The world is my representation: Direct realism and the extended mind

Metascience ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 511-514
Author(s):  
Justin Christy
Author(s):  
J. Christopher Maloney

Representationalism rightly treats perception as a type of cognitive representation. However, it wrongly proposes that perceptual content determines phenomenal character. Rather, it is the form, not the content, of a perceptual representation that constitutes phenomenal character. For direct realism is true: Perception is that form of cognition in which representation and represented are the same. Other forms of cognition recruit representations that are distinct from what they represent. In contrast, perceptual representation extends the mind's reach into the world by casting the very object perceived in the role of a self-referential demonstrative. By fusing representation and represented perception provides direct acquaintance with what is seen exactly as it is seen to be and thus determines phenomenal character.


Author(s):  
M.G.F. Martin

Sense perception is the use of our senses to acquire information about the world around us and to become acquainted with objects, events, and their features. Traditionally, there are taken to be five senses: sight, touch, hearing, smell and taste. Philosophical debate about perception is ancient. Much debate focuses on the contrast between appearance and reality. We can misperceive objects and be misled about their nature, as well as perceive them to be the way that they are: you could misperceive the shape of the page before you, for example. Also, on occasion, it may seem to us as if we are perceiving, when we do not perceive at all, but only suffer hallucinations. Illusions and hallucinations present problems for a theory of knowledge: if our senses can mislead us, how are we to know that things are as they appear, unless we already know that our senses are presenting things as they are? But the concern in the study of perception is primarily to explain how we can both perceive and misperceive how things are in the world around us. Some philosophers have answered this by supposing that our perception of material objects is mediated by an awareness of mind-dependent entities or qualities: typically called sense-data, ideas or impressions. These intermediaries allegedly act as surrogates or representatives for external objects: when they represent aright, we perceive; when they mislead, we misperceive. An alternative is to suppose that perceiving is analogous to belief or judgment: just as judgment or belief can be true or false, so states of being appeared to may be correct or incorrect. This approach seeks to avoid intermediary objects between the perceiver and the external objects of perception, while still taking proper account of the possibility of illusion and hallucination. Both responses contrast with that of philosophers who deny that illusions and hallucinations have anything to tell us about the nature of perceiving proper, and hold to a form of naïve, or direct, realism. The account of perception one favours has a bearing on one’s views of other aspects of the mind and world: the nature and existence of secondary qualities, such as colours and tastes; the possibility of giving an account of the mind as part of a purely physical, natural world; how one should answer scepticism concerning our knowledge of the external world.


2001 ◽  
Vol 24 (5) ◽  
pp. 1008-1009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Boris M. Velichkovsky ◽  
Sebastian Pannasch

The sensorimotor account of perception is akin to Gibsonian direct realism. Both emphasize external properties of the world, challenging views based on the analysis of internal visual processing. To compare the role of distal and retinotopic parameters, distractor effect – an optomotor reaction of midbrain origin – is considered. Even in this case, permanence in the environment, not on the retina, explains the dynamics of habituation.


Glimpse ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-60
Author(s):  
Paul Majkut ◽  

Disputes among conflicting “schools of thought,” located predominantly in philosophy departments in universities throughout the world, have degenerated into an academic, bookish philosophy that threatens to replace the discourse of wonder with the jargon of specialists. An elite process of inbred, intellectual decay renders all schools to a discourse that restricts philosophical discourse to print media, professional / professorial standards replace open-ended discussion, and “publish or perish” deflates the value of discourse. Literacy becomes the benchmark of understanding, and illiteracy is equated with lack of understanding. A tyranny of the articulate dismisses the wisdom of ordinary discourse, and the book itself becomes a coffin whose colophon page is a gravestone inscribed with the date of death of the corpse text within. Escape from this inevitable condition can be found in a return to the ordinary, common language and direct realism of the everyday human through a process of mediation, unmediation, and immediation.


2004 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 401-402
Author(s):  
Terry Dartnall

Grush's framework has epistemological implications and explains how it is possible to acquire offline empirical knowledge. It also complements the extended-mind thesis, which says that mind leaks into the world. Grush's framework suggests that the world leaks into the mind through the offline deployment of emulators that we usually deploy in our experience of the world.


2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Clara Garavito

Incorporation is the body’s capacity to take something to alter or extend itself. In the literature on the subject, there is a lively debate on what constitutes incorporation. According to the Hypothesis of Extended Mind, whatever extends our cognitive processes is incorporated. At the same time, that object becomes a part of our self-manifestation. However, De Preester, in what I call a narrow version of incorporation, proposes that an object is incorporated to the self only if it is included in the sense of ownership of the body. Here, I explore a broader version of incorporation, related to Merleau-Ponty’s ideas of habit and incorporation. From this perspective, incorporation is the way a self expands and alters itself in its dealings with the world. A self, as a lived body, emerges in the self’s constitutive openness to worlds; therefore, objects (and even others) are incorporated in a temporal and situated way if they participate in constitutive experiences. Finally, this perspective explores the idea of a flexible and transparent self rather than a fixed self based on representations of the body.


Author(s):  
Sebastian Ignacio Oreamuno

Over the years, the connection between the pointe shoe and femininity has solidified, propagating a gendered perspective of pointe dancing as exclusively for women dancers. The gendering of the pointe shoe as feminine makes it difficult for men to dance on pointe. However, shifting perceptions that recognize the pointe shoe as a technological site of knowledge production would encourage men, and any body for that matter, to dance on pointe. Utilizing Judith Butler’s ([1990] 1999) concept of gender performativity and Teresa de Lauretis’s (1987) thinking on the technology of gender, I argue that the continuous iteration of ballerinas on pointe has constructed the pointe shoe as a performative gendered technology. Further mobilizing Tim Ingold’s (2004) work on how we understand the world through our feet and Andy Clark and David Chalmers’s (1998) concept of the extended mind, I argue that knowledge is embodied through the pointe shoe from the ground up, shaping not only the dancer’s body and balance but also their self-awareness and cognition. Ultimately, in this article I argue that the possibility to gain knowledge from pointe, through either training or performance, should not be restricted to a socially constructed gender binary to which traditional ballet so closely associates itself.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Martin Rosseinsky

The basic relationship between consciously-experienced representations, and material objects they represent, is hotly debated in some circles. But is it practically important? To investigate this, I introduce new symbolic notation, capable of labelling object, brain-perception, and conscious representation. Simple physics-based reasoning argues against identity of object and representation (rejecting e.g., direct realism). Nevertheless, a pivotal concern of the direct-realism school remains: how do we have knowledge of the world, if it’s only experienced indirectly? I sketch an indirect-school response, and review recent theoretical results showing how it simply doesn’t work in the dynamically-conventional setting (which is the hallmark of modern mainstream science). After illustrating how dynamically-conventional dysfunctions affect the foundations of science itself, I point to an experimentally-based resolution of knowledge-problems (and of the direct/indirect debate itself). Because the foundational problems for science affect its standing in society (for example, in its conflict with postmodernist ‘post-Truth’), the object-representation debate does turn out to have a practical significance, far beyond its conventional, academic/abstract/technical, framing.


2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aili Bresnahan

This article provides an account of improvisational artistry in live dance performance that construes the contribution of the dance performer as a kind of agency. Andy Clark's theory of the embodied and extended mind is used in order to consider how this account is supported by research on how a thinking-while-doing person navigates the world. I claim here that while a dance performer's improvisational artistry does include embodied and extended features that occur outside of the brain and nervous system, that this can be construed as “agency” rather than “thought.” Further I claim that trained and individual style accounts for how this agency acquires its artistic nature. This account thus contributes to the philosophy of improvisation in dance performance in a way that includes motor as well as cognized intentions.


2018 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Gantman ◽  
Robin Gomila ◽  
Joel E. Martinez ◽  
J. Nathan Matias ◽  
Elizabeth Levy Paluck ◽  
...  

AbstractA pragmatist philosophy of psychological science offers to the direct replication debate concrete recommendations and novel benefits that are not discussed in Zwaan et al. This philosophy guides our work as field experimentalists interested in behavioral measurement. Furthermore, all psychologists can relate to its ultimate aim set out by William James: to study mental processes that provide explanations for why people behave as they do in the world.


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