Externalists Should Be Sense-Datum Theorists

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
MATT DUNCAN
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Primary Motivation ◽  
Philosophy Of Perception ◽  
External Objects ◽  
The World ◽  
Popular View ◽  
Sensible Qualities

Abstract One increasingly popular view in the philosophy of perception is externalism about sensible qualities, according to which sensible qualities such as colors, smells, tastes, and textures are features, not of our minds, but of mind-independent, external objects in the world. The primary motivation for this view is that perceptual experience seems to be transparent—that is, when we attend to sensible qualities, it seems like what we are attending to are features of external objects, not our own minds. Most (if not all) externalists are either naïve realists or externalist representationalists. However, in this article, I argue that those who are moved by the primary motivation for externalism should instead be sense-datum theorists, for externalists’ primary motivation supports the sense-datum theory, not their actually favored views. I argue that externalists should focus on different motivations, get new ones, or become sense-datum theorists.

The Horizonal Structure of Perceptual Experience

2013 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-141
Author(s):  
Carleton B. Christensen
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
Intentional Content ◽  
John Mcdowell ◽  
Philosophy Of Perception ◽  
The World ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
The Subject

Edmund Husserl’s account of the horizonal character of simple, sensuous perception provides a sophisticated account of perceptual intentional content which enables plausible responses to key issues in the philosophy of perception and in Heidegger interpretation. Section 2 outlines Husserl’s account of intentionality in its application to such perceptual experience. Section 3 then elaborates the notion of perceptual horizon in order to draw out, in Section 4, its implications for four issues: firstly, the relation between the object perceived and perceptual appearance (qua item “in consciousness”); secondly, the relation between the subject perceiving and perceptual appearance; thirdly, what sense of the body is inherent to perceptual experience of the horizonal kind; and fourthly, what John McDowell is getting at when he claims that traditional conceptions fail to capture how perception puts us in cognitive contact with the world. The paper concludes by using the interpretation developed to show how Husserl’s account of perceptual experience as horizonal enables one to draw out the sense and worth of what Heidegger means by worldliness and the “Da” of Dasein.

Neopragmatism and Philosophy of Perception

2021 ◽  
pp. 107-126
Author(s):  
Joshua Gert
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Naive Realism ◽  
Naïve Realism ◽  
Positive View ◽  
Sense Data ◽  
Philosophy Of Perception ◽  
Related Idea ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Insight Into

Neopragmatism is an anti-metaphysical approach to philosophical problems. It addresses such problems by taking the focus off of metaphysics, and turning it onto language. That is, the neopragmatist seeks philosophically uncontentious explanations of the sort of talk that often gives rise to the sense that there is a deep philosophical puzzle to solve. In the domain of perception, reflection on apt ways of describing perceptual experiences have led to various metaphysically committing theories, including (i) sense data theory, (ii) representationalism, and (iii) naïve realism. This chapter uses neopragmatist techniques to undermine the case for the last of these. The attack is two-pronged. First, some of the metaphysical commitments of naïve realism are criticized. Second, neopragmatism is used to explain some of the ideas that were thought to lend naïve realism support. These include the idea that perceptual experience has a peculiar sort of openness or presentational character, and the related idea that such experience gives insight into the mind-independent character of the world. Beyond forming the basis for criticizing other views, neopragmatism also suggests a positive view of perception. This is a form of adverbialism that relies on the idea that our sensory states are information-bearing, but not, in any robust sense, representational.

Colour, theories of

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David R. Hilbert
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Physical Property ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Physical Sciences ◽  
Adequate Theory ◽  
External Objects ◽  
The World ◽  
Physical Objects ◽  
The Right ◽  
Apparent Conflict

The world as perceived by human beings is full of colour. The world as described by physical scientists is composed of colourless particles and fields. Philosophical theories of colour since the Scientific Revolution have been driven primarily by a desire to harmonize these two apparently conflicting pictures of the world. Any adequate theory of colour has to be consistent with the characteristics of colour as perceived without contradicting the deliverances of the physical sciences. Given this conception of the aim of a theory of colour, there are three possibilities for resolving the apparent conflict between the scientific and perceptual facts. The first is to deny that physical objects have colours. Theories of this kind admit that objects appear coloured but maintain that these appearances are misleading. The conflict is resolved by removing colour from the external world. Second, it might be that colour is a relational property. For an object to possess a particular colour it must be related in the right way to a perceiver. One common version of this view analyses colour as a disposition to cause particular kinds of perceptual experience in a human being. Since the physical sciences deal only with the intrinsic properties of physical objects and their relations to other physical objects and not their relations to perceiving subjects, the possibility of conflict is removed. A third possible response is to maintain that colour really is a property of external objects and that the conflict is merely apparent. Some theories of this form maintain that colour is identical to a physical property of objects. Others maintain that colour is a property that physical objects possess over and above all their physical properties. Philosophical discussions of colour typically take the form of either elaborating on one of these three possibilities or attempting to show more generally that one of these three types of response is to be preferred to the others.

A Multisensory Philosophy of Perception

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Casey O'Callaghan
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Learning ◽  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Human Perception ◽  
Sense Perception ◽  
Perceptual Consciousness ◽  
Philosophy Of Perception ◽  
Perceptual Illusions ◽  
The World ◽  
Multisensory Interactions ◽  
Over Time

This book argues that human perception and perceptual consciousness are richly multisensory. Its thesis is that the coordinated use of multiple senses enhances and extends human perceptual capacities and consciousness in three critical ways. First, crossmodal perceptual illusions reveal hidden multisensory interactions that typically make the senses more coherent and reliable sources of evidence about the environment. Second, the joint use of multiple senses discloses more of the world, including novel features and qualities, making possible new forms of perceptual experience. Third, through crossmodal dependence, plasticity, and perceptual learning, each sense is reshaped by the influence of others, at a time and over time. The implication is that no sense—not even vision itself—can be understood entirely in isolation from the others. This undermines the prevailing approach to perception, which proceeds sense by sense, and sets the stage for a revisionist multisensory approach that illuminates the nature, scope, and character of sense perception.

Numerical symbols as explanations of human perceptual experience

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Barner
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Number Words ◽  
The World ◽  
Symbolic Systems ◽  
Perceptual Systems

Why did humans develop precise systems for measuring experience, like numbers, clocks, andcalendars? I argue that precise representational systems were constructed by earlier generationsof humans because they recognized that their noisy perceptual systems were not capturingdistinctions that existed in the world. Abstract symbolic systems did not arise from perceptualrepresentations, but instead were constructed to describe and explain perceptual experience. Byanalogy, I argue that when children learn number words, they do not rely on noisy perceptualsystems, but instead acquire these words as units in a broader system of procedures, whosemeanings are ultimately defined by logical relations to one another, not perception.

The Meditations

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter Ott
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Developmental Reading ◽  
Basic Structure ◽  
Brain Image ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Third ◽  
Real Work ◽  
Sensible Qualities ◽  
The Brain

Despite its difference in aspiration, the Meditations preserves the basic structure of perceptual experience outlined in Descartes’s earliest works. The chapter explores Descartes’s notion of an idea and uses a developmental reading to clear up the mystery surrounding material falsity. In the third Meditation, our protagonist does not yet know enough about extension in order to be able to tell whether her idea of cold is an idea of a real feature of bodies or merely the idea of a sensation. By the time she reaches the end of her reflections, she has learned that sensible qualities are at most sensations. As in his earliest stages, Descartes believes that the real work of perceiving the geometrical qualities of bodies is done by the brain image, which he persists in calling an ‘idea,’ at least when it is the object of mental awareness.

scholarly journals Extending the extended consciousness debate: perception, imagination, and the common kind assumption

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Deery
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Phenomenal Consciousness ◽  
Psychological Theory ◽  
Predictive Processing ◽  
Mental Event ◽  
The World ◽  
Predictive Approach ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Brain

AbstractFor some, the states and processes involved in the realisation of phenomenal consciousness are not confined to within the organismic boundaries of the experiencing subject. Instead, the sub-personal basis of perceptual experience can, and does, extend beyond the brain and body to implicate environmental elements through one’s interaction with the world. These claims are met by proponents of predictive processing, who propose that perception and imagination should be understood as a product of the same internal mechanisms. On this view, as visually imagining is not considered to be world-involving, it is assumed that world-involvement must not be essential for perception, and thus internalism about the sub-personal basis is true. However, the argument for internalism from the unity of perception and imagination relies for its strength on a questionable conception of the relationship between the two experiential states. I argue that proponents of the predictive approach are guilty of harbouring an implicit commitment to the common kind assumption which does not follow trivially from their framework. That is, the assumption that perception and imagination are of the same fundamental kind of mental event. I will argue that there are plausible alternative ways of conceiving of this relationship without drawing internalist metaphysical conclusions from their psychological theory. Thus, the internalist owes the debate clarification of this relationship and further argumentation to secure their position.

Internal and External Objects of Cognition

2019 ◽  
pp. 95-130
Author(s):  
Michael Ayers
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Timothy Williamson ◽  
External Objects ◽  
The World ◽  
Philosophical Task

Detailed analysis is conducted of the different constructions in which ‘know’, ‘believe’, ‘see’, and cognate verbs appear in ordinary or natural language, of their functions and of the relations and differences between them: e.g. noun-clauses of the form ‘that P’ serve different purposes after each of these classes of verb, partly reflected in the proposition–fact distinction—although ‘facts’ are ontologically unsuited to be what it is in the world we know. Some relevant views of Timothy Williamson (e.g. ‘e=k’) are discussed. The emphasis in current epistemology on the ‘know/see that P’ construction is criticized—no construction, and no use of the term ‘evidence’, is philosophically best, since it is no accident that we have them all. The philosophical task is to understand how they work together—the footprints in language of our cognitive relation to reality, manifestations of what knowledge, belief, and perception are.

Perception

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
M.G.F. Martin
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Direct Realism ◽  
Philosophical Debate ◽  
Sense Data ◽  
Intermediary Objects ◽  
External Objects ◽  
The World ◽  
Five Senses ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Proper Account

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.

scholarly journals Daubert’s Naïve Realist Challenge to Husserl

2019 ◽  
Vol 96 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-243
Author(s):  
Matt E.M. Bower
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Perceptual Constancy ◽  
Extensive Discussion ◽  
Philosophical Literature ◽  
Phenomenological Movement ◽  
Fundamental Nature ◽  
Philosophy Of Perception ◽  
Naive Realist ◽  
Realist View

Despite extensive discussion of naïve realism in the wider philosophical literature, those influenced by the phenomenological movement who work in the philosophy of perception have hardly weighed in on the matter. It is thus interesting to discover that Edmund Husserl’s close philosophical interlocutor and friend, the early twentieth-century phenomenologist Johannes Daubert, held the naive realist view. This article presents Daubert’s views on the fundamental nature of perceptual experience and shows how they differ radically from those of Husserl’s. The author argues, in conclusion, that Daubert’s views are superior to those of Husserl’s specifically in the way that they deal with the phenomenon of perceptual constancy.

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