Can Constancy Mechanisms Draw the Limits of Intentionality?

Mechanisms of simultaneity constancy

Mechanisms of color constancy.

We develop a model of how the visual system finds the colors of objects that have unknown shapes and positions. The model relies on mechanisms of light adaptation, coupled with eye movements, to recover three descriptors of surface reflectance that are represented in the signals of an achromatic mechanism and two color-opponent mechanisms. These descriptors are transformed to yield estimates of...

How (not) to draw philosophical implications from the cognitive nature of concepts: the case of intentionality

Philosophers have often appealed to intuitive judgments in various thought experiments to support or reject particular theses. Experimental philosophy is an emerging discipline that examines the cognitive nature of such intuitive judgments. In this paper, we assess the methodological and epistemological status of experimental philosophy. We focus on the Knobe effect, in which our intuitive judg...

Bacterial virulence: can we draw the line?

The molecular approach to microbial pathogenesis has resulted in an impressive amount of data on bacterial virulence genes. Bacterial genome sequences rapidly add candidate virulence genes to electronic databases. The interpretation of this overwhelming information is obscured because every gene involved in pathogenicity is called a virulence gene, regardless of its function in the complex proc...

Chromaticity limits in color constancy calculations

There are two very different kinds of color constancy. One kind studies the ability of humans to be insensitive to the spectral composition of scene illumination. The second studies computer vision techniques for calculating the surface reflectances of objects in variable illumination. Camera-measured chromaticity has been used as a tool in computer vision scene analysis. This paper measures th...