Boyd Millar
Biographic Data
| ID | 1143602 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Boyd Millar |
| GIVEN NAMES | Boyd |
| FAMILY NAME | Millar |
| SIGNATURE | MILLAR B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of York |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6308-2379 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 13 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The Argument from Imagination
Much of the debate between naïve realism and the content view has focused on a particular aspect of perceptual phenomenology: the phenomenal immediacy that distinguishes perceptual experiences from both imagery experiences and conscious thoughts. According to a version of the argument from hallucination , we should prefer the content view to naïve realism because the former, unlike the latter, can provide a unified explanation of the fact that bo…
Grief and the Limits of Possibility
Recent prominent philosophical work has proposed that grief’s formal object —that which all instances of grief are directed towards, and which distinguishes grief from other emotions—is the loss of significant life possibilities. This article challenges the “lost possibilities” account by examining cases of grief where possibilities are experienced as being different , disenfranchised, or diminished prior to the loss. We argue that individuals re…
Mechanisms of skillful interaction
The mechanistic model depicts scientific explanations as involving the discovery of multi-level, organized components that constitute a target phenomenon. Meanwhile, sensorimotor enactivism purports to offer a scientifically informed account of perceptual experience as a skill-laden interactive relationship, constitutively involving both perceiver and world, rather than as an agent-bound representation of the world. Insofar as sensorimotor enacti…
Can Animals Grieve
Empirical research provides striking examples of non-human animal responses to death, which look very much like manifestations of grief. However, recent philosophical work appears to challenge the idea that animals can grieve. Grief, in contrast to more rudimentary emotional experiences, has been taken to require potentially human-exclusive abilities like a fine-grained sense of particularity, an ability to project toward the distal future and th…
Perceiving secondary qualities
On the Appropriateness of Grief to Its Object
How we understand the nature and role of grief depends on what we take its object to be and vice versa. This paper focuses on recent claims by philosophers that grief is frequently or even inherently irrational or inappropriate in one or another respect, all of which hinge on assumptions concerning the proper object of grief. By emphasizing the temporally extended structure of grief, we offer an alternative account of its object that undermines t…
Grief and the non-death losses of Covid-19
Articles in the popular media and testimonies collected in empirical work suggest that many people who have not been bereaved have nevertheless grieved over pandemic-related losses of various kinds. There is a philosophical question about whether any experience of a non-death loss ought to count as grief, hinging upon how the object of grief is construed. However, even if one accepts that certain significant non-death losses are possible targets …
Grief’s impact on sensorimotor expectations
The philosophy of grief has directed little attention to bereavement’s impact on perceptual experience. However, misperceptions, hallucinations and other anomalous experiences are strikingly common following the death of a loved one. Such experiences range from misperceiving a stranger to be the deceased, to phantom sights, sounds and smells, to nebulous quasi-sensory experiences of the loved one’s presence. This paper draws upon the enactive sen…
Grief, Smell and the Olfactory Air of a Person
Philosophical research into olfaction often focuses on its limitations. We explore instead an underappreciated capacity of the sense of smell, namely, its role in interpersonal experience. To illustrate this, we examine how smell can enable continuing connections to deceased loved ones. Understanding this phenomenon requires an appreciation of, first, how olfaction's limitations can facilitate experiences of the deceased person and, second, how o…
Misperceiving properties
Recently, a number of philosophers have argued that property illusions —cases in which we perceive a property, but that property is not the property it seems to us to be in virtue of our perceptual experience—and veridical illusions —cases in which we veridically perceive an object's properties, but our experience of some specific property is nonetheless unsuccessful or illusory—can occur. I defend the contrary view. First, I maintain that there …
Grief
Despite being one of life's most disruptive, painful, and puzzling experiences, grief has been rather neglected within philosophical scholarship until recently.Michael Cholbi helps to plug this gap with this clearly written guide, which addresses many of the most important philosophical questions surrounding grief.Due to its approachable style, the book will be of interest to the general reader as well as those engaged in related philosophical en…
Partisan Epistemology and Misplaced Trust
The fact that each of us has significantly greater confidence in the claims of co-partisans – those belonging to groups with which we identify – explains, in large part, why so many people believe a significant amount of the misinformation they encounter. It's natural to assume that such misinformed partisan beliefs typically involve a rational failure of some kind, and philosophers and psychologists have defended various accounts of the nature o…
Grief, Continuing Bonds, and Unreciprocated Love
The widely accepted “continuing bonds” model of grief tells us that rather than bereavement necessitating the cessation of one's relationship with the deceased, very often the relationship continues instead in an adapted form. However, this framework appears to conflict with philosophical approaches that treat reciprocity or mutuality of some form as central to loving relationships. Seemingly the dead cannot be active participants, rendering it p…
Horror Films and Grief
Many of the most popular and critically acclaimed horror films feature grief as a central theme. This article argues that horror films are especially suited to portraying and communicating the phenomenology of grief. We explore two overlapping claims. First, horror is well suited to represent the experience of grief, in particular because the disruptive effects of horror “monsters” on protagonists mirror the core experience of disruption that acc…
Towards a sensorimotor approach to flavour and smell
Sensorimotor enactivism takes perceptual experience to be constituted by a kind of attunement to sensorimotor contingencies – law‐like relations between sensory inputs and bodily activity. The chemical senses have traditionally been construed as especially simple and passive, and a number of philosophers have argued that flavour and smell are problem cases for the sensorimotor approach. In this article, I respond to these objections to the sensor…
Smelling objects
Objects are central to perception and our interactions with the world. We perceive the world as parsed into discrete entities that instantiate particular properties, and these items capture our attention and shape how we interact with the environment. Recently there has been some debate about whether the sense of smell allows us to perceive odours as discrete objects, with some suggesting that olfaction is aspatial and doesn’t allow for object-in…
Frege's Puzzle for Perception
According to an influential variety of the representational view of perceptual experience—the singular content view —the contents of perceptual experiences include singular propositions partly composed of the particular physical object(s) a given experience is about or of. The singular content view faces well‐known difficulties accommodating hallucinations; I maintain that there is also an analogue of Frege's puzzle that poses a significant probl…
The Phenomenological Problem of Perception
Sensory Phenomenology and Perceptual Content
The consensus in contemporary philosophy of mind is that how a perceptual experience represents the world to be is built into its sensory phenomenology. I defend an opposing view which I call ‘moderate separatism’, that an experience's sensory phenomenology does not determine how it represents the world to be. I argue for moderate separatism by pointing to two ordinary experiences which instantiate the same sensory phenomenology but differ with r…
Peacocke’s trees
Smelling objects
Objects are central to perception and our interactions with the world. We perceive the world as parsed into discrete entities that instantiate particular properties, and these items capture our attention and shape how we interact with the environment. Recently there has been some debate about whether the sense of smell allows us to perceive odours as discrete objects, with some suggesting that olfaction is aspatial and doesn’t allow for object-in…
Sensory Phenomenology and Perceptual Content
The consensus in contemporary philosophy of mind is that how a perceptual experience represents the world to be is built into its sensory phenomenology. I defend an opposing view which I call ‘moderate separatism’, that an experience's sensory phenomenology does not determine how it represents the world to be. I argue for moderate separatism by pointing to two ordinary experiences which instantiate the same sensory phenomenology but differ with r…
Partisan Epistemology and Misplaced Trust
The fact that each of us has significantly greater confidence in the claims of co-partisans – those belonging to groups with which we identify – explains, in large part, why so many people believe a significant amount of the misinformation they encounter. It's natural to assume that such misinformed partisan beliefs typically involve a rational failure of some kind, and philosophers and psychologists have defended various accounts of the nature o…
Peacocke’s trees
Sensory Phenomenology and Perceptual Content
The consensus in contemporary philosophy of mind is that how a perceptual experience represents the world to be is built into its sensory phenomenology. I defend an opposing view which I call ‘moderate separatism’, that an experience's sensory phenomenology does not determine how it represents the world to be. I argue for moderate separatism by pointing to two ordinary experiences which instantiate the same sensory phenomenology but differ with r…
The Phenomenological Problem of Perception
Frege's Puzzle for Perception
According to an influential variety of the representational view of perceptual experience—the singular content view —the contents of perceptual experiences include singular propositions partly composed of the particular physical object(s) a given experience is about or of. The singular content view faces well‐known difficulties accommodating hallucinations; I maintain that there is also an analogue of Frege's puzzle that poses a significant probl…
Smelling objects
Objects are central to perception and our interactions with the world. We perceive the world as parsed into discrete entities that instantiate particular properties, and these items capture our attention and shape how we interact with the environment. Recently there has been some debate about whether the sense of smell allows us to perceive odours as discrete objects, with some suggesting that olfaction is aspatial and doesn’t allow for object-in…
Horror Films and Grief
Many of the most popular and critically acclaimed horror films feature grief as a central theme. This article argues that horror films are especially suited to portraying and communicating the phenomenology of grief. We explore two overlapping claims. First, horror is well suited to represent the experience of grief, in particular because the disruptive effects of horror “monsters” on protagonists mirror the core experience of disruption that acc…
Towards a sensorimotor approach to flavour and smell
Sensorimotor enactivism takes perceptual experience to be constituted by a kind of attunement to sensorimotor contingencies – law‐like relations between sensory inputs and bodily activity. The chemical senses have traditionally been construed as especially simple and passive, and a number of philosophers have argued that flavour and smell are problem cases for the sensorimotor approach. In this article, I respond to these objections to the sensor…
Grief, Continuing Bonds, and Unreciprocated Love
The widely accepted “continuing bonds” model of grief tells us that rather than bereavement necessitating the cessation of one's relationship with the deceased, very often the relationship continues instead in an adapted form. However, this framework appears to conflict with philosophical approaches that treat reciprocity or mutuality of some form as central to loving relationships. Seemingly the dead cannot be active participants, rendering it p…
On the Appropriateness of Grief to Its Object
How we understand the nature and role of grief depends on what we take its object to be and vice versa. This paper focuses on recent claims by philosophers that grief is frequently or even inherently irrational or inappropriate in one or another respect, all of which hinge on assumptions concerning the proper object of grief. By emphasizing the temporally extended structure of grief, we offer an alternative account of its object that undermines t…
Grief and the non-death losses of Covid-19
Articles in the popular media and testimonies collected in empirical work suggest that many people who have not been bereaved have nevertheless grieved over pandemic-related losses of various kinds. There is a philosophical question about whether any experience of a non-death loss ought to count as grief, hinging upon how the object of grief is construed. However, even if one accepts that certain significant non-death losses are possible targets …
Grief’s impact on sensorimotor expectations
The philosophy of grief has directed little attention to bereavement’s impact on perceptual experience. However, misperceptions, hallucinations and other anomalous experiences are strikingly common following the death of a loved one. Such experiences range from misperceiving a stranger to be the deceased, to phantom sights, sounds and smells, to nebulous quasi-sensory experiences of the loved one’s presence. This paper draws upon the enactive sen…
Grief, Smell and the Olfactory Air of a Person
Philosophical research into olfaction often focuses on its limitations. We explore instead an underappreciated capacity of the sense of smell, namely, its role in interpersonal experience. To illustrate this, we examine how smell can enable continuing connections to deceased loved ones. Understanding this phenomenon requires an appreciation of, first, how olfaction's limitations can facilitate experiences of the deceased person and, second, how o…
Misperceiving properties
Recently, a number of philosophers have argued that property illusions —cases in which we perceive a property, but that property is not the property it seems to us to be in virtue of our perceptual experience—and veridical illusions —cases in which we veridically perceive an object's properties, but our experience of some specific property is nonetheless unsuccessful or illusory—can occur. I defend the contrary view. First, I maintain that there …
Grief
Despite being one of life's most disruptive, painful, and puzzling experiences, grief has been rather neglected within philosophical scholarship until recently.Michael Cholbi helps to plug this gap with this clearly written guide, which addresses many of the most important philosophical questions surrounding grief.Due to its approachable style, the book will be of interest to the general reader as well as those engaged in related philosophical en…
Partisan Epistemology and Misplaced Trust
The fact that each of us has significantly greater confidence in the claims of co-partisans – those belonging to groups with which we identify – explains, in large part, why so many people believe a significant amount of the misinformation they encounter. It's natural to assume that such misinformed partisan beliefs typically involve a rational failure of some kind, and philosophers and psychologists have defended various accounts of the nature o…
Can Animals Grieve
Empirical research provides striking examples of non-human animal responses to death, which look very much like manifestations of grief. However, recent philosophical work appears to challenge the idea that animals can grieve. Grief, in contrast to more rudimentary emotional experiences, has been taken to require potentially human-exclusive abilities like a fine-grained sense of particularity, an ability to project toward the distal future and th…
Perceiving secondary qualities
Mechanisms of skillful interaction
The mechanistic model depicts scientific explanations as involving the discovery of multi-level, organized components that constitute a target phenomenon. Meanwhile, sensorimotor enactivism purports to offer a scientifically informed account of perceptual experience as a skill-laden interactive relationship, constitutively involving both perceiver and world, rather than as an agent-bound representation of the world. Insofar as sensorimotor enacti…
The Argument from Imagination
Much of the debate between naïve realism and the content view has focused on a particular aspect of perceptual phenomenology: the phenomenal immediacy that distinguishes perceptual experiences from both imagery experiences and conscious thoughts. According to a version of the argument from hallucination , we should prefer the content view to naïve realism because the former, unlike the latter, can provide a unified explanation of the fact that bo…
Grief and the Limits of Possibility
Recent prominent philosophical work has proposed that grief’s formal object —that which all instances of grief are directed towards, and which distinguishes grief from other emotions—is the loss of significant life possibilities. This article challenges the “lost possibilities” account by examining cases of grief where possibilities are experienced as being different , disenfranchised, or diminished prior to the loss. We argue that individuals re…
Epistemology (15 works) · Psychology (15 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Cognitive psychology (8 works) · Grief (8 works) · Perception (8 works) · Psychotherapist (7 works) · Cognitive science (6 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Embodied and Extended Cognition (6 works)