This innovative new collection features six original essays exploring the spatial, temporal, and other structures that shape conscious perception. Includes cutting-edge research on an increasingly influential topic in the philosophy of the mind Explores structural differences between the senses and between different theories of perceptual experience Offers innovative new arguments on the philosophy of perception written by leading scholars in the field
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.
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.
This book explores the important yet neglected relationship between the philosophy of time and the temporal structure of perceptual experience. It examines how time structures perceptual experience and, through that structuring, the ways in which time makes perceptual experience trustworthy or erroneous. Sean Power argues that our understanding of time can determine our understanding of perceptual experience in relation to perceptual structure and perceptual error. He examines the general conditions under which an experience may be sorted into different kinds of error such as illusions, hallucinations, and anosognosia. Power also argues that some theories of time are better than others at giving an account of the structure and errors of perceptual experience. He makes the case that tenseless theory and eternalism more closely correspond to experience than tense theory and presentism. Finally, the book includes a discussion of the perceptual experience of space and how tenseless theory and eternalism can better support the problematic theory of naïve realism. Philosophy of Time and Perceptual Experience originally illustrates how the metaphysics of time can be usefully applied to thinking about experience in general. It will appeal to those interested in the philosophy of time and debates about the trustworthiness of experience.
Imagine you are sitting at Starbuck glancing at the blue coffee mug in front of you. The mug is blue on the outside, white on the inside. It's large for a mug. And it's nearly full of freshly made coffee. In the envisaged case, you see all those aspects of the scene in front of you, but it remains a question of ferocious debate whether the visual experience that makes up your seeing is a direct “perceptual” relation between you and your environment or a psychology state that has a content that represents the mug. If your experience involves an external “perceptual” relation to an external, mind-independent object, it is unlike familiar mental states such as belief and desire states, which are widely considered psychological states with a representational content that stands between you and the external world. Your belief that the coffee mug in front of you is blue has a content that represents the coffee mug as being blue. Your desire that the coffee in the mug is still hot has a content that represents a state of affairs that may or may not in fact obtain, namely the state of affairs that the coffee in the mug is still hot. In this book, Brit Brogaard defends the view that visual experience is like belief in having a representational content. Her defense differs from most previous defenses of this view in that it begins by looking at the language of ordinary speech. She provides a linguistic analysis of what we say when we say that things look a certain way or that the world appears to us to be a certain way. She then argues that this analysis can be used to argue for the view that visual experience has a representation content that mediates between you and the world when you visually perceive.
This is the most authoritative and comprehensive guide ever published to the state of the art in philosophy of mind, a flourishing area of research. An outstanding team of contributors offer 45 new critical surveys of a wide range of topics.
Perceptual organization comprises a wide range of processes such as perceptual grouping, figure-ground organization, filling-in, completion, perceptual switching, etc. Such processes are most notable in the context of shape perception but they also play a role in texture perception, lightness perception, color perception, motion perception, depth perception, etc. Perceptual organization deals with a variety of perceptual phenomena of central interest, studied from many different perspectives, including psychophysics, experimental psychology, neuropsychology, neuroimaging, neurophysiology, and computational modeling. Given its central importance in phenomenal experience, perceptual organization has also figured prominently in classic Gestalt writings on the topic, touching upon deep philosophical issues regarding mind-brain relationships and consciousness. In addition, it attracts a great deal of interest from people working in applied areas like visual art, design, architecture, music, and so forth. The Oxford Handbook of Perceptual Organization provides a broad and extensive review of the current literature, written in an accessible form for scholars and students. With chapter written by leading researchers in the field, this is the state-of-the-art reference work on this topic, and will be so for many years to come.
One of the most important divisions in the human mind is between perception and reasoning. We reason from information that we take ourselves to have already, but perception is a means of taking in new information. Reasoning can be better or worse, but perception is considered beyond reproach. The Rationality of Perception argues that these two aspects of the mind become deeply intertwined when beliefs, fears, desires, or prejudice influence what weperceive. When the influences reach all the way to perceptual appearances, we face a philosophical problem: is it reasonable to strengthen what one believes or fears or suspects on the basis of an experience that wasgenerated by those very same beliefs, fears, or suspicions? Drawing on examples involving racism, emotion, and scientific theories, Siegel argues that perception itself can be rational or irrational, and makes vivid the relationship between perception and culture.
A team of distinguished philosophers and psychologists explore the nature of phenomenal qualities, the qualities of conscious experiences, and the ways in which they fit in with our understanding of mind and reality. This volume offers an indispensable resource for anyone wishing to understand the nature of conscious experience.
