Communication and cognition are presented as deeply interrelated aspects of the mind, the means by which animals perceive, respond to, and understand each other as well as their world. This chapter reviews chemosensory, vibrational (acoustic and seismic), visual and tactile sense modalities, the various ways in which people have attempted to exploit these sensory channels to manage problematic behaviors, and the ways in which anthropogenic disturbances and pollutants can interfere with signaling. It then delves into domains such as self-awareness, personality, problem-solving, cooperation, social learning, and culture. The chapter considers intriguing adaptive hypotheses such as that of cognitive buffering, before provoking reflection on the downstream consequences of social disturbance and trauma. Drawing on experimental studies on elephants and a range of other species from honeybees to whales, the comparative perspective positions cognitive abilities within their broader ecological and evolutionary contexts, and highlights why it is crucial to account for phenomena such as social learning and culture in protecting and managing elephant populations.

Chapter 2 discusses the subject of perception and how an individual’s selective perception of a situation influences their behavior. This discussion is expanded to include selective perception from a cultural perspective as well as from a group perspective. We also discuss the effects of selective perception on the degree and quality of communication that occurs in groups.

This chapter offers an exposition of Collingwood’s theory of imagination as presented in the commonly overlooked Book Two of The Principles of Art. I show how the standard objections to Collingwood’s view are relatively superficial, and also how the account in Book Two should be understood in the light of Collingwood’s remarks concerning the imagination in his earlier writings (especially Speculum Mentis and Outlines of a Philosophy of Art). For Collingwood, sense perception inseparably involves the imagination of possible objects of perception in any perceptual experience. Moreover, the imagination makes the sensory object thinkable – a position that blends Kantian and Humean motifs. Additionally, the crucial mark of the imaginary object is self-containment (“monadism”), a notion serving to clarify both Collingwood’s claim that the imagination is indifferent to reality or unreality and the conceptual connection, on his view, between imagination and art.

Christophe Triau’s chapter accounts for the state of the art of mise en scène in contemporary theatre. Triau explains how contemporary mise en scène is characterized by its marked refusal to construct immediately legible meaning or recognizable reference points on stage. Instead, with reference to the works of four major directors – Claude Régy, François Tanguy and the Théâtre du Radeau, Joël Pommerat, and Gisèle Vienne – Triau argues that stage direction tends to place audience members’ sense of perception under pressure. The stage is transformed into a destabilizing space of uncertainty, dream, hallucination or fantasy, which questions and renews the audience’s experience of perception, opening it out to other possibilities distinct from ordinary perception. In their very different ways, these directors bring into play not only what is seen but how the audience sees: the frameworks and activity of perception both in the theatre and in life.

Pronunciation teaching is often based on assumptions that learners are monolingual speakers, with the sound system of their native language determining the segmental and suprasegmental difficulties that mark learners’ foreign accents. However, many, if not a majority of speakers of other languages come to pronunciation with more than one language under their command. These bilingual/multilingual speakers are the norm in a globalized world, but how we teach pronunciation rarely accounts for the knowledge and skills these speakers bring to the learning of pronunciation. This chapter describes how the characteristics of bilingual speakers suggest how pronunciation teaching can be reimagined to take into account the range and flexibility of bilingual speakers in using multiple languages. Specifically, we argue that taking a nativeness viewpoint is inconsistent with taking a bilingual viewpoint and calls for pedagogical techniques that build on the kinds of needs bilingual speakers have in pronouncing additional languages.

This chapter discusses the way the contemplation of Intellect and the Forms is related to the experience of the sensible world. Despite the traditional view that Platonism espouses “two worlds”, Plotinus mocks the idea of the sensible and the intelligible as being actually two separated realms. Rather, for him there is only one world but seen from different perspectives by different cognitive activities of the soul. What happens in noetic contemplation is not that the Forms are seen apart from their sensible images, but that they are seen in and through their images, having become transparent to their essences. Or, when the experience is mature, it is rather that the sensible things are seen in and through their intelligible archetypes. To explain that phenomenon, Plotinus uses the continuum of dimness and clarity, and claims that perception is dim intellection, while intellection is clear perception. The contemplation of the transparency of the sensible to the intelligible gives rise to the experience of “bodies in Intellect” or the profound unity of the two realms, where the entire reality of the sensible is to be found in the intelligible.

This chapter discusses the first level of contemplation, namely, psychic contemplation. The point of departure is Plotinus’ view of perception as a multi-level activity and his claim that we perceive external things by virtue of internal images. In the realm of affective experience, we also co-create our emotions rather than receive them passively. The fall is a distortion of the states of knowing (perceptions) and the states of loving (affects) as well as of the sense of the body, the world, and the self. In the first phases of contemplative ascent, virtues purify our experience of the self, and we begin to overcome the sense of the world as external and our emotional enslavement to it. The result is peace and freedom. The analysis of perception and affective experience shows that for Plotinus contemplation is a natural state of our soul. It is not adding something which is not there but recovering our awareness of what is already going on when we perceive experience affects or relate to our body.

This chapter explores the perceptual acts modelled by John Clare’s poetry, especially in encounters with the more-than-human world. Rather than foregrounding the ways a perceiving ego shapes a landscape, Clare details situations and perspectives readers can imaginatively enter and emphasizes the ways that the situations themselves invite receptivity. He normalizes ecologically attuned modes of perception by presenting them as enabled by the places, plants, and animals his speakers encounter more than the speakers themselves. Focusing on poems that place speakers among or beneath birds and weeds, including ‘To an Insignificant Flower’, ‘The Fens’, and some shorter bird poems, Falke describes the poetic means through which Clare encourages epistemological humility and other-directedness. She then articulates a mode of reading Clare’s poetry based on these same perceptual habits.

The introduction introduces the concept of imagination used in the book, explains the relation of art and of faith to this concept, and discusses the approach and method of the book, highlighting its understanding of theology and theology’s relationship to phenomenology and to other disciplines. The introduction concludes with an overview of the plan of the book.

This chapter moves from the macro-level of social and narrative imagination to the micro-level of speaking and seeing. It continues to consider the interplay of inheritance and originality in these practices: the constitutive underdetermination or equivocity of what we see and say. The chapter illuminates the ways in which even at the smallest levels, we construct the world imaginatively. It then begins to discuss how art and poetry loosen the grasp of automated perception and do not impose an alternative vision but rather grant a double vision of our lives, allowing us to see it from new perspectives or in new ways. The chapter concludes with a consideration of liturgical and biblical renewals of perception.

The Isles of Scilly are an archipelago twenty-eight miles off the south-west coast of England, with a population of c. 2,000 people. The current indigenous population is believed to have descended from 1571, when the islands were repopulated by a member of the aristocracy who leased the islands from the British Crown. The islands’ leasing continued until 1920, when all but one island reverted to the Duchy of Cornwall. Metalinguistic commentary from the sixteenth century onwards suggests that Scillonians are perceived as more cultured, better educated and better spoken than their mainland counterparts. By drawing on oral history data, this vignette will explore the accuracy of these perceptions. To do so, it examines the extent to which phonetic features of Scillonian English relate to traditional varieties of Cornish English, on the one hand, and standard English, on the other. In explaining the patterns of linguistic variation found on the islands, consideration is given to the presence (or not) of the Cornish language on the islands, dialect contact, the ‘feudal-like’ system of governance, the peculiarities of education practices, and the identity factors that affect how and why different groups of Scillonians use distinctive linguistic variants.

The eponymous protagonist of Gwendolyn Brooks’s under-examined 1953 novel Maud Martha becomes acutely attuned to the multisensory dimensions of quotidian experience. As she navigates the intersecting forces of race, gender, class, and color in the public sphere, she begins to conceive of herself as a perceiving subject rather than solely as a perceived object in the private sphere. Drawing on Black feminist scholarship, I theorize synesthetic stillness as an aesthetic strategy that reveals aspects of Black interiority through its exploration of overlapping and intermingling perceptual faculties. In deploying synesthetic stillness, Brooks not only counters dehumanizing sensory stereotypes, but traces a mode of Black resistance that privileges internal sensation rather than external expression.