Seeing, Doing, and Knowing: A Philosophical Theory of Sense Perception

Posted: maestro on Feb 04 | Personal E-Book

Product Details

Paperback: 384 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; New Ed edition (March 26, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0199204284
ISBN-13: 978-0199204281

Editorial Reviews

Book Description
Seeing, Doing, and Knowing is an original and comprehensive philosophical treatment of sense perception as it is currently investigated by cognitive neuroscientists. Its central theme is the task-oriented specialization of sensory systems across the biological domain. Sensory systems are automatic sorting machines; they engage in a process of classification. Human vision sorts and orders external objects in terms of a specialized, proprietary scheme of categories - colours, shapes, speeds and directions of movement, etc. This ‘Sensory Classification Thesis’ implies that sensation is not a naturally caused image from which an organism must infer the state of the world beyond; it is more like an internal communication, a signal concerning the state of the world issued by a sensory system, in accordance with internal conventions, for the use of an organism’s other systems. This is why sensory states are both easily understood and persuasive. Sensory classification schemes are purpose-built to serve the knowledge-gathering and pragmatic needs of particular types of organisms. They are specialized: a bee or a bird does not see exactly what a human does. The Sensory Classification Thesis helps clarify this specialization in perceptual content and supports a new form of realism about the deliverances of sensation: ‘Pluralistic Realism’ is based on the idea that sensory systems coevolve with an organism’s other systems; they are not simply moulded to the external world. The last part of the book deals with reference in vision. Cognitive scientists now believe that vision guides the limbs by means of a subsystem that links up with the objects of physical manipulation in ways that bypass sensory categories. In a novel extension of this theory, Matthen argues that ‘motion-guiding vision’ is integrated with sensory classification in conscious vision. This accounts for the quasi-demonstrative form of visual states: ‘This particular object is red’, and so on. He uses this idea to cast new light on the nature of perceptual objects, pictorial representation, and the visual representation of space.

About the Author
Mohan Matthen is a Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia.

Contents
Prelude: The New Philosophy of Vision 1
Part I: Classification
1. The Sensory Classification Thesis 13
2. Sensory Classification: The View from Psychology 36
3. Sensory Concepts 61
Afterword to Part I: A Look Ahead: Pluralistic Realism 90
Part II: Similarity
4. The Sensory Ordering Thesis 95
5. The Sources of Sensory Similarity 123
Afterword to Part II: The Stages of the Sensory Process 146
Part III: Specialization
6. Perceptual Specialization and the Definition of Colour 153
7. The Disunity of Colour 177
8. Pluralistic Realism 188
Part IV: Content
9. Sensing and Doing 213
10. Sense Experience 235
11. The Semantic Theory of Colour Experience 246
Part V: Reference
12. Visual Objects 271
13. Visual Reference 293
Conclusion 325
List of Definitions and Named Theses 328
Literature Consulted 336
Index 351