Perception and Perceptual Belief

2020 ◽  
pp. 3-23
Author(s):  
Robert Audi
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Visual Experience ◽  
Causal Relation ◽  
Perceptual Belief ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
Phenomenal Properties

This chapter shows how perception is experiential, relational, and representational: in broad terms, a phenomenally representational, discriminative, non-deviant causal relation to an object. In seeing, we have visual experience; in visual experience that is perceptual and not merely sensory, as in hallucinations, some object is visually represented as having certain properties; and genuinely seeing an object entails that it exists. This view of perception is a version of realism. It is realistic about both the objects of perception and the phenomenal properties we instantiate in perceptual experience. The view leaves open, however, the ultimate ontological status of those objects and properties. The properties, however, must be understood to have a character that enables us both to experience what, phenomenologically, it is like to see and what, externally, the things seen are like physically.

Classification of Disjunctivism about the Phenomenology of Visual Experience

2019 ◽  
Vol 44 ◽  
pp. 89-110
Author(s):  
Takuya Niikawa ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Visual Experience ◽  
Coarse Grained ◽  
Veridical Perception ◽  
Explanatory Status

This paper proposes a classificatory framework for disjunctivism about the phenomenology of visual perceptual experience. Disjunctivism of this sort is typically divided into positive and negative disjunctivism. This distinction successfully reflects the disagreement amongst disjunctivists regarding the explanatory status of the introspective indiscriminability of veridical perception and hallucination. However, it is unsatisfactory in two respects. First, it cannot accommodate eliminativism about the phenomenology of hallucination. Second, the class of positive disjunctivism is too coarse-grained to provide an informative overview of the current dialectical landscape. Given this, I propose a classificatory framework which preserves the positive-negative distinction, but which also includes the distinction between eliminativism and non-eliminativism, as well as a distinction between two subclasses of positive disjunctivism. In describing each class in detail, I specify who takes up each position in the existing literature, and demonstrate that this classificatory framework can disambiguate some existing disjunctivist views.

The poetic mind: a producer-oriented approach to literature and art

2015 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Kolaiti
Keyword(s):  
Mental State ◽  
Causal Relation ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
Linguistic Study ◽  
Object A ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Action Process ◽  
Oriented Approach

AbstractThis paper aims to shift theoretical attention from the reception to the production end of literature, and from the literary text per se to the action-process of which it is an outcome. It focuses on the internal activities that bring about literary, or more generally, artistic behavior and suggests that a certain action-process is literature – and the resulting object a literary text – when it stands in a causal relation to a specialised type of creative mental state. This state will be termed the artistic thought state. The idea that literary texts are causally linked to artistic thought states may help provide answers to some persistent ontological questions in literary and art study (e.g. about the ontological status of literary objects as opposed to their linguistic ‘mere thing’ equivalents), and delineate new potential for research in the linguistic study of literature.

scholarly journals Experiential Pluralism and Mental Kinds

2021 ◽  
pp. 63-84
Author(s):  
Maja Spener
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Visual Experience ◽  
Philosophical Debates

This paper offers a new argument in favour of experiential pluralism about visual experience—the view that the nature of successful visual experience is different from the nature of unsuccessful visual experience. The argument appeals to the role of experience in explaining possession of ordinary abilities. In addition, the paper makes a methodological point about philosophical debates concerning the nature of perceptual experience: whether a given view about the nature of experience amounts to an interesting and substantive thesis about our own minds depends on the significance of the psychological kind claim made by it. This means that an adequate defence of a given view of the nature of experience must include articulation of the latter’s significance qua psychological kind. The argument advanced provides the material to meet this demand. In turn, this constitutes further support for the argument itself.

scholarly journals Perceptual Experience and Seeing-as

2015 ◽  
pp. 123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Enrique Kalpokas
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Perceptual Belief ◽  
Main Thesis

According to Rorty, Davidson and Brandom, to have an experience is to be caused by our senses to hold a perceptual belief. This article argues that the phenomenon of seeing-as cannot be explained by such a conception of perceptual experience. First, the notion of experience defended by the aforementioned authors is reconstructed. Second, the main features of what Wittgenstein called “seeing aspects” are briefly presented. Finally, several arguments are developed in order to support the main thesis of the article: seeing-as cannot be explained by the conception of experience defended by Rorty, Davidson and Brandom.

scholarly journals The Variability of Mental Timeline in Vertical Dimension

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jiaoyan He ◽  
Cuihua Bi ◽  
Hao Jiang ◽  
Jianan Meng
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Visual Experience ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Vertical Dimension ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Spatial Terms ◽  
Implicit And Explicit ◽  
Time Information

People often use concrete spatial terms to represent abstract time. Previous studies have shown that mental timeline (MTL) is represented along a horizontal axis. Studies of the mental timeline have demonstrated that compared with English speakers, Mandarin speakers are more likely to think about time vertically (up-down) than horizontally (left-right/front-back). Prior studies have suggested that MTL in the up and down dimensions originated from temporal-spatial metaphors in language. However, there are still a large number of perceptual experiences in the up and down dimensions, such as visual and sensorimotor experience. Then does the visual experience in daily life affect the MTL in the vertical dimension? This study is aimed to investigate whether visual experience can promote or activate the opposite direction of MTL from implicit and explicit levels. The results showed that when the time information in the task was not prominent, the direction of vertical MTL cannot be affected by ascending or descending perceptual experience. While when the time information was prominent, whether the task was implicit or explicit, compared with the control group, watching the top-down scene significantly increased the top-down direction selection, while in the implicit task, watching the bottom-up scene made the top-down MTL disappear. To the best of our knowledge, our study provides the first evidence that the flexibility of space–time associations in vertical dimension extends beyond explicit and embraces even implicit levels. This study shows that the vertical MTL is activated in certain conditions and could be affected by the visual experience.

Phenomenal Presence

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Perceptual Belief ◽  
Perceptual Awareness ◽  
The Third ◽  
Spatial Properties ◽  
Perceptual Presence

Many different features figure consciously in our perceptual experiences, in the sense that they make a subjective difference to those experiences. These features range from colours and shapes to volumes and backsides, from natural or artefactual kinds to reasons for perceptual belief, and from the existence and externality of objects to the relationality and wakefulness of our perceptual awareness of them. The topic of this collection of essays is the different ways in which features like these can be phenomenally present in perceptual experience. In particular, the focus is on features that are less often discussed, and the perceptual presence of which is less obvious because they are out of view or otherwise easily overlooked, features given in a non-sensory manner, and features that are categorical in the sense that they pertain to all perceptual experiences alike (such as their justificatory power, their wakefulness, or the externality of their objects). The book is divided into four parts, each dealing with a different kind of phenomenal presence. The first addresses the nature of the presence of perceptual constancies and variations, while the second investigates the determinacy and ubiquity of the presence of spatial properties in perception. The third part deals with the presence of hidden or occluded aspects of objects, while the last part of the volume discusses the presence of categorical aspects of perceptual experience. Together, the contributions provide a thorough examination of which features are phenomenally present in perception, and what it is for them to figure in experience in this way.

scholarly journals Qualitative relationism about subject and object of perception and experience

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Pace Giannotta
Keyword(s):  
General Theory ◽  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Temporal Structure ◽  
Alternative View ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
Genetic Phenomenology ◽  
Neutral Monism ◽  
Subject And Object ◽  
The Subject

Abstract In this paper, I compare various theories of perception in relation to the question of the epistemological and ontological status of the qualities that appear in perceptual experience. I group these theories into two main views: quality externalism and quality internalism, and I highlight their contrasting problems in accounting for phenomena such as perceptual relativity, illusions and hallucinations (the “problem of perception”). Then, I propose an alternative view, which I call qualitative relationism and which conceives of the subject and the object of perceptual experience as essentially related to one another (hence relationism) in a process of co-constitution out of fundamental qualities (hence qualitative relationism). I lend support to this view by drawing on Husserl’s genetic phenomenology, which I complement with a form of neutral monism. I argue that the investigation of the temporal structure of perceptual experience leads us to find at its heart a qualitative process that is more fundamental than the two relata of perception and that gives rise to them. Then, I extend this account of perception into a general theory of intentionality and experience and I develop its implications into a neutral monist metaphysics.

scholarly journals Seeing the forest for the trees: Scene perception and the admissible contents of perceptual Experience

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Tom McClelland
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Visual Experience ◽  
Scene Perception ◽  
Empirical Literature ◽  
Visual Objects ◽  
Pine Tree ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Visual Scenes ◽  
High Level

Debates surrounding the high-level contents of perceptual experience focus on whether weperceive the high-level properties of visual objects, such as the property of being a pine tree. Thispaper considers instead whether we perceive the high-level properties of visual scenes, such asthe property of being a forest. Liberals about the contents of perceptual experience have offered avariety of phenomenal contrast cases designed to reveal how the high-level properties of objectsfigure in our visual experience. I offer a series of equivalent phenomenal contrast cases intendedto show how the high-level properties of visual scenes also figure in visual experience. Thisfirst-person evidence of high-level scene perception is combined with third-person evidence fromthe extensive empirical literature on scene categorisation. Critics of liberalism have attempted todeflate existing phenomenal contrast cases by explaining the contrasts in terms of non-perceptualcontents or in terms of attentional changes. I show that neither response is applicable to mycontrast cases and conclude that we do indeed perceptually experience the high-level propertiesof visual scenes.

Moving beyond the “LDL hypothesis”

VASA ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 44 (5) ◽  
pp. 333-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Werner ◽  
Ulrich Laufs
Keyword(s):  
Ldl Cholesterol ◽  
Causal Relation ◽  
Low Density Lipoprotein ◽  
Density Lipoprotein ◽  
Clinical Trial Data ◽  
Randomised Clinical Trial ◽  
Trial Data ◽  
Low Density Lipoprotein Cholesterol ◽  
Genetic Studies ◽  
Statin Drug

Abstract. Summary: The term “LDL hypothesis” is frequently used to describe the association of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-cholesterol, LDL-C) and cardiovascular (CV) events. Recent data from genetic studies prove a causal relation between serum LDL-C and CV events. These data are in agreement with mechanistic molecular studies and epidemiology. New randomised clinical trial data show that LDL-C lowering with statins and a non-statin drug, ezetimibe, reduces CV events. We therefore believe that the “LDL-hypothesis” has been proven; the term appears to be outdated and should be replaced by “LDL causality”.

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