Author: William G. Lycan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019269989X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 154
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Book Description
Perceptual Content is the first book to discuss and compare the representational characters of all the traditional "five senses". It has three main topics or concerns. (1) The diversity of the senses: though Lycan maintains as a working assumption that all perception represents, the similarity between sense modalities ends there. The senses' respective representational modes, styles and structures -- not just their mechanisms -- differ very strongly from each other. (2) The Layering thesis: Lycan argues that a single sensory representation usually has more than one content, the contents systematically related to each other by a priority or dependence relation. More specifically, a perceptual state may represent one object or property by representing a more primitive or less ambitious one; he calls this the "layering" of content. For example, by hearing a sound sequence involving such-and-such volumes and timbres, you hear a voice speaking, and by hearing the voice, you hear words in a language. In some modalities layering works unexpectedly: nearly all tactile representation derives from representation of conditions of or in the subject's own skin, meaning that touch represents, e.g., the texture of a physical object by, and only by, representing stress within the skin; and even among the skin conditions, some are represented only by representing more primitive ones. (3) Aspect perception: despite Wittgenstein's famous discussion of "seeing as" in a late section of Philosophical Investigations, little has been written on perceiving-as. Besides its intrinsic interest -- even popular appeal, what with joke ambiguous figures such as the duck-rabbit and the old/young woman -- it remains especially mysterious. Nearly all work on it has concerned vision only. But it is crucial for understanding auditory representation, which is one thing that distinguishes hearing from the other senses. Further, the auditory case severely damages what Lycan and others had thought was the best approach to understanding aspect perception, in terms of attention.
Author: Susanna Siegel
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190294051
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
What do we see? We are visually conscious of colors and shapes, but are we also visually conscious of complex properties such as being John Malkovich? In this book, Susanna Siegel develops a framework for understanding the contents of visual experience, and argues that these contents involve all sorts of complex properties. Siegel starts by analyzing the notion of the contents of experience, and by arguing that theorists of all stripes should accept that experiences have contents. She then introduces a method for discovering the contents of experience: the method of phenomenal contrast. This method relies only minimally on introspection, and allows rigorous support for claims about experience. She then applies the method to make the case that we are conscious of many kinds of properties, of all sorts of causal properties, and of many other complex properties. She goes on to use the method to help analyze difficult questions about our consciousness of objects and their role in the contents of experience, and to reconceptualize the distinction between perception and sensation. Siegel's results are important for many areas of philosophy, including the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and the philosophy of science. They are also important for the psychology and cognitive neuroscience of vision.
Author: Mohan Matthen
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199600473
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 945
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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Perception is a survey by leading philosophical thinkers of contemporary issues and new thinking in philosophy of perception. It includes sections on the history of the subject, introductions to contemporary issues in the epistemology, ontology and aesthetics of perception, treatments of the individual sense modalities and of the things we perceive by means of them, and a consideration of how perceptual information is integrated and consolidated. New analytic tools and applications to other areas of philosophy are discussed in depth. Each of the forty-five entries is written by a leading expert, some collaborating with younger figures; each seeks to introduce the reader to a broad range of issues. All contain new ideas on the topics covered; together they demonstrate the vigour and innovative zeal of a young field. The book is accessible to anybody who has an intellectual interest in issues concerning perception.
Author: J. Christopher Maloney
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190854774
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
Naturalistic cognitive science, when realistically rendered, rightly maintains that to think is to deploy contentful mental representations. Accordingly, conscious perception, memory, and anticipation are forms of cognition that, despite their introspectively manifest differences, may coincide in content. Sometimes we remember what we saw; other times we predict what we will see. Why, then, does what it is like consciously to perceive, differ so dramatically from what it is like merely to recall or anticipate the same? Why, if thought is just representation, does the phenomenal character of seeing a sunset differ so stunningly from the tepid character of recollecting or predicting the sun's descent? J. Christopher Maloney argues that, unlike other cognitive modes, perception is in fact immediate, direct acquaintance with the object of thought. Although all mental representations carry content, the vehicles of perceptual representation are uniquely composed of the very objects represented. To perceive the setting sun is to use the sun and its properties to cast a peculiar cognitive vehicle of demonstrative representation. This vehicle's embedded referential term is identical with, and demonstrates, the sun itself. And the vehicle's self-attributive demonstrative predicate is itself forged from a property of that same remote star. So, in this sense, the perceiving mind is an extended mind. Perception is unbrokered cognition of what is real, exactly as it really is. Maloney's theory of perception will be of great interest in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science.
Author: Diego Zucca
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443884685
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 395
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Book Description
In recent years, there has been a notable increase in philosophical interest in perception. Perception is the basic and primary way in which we get in touch with our world in cognitive and active terms: by perceiving the surrounding world, we come to form true beliefs about it and successfully inhabit it through our actions. As such, correctly understanding the nature of perception will help to shed light on many other central philosophical issues. This book offers a defence of the content view of perceptual experience, of the idea that our perceptual experiences represent the world as being a certain way, and so have representational content. An articulated framework is provided for understanding the nature of these experiences in terms of contentful states, as well as for exploring the epistemological, semantical and phenomenological consequences of such an understanding. In addition, the book also includes a detailed and systematic account of how we conceive and ascribe the content of our experiences and their relation to our phenomenology, beliefs and knowledge of the world.
Author: William G Lycan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192871811
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 168
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Book Description
Perceptual Content is the first book to discuss and compare the representational characters of all the traditional "five senses". It has three main topics or concerns: the diversity of the senses; the way the contents of sensory representations are layered; and aspect perception, "perceiving as".
Author: Berit Brogaard
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199756015
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 393
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Book Description
Within the contemporary philosophical debates over the nature of perception, the question of whether perception has content in the first place recently has become a focus of discussion. The most common view is that it does, but a number of philosophers have questioned this claim. The issue immediately raises a number of related questions. What does it mean to say that perception has content? Does perception have more than one kind of content? Does perceptual content derive from the content of beliefs or judgments? Should perceptual content be understood in terms of accuracy conditions? Is naive realism compatible with holding that perception has content? This volume brings together philosophers representing many different perspectives to address these and other central questions in the philosophy of perception.
Author: Alva Noë
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262640635
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 291
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Book Description
"Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us," writes Alva Noë. "It is something we do." In Action in Perception, Noë argues that perception and perceptual consciousness depend on capacities for action and thought—that perception is a kind of thoughtful activity. Touch, not vision, should be our model for perception. Perception is not a process in the brain, but a kind of skillful activity of the body as a whole. We enact our perceptual experience. To perceive, according to this enactive approach to perception, is not merely to have sensations; it is to have sensations that we understand. In Action in Perception, Noë investigates the forms this understanding can take. He begins by arguing, on both phenomenological and empirical grounds, that the content of perception is not like the content of a picture; the world is not given to consciousness all at once but is gained gradually by active inquiry and exploration. Noë then argues that perceptual experience acquires content thanks to our possession and exercise of practical bodily knowledge, and examines, among other topics, the problems posed by spatial content and the experience of color. He considers the perspectival aspect of the representational content of experience and assesses the place of thought and understanding in experience. Finally, he explores the implications of the enactive approach for our understanding of the neuroscience of perception.
Author: Susanna Schellenberg
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192562681
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
Perception is our key to the world. It plays at least three different roles in our lives. It justifies beliefs and provides us with knowledge of our environment. It brings about conscious mental states. It converts informational input, such as light and sound waves, into representations of invariant features in our environment. Corresponding to these three roles, there are at least three fundamental questions that have motivated the study of perception. How does perception justify beliefs and yield knowledge of our environment? How does perception bring about conscious mental states? How does a perceptual system accomplish the feat of converting varying informational input into mental representations of invariant features in our environment? This book presents a unified account of the phenomenological and epistemological role of perception that is informed by empirical research. So it develops an account of perception that provides an answer to the first two questions, while being sensitive to scientific accounts that address the third question. The key idea is that perception is constituted by employing perceptual capacities - for example the capacity to discriminate instances of red from instances of blue. Perceptual content, consciousness, and evidence are each analyzed in terms of this basic property of perception. Employing perceptual capacities constitutes phenomenal character as well as perceptual content. The primacy of employing perceptual capacities in perception over their derivative employment in hallucination and illusion grounds the epistemic force of perceptual experience. In this way, the book provides a unified account of perceptual content, consciousness, and evidence.
Author: Alva Noë
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262640473
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 644
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Book Description
The philosophy of perception is a microcosm of the metaphysics of mind. Its central problems—What is perception? What is the nature of perceptual consciousness? How can one fit an account of perceptual experience into a broader account of the nature of the mind and the world?—are at the heart of metaphysics. Rather than try to cover all of the many strands in the philosophy of perception, this book focuses on a particular orthodoxy about the nature of visual perception. The central problem for visual science has been to explain how the brain bridges the gap between what is given to the visual system and what is actually experienced by the perceiver. The orthodox view of perception is that it is a process whereby the brain, or a dedicated subsystem of the brain, builds up representations of relevant figures of the environment on the basis of information encoded by the sensory receptors. Most adherents of the orthodox view also believe that for every conscious perceptual state of the subject, there is a particular set of neurons whose activities are sufficient for the occurrence of that state. Some of the essays in this book defend the orthodoxy; most criticize it; and some propose alternatives to it. Many of the essays are classics. Contributors G.E.M. Anscombe, Dana Ballard, Daniel Dennett, Fred Dretske, Jerry Fodor, H.P. Grice, David Marr, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Zenon Pylyshyn, Paul Snowdon, and P.F. Strawson
