Research

Dustin Stokes

To be in the world is to be in contact with it. And for animate creatures, this includes mental contact. One thing that is distinctively human is the variety and richness of mental contact that we can achieve with the world: through our bodies, through our senses, and through our cognitive capacities. Contact brings change. The world thus changes us through perceptual experience and belief. We change ourselves through our values and motivations. And we change the world through action, imagination, and creativity. And there are complicated connections and interactions throughout. If there is a common thread to all my work, even if a bit metaphorical, it is to understand this ongoing, dynamic cycle: how the various modes of bodily, sensory, and cognitive contact change and interact in human existence. 

The big, broad ambition of my research is to better understand the human condition. And to do this by better understanding these varied modes of contact with the world, and their rich and complex interactions. It’s my view that this kind of understanding will only come with a combination of philosophical analysis and empirical study, and that neither general methodology is independently sufficient. And it’s my view that while we want to distinguish modes of mental contact, we do best to acknowledge the ways those modes connect, influence, and improve one another. This is to acknowledge the malleability of the mind, and the deep ways that we change ourselves through experience. 

    

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In more familiar terms of art, my central area of research is thus the philosophy of cognition and perception. I work mainly on the architecture and epistemology of mind, on how to best theorize distinctive mental phenomena, how they relate, how they are structured into some kind of whole, and how they factor into our normative and evaluative lives. Some examples: how might cognitive states like belief influence visual experience in interesting ways? How might imagination or imagery be used to creative or epistemic ends? How do distinct sensory modalities relate? How does expertise in a domain change one’s sensory perception within that domain? My philosophical approach is analytic but accompanied by close attention to relevant empirical data (in fact, I continue to collaborate with empirical scientists).

One main topic of interest is top-down or cognitive effects on perception. The orthodoxy in cognitive science and philosophy of perception remains a modularist one: cognitive states like belief, expectation, and desire are supposed not to influence perceptual processes like vision. Perception is supposed to be cognitively impenetrable. I have frequently argued to the opposite conclusion, and by appeal to a range of studies and data in the behavioral and brain sciences. A major shift in my more recent work is at least twofold. First, de-emphasize modularity and cognitive penetration and, second, focus instead on possible cases of cognitive improvement of perception. Regarding the first, I think that the literature has gone stagnant by virtue of what I call the default position assumption. It is assumed by parties on both sides of relevant debates that modularity is the default view, and that any case against it must take the form of a clear counterexample. In this way, alternative views are presented as challenges rather than bona fide alternatives; they stand or fall with their success at defeating orthodoxy. In my 2021 monograph (Thinking and Perceiving: On the Malleability of the Mind), I suggest that a view should enjoy such default status only if it enjoys strong argumentation or superior explanatory and predictive power. Modularity enjoys neither. I couple this with an emphasis on cases where one’s expert-level knowledge and skill within a domain appear to improve one’s perceptual performance within that domain. The expert radiologist not only judges better what she sees when examining a chest x-ray, she sees better. This marks a clear contrast with the extant literature on cognitive penetration, which typically focuses on cases where background cognitive states like belief are somehow thwarting the accuracy of perception. 

These issues figure centrally in my recent papers and empirical studies. In a now well-established empirical literature, there is a wide range of cases where experts within a domain—for example, radiology, fingerprint examination, elite athletics, birdwatching, as well as lab-trained experts—display (by contrast to naïve and novice subjects) behavioral, eye-tracking, and neurological differences. And in new empirical studies we compared differences in behavioral and eye-tracking measures between expert radiologists and practicing architects. These differences between subjects are, I argue, best explained as genuine cognitive effects on perception. In the later chapters of Thinking and Perceiving, I extend this analysis. I argue that we should think about these cases of expertise as cases of epistemic virtue, where the agent is herself credited for the cognitive improvements of her visual and other perceptual capacities. Thus, and this is the central thesis of my book, thinking does not just affect perceiving, thinking improves perceiving. The mind is malleable not modular. This analysis and thesis are then applied to a wide range of philosophical and scientific questions: theory-ladenness and objectivity, perceptual content and perceptual accuracy, implicit bias and face perception, the nature of selective attention, rich perceptual content and aesthetic properties. It is these chapters that, I feel, tie together a lot of the work that I have done in the last several years, not just in philosophy and cognitive science of perception, but in philosophy of science, epistemology, and aesthetics. 

I also work on topics concerning imagination: on imaginative resistance, imagination and knowledge, creative imagination, visual imagery and sensory experience, and the nature of mental imagery. One recent example is my ‘Mental imagery and fiction.’ One mode of the paper is critical: I argue that imagery essentialism—the claim that an act of the imagination necessarily involves a mental or sensory image—is mistaken, and this can be motivated both by appeal to empirical studies on figurative language and reflection on our engagement with fictions. The aim of the paper is not, however, solely critical. From those same studies and reflections, we learn interesting lessons about how imagery does function. And this underscores (even though it does not wholly vindicate) a prescription made by the imagery essentialist: we should put the image back in our theories of the imagination. 

I continue to work on creative thought and behavior. I have published multiple papers on naturalistic approaches to creativity, on imagination and creativity, and on how we should think about our practices of attributing the concept of creativity. We recently published our entry, ‘Creativity’, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which reviews both historical and contemporary theorizing on the topic, as well as studies in psychology, neuroscience, computer science, and artificial intelligence research. This article (co-authored with a regular collaborator, Elliot Paul) also comes with a prescription: given its importance to the human condition, creativity is an oddly neglected topic in contemporary philosophy. Our hope is that more philosophers will take up the task of working on it.  

This prescription is followed in our in-progress monograph, Creative Agency (under contract with OUP, again co-authored with Elliot Paul). The monograph centers around a puzzle, The Paradox of Creative Agency. Famously, creative insights often come unbidden, as spontaneous a-ha moments seemingly out of the control of the agent. At the same time, creative acts are ones that we praise, implying an attribution of responsibility and control to the agent. The puzzle is to resolve this apparent tension (which can be understood both in terms of the phenomenology of creativity and how we conceptualize or define ‘creativity’). Our approach departs from the orthodox product-oriented analysis of creativity; creativity is a kind of process, one involving value, novelty and agency. The book thus offers an analysis of how mental and bodily agency, and in the forms of expertise and skill, figure in instances of creative achievement. And this provides the materials needed to resolve the apparent tension between the spontaneity and agential control of creative processes. The analysis is applied to a number of topics, including AI and creativity, creativity and aesthetic appreciation, and collective creativity. 

Finally, some of my current projects attempt to bring together previously disparate work on perception, imagination and imagery, and creativity. One example: My ‘Perceptual expertise and creativity’ (in progress) begins with a platitude: creative individuals are often highly skilled within a domain, be it sculpture, soccer, or surgery. Recall my claim that perceptual expertise sometimes involves genuine sensory perceptual improvement, where those perceptual changes depend upon the concept-rich cognitive learning specific to that domain. If successful, this view can contribute to a naturalistic explanation of creativity. Some creative individuals are perceptual experts within their relevant domains. This perceptual advantage implies an advantage in available cognitive resources, and this latter claim is further evidenced by studies on visual short-term memory and task-evoked pupillary response. If the expert painter or elite athlete actually perceives better in her context of expertise (as a result of her previous training), this offloads some of the needed cognitive work to her visual systems, and thereby frees up cognitive load (reducing demands on working memory) to try something new, imagine a new angle, innovate, create.