Perceptual Content
The seminar revolves around a central question about the nature of perception: namely, in what sense perceptual states have ‘content’ (and, thus, in what way they relate to the world).
In contemporary philosophy, there are two dominant answers to this question. Some say that a specification of the content of a perceptual state is a specification of how the state represents the world as being. Others – disjunctivists or naïve realists – deny that perceptual states are representations. Rather, they hold that (veridical) perceptual states are relations to (worldly) objects and that the objects of perceptual constitute their content.
Perceptual psychology seems to suggest a third answer. Namely, that perceptual states are representational, but in a different sense from that employed in the philosophical debate.
In this seminar, we will seek to articulate and assess the notion of ‘representation’ found in vision science and perceptual psychology, and consider the implications that the science’s use of it has for philosophical questions about psychological states and their content.
We will be reading a selection of material from the list below. All the literature is available through the University Library. Anything which is not available on-line will be made available in the form of master-copies.
I. Problems of Perception – in philosophy and perceptual psychology.
Tyler Burge, The Origins of Objectivity, (paperback, Oxford University
Press), Chapters 1-3 and 8-10.
Tim Crane, ‘The Problem of Perception’, Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (Online).
Gary Hatfield, Perception and Cognition: Essays in the Philosophy of
Cognition, OUP 2009, Chapter 6.
Gary Hatfield and Sarah Allred, Sensation, Cognition and Constancy, OUP
2012. (Several papers are relevant, but we can most likely only discuss
one.)
David Marr, Vision, MIT 1982, Chapter 2.
Mike Martin, 2002, “The Transparency of Experience”, Mind and Language,
17: 376–425.
Mike Martin, 2000, “Beyond Dispute: Sense-Data, Intentionality and the
Mind-Body Problem” in Crane and Patterson (eds.) 2000, 195–231.
Steven Palmer, Vision Science: Photons to Phenomenology, MIT 1999,
Chapters 1, 2 and 7.
A.D. Smith, The Problem of Perception Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2002, Chapter 2.
Paul Snowdon, ‘How to interpret “direct perception”’, in T. Crane (ed),
The Contents of Experience, CUP 1992.
Matthew Soteriou, ‘The Disjunctive Theory of Perception’, Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Online).
II. Representation (or Content) in Cognitive Science
Craik, Kenneth(1967), The Nature of Explanation, Chapter 5: Hypothesis on the nature of thought, pp. 50-61, Cambridge University Press, 1st updated edition.
Duncan Luce, R. and Patrick Suppes(2002), ‘Representational Measurement Theory’, in John Wixted (ed.) Stevens’ Handbook of Experimental Psychology, Third Edition, Volume 4: Methodology in Experimental Psychology. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Epstein, William(1995) ‘The Metatheoretical Context’, in W. Epstein and Sheena Rogers (eds.), Perception of Space and Motion, Academic Press.
Gallistel, C.R.(1990), The Organization of Learning, Chapter two: ‘Representation’. MIT Press.
Gallistel, C.R. and Adam Philip King(2009), Memory and the Computational Brain, Chapter 7: Computation, Wiley-Blackwell.
Hochberg, Julian(1981), ‘Levels of Perceptual Organization’, pp. 255- 278 in Michael Kubovy and James R. Pomerantz, Perceptual Organization. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, New Jersey, 1981.
Krantz, David H., R. Duncan Luce, Patrick Suppes and Amos Tversky(2006), The Foundations of Measurement, Volume 1, Chapter 1 (pp. 1-37 ). Dover Publications.
Kubovy, Michael and William Epstein(2001), ‘Internalization: A metaphor we can live without’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24, 618-625.
Marr, David (1982). Vision. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman.
Palmer, Stephen E. (1978), ‘Fundamental Aspects of Cognitive Representation’, in Eleanor Rosch (ed.), Cognition and Categorization.
Palmer, Stephen E. and Ruth Kimchi (1986), ‘The Information Processing Approach to Cognition’. In Terry J. Knapp and Lynn C. Robertson (eds.), Approaches to Cognition: Contrasts and Controversies, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, New Jersey. pp. 37-77
Pollock, John L., Technical Methods in Philosophy, Chapter One: Set Theory, Westview Press, 1990.
Pomerantz, James R. and Micheal Kubovy(1981), ‘Perceptual Organization: An Overview’, pp. 423- 456 in Michael Kubovy and James R. Pomerantz, Perceptual Organization. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, New Jersey.
Shepard, Roger N. and Susan Chapman(1970), ‘Second-Order Isomorphism in Internal Representations: Shapes of States’, Cognitive Psychology 1, 1-17.
Shepard, Roger N. (1975), ‘Form, Formation, and Transformation of Internal Representations’. Pp. 87-122 In Robert L. Solso (ed.), Information Processing and Cognition: The Loyola Symposium. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, New Jersey.
Shepard, Roger N. (1981), ‘Psychological Complementarity’, pp. 279-341, in Michael Kubovy and James R. Pomerantz, Perceptual Organization. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, New Jersey.
Shepard, Roger N. (2001), ‘Perceptual-cognitive universals as reflections of the world’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2001), 24, 581-601
Suppes, Patrick and Joseph L. Zinnes(1962), ‘Basic Measurement Theory’, Technical Report No. 45, Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences, Stanford University. March 15.