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Perception and demonstratives
No full textA ‘perceptual demonstrative’ thought is a thought of the kind standardly made available by a perceptual link with an object, and standardly expressed using ‘this’ or that’. This chapter is an introduction to a range of questions about how perception of objects enables us to form perceptual demonstrative thoughts about them
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Perceptual Reports
No full textPerceptual reports are utterances of sentences that contain a perceptual verb, such as ‘look’, ‘sound’, ‘feel’, ‘see’, and ‘perceive’. It is natural to suppose that at least in many cases, these types of reports reflect aspects of the phenomenal character and representational content of a subject’s perceptual experiences. For example, an utterance of ‘my chair looks red but it’s really white’ appears to reflect phenomenal properties of the speaker’s experience of a chair. Whether perceptual reports actually reflect these things is a substantial question and one with which
this entry will be partially concerned. This article begins with a linguistic analysis of perceptual verbs and then considers some potential implications of this analysis for the philosophy of perception, given the assumption that perceptual reports sometimes express truths
Perceiving Temporal Structure
No full textPerceptual experience seems to present us with not only objects and their ‘static’ properties such as shapes, colours, and positions but also with events and their temporal structure: that is, their temporal relationships such as simultaneity and temporal order. This dissertation aims to defend the claim that we perceptually experience temporal structure from recently revived challenges, and to show how a theory of temporal perception bears on central issues in the philosophy of mind.
Experience manifestly possesses its own temporal structure. If we have perceptual experiences of the temporal structure of external events, it seems natural to ask whether there is a deep explanatory connection between the temporal features of the experiences themselves and the temporal features that they are experiences of. Accordingly, much of the philosophical debate about temporal perception focuses on the matching thesis: the claim that the temporal structure of perceptual experience always matches the temporal structure that one experiences events as having. Debate between critics and proponents of the thesis can sometimes appear to be stuck in a clash between experimental results and strongly held introspective intuitions about experience. I do not directly argue against the matching thesis, but I show how we can improve upon existing experimentally-based arguments against it. I also show how its critics can explain (rather than simply disregard or deny) the intuitions that allegedly support it. Trying to explain these intuitions from the critic’s perspective suggests new ideas about temporal perception that are not only coherent but independently plausible. I develop these ideas and show how they can deepen our understanding of how temporal perception fits with other issues central to the philosophy of mind: our introspective awareness of our experiences, the connection between perception and the temporal present, and perception’s role in guiding action.Ph.D
Perceiving Temporal Structure
Get PDFPerceptual experience seems to present us with not only objects and their ‘static’ properties such as shapes, colours, and positions but also with events and their temporal structure: that is, their temporal relationships such as simultaneity and temporal order. This dissertation aims to defend the claim that we perceptually experience temporal structure from recently revived challenges, and to show how a theory of temporal perception bears on central issues in the philosophy of mind.
Experience manifestly possesses its own temporal structure. If we have perceptual experiences of the temporal structure of external events, it seems natural to ask whether there is a deep explanatory connection between the temporal features of the experiences themselves and the temporal features that they are experiences of. Accordingly, much of the philosophical debate about temporal perception focuses on the matching thesis: the claim that the temporal structure of perceptual experience always matches the temporal structure that one experiences events as having. Debate between critics and proponents of the thesis can sometimes appear to be stuck in a clash between experimental results and strongly held introspective intuitions about experience. I do not directly argue against the matching thesis, but I show how we can improve upon existing experimentally-based arguments against it. I also show how its critics can explain (rather than simply disregard or deny) the intuitions that allegedly support it. Trying to explain these intuitions from the critic’s perspective suggests new ideas about temporal perception that are not only coherent but independently plausible. I develop these ideas and show how they can deepen our understanding of how temporal perception fits with other issues central to the philosophy of mind: our introspective awareness of our experiences, the connection between perception and the temporal present, and perception’s role in guiding action.Ph.D
The Role of Concepts in Perception
Get PDFThe claim of my dissertation is that some basic concepts are required for perception. Non-basic concepts, we acquire, and I give an account as to how that process changes our perception.
Suppose you are looking at the Mona Lisa. It might seem that you can perceive a lot more shades of color and a lot more shapes than for which you possess precise concepts. I argue against this. For every color or shape in appearance you have the ability to categorize it as that color or shape. It’s just that this is done by your sensory system prior to appearance. I argue that empirical studies show this. Blindsighted patients, for instance, are blind in part of their visual field. But they can use color and shape information received through the blind portion. I take this, along with other studies, to show that once you perceive a color or shape, it has already been categorized.
I then argue that we perceive only low-level properties like colors and shapes. For in-stance, we don’t perceive high-level kind properties like being a table or being a wren. I do think that wrens or tables might look different to you after you become disposed to recognize them. Some take this to show that being a wren or being a table can be represented in your perception. I argue that this inference does not follow. If you are not disposed to recognize wrens, but we track the attention of someone who is, and we get you to attend to wrens in that same way, your visual phenomenology might be exactly the same as theirs. But there is no reason to think that it represents a wren. After all, you lack a recognitional disposition for wrens. I take this and other arguments to show that we perceive only low-level properties like colors and shapes.Ph
The Sense of Touch
Get PDFMy thesis is a collection of philosophical essays on the sense of touch. I argue first that touch is much like vision in being unisensory. (This has often been denied). But it is unlike vision in displaying a duality of the proximal and the distal, since it informs us both of the condition of our own bodies, and of the properties of external things. My account of this duality is unorthodox, since I argue that we do not sense distant objects in virtue of sensing the condition of our own bodies. Both forms of touch involve exploratory action—both are forms of haptic perception—but the nature of this involvement is unclear. I defend the view that haptic perceptions are haptic explorations. I first clarify this thesis, then distinguish it from other views, like those of Alva Noë and Susan Hurley, that posit a strong link between action and perception. Despite this interactive nature, touch may seem more constrained than vision and audition in requiring direct bodily contact with objects in the world. I argue against this view, and show that through touch we are capable of sensing objects that are not, and are not perceived as being, in direct contact with our bodies. Here again, touch is somewhat like vision.
The development of this account requires conceptual analysis of a range of important issues in the philosophy of perception, including the nature of multisensory experience, the role of bodily awareness in perception, the relation between action and perception, and the structure of non-visual spatial perception. For instance, because touch involves both coordinated bodily movements and a range of distinct sensory receptors in the skin, it is often thought to be a multisensory form of awareness (especially by psychologists). However, this view relies on an implausible conception of multisensory interaction. In its place, I develop a nuanced hierarchy of multisensory involvement according to which touch is a single modality. This is because the various systems involved in touch all predicate or assign sensory properties to the same tangible objects: when we grasp a mug, for instance, many different tactual properties—shape, warmth, texture, etc.—are all felt to belong to the mug. This is similar to what happens in vision with visual objects: when we see an object, a range of different visual properties, largely processed in functionally-distinct systems—are seen as belonging to it.
Another unique aspect of my view is the claim that through touch we can experience distal objects—objects not in direct or even apparent contact with our bodies. I develop a positive account of such touch, arguing that distal touch requires (1) a strong interactive connection between our bodies and the distal object (through tools or other such intermediaries) and (2) that distal objects are represented in touch as located in peripersonal space, the space immediately surrounding our bodies, defined by the limits of our exploratory engagement (by how far we can reach or move). This positive account allows for a more robust account of our embodied experience, and shows that touch—at least in some respects—is more like the other senses than typically supposed.Ph
The Role of Concepts in Perception
No full textThe claim of my dissertation is that some basic concepts are required for perception. Non-basic concepts, we acquire, and I give an account as to how that process changes our perception.
Suppose you are looking at the Mona Lisa. It might seem that you can perceive a lot more shades of color and a lot more shapes than for which you possess precise concepts. I argue against this. For every color or shape in appearance you have the ability to categorize it as that color or shape. It’s just that this is done by your sensory system prior to appearance. I argue that empirical studies show this. Blindsighted patients, for instance, are blind in part of their visual field. But they can use color and shape information received through the blind portion. I take this, along with other studies, to show that once you perceive a color or shape, it has already been categorized.
I then argue that we perceive only low-level properties like colors and shapes. For in-stance, we don’t perceive high-level kind properties like being a table or being a wren. I do think that wrens or tables might look different to you after you become disposed to recognize them. Some take this to show that being a wren or being a table can be represented in your perception. I argue that this inference does not follow. If you are not disposed to recognize wrens, but we track the attention of someone who is, and we get you to attend to wrens in that same way, your visual phenomenology might be exactly the same as theirs. But there is no reason to think that it represents a wren. After all, you lack a recognitional disposition for wrens. I take this and other arguments to show that we perceive only low-level properties like colors and shapes.Ph
The Sense of Touch
No full textMy thesis is a collection of philosophical essays on the sense of touch. I argue first that touch is much like vision in being unisensory. (This has often been denied). But it is unlike vision in displaying a duality of the proximal and the distal, since it informs us both of the condition of our own bodies, and of the properties of external things. My account of this duality is unorthodox, since I argue that we do not sense distant objects in virtue of sensing the condition of our own bodies. Both forms of touch involve exploratory action—both are forms of haptic perception—but the nature of this involvement is unclear. I defend the view that haptic perceptions are haptic explorations. I first clarify this thesis, then distinguish it from other views, like those of Alva Noë and Susan Hurley, that posit a strong link between action and perception. Despite this interactive nature, touch may seem more constrained than vision and audition in requiring direct bodily contact with objects in the world. I argue against this view, and show that through touch we are capable of sensing objects that are not, and are not perceived as being, in direct contact with our bodies. Here again, touch is somewhat like vision.
The development of this account requires conceptual analysis of a range of important issues in the philosophy of perception, including the nature of multisensory experience, the role of bodily awareness in perception, the relation between action and perception, and the structure of non-visual spatial perception. For instance, because touch involves both coordinated bodily movements and a range of distinct sensory receptors in the skin, it is often thought to be a multisensory form of awareness (especially by psychologists). However, this view relies on an implausible conception of multisensory interaction. In its place, I develop a nuanced hierarchy of multisensory involvement according to which touch is a single modality. This is because the various systems involved in touch all predicate or assign sensory properties to the same tangible objects: when we grasp a mug, for instance, many different tactual properties—shape, warmth, texture, etc.—are all felt to belong to the mug. This is similar to what happens in vision with visual objects: when we see an object, a range of different visual properties, largely processed in functionally-distinct systems—are seen as belonging to it.
Another unique aspect of my view is the claim that through touch we can experience distal objects—objects not in direct or even apparent contact with our bodies. I develop a positive account of such touch, arguing that distal touch requires (1) a strong interactive connection between our bodies and the distal object (through tools or other such intermediaries) and (2) that distal objects are represented in touch as located in peripersonal space, the space immediately surrounding our bodies, defined by the limits of our exploratory engagement (by how far we can reach or move). This positive account allows for a more robust account of our embodied experience, and shows that touch—at least in some respects—is more like the other senses than typically supposed.Ph
Perceiving as Predicting
Get PDFAccording to an emerging vision in computational cognitive neuroscience, perception (rich, full-blooded, world-presenting perception of the kind we enjoy) depends heavily on prediction. To visually perceive, if this schema is correct, is to meet incoming visual information with a set of matching top-down predictions that track the evolving visual signal across multiple spatial and temporal scales. This chapter first introduces this general explanatory schema, then displays some recent evidence for the schema, and discusses to what extent it marks a radical departure from previous (feature-detection based) models of perception. It ends by exploring some implications of the schema for questions concerning multimodal and crossmodal effects in sensory processing, and for an understanding of the deep and fundamental relations between perception, imagination, and understanding
Perception and demonstratives
Get PDFA ‘perceptual demonstrative’ thought is a thought of the kind standardly made available by a perceptual link with an object, and standardly expressed using ‘this’ or that’. This chapter is an introduction to a range of questions about how perception of objects enables us to form perceptual demonstrative thoughts about them.Peer reviewe
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