Picturing, signifying, and attending

Abstract

In this paper, I develop an empirically-driven approach to the relationship between conceptual and non-conceptual representations. I begin by clarifying Wilfrid Sellars's distinction between a non-conceptual capacity to picture significant aspects of our world, and a capacity to stabilize semantic content in the form of conceptual representations that signify those aspects of the world that are relevant to our shared practices. I argue that this distinction helps to clarify the reason why cognition must be understood as embodied and situated. Drawing on recent models of attention and valuation, I then argue that the human brain constructs a dynamic model of the world that it has encountered, encoding higher-level regularities in the form of linguistically structured representations. And I conclude by arguing that this approach to cognition provides a set of critical resources for understanding the situated nature of social cognition.

Visual essentialism & social kinds

“…Bryce Huebner (2016Huebner ( , 2018Huebner ( , 2019 further explains how attention shapes individual understandings of racial groups in a racialized society and reinforces oppressive social norms. Huebner states:…”

“…Bryce Huebner (2016, 2018, 2019) further explains how attention shapes individual understandings of racial groups in a racialized society and reinforces oppressive social norms. Huebner states:

Our habits of attention are shaped by ongoing patterns of feedback, from the people that we interact with, and from our movements through the social … and once we have learned to track all of the relevant social phenomena, our attentional biases can help to minimize the amount of cognitive effort that is required to act in a socially accepted way.

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