Search Results

One way of putting powers to work is to use them to ground (at least some) modal truths. One might hold that truths of possibility are true because of the powers of objects. For instance, that it is possible that one more person be in this room is true because of the ambulatory powers of the people in the adjoining rooms. That it is possible that Slow Steve run a fifteen-minute mile is true because of the locomotive powers that Steve has (perhaps along with other powers, such as his respiratory powers). Call the family of stronger or weaker views which hold that possibility claims are true because of powers the ‘Powers Accounts of Possibility,’ or ‘Powers Accounts’ for short. Call a proponent of a Powers Account a ‘Powers Accountant.’ In this paper I present nine objections to Powers Accounts of Possibility and show how a Powers Accountant can respond to them. I begin by providing an exceedingly strong Powers Account and offering three objections to it. The objections will prove useful for forming a more moderate Powers Account. I then subject the more moderate Powers Account to six further objections. In the end, I vindicate a Powers Account of Possibility against all nine objections.

This chapter traces the strategies that Caribbean ritual specialists used to create substances and objects with bodily effect. It shows how ritual practitioners modeled the power of medicinal substances and power objects on the basis of myriad encounters with cosmopolitan therapeutic communities in Caribbean lands. The power of healing substances resided in the tactics that practitioners used to claim privileged access to nature’s secrets, to its blessings and terrifying truths. The chapter shows how the tracing of the history of seventeenth-century Caribbean materials with bodily effects necessitates the plotting of maps of social realities and competition that go beyond a study of European appropriation and interpretation of “exotic” materials.These substances’ effectiveness was inextricably linked to the local realities within which practitioners deployed them. Caribbean substance specialists worked in communities that were unstable and continuously engaged in exchanges and appropriations. The specialized and complex powers of the substances and power objects they crafted for specific Caribbean rich and vibrant social spaces were, thus, not always geographically portable.

This chapter focuses on the problematic nature of objective colors, which have been relegated to being “a power in an object to produce in us an experience with a certain qualitative character.” For this reason, colors are often treated as merely properties of our subjective experiences, or “secondary properties,” instead of being treated as objective properties of external physical objects, or “primary properties.” One alternative to this view is simply identifying familiar external colors with the “power within external objects” that tends to produce the necessary internal sensation. Contrary to Locke’s criterion for objective reality, this chapter argues that the successful reduction to objective properties of material objects is an accomplished fact, both of science and of settled history. Further, it is argued that Locke’s criterion of a first-order resemblance to the qualities of our sensations is an ill-conceived notion.

This chapter expounds Locke’s theory of primary qualities and secondary qualities and defends a modernized version of it. It argues for the following theses. Although Locke defines secondary qualities as powers in objects to produce in us ideas of color, sound, taste, smell, heat, and cold, he oscillates between equating colors, sounds, etc. with (a) those powers and with (b) the ideas they produce in us. This oscillation stems from Locke’s wanting to say that they are both (a) and (b), despite his basic cleavage between ideas and qualities. Such a hybrid view of them is plausible, especially if we drop the three-term theory of perception often attributed to Locke in favor of a two-term theory, which says that the last term in the perceptual causal chain is the object’s appearing some way to the perceiver, and which distinguishes this “manifest aspect” of a secondary quality from its “dispositional aspect.”

Chapter 4 looks at how key stimuli and brain programming affect our own species’ aesthetics and determine which shapes, colors, and landscapes humans are attracted to and consider beautiful. Like other animals, people are predisposed to respond to certain key stimuli, which have been associated with an expectation of functionality, fitness, and increased well-being. In other words, the perception of beauty represents a strong internal indicator, which it pays to be guided by in order to gain various benefits. In this investigation, the chapter enters the micro-processes of artistic creation. It looks at the aesthetic effects that make up an artwork and at the understanding of why something captivates and fascinates people. The right embellishment can transform a trivial everyday object into an overwhelming power object—a kind of fetish that means the world to us and costs a fortune. How does something like this happen?

Chapter 10 concludes with showing the strength and limitations of the approach presented in this book, in a discussion that highlights the differences between a classic humanistic approach and an evolutionary, behavioral approach. The aim is not to move aesthetics from the humanities and into behavioral psychology and other sciences. On the contrary, the aesthetic field is a house with many doors, and you will need several keys to open them. However, aesthetics and art are also behavior. They are something our species does, and that is why behavioral sciences were prioritized. Furthermore, with behavioral and evolutionary psychology as tools, we can really shine an extensive and important light on the big Why of art and aesthetics.