Catharine Abell, Department of Philosophy, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109  PSYCHE 11 (1), February 2005 REVIEW OF: Pylyshyn, Z. 2003. Seeing and Visualizing: It's Not What You Think. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 563pp. US$42.98 hbk. ISBN: 0-262-16217-2. This book has three principle aims: to show that neither vision nor mental imagery involves the creation or inspection of picture-like mental representations; to defend the claim that our visual processes are, in significant part, cognitively impenetrable; and to develop a theory of "visual indexes". In what follows, I assess Pylyshyn's success in realising each of these aims in turn. I focus primarily on his arguments against "picture theories" of vision and mental imagery, to which approximately half the book is devoted. I argue that Pylyshyn adopts an unnecessarily restricted interpretation of what it would be for mental representations to be picture-like, and that this leads him prematurely to reject the possibility of explaining the introspective evidence concerning the nature of mental imagery. 1. The Denial of Pictures in Our Heads The first and final three chapters of this book are devoted to discussion of views according to which either vision or mental imagery is pictorial in nature. Pylyshyn is adamantly opposed to such views, and argues that those who hold them do so only either because, in the case of vision, they succumb to the "intentional fallacy" of attributing to representations properties of what they represent or because, in the case of imagery, they mistakenly believe that introspection provides us with access to the underlying structure of our mental representations. However, he construes that claim that we have picture-like mental representations very narrowly, as entailing the claim that intrinsic features of our cognitive architecture are somehow pictorial. Consequently, as I will argue, he fails to PSYCHE:  PSYCHE 2005: VOLUME 11 ISSUE 1 2 consider several possible contruals of mental representations as picture-like that would enable him to explain the introspective evidence about mental imagery. Chapter 1 comprises a detailed argument against the theory according to which vision creates a picture in the head. He explains the influence of the picture theory as due to the discrepancy between the information provided by our phenomenal visual experience and that contained on our retinas. Visual experience extends beyond the spatial and temporal boundaries imposed by the sensors in the fovea. Pylyshyn believes that this leads some to assume that there is an inner image that holds visual information for longer periods, and records spatially extended information by integrating the information available from the retinas at various moments. However, he argues that the informational richness of perceptual experience is better explained by the hypothesis that we have some method of identifying elements of a visible scene as they appear on successive retinal images. He claims that we assign labels to parts of a visible scene and keep track of the labels that have previously been assigned to those parts that remain in view, thus obviating the need for visual storage of off-foveal visual patterns. Pylyshyn invokes a range of claims from experimental psychology against the picture view. Most of these rely on evidence about the interpretation of pictures to support inferences about perception in general. Such claims depend on the implicit assumption that picture interpretation depends on perceptual mechanisms which process pictures and their objects in the same way. While this is a common assumption among psychologists, it is a matter of continuing debate among philosophers (see, for example, Walton 1990, who argues that picture interpretation depends on imagination in a way that vision does not). Moreover, even if it is warranted, this assumption causes problems for Pylyshyn's argument. He argues that vision cannot involve the creation of an inner picture because the information vision provides about a scene is not nearly so rich or uniformly detailed as that associated with pictures. However, if the interpretation of pictures depends on general visual mechanisms, the information provided by pictures should be no more or less detailed than that provided by vision itself. Furthermore, it is not at all clear that the information provided by pictures is especially rich or detailed. For example, stick figure drawings provide only very schematic information about their objects. This point is made forcefully by Michael Tye (1991) in his discussion of mental imagery, but is neglected by Pylyshyn. The final three chapters address the nature of mental imagery. Pylyshyn's main concern in these chapters is to demonstrate the implausibility of the picture theory of mental imagery. In Chapter 6, he argues that the plausibility of the picture theory results from equivocating between images' content-the properties they represent their objects as having-and their form-the underlying system of representation they employ. In order for the picture theory to be true, he argues, the form of mental images, and not merely their contents, must be picture-like. Because those properties of images that are due to their form are unalterable, he argues, they will be cognitively impenetrable, whereas those that are due to their content will be penetrable. He then argues that the various imaging tasks whose outcomes are commonly invoked in support of the picture theory are cognitively penetrable and thus do not demonstrate that mental images are pictorial in form. PSYCHE:  PSYCHE 2005: VOLUME 11 ISSUE 1 3 In Chapter 7, Pylyshyn seeks to support his argument that mental images are distinguished by their contents rather than their form by showing that they lack any of the essential characteristics of pictures. In particular, he argues that mental images do not share the spatial properties of pictures, and that they are not processed by the visual system in a way that supports the claim that they can themselves be seen. His argument for the latter claim relies heavily on empirical evidence for the dissociation of vision and imagery. However, this evidence does not directly support the claim that our visual mechanisms are not applied to the interpretation of mental imagery. It could equally well be explained as due to the different causes of each, one external and one internal. Chapter 8 addresses the role of mental images in thought. Pylyshyn argues that the contribution that imagery makes to our problem solving abilities is not analogous to that which diagrams make. For example, he argues that, unlike diagrams, mental images do not enable us to notice new spatial relations. However, the evidence he cites for this (for example, that we do not notice the ambiguity of imaged Necker Cubes) may reflect limitations to our capacity to create images rather than limitations to what we can learn from them. He argues that images contribute to thought because their contents are different from those of other mental representations. Consequently, he claims, they get us to notice aspects of things that can be helpful in solving certain problems. However, while he acknowledges that the properties that images typically encode are also encoded by pictures, he denies that they share any of the other characteristics of pictures and thus denies that their role in thought is evidence that they are pictorial. However, several philosophers (eg Lopes 1996, Peacocke 1987) argue that what makes a representation pictorial is precisely the nature of the information it provides. On such accounts, that images typically encode the same properties as pictures is constitutive of their being pictorial. Pylyshyn's argumentative strategy shows that he takes picture theories to challenge the language of thought hypothesis, according to which all mental representations are essentially linguistic. However, it is not clear that picture theorists must deny this hypothesis. Many picture theorists deny that they need do so (for example Kosslyn 1983, Tye 1988). Kosslyn and Tye both propose that mental images are pictorial in virtue of having functional spatial properties. They have such properties in virtue of comprising digital data structures that correspond to two-dimensional matrices, which in turn function like two-dimensional displays that are interpreted in the same way as pictures. Pylyshyn argues that the functional space proposal cannot be invoked in support of the picture theory, since it does not identify any intrinsic properties of images and thus does not say anything about the underlying representational form of mental imagery. However, so long as the picture theory is construed as an attempt to explain the introspective evidence about mental imagery and not as a claim about our cognitive architecture-as indeed Kosslyn and Tye construe it-this argument has no force. Pylyshyn acknowledges that we still lack a good account of precisely what distinguishes mental images from other mental representations. This is surely the most interesting question about mental imagery. It is therefore difficult to understand why Pylyshyn chooses to focus instead on the question of what, if anything, imagery shows about our cognitive architecture. Pylyshyn addresses the former question only insofar as he concludes Chapter 7 by enumerating several constraints that should be met by any PSYCHE:  PSYCHE 2005: VOLUME 11 ISSUE 1 4 theory of mental imagery. These constraints require images to be explained as possessing certain features, including the following: containing information about appearances and the relative locations of objects; referring to individual things; and lacking explicit quantifiers, disjunctions and negations. He does not make any attempt to develop an account that meets such constraints himself. Moreover, he ignores the possibility that a picture theory of mental imagery which is neutral regarding the underlying structure of mental representations could meet these constraints. There is reason to believe that such an account could succeed. Pictures typically meet the constraints that Pylyshyn identifies. Furthermore, contemporary philosophical accounts do not construe pictorial representation as essentially spatial, or in any other way that would have implications for the underlying representational structure of mental images, were they picture-like. Instead, they typically construe pictures' representational properties as depending on their capacity to elicit appropriate visual experiences from their viewers (eg Hopkins 1998, Wollheim 1987), or to engage their viewers' visual mechanisms in appropriate ways (eg Schier 1986). These accounts explain why pictures exhibit their characteristic features by appeal to the experiences they elicit or mechanisms they engage. This suggests that the apparently picture-like features of mental images could likewise be explained by appeal to the role our visual systems play in imaging, irrespective of the underlying representational structure of either vision or imagery. 2. The Cognitive Impenetrability of Early Vision Pylyshyn devotes the second chapter to discussion of whether and in what way vision is cognitively penetrable. He argues that the cognitive penetrability of vision is limited to the initial allocation of visual attention and to late visual processing and that there is an intermediary stage called "early vision" that is informationally encapsulated. The cognitive penetration of vision can thus take two forms: our beliefs may determine what features of a scene we attend to (Pylyshyn goes on to discuss focal attention and its underlying mechanisms in Chapters 4 and 5); and they may influence the way in which we classify the objects that are detected in early visionas chairs, or tables, etc. Pylyshyn argues persuasively that the evidence that is commonly invoked in favour of the thesis that vision is cognitively penetrable can be explained as resulting from one of three things: our allocation of focal attention; the way in which we interpret what we see; or evolved, informationally encapsulated constraints on interpretation in early vision. In Chapter 3, Pylyshyn elaborates on the nature of the evolved constraints he believes to govern interpretation in early vision. These constraints enable the visual system to recover a unique 3D structure from proximal 2D data that are intrinsically ambiguous because they are logically compatible with an indefinite number of different 3D structures. Unlike inferences from general knowledge, he argues, these constraints do not influence processes outside the visual system and do not respond to general knowledge concerning their appropriateness or applicability. However, they reflect principles that apply frequently, but not invariably in our world. Therefore, he claims, they usually, but do not always result in veridical visual representations. He gives examples of such constraints that are drawn both from computer vision and from studies of human vision. PSYCHE:  PSYCHE 2005: VOLUME 11 ISSUE 1 5 3. The Allocation of Visual Indexes to Primitive Visual Objects Pylyshyn's main claim in Chapter 4 is that our attentional focus is allocated to objects rather than locations. He claims that the visual system detects and tracks "primitive visual objects", which are tracked as individuals rather than according to their spatial location or other properties. This claim is supported by two arguments. Firstly, although Pylyshyn identifies focal attention, along with the way we interpret what we see, as one of the two sources of cognitive influence on vision, he argues that attentional focus can nonetheless only be given to "transducable" features of a scene - that is, features whose detection does not involve accessing memory or drawing inferences. If this were not the case, he argues, the notion of attentional focus would have little explanatory value, since any difference whatever between subjects' perceptual experiences could be explained as resulting from differences in what is attended to. Secondly, he argues that the transducable features to which attention is allocated must be objects in a scene, rather than properties of the scene or of objects. He presents a range of empirical evidence in support of this claim, including evidence for the endurance of attention despite change in physical location, temporal interruption, and objects' not being spatially defined. He also presents a range of neuropsychological evidence, including evidence from dysfunctions of attention. The claim that attention is allocated to objects independently of their properties assumes that we have some means of individuating objects that does not depend on property individuation. In Chapter 5, Pylyshyn presents his argument for this assumption. He claims that there is a mechanism, called a visual index, which is deployed prior to focal attention being allocated, that individuates objects and allows them to be tracked before any of their properties have been detected. Visual indexes are references to individual objects in the world. Pylyshyn argues that indexing is a causal, rather than a conceptual process: while certain properties of an object secure assignment of an index, the index does not represent the object it picks out as possessing those properties and continues to pick out that object however its properties may change. The claim that vision involves an indexing mechanism is an interesting one. However, it is not clear how an index, once allocated, could track an object without representing any of its properties. Without some method of comparing those properties that initially secured allocation of an index with the properties of a subsequently viewed visual scene, there seems to be no basis for picking out a particular part of that scene as comprising the object to which the index refers. While Pylyshyn discusses a range of empirical evidence that he takes to support his claim, this evidence is not conclusive and he does not adequately defend the coherence of the notion of a visual index. This book is valuable in many ways. It is engaging and clearly written. It also presents a persuasive defence of the claim that our visual and cognitive processes are independent, which nonetheless does not neglect the various ways in which our beliefs may influence what we see. Furthermore, it is valuable both as a summary of Pylyshyn's views on vision and mental imagery and for its presentation and discussion of the relevant empirical data. However, it does not significantly advance the issues it sets out to discuss. Much of this book re-presents arguments that Pylyshyn has previously developed elsewhere. Moreover, in his discussion of mental imagery in the final three chapters, Pylyshyn is content to argue against a very limited range of construals of the claim that PSYCHE:  PSYCHE 2005: VOLUME 11 ISSUE 1 6 images are pictorial, and does not address either the issue of how else their pictorial nature might be construed or that of how else the difference between mental imagery and other mental representations could be explained. Unfortunately, the book is also ridden with minor typographic errors. References Hopkins, R. 1998. Picture, Image and Experience. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Kosslyn, S.M. 1983. Ghosts in the Mind's Machine. New York, W.W. Norton. Lopes, D. 1996. Understanding Pictures. Oxford, Clarendon Press. Peacocke, C. 1987. Depiction. Philosophical Review XCVI(3): 383-410. Schier, F. 1986. Deeper Into Pictures. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Tye, M. 1988. The picture theory of mental images. Philosophical Review XCVII (4): 497-520. Tye, M. 1991. The Imagery Debate. Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press. Walton, K. 1990. Mimesis as Make-Believe. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press. Wollheim, R. 1987. Painting as an Art. Princeton, Princeton University Press.