R L Gregory and Others: The Wrong Picture of the Picture Theory of Perception

Perception ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 269-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Katz
Keyword(s):  
External World ◽  
Infinite Regress ◽  
Rule Following ◽  
Perceptual Knowledge ◽  
Picture Theory

It is the position of R L Gregory and other cognitive theorists that perceptual knowledge conceived as an inner picture leads to an infinite regress, but that perceptual knowledge conceived as an abstract or coded representation does not. It is argued here that this view is mistaken. All inner representations, whether pictorial or abstract, lead to the regress because all representations, inner or outer, require interpretation, and hence an interpreter. The problem will not disappear, furthermore, by formalizing the representation because rule-following is not equivalent to interpretation. The regress can only be avoided if the whole organism is made the interpreter, and representations are given their appropriate place: in the external world, not inside heads.

Explaining Perceptual Knowledge

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Stroud
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
External World ◽  
Satisfactory Explanation ◽  
Perceptual Knowledge ◽  
Epistemological Problem ◽  
The Way

This chapter offers a response to Quassim Cassam’s ‘Seeing and Knowing’, which challenges some of the conditions Cassam thinks the author has imposed on a satisfactory explanation of our knowledge of the external world. According to Cassam, the conditions he specifies can be fulfilled in ways that explain how the knowledge is possible. What is at stake in this argument between Cassam and the author is the conception of what is perceived to be so that is needed to account for the kind of perceptual knowledge we all know we have. That is what must be in question in any promising move away from the overly restrictive conception of perceptual experience that gives rise to the hopelessness of the traditional epistemological problem. The author suggests that we should explore the conditions of successful ‘propositional’ perception of the way things are and emphasizes the promise of such a strategy.

Perceptual Knowledge of the External World

2018 ◽  
pp. 27-60
Author(s):  
Keith Lehrer
Keyword(s):  
External World ◽  
External Object ◽  
Perceptual Knowledge ◽  
Object Description ◽  
The Subject

This chapter explains how exemplarization of experience can provide representational evidence for perceptual claims. The perceptual subject experiences a smell of the spray of a skunk and knows what the sensation is like before he learns the origin of it. To know what the sensation is like in itself requires the subject has some conception or representation of what it is like. The representation of the experience is the result of using the experience as a reflexive exemplar representation of a kind of sensation of which it is an instance. As the subject learns that the exemplar sensation is the odor of the spray of a skunk, it becomes part of the meaning and, consequently, evidence for external object description by exhibiting what the objects are like for us. The evidence of truth is fallible but when not defeated by error it provides defensible knowledge of external things.

scholarly journals The Indeterminacy of Translation: Fifty Years Later

Disputatio ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (32) ◽  
pp. 385-393 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen L. White
Keyword(s):  
External World ◽  
Rule Following ◽  
Stimulus Meaning ◽  
Skeptical Problem ◽  
Epistemological Skepticism

Abstract The paper considers the Quinean heritage of the argument for the indeterminacy of translation. Beyond analyzing Quine’s notion of stimulus meaning, the paper discusses two Kripkean argument’s against the Quinean claim that dispositions can provide the basis for an account of meaning: the Normativity Argument and the Finiteness Argument. An analogy between Kripke’s arguments and Hume’s argument for epistemological skepticism about the external world will be drawn. The paper shows that the answer to Kripke’s rule-following skepticism is analogous to the answer to Humean skepticism: our use of concepts is more basic than, and presupposed by, the statement of the skeptical problem itself.

Wittgenstein and the Transmission of Traditions

1990 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 41-60
Author(s):  
Anthony O'Hear
Keyword(s):  
External World ◽  
Saul Kripke ◽  
Private Language ◽  
Rule Following ◽  
Considerable Discussion

In this country, we tend to look at Wittgenstein in a rather ahistorical way. We see his concerns as fundamentally logico-linguistic, following on first from the work of Frege and Russell, and then referring back indirectly to the concerns of the British empiricists, to those of Locke and Hume, say, on such matters as the reference of our talk about sensations and scepticism about the external world. Recently there has been considerable discussion of the extent to which Wittgenstein's own analysis of the private language and of rule-following might not itself be a new version of a fundamentally Humean scepticism: according to Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein's arguments amount to a demonstration that there is no more reason for speakers of a language to follow the rules governing the concepts of that language in the same way than on the Humean account there is any reason for an effect to follow its causes (Kripke, 1981).

Knowledge without “Experience”

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Michael Williams
Keyword(s):  
External World ◽  
Central Theme ◽  
John Mcdowell ◽  
Perceptual Knowledge ◽  
On Certainty ◽  
Cartesian Skepticism ◽  
The World

Genia Schönbaumsfeld argues that Cartesian skepticism is an illusion induced by the “Cartesian Picture” of perceptual knowledge, in which knowledge of the “external world” depends on an inference from how things subjectively seem to one to how they actually are. To show its incoherence, she draws on the work of John McDowell, which she sees as elaborating a central theme from Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. I argue that Cartesian skepticism is not an illusion, as Schönbaumsfeld understands ‘illusion’, and that McDowell’s account of perceptual knowledge is both untenable and incompatible with Wittgenstein’s ideas about knowledge. Schönbaumsfeld thinks that, to understand how perception can engender knowledge of the world, we need a non-Cartesian account of perceptual reasons. Wittgenstein offers a much more radical break with the Cartesian Picture: an account of knowledge without ‘experience’.

A Sellarsian Transcendental Argument against External World Skepticism

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
Marin Geier
Keyword(s):  
External World ◽  
Transcendental Argument ◽  
Wilfrid Sellars ◽  
Rule Following ◽  
External World Skepticism ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Brain In A Vat

This paper investigates the relation between what James Conant has called Kantian and Cartesian varieties of skepticism. It is argued that a solution to the most prominent example of a Kantian variety of skepticism, i.e. Kripkensteinian skepticism about rule-following and meaning, can be found in the works of Wilfrid Sellars. It is then argued that, on the basis of that very same solution to the Kantian problematic of rule-following and meaning, a novel argument against external world skepticism can be formulated. This argument takes the shape of a transcendental argument, which is reminiscent of Hilary Putnam’s infamous argument against the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis, but is, as is argued, superior to it in certain respects.

scholarly journals On Otherness: An Analysis in the Context of Ibn Sına’s Theory of Relation

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 91-120
Author(s):  
Zehra Gökgöz
Keyword(s):  
General Class ◽  
External World ◽  
General Concept ◽  
Infinite Regress ◽  
Solution Model ◽  
Ibn Sina ◽  
History Of Thought ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual

The mode of existence of relatives has been a matter of debate throughout the history of thought. Having evaluated the debate through the contrast between a first intelligible that has individuals in the external world and a second intelligible that has no counterpart at the individual level in the external world, Ibn Sīnā believed the relative to be a categorical accident with individuals that can be pointed at in the external world. In the Metaphysics of al-Shifā, Ibn Sīnā proposed a solution aimed at eliminating the objections based on the infinite regress against his view. The article tests the applicability of the model built in this solution to the meaning of otherness (al-mughāyara), the results of which reveal the incompatibility of otherness with this model as a problem. When examining the source of this problem, the following findings are noted: The categorical relative (al-muḍāf) and pure relation (iḍāfa) are not the same thing. Pure relation is a general concept upon which the categorical relative is based and to which it cannot be reduced, because the predicate of oneness (wahda) becomes valid for multiplicity (kathra) through pure relation. Otherness is a general predicate that is inherent in and coextensive with pure relation; in this way, otherness is included in the most general class of concepts that explain the order in the existence of all existents including the categorical relative. As Ibn Sīnā’s solution model in Metaphysics aims to explain the result of pure relation in essences, it cannot be applied to pure relation phases that prioritize results and transcend categories and thus cannot be applied to otherness.

Perceptual Knowledge Report Analysis (PKRA): un nuovo strumento

2013 ◽  
pp. 23-44
Author(s):  
Paola Abrate ◽  
Stella Ambel ◽  
Elena Checchin ◽  
Tiziana Frau ◽  
Sabrina Giorcelli ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Knowledge ◽  
Report Analysis

Thomas Reid's View of Memorial Conception

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 211-226
Author(s):  
Marina Folescu
Keyword(s):  
External World ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Good Grasp

Thomas Reid believed that the human mind is well equipped, from infancy, to acquire knowledge of the external world, with all its objects, persons and events. There are three main faculties that are involved in the acquisition of knowledge: (original) perception, memory, and imagination. It is thought that we cannot understand how exactly perception works, unless we have a good grasp on Reid's notion of perceptual conception (i.e., of the conception employed in perception). The present paper argues that the same is true of memory, and it offers an answer to the question: what type of conception does it employ?

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