I hope this finds you well.
I am a researcher working on color perception and categorization, currently guest-editing a special issue of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology entitled “Sensory categories”. As you know, research tends to be quite segregated by modality, and the purpose of the issue is to gather in a single publication research papers that address questions of categorization that are relevant across modalities.
Thank you in advance for your time.
Dr Yasmina Jraissati
Philosophy Department
American University of Beirut
CALL FOR PAPERS
"Sensory Categories"
Special issue of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology
Submission deadline: June 1, 2017
As human perceivers we receive a wide variety of sensory inputs that we process with only limited cognitive capacities. Our cognitive relation to the world requires that we organize our sensory experience and group things together. How we categorize sensory experience and verbalize it remains mostly unknown, however. For example, even in the widely studied case of color categorization, the question of why we draw the boundary between green and blue where we do is still standing.
In the attempt to understand the relationship of language and color perception in cognition, the tendency has mostly been to frame the discussion in terms of the nurture vs. nature contrast. Recently, more complex models seeking alternative explanations or looking to integrate both hard-wired mechanisms and cultural factors have been proposed. Such accounts are promising, but remain a minority. With similar questions arising in other sensory domains (olfaction, flavor, touch, sound, phonemes, etc.), the question whether such alternative models can be generalized across modalities needs to be addressed: Can there be a unified sensory categorization model?
We invite such innovative ways of framing the debate. The main goal of this special issue is to foster the reflection on such alternative frameworks and to serve as reference for future research in the field. We encourage submissions that broaden the horizon of this discussion and study the multiple aspects of the problem at hand, in relation to the following non-exhaustive set of issues:
− Is there a unified model of categorization across sensory domains? Can the various color categorization models be generalized? Is color the right standard?
− What are the roles of environment and context in sensory categorization? How can these be identified and measured?
− What can we learn from cross-cultural differences or similarities in sensory categories? And from comparisons between experts and novices?
− What can we learn from comparing categories across sensory experiences – or in less explored sensory domains?
− Might some perceptual categories exhibit multi-modal interactions?
− Is perceptual similarity the only relevant categorization principle across modalities?
− What are the limitations of prototype theory when it comes to sensory categories?
− Are representation perceptual spaces adequate tools to investigate sensory categorization in all sensory domains?
− Are there perceptual primaries? What role do they play in categorization? And what do we mean by that notion?
Guest editor
Yasmina Jraissati (American University of Beirut)
Guest authors
Ophelia Deroy (Center for the study of the senses, University of London)
Peter Gärdenfors (University of Lund)
Kimberly Jameson (University of California, Irvine)
Christoph Witzel (Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, Université Paris Descartes, CNRS)
Schedule
Submission deadline: June 1, 2017
Target publication date: January 2018
How to submit
Prospective authors should register at:
www.editorialmanager.com/ropp to obtain a login and select Sensory categories as the article type. Manuscripts should be no longer than 8,000 words and conform to the author guidelines available on the journal's website.
About the journal
The Review of Philosophy and Psychology (ISSN: 1878-5158; eISSN: 1878-5166) is a peer-reviewed journal, published quarterly by Springer, which focuses on philosophical and foundational issues in cognitive science. The journal’s aim is to provide a forum for discussion on topics of mutual interest to philosophers and psychologists and to foster interdisciplinary research at the crossroads of philosophy and the sciences of the mind, including the neural, behavioral and social sciences. The journal publishes theoretical works grounded in empirical research as well as empirical articles on issues of philosophical relevance. It includes thematic issues featuring invited contributions from leading authors together with articles answering a call for papers.
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