Philosophy of perception
The philosophy of perception is concerned with the nature of
Categories of perception
We may categorize perception as internal or external.[original research?]
- Internal perception (proprioception) tells us what is going on in our bodies; where our limbs are, whether we are sitting or standing, whether we are depressed, hungry, tired and so forth.
- External or sensory perception (exteroception), tells us about the world outside our bodies. Using our senses of sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste, we perceive colors, sounds, textures, etc. of the world at large. There is a growing body of knowledge of the mechanics of sensory processes in cognitive psychology.
- Mixed internal and external perception (e.g., emotion and certain moods) tells us about what is going on in our bodies and about the perceived cause of our bodily perceptions.
The philosophy of perception is mainly concerned with exteroception.[original research?]
Scientific accounts of perception
An object at some distance from an observer will reflect light in all directions, some of which will fall upon the corneae of the
Sound is analyzed in term of pressure waves sensed by the cochlea in the ear. Data from the eyes and ears is combined to form a 'bound' percept. The problem of how this is produced, known as the binding problem.
Perception is analyzed as a
Contrary to the behaviouralist approach to understanding the elements of cognitive processes,
Problem of Perception
Important philosophical problems derive from the
The succession of data transfers involved in perception suggests that sense data are somehow available to a perceiving subject that is the substrate of the percept. Indirect realism, the view held by John Locke and Nicolas Malebranche, proposes that we can only be aware of mental representations of objects. However, this may imply an infinite regress (a perceiver within a perceiver within a perceiver...), though a finite regress is perfectly possible.[10] It also assumes that perception is entirely due to data transfer and information processing, an argument that can be avoided by proposing that the percept does not depend wholly upon the transfer and rearrangement of data. This still involves basic ontological issues of the sort raised by Leibniz[11] Locke, Hume, Whitehead and others, which remain outstanding particularly in relation to the binding problem, the question of how different perceptions (e.g. color and contour in vision) are "bound" to the same object when they are processed by separate areas of the brain.
Indirect realism (representational views) provides an account of issues such as perceptual contents,
Idealism holds that reality is limited to mental qualities while skepticism challenges our ability to know anything outside our minds. One of the most influential proponents of idealism was George Berkeley who maintained that everything was mind or dependent upon mind. Berkeley's idealism has two main strands, phenomenalism in which physical events are viewed as a special kind of mental event and subjective idealism. David Hume is probably the most influential proponent of skepticism.
A fourth theory of perception in opposition to naive realism, enactivism, attempts to find a middle path between direct realist and indirect realist theories, positing that cognition is a process of dynamic interplay between an organism's sensory-motor capabilities and the environment it brings forth.[14] Instead of seeing perception as a passive process determined entirely by the features of an independently existing world, enactivism suggests that organism and environment are structurally coupled and co-determining. The theory was first formalized by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch in "The Embodied Mind".[15]
Spatial representation
An aspect of perception that is common to both realists and anti-realists is the idea of mental or
Beyond spatial representation
Traditionally, the philosophical investigation of perception has focused on the sense of vision as the paradigm of sensory perception.[18] However, studies on the other sensory modalities, such as the sense of smell, can challenge what we consider characteristic or essential features of perception. Take olfaction as an example. Spatial representation relies on a "mapping" paradigm that maps the spatial structures of the stimuli onto discrete neural structures and representations.[19] However, olfactory science has shown us that perception is also a matter of associative learning, observational refinement, and a decision-making process that is context-dependent. One of the consequences of these discoveries on the philosophy of perception is that common perceptual effects such as conceptual imagery turn more on the neural architecture and its development than the topology of the stimulus itself.[20]
See also
- Anil Gupta
- Argument from illusion
- Arthur Schopenhauer
- Āyatana
- Binding problem
- Consciousness
- Direct realism
- Epistemology
- George Berkeley
- Hallucinations in the sane
- Immanuel Kant
- Idealism
- Indirect realism
- John McDowell
- Fiona Macpherson
- Map-territory relation
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty
- Mind's eye
- Multistable perception
- Open individualism
- Charles Sanders Peirce
- Perceptual conceptualism
- Philosophical realism
- Roderick Chisholm
- Sensorium
- Solipsism
- Subjective character of experience
- Susanna Schellenberg
- Susanna Siegel
- Theories of perception
- Thomas Reid
- Transcendental idealism
- Vertiginous question
- Visual perception
- Visual space
Notes
- ^ a b c d cf. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-episprob/ BonJour, Laurence (2007): "Epistemological Problems of Perception." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed 1.9.2010.
- ^ cf. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-problem/ Crane, Tim (2005): "The Problem of Perception." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed 1.9.2010; Drestske, Fred (1999): "Perception." In: Robert Audi, The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Second Edition, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cambridge University Press, pp. 654–658, here p. 656.
- ^ cf. Alva Noë (2006): Perception. In: Sahotra Sarkar/Jessica Pfeifer (Eds.), The Philosophy of Science: An Encyclopedia, New York: Routledge, pp. 545–550, here p. 546 ff.
- ISBN 9780674983694.
- ^ see Moutoussis and Zeki (1997)
- S2CID 4452222.
- ^ Skinner 1953
- ^ Chalmers DJ. (1995) "Facing up to the hard problem of consciousness." Journal of Consciousness Studies 2, 3, 200–219
- ^ Smythies J. (2003) "Space, time and consciousness." Journal of Consciousness Studies 10, 3, 47–64.
- ^ Edwards JC. (2008) "Are our spaces made of words?" Journal of Consciousness Studies 15, 1, 63–83.
- ^ Woolhouse RS and Franks R. (1998) GW Leibniz, Philosophical Texts, Oxford University Press.
- ^ Siegel, S. (2011)."The Contents of Perception", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2011/entries/perception-contents/>.
- ^ Siegel, S.: The Contents of Visual Experience. New York: Oxford University Press. 2010
- ^ p 206, Varela F, Thompson E, Rosch E (1991) "The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience" MIT Press
- ^ Varela F, Thompson E, Rosch E (1991) "The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience" MIT Press
- Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique: 171–184.
- S2CID 170960993.
- ISBN 9780674983694.
- ^ "Nautilus | Science Connected". Nautilus. 2020-12-11. Retrieved 2020-12-11.
- ISBN 9780674983694.
References
- BonJour, L. (2007). "Epistemological Problems of Perception". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- Crane, Tim; French, C. (2015). "The Problem of Perception". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- Georgakakis, Christos; Moretti, Luca. "Cognitive Penetrability of Perception and Epistemic Justification". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- Zalta, Edward N., ed. (2004). "Maurice Merleau-Ponty". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- O'Brien, Daniel. "Epistemology of Perception". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- O'Brien, Daniel. "Objects of Perception". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- Siegel, Susanna (2005). "The Contents of Perception". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Further reading
Historical
- Descartes, Rene (1641). Meditations on First Philosophy. Online text
- Hume, David (1739–40). A Treatise of Human Nature: Being An Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning Into Moral Subjects. Online text
- Kant, Immanuel (1781). Critique of Pure Reason. Norman Kemp Smith (trans.) with preface by Howard Caygill, Palgrave Macmillan. Online text
- Locke, John (1689). An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Online text
- Russell, Bertrand (1912). The Problems of Philosophy, London: Williams and Norgate; New York: Henry Holt and Company. Online text
Contemporary
- Burge, Tyler (1991). "Vision and Intentional Content," in E. LePore and R. Van Gulick (eds.) John Searle and his Critics, Oxford: Blackwell.
- Chalmers DJ. (1995) "Facing up to the hard problem of consciousness." Journal of Consciousness Studies 2, 3, 200–219.
- Dretske, Fred (1981). Knowledge and the Flow of Information, Oxford: Blackwell.
- Evans, Gareth (1982). The Varieties of Reference, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
- McDowell, John, (1982). "Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge," Proceedings of the British Academy, pp. 455–79.
- McDowell, John, (1994). Mind and World, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
- McGinn, Colin (1995). "Consciousness and Space," In Conscious Experience, Thomas Metzinger (ed.), Imprint Academic.
- Mead, George Herbert (1938). "Mediate Factors in Perception," Essay 8 in The Philosophy of the Act, Charles W. Morris with John M. Brewster, Albert M. Dunham and David Miller (eds.), Chicago: University of Chicago, pp. 125–139.
- Moutoussis, K. and Zeki, S. (1997). "A Direct Demonstration of Perceptual Asynchrony in Vision," Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences, 264, pp. 393–399.
- Noe, Alva/Thompson, Evan T.: Vision and Mind: Selected Readings in the Philosophy of Perception, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002.
- Peacocke, Christopher (1983). Sense and Content, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Putnam, Hilary (1999). The Threefold Cord, New York: Columbia University Press.
- Shoemaker, Sydney (1990). "Qualities and Qualia: What's in the Mind?" Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 50, Supplement, pp. 109–31.
- Tong, Frank (2003). "Primary Visual Cortex and Visual Awareness," Nature Reviews, Neuroscience, Vol 4, 219. Online text
- Tye, Michael (2000). Consciousness, Color and Content, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.