Robert Briscoe | Ohio University (original) (raw)
Papers by Robert Briscoe
Mind & Language, 2008
In this paper, I critically assess the enactive account of visual perception recently defended by... more In this paper, I critically assess the enactive account of visual perception recently defended by Alva Noë (2004). I argue inter alia that the enactive account falsely identifi es an object ' s apparent shape with its 2D perspectival shape; that it mistakenly assimilates visual shape perception and volumetric object recognition; and that it seriously misrepresents the constitutive role of bodily action in visual awareness. I argue further that noticing an object ' s perspectival shape involves a hybrid experience combining both perceptual and imaginative elements-an act of what I call ' make-perceive ' .
Philosophical Topics, 2016
Pictures are patterned, 2D surfaces designed to elicit 3D-scenerepresenting experiences from thei... more Pictures are patterned, 2D surfaces designed to elicit 3D-scenerepresenting experiences from their viewers. In this essay, I argue that philosophers have tended to underestimate the relevance of research in vision science to understanding the nature of pictorial experience. Both the deeply entrenched methodology of virtual psychophysics as well as empirical studies of pictorial space perception provide compelling support for the view that pictorial experience and seeing face-to-face are experiences of the same psychological, explanatory kind. I also show that an empirically informed account of pictorial experience provides resources to develop a novel, resemblance-based account of depiction. According to what I call the deep resemblance theory, pictures work by presenting virtual models of objects and scenes in phenomenally 3D, pictorial space. Most people think they know what a picture is. Anything so familiar must be simple. They are wrong.-Gibson 1980, xvii And Dominic Lopes: [P]ictures are at bottom vehicles for the storage, manipulation, and communication of information. .. Pictures share language's burden in representing the world and our thoughts about it. (Lopes 1996, 7) Depiction. .. is a form of representation. This is one of the few bedrock truths approved by all philosophers who have worked up an opinion on the matter. (Lopes 2006, 160) We can call the general, but seldom, if ever, defended, assumption common to these statements the (Pictorial) Content Thesis. According to the Content Thesis, pictures, like assertions, beliefs, and perceptual experiences, are constitutively representational: 1. The Content Thesis is formulated here in a general way that doesn't presuppose any particular account of pictorial content. For some widely accepted constraints on an adequate account of pictorial content, see Hopkins 2006, 145-46. For an expression of the view that "pictures are human artefacts specifically designed for communication, " see Lopes 1996, 19, 86-89.
The Cognitive Penetrability of Perception, 2015
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 2009
Neuropsychological findings used to motivate the "two visual systems" hypothesis have been taken ... more Neuropsychological findings used to motivate the "two visual systems" hypothesis have been taken to endanger a pair of widely accepted claims about spatial representation in visual experience. The first is the claim that visual experience represents 3-D space around the perceiver using an egocentric frame of reference. The second is the claim that there is a constitutive link between the spatial contents of visual experience and the perceiver's bodily actions. In this paper, I carefully assess three main sources of evidence for the two visual systems hypothesis and argue that the best interpretation of the evidence is in fact consistent with both claims. I conclude with some brief remarks on the relation between visual consciousness and rational agency.
AVANT. The Journal of the Philosophical-Interdisciplinary Vanguard, 2014
It is natural to assume that the fine-grained and highly accurate spatial information present in ... more It is natural to assume that the fine-grained and highly accurate spatial information present in visual experience is often used to guide our bodily actions. Yet this assumption has been chal-lenged by proponents of the Two Visual Systems Hypothesis (TVSH), according to which visuo-motor programming is the responsibility of a “zombie ” processing stream whose sources of bottom-up spatial information are entirely non-conscious (Clark, 2007, 2009; Goodale & Milner, 1992, 2004a; Milner & Goodale, 1995/2006, 2008). In many formulations of TVSH, the role of conscious vision in action is limited to “recognizing objects, selecting targets for action, and deter-mining what kinds of action, broadly speaking, to perform ” (Clark, 2007, p. 570). Our aim in this study is to show that the available evidence not only fails to support this dichotomous view but actually reveals a significant role for conscious vision in motor programming, especially for actions that require deliberate attention.
An Essay on the Origin of Ideas pursues two ambitious and original projects. First, Gauker develo... more An Essay on the Origin of Ideas pursues two ambitious and original projects. First, Gauker develops and defends the Sellarsian thesis that public language is the medium of conceptual thought, all thought that involves distinguishing between particulars on the basis of the kinds to which they belong. Concepts, on Gauker's view, are not expressed or conveyed by means of language. Rather, concepts are words and phrases used in meaningful acts of speech (p. 257). Second, Gauker undertakes to show that dispositions to produce and consume sentences containing ordinary, empirical words, like 'icicle', 'window', and 'blackbird', can be learned on the basis of a kind of imagistic thinking that does not involve the application of concepts. (Imagistic representations include both 'receptive' perceptions as well as 'prospective' mental imagery.) Since these words, when used in intersubjective communication or inner speech, according to Gauker, just are the concepts icicle, window, and blackbird, an account that explains how speakers acquire the aforementioned dispositions also functions as an account of concept learning. In the course of pursuing these projects, Gauker also outlines a radically pragmatist theory of language. Language is portrayed not as a means of conveying thoughts from one speaker to another, but rather as a tool for optimizing the performance of multi-agent tasks. More specifically, overt acts of speech are instruments that enable one agent to guide from outside, as it were, how another agent engages in prospective, imagistic planning. By making assertions, an agent can instill in those who hear her imagistic representations of their situation that permit each participant to carry out her part of a collaborative project in an optimal way (p. 242). On Gauker's view, the only genuine representations in the mind are nonconceptual, imagistic ones. Language does not augment or 'upgrade' our endogenous, imagistic mindware with novel representational resources à la Andy Clark (see Clark's 'Magic Words' in Language and Thought: Interdisciplinary Themes, edited by P. Carruthers and J. Boucher, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 162-83), but instead enables human beings to create and manipulate imagistic representations in ways that would otherwise be impossible. In this respect, Gauker's view sharply departs from other strong cognitive conceptions of language (for discussion, see Peter Carruthers, 'The Cognitive Functions of Language', Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 25 (2002), pp. 657-726). Chapters one through four critically examine alternative, languageindependent theories of concepts and are intended to clear the ground for positive developments in the second half of the book. Chapter one begins by raking the empiricist view that concepts are 'abstracted' from perceptions over
Journal of Consciousness Studies, Dec 31, 2007
Cognitive Science
With Robert Briscoe, forthcoming in Cognitive Science
Synthese, 2019
According to the decomposition thesis, perceptual experiences resolve without remainder into thei... more According to the decomposition thesis, perceptual experiences resolve without remainder into their different modality-specific components. Contrary to this view, I argue that certain cases of multisensory integration give rise to experiences representing features of a novel type. Through the coordinated use of bodily awareness—understood here as encompassing both proprioception and kinaesthesis—and the exteroceptive sensory modalities, one becomes perceptually responsive to spatial features whose instances couldn’t be represented by any of the contributing modalities functioning in isolation. I develop an argument for this conclusion focusing on two cases: 3D shape perception in haptic touch and experiencing an object’s egocentric location in crossmodally accessible, environmental space.
Philosophy Compass, 2017
The first part of this survey article offered a cartography of some of the more extensively studi... more The first part of this survey article offered a cartography of some of the more extensively studied forms of multisensory processing. In this second part, I turn to examining some of the different possible ways in which the structure of conscious perceptual experience might also be characterized as multisensory. In addition, I discuss the significance of research on multisensory processing and multi-sensory consciousness for philosophical debates concerning the modularity of perception, cognitive penetration, and the individua-tion of the senses.
Aspect Perception after Wittgenstein: Seeing-As and Novelty (Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy) edited by Michael Beaney, Brendan Harrington, and, Dominic Shaw, 2018
An oil painting caught and held him.. .. There was beauty, and it drew him irresistibly. He forgo... more An oil painting caught and held him.. .. There was beauty, and it drew him irresistibly. He forgot his awkward walk and came closer to the painting, very close. The beauty faded out of the canvas. His face expressed his bepuzzlement. He stared at what seemed a careless daub of paint, then stepped away. Immediately all the beauty flashed back into the canvas. 'A trick picture', was his thought. . .-Jack London, Martin Eden (1909/1982) A. Pictures elicit a 3D-scene-representing experience of the same psychological kind as the experience of seeing face-to-face (Gombrich 1961/2000, 1972, 1982; Briscoe 2016). Since the represented, 3D scene is absent from sight, however, this experience is non-veridical. B. When we look at a picture, we enjoy an experience as of the depicted, 3D scene. This experience, however, is always fused with awareness of the superficial pattern on the pictorial surface (Wollheim 1987, 1998, 2003). In this respect, pictorial experience has two different dimensions or 'folds' of representational content. Accounts (A) and (B) maintain that the appearance of depth and 3D structure 'beyond' the 2D pictorial surface is essential to pictorial experience. When we look at a suitably patterned surface, Richard Wollheim writes, we are typically aware of 'something in front of or behind something else' (1998: 221). As John Kulvicki puts it, 'there is a strong sense in which depicted scenes seem to recede from the canvas' (2009: 391). Other prominent accounts, by contrast, attach theoretical priority to seeing properties
New Directions in the Philosophy of Perception, edited by C. Hill and B. McLaughlin, Philosophical Topics 44(2), 2016
Pictures are 2D surfaces designed to elicit 3D-scene-representing experiences from their viewers.... more Pictures are 2D surfaces designed to elicit 3D-scene-representing experiences from their viewers. In this essay, I argue that philosophers have tended to underestimate the relevance of research in vision science to understanding the nature of pictorial experience or ‘seeing-in’, to use Richard Wollheim’s familiar expression. Both the deeply entrenched methodology of virtual psychophysics as well as empirical studies of pictorial space perception provide compelling support for the view that seeing-in and seeing face-to-face are experiences of the same psychological, explanatory kind. I also show that an empirically informed account of seeing-in provides resources to develop a novel, resemblance-based account of depiction. According to what I call the deep resemblance theory, pictures work by presenting virtual models of objects and scenes in phenomenally 3D, pictorial space.
It is natural to assume that the fine-grained and highly accurate spatial information present in ... more It is natural to assume that the fine-grained and highly accurate spatial information present in visual experience is often used to guide our bodily actions. Yet this assumption has been challenged by proponents of the Two Visual Systems Hypothesis (TVSH), according to which visuomotor programming is the responsibility of a "zombie" processing stream whose sources of bottom-up spatial information are entirely non-). In many formulations of TVSH, the role of conscious vision in action is limited to "recognizing objects, selecting targets for action, and determining what kinds of action, broadly speaking, to perform" (Clark, 2007, p. 570). Our aim in this study is to show that the available evidence not only fails to support this dichotomous view but actually reveals a significant role for conscious vision in motor programming, especially for actions that require deliberate attention.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Jul 2015
(This is a Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article. It is available for free at their site at... more (This is a Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article. It is available for free at their site at plato.stanford.edu.) Action is a means of acquiring perceptual information about the environment. Turning around, for example, alters your spatial relations to surrounding objects and, hence, which of their properties you visually perceive. Moving your hand over an object’s surface enables you to feel its shape, temperature, and texture. Sniffing and walking around a room enables you to track down the source of an unpleasant smell. Active or passive movements of the body can also generate useful sources of perceptual information (Gibson 1966, 1979). The pattern of optic flow in the retinal image produced by forward locomotion, for example, contains information about the direction in which you are heading, while motion parallax is a “cue” used by the visual system to estimate the relative distances of objects in your field of view. In these uncontroversial ways and others, perception is instrumentally dependent on action. According to an explanatory framework that Susan Hurley (1998) dubs the “Input-Output Picture”, the dependence of perception on action is purely instrumental:
Movement can alter sensory inputs and so result in different perceptions… changes in output are merely a means to changes in input, on which perception depends directly. (1998: 342)
The action-based theories of perception, reviewed in this entry, challenge the Input-Output Picture. They maintain that perception can also depend in a noninstrumental or constitutive way on action (or, more generally, on capacities for object-directed motor control). This position has taken many different forms in the history of philosophy and psychology. Most action-based theories of perception in the last 300 years, however, have looked to action in order to explain how vision, in particular, acquires either all or some of its spatial representational content. Accordingly, these are the theories on which we shall focus here.
We begin in Section 1 by discussing George Berkeley’s Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709), the historical locus classicus of action-based theories of perception, and one of the most influential texts on vision ever written. Berkeley argues that the basic or “proper” deliverance of vision is not an arrangement of voluminous objects in three-dimensional space, but rather a two-dimensional manifold of light and color. We then turn to a discussion of Lotze, Helmholtz, and the local sign doctrine. The “local signs” were felt cues for the mind to know what sort of spatial content to imbue visual experience with. For Lotze, these cues were “inflowing” kinaesthetic feelings that result from actually moving the eyes, while, for Helmholtz, they were “outflowing” motor commands sent to move the eyes.
In Section 2, we discuss sensorimotor contingency theories, which became prominent in the 20thcentury. These views maintain that an ability to predict the sensory consequences of self-initiated actions is necessary for perception. Among the motivations for this family of theories is the problem of visual direction constancy—why do objects appear to be stationary even though the locations on the retina to which they reflect light change with every eye movement?—as well as experiments on adaptation to optical rearrangement devices (ORDs) and sensory substitution.
Section 3 examines two other important 20th century theories. According to what we shall call the motor component theory, efference copies generated in the oculomotor system and/or proprioceptive feedback from eye-movements are used together with incoming sensory inputs to determine the spatial attributes of perceived objects. Efferent readiness theories, by contrast, look to the particular ways in which perceptual states prepare the observer to move and act in relation to the environment. The modest readiness theory, as we shall call it, claims that the way an object’s spatial attributes are represented in visual experience can be modulated by one or another form of covert action planning. The bold readiness theory argues for the stronger claim that perception just is covert readiness for action.
In Section 4, we move to the disposition theory, most influentially articulated by Gareth Evans (1982, 1985), but more recently defended by Rick Grush (2000, 2007). Evans’ theory is, at its core, very similar to the bold efferent readiness theory. There are some notable differences, though. Evans’ account is more finely articulated in some philosophical respects. It also does not posit a reduction of perception to behavioral dispositions, but rather posits that certain complicated relations between perceptual input and behavioral provide spatial content. Grush proposes a very specific theory that is like Evans’ in that it does not posit a reduction, but unlike Evans’ view, does not put behavioral dispositions and sensory input on an undifferentiated footing.
Human beings have the ability to 'augment' reality by superimposing mental imagery on the visuall... more Human beings have the ability to 'augment' reality by superimposing mental imagery on the visually perceived scene. For example, when deciding how to arrange furniture in a new home, one might project the image of an armchair into an empty corner or the image of a painting onto a wall. The experience of noticing a constellation in the sky at night is also perceptual-imaginative amalgam: it involves both seeing the stars in the constellation and imagining the lines that connect them at the same time. I here refer to such hybrid experiences – involving both a bottom-up, externally generated component and a top-down, internally generated component – as make-perceive (Briscoe 2008, 2011). My discussion in this paper has two parts. In the first part, I show that make-perceive enables human beings to solve certain problems and pursue certain projects more effectively than bottom-up perceiving or top-down visualization alone. To this end, the skillful use of projected mental imagery is surveyed in a variety of contexts, including action planning, the interpretation of static mechanical diagrams, and non-instrumental navigation. In the second part, I address the question of whether make-perceive may help to account for the " phenomenal presence " of occluded or otherwise hidden features of perceived objects. I argue that phenomenal presence is not well explained by the hypothesis that hidden features are represented using projected mental images. In defending this position, I point to important phenomenological and functional differences between the way hidden object features are represented respectively in mental imagery and amodal completion.
Mind & Language, 2008
In this paper, I critically assess the enactive account of visual perception recently defended by... more In this paper, I critically assess the enactive account of visual perception recently defended by Alva Noë (2004). I argue inter alia that the enactive account falsely identifi es an object ' s apparent shape with its 2D perspectival shape; that it mistakenly assimilates visual shape perception and volumetric object recognition; and that it seriously misrepresents the constitutive role of bodily action in visual awareness. I argue further that noticing an object ' s perspectival shape involves a hybrid experience combining both perceptual and imaginative elements-an act of what I call ' make-perceive ' .
Philosophical Topics, 2016
Pictures are patterned, 2D surfaces designed to elicit 3D-scenerepresenting experiences from thei... more Pictures are patterned, 2D surfaces designed to elicit 3D-scenerepresenting experiences from their viewers. In this essay, I argue that philosophers have tended to underestimate the relevance of research in vision science to understanding the nature of pictorial experience. Both the deeply entrenched methodology of virtual psychophysics as well as empirical studies of pictorial space perception provide compelling support for the view that pictorial experience and seeing face-to-face are experiences of the same psychological, explanatory kind. I also show that an empirically informed account of pictorial experience provides resources to develop a novel, resemblance-based account of depiction. According to what I call the deep resemblance theory, pictures work by presenting virtual models of objects and scenes in phenomenally 3D, pictorial space. Most people think they know what a picture is. Anything so familiar must be simple. They are wrong.-Gibson 1980, xvii And Dominic Lopes: [P]ictures are at bottom vehicles for the storage, manipulation, and communication of information. .. Pictures share language's burden in representing the world and our thoughts about it. (Lopes 1996, 7) Depiction. .. is a form of representation. This is one of the few bedrock truths approved by all philosophers who have worked up an opinion on the matter. (Lopes 2006, 160) We can call the general, but seldom, if ever, defended, assumption common to these statements the (Pictorial) Content Thesis. According to the Content Thesis, pictures, like assertions, beliefs, and perceptual experiences, are constitutively representational: 1. The Content Thesis is formulated here in a general way that doesn't presuppose any particular account of pictorial content. For some widely accepted constraints on an adequate account of pictorial content, see Hopkins 2006, 145-46. For an expression of the view that "pictures are human artefacts specifically designed for communication, " see Lopes 1996, 19, 86-89.
The Cognitive Penetrability of Perception, 2015
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 2009
Neuropsychological findings used to motivate the "two visual systems" hypothesis have been taken ... more Neuropsychological findings used to motivate the "two visual systems" hypothesis have been taken to endanger a pair of widely accepted claims about spatial representation in visual experience. The first is the claim that visual experience represents 3-D space around the perceiver using an egocentric frame of reference. The second is the claim that there is a constitutive link between the spatial contents of visual experience and the perceiver's bodily actions. In this paper, I carefully assess three main sources of evidence for the two visual systems hypothesis and argue that the best interpretation of the evidence is in fact consistent with both claims. I conclude with some brief remarks on the relation between visual consciousness and rational agency.
AVANT. The Journal of the Philosophical-Interdisciplinary Vanguard, 2014
It is natural to assume that the fine-grained and highly accurate spatial information present in ... more It is natural to assume that the fine-grained and highly accurate spatial information present in visual experience is often used to guide our bodily actions. Yet this assumption has been chal-lenged by proponents of the Two Visual Systems Hypothesis (TVSH), according to which visuo-motor programming is the responsibility of a “zombie ” processing stream whose sources of bottom-up spatial information are entirely non-conscious (Clark, 2007, 2009; Goodale & Milner, 1992, 2004a; Milner & Goodale, 1995/2006, 2008). In many formulations of TVSH, the role of conscious vision in action is limited to “recognizing objects, selecting targets for action, and deter-mining what kinds of action, broadly speaking, to perform ” (Clark, 2007, p. 570). Our aim in this study is to show that the available evidence not only fails to support this dichotomous view but actually reveals a significant role for conscious vision in motor programming, especially for actions that require deliberate attention.
An Essay on the Origin of Ideas pursues two ambitious and original projects. First, Gauker develo... more An Essay on the Origin of Ideas pursues two ambitious and original projects. First, Gauker develops and defends the Sellarsian thesis that public language is the medium of conceptual thought, all thought that involves distinguishing between particulars on the basis of the kinds to which they belong. Concepts, on Gauker's view, are not expressed or conveyed by means of language. Rather, concepts are words and phrases used in meaningful acts of speech (p. 257). Second, Gauker undertakes to show that dispositions to produce and consume sentences containing ordinary, empirical words, like 'icicle', 'window', and 'blackbird', can be learned on the basis of a kind of imagistic thinking that does not involve the application of concepts. (Imagistic representations include both 'receptive' perceptions as well as 'prospective' mental imagery.) Since these words, when used in intersubjective communication or inner speech, according to Gauker, just are the concepts icicle, window, and blackbird, an account that explains how speakers acquire the aforementioned dispositions also functions as an account of concept learning. In the course of pursuing these projects, Gauker also outlines a radically pragmatist theory of language. Language is portrayed not as a means of conveying thoughts from one speaker to another, but rather as a tool for optimizing the performance of multi-agent tasks. More specifically, overt acts of speech are instruments that enable one agent to guide from outside, as it were, how another agent engages in prospective, imagistic planning. By making assertions, an agent can instill in those who hear her imagistic representations of their situation that permit each participant to carry out her part of a collaborative project in an optimal way (p. 242). On Gauker's view, the only genuine representations in the mind are nonconceptual, imagistic ones. Language does not augment or 'upgrade' our endogenous, imagistic mindware with novel representational resources à la Andy Clark (see Clark's 'Magic Words' in Language and Thought: Interdisciplinary Themes, edited by P. Carruthers and J. Boucher, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 162-83), but instead enables human beings to create and manipulate imagistic representations in ways that would otherwise be impossible. In this respect, Gauker's view sharply departs from other strong cognitive conceptions of language (for discussion, see Peter Carruthers, 'The Cognitive Functions of Language', Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 25 (2002), pp. 657-726). Chapters one through four critically examine alternative, languageindependent theories of concepts and are intended to clear the ground for positive developments in the second half of the book. Chapter one begins by raking the empiricist view that concepts are 'abstracted' from perceptions over
Journal of Consciousness Studies, Dec 31, 2007
Cognitive Science
With Robert Briscoe, forthcoming in Cognitive Science
Synthese, 2019
According to the decomposition thesis, perceptual experiences resolve without remainder into thei... more According to the decomposition thesis, perceptual experiences resolve without remainder into their different modality-specific components. Contrary to this view, I argue that certain cases of multisensory integration give rise to experiences representing features of a novel type. Through the coordinated use of bodily awareness—understood here as encompassing both proprioception and kinaesthesis—and the exteroceptive sensory modalities, one becomes perceptually responsive to spatial features whose instances couldn’t be represented by any of the contributing modalities functioning in isolation. I develop an argument for this conclusion focusing on two cases: 3D shape perception in haptic touch and experiencing an object’s egocentric location in crossmodally accessible, environmental space.
Philosophy Compass, 2017
The first part of this survey article offered a cartography of some of the more extensively studi... more The first part of this survey article offered a cartography of some of the more extensively studied forms of multisensory processing. In this second part, I turn to examining some of the different possible ways in which the structure of conscious perceptual experience might also be characterized as multisensory. In addition, I discuss the significance of research on multisensory processing and multi-sensory consciousness for philosophical debates concerning the modularity of perception, cognitive penetration, and the individua-tion of the senses.
Aspect Perception after Wittgenstein: Seeing-As and Novelty (Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy) edited by Michael Beaney, Brendan Harrington, and, Dominic Shaw, 2018
An oil painting caught and held him.. .. There was beauty, and it drew him irresistibly. He forgo... more An oil painting caught and held him.. .. There was beauty, and it drew him irresistibly. He forgot his awkward walk and came closer to the painting, very close. The beauty faded out of the canvas. His face expressed his bepuzzlement. He stared at what seemed a careless daub of paint, then stepped away. Immediately all the beauty flashed back into the canvas. 'A trick picture', was his thought. . .-Jack London, Martin Eden (1909/1982) A. Pictures elicit a 3D-scene-representing experience of the same psychological kind as the experience of seeing face-to-face (Gombrich 1961/2000, 1972, 1982; Briscoe 2016). Since the represented, 3D scene is absent from sight, however, this experience is non-veridical. B. When we look at a picture, we enjoy an experience as of the depicted, 3D scene. This experience, however, is always fused with awareness of the superficial pattern on the pictorial surface (Wollheim 1987, 1998, 2003). In this respect, pictorial experience has two different dimensions or 'folds' of representational content. Accounts (A) and (B) maintain that the appearance of depth and 3D structure 'beyond' the 2D pictorial surface is essential to pictorial experience. When we look at a suitably patterned surface, Richard Wollheim writes, we are typically aware of 'something in front of or behind something else' (1998: 221). As John Kulvicki puts it, 'there is a strong sense in which depicted scenes seem to recede from the canvas' (2009: 391). Other prominent accounts, by contrast, attach theoretical priority to seeing properties
New Directions in the Philosophy of Perception, edited by C. Hill and B. McLaughlin, Philosophical Topics 44(2), 2016
Pictures are 2D surfaces designed to elicit 3D-scene-representing experiences from their viewers.... more Pictures are 2D surfaces designed to elicit 3D-scene-representing experiences from their viewers. In this essay, I argue that philosophers have tended to underestimate the relevance of research in vision science to understanding the nature of pictorial experience or ‘seeing-in’, to use Richard Wollheim’s familiar expression. Both the deeply entrenched methodology of virtual psychophysics as well as empirical studies of pictorial space perception provide compelling support for the view that seeing-in and seeing face-to-face are experiences of the same psychological, explanatory kind. I also show that an empirically informed account of seeing-in provides resources to develop a novel, resemblance-based account of depiction. According to what I call the deep resemblance theory, pictures work by presenting virtual models of objects and scenes in phenomenally 3D, pictorial space.
It is natural to assume that the fine-grained and highly accurate spatial information present in ... more It is natural to assume that the fine-grained and highly accurate spatial information present in visual experience is often used to guide our bodily actions. Yet this assumption has been challenged by proponents of the Two Visual Systems Hypothesis (TVSH), according to which visuomotor programming is the responsibility of a "zombie" processing stream whose sources of bottom-up spatial information are entirely non-). In many formulations of TVSH, the role of conscious vision in action is limited to "recognizing objects, selecting targets for action, and determining what kinds of action, broadly speaking, to perform" (Clark, 2007, p. 570). Our aim in this study is to show that the available evidence not only fails to support this dichotomous view but actually reveals a significant role for conscious vision in motor programming, especially for actions that require deliberate attention.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Jul 2015
(This is a Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article. It is available for free at their site at... more (This is a Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article. It is available for free at their site at plato.stanford.edu.) Action is a means of acquiring perceptual information about the environment. Turning around, for example, alters your spatial relations to surrounding objects and, hence, which of their properties you visually perceive. Moving your hand over an object’s surface enables you to feel its shape, temperature, and texture. Sniffing and walking around a room enables you to track down the source of an unpleasant smell. Active or passive movements of the body can also generate useful sources of perceptual information (Gibson 1966, 1979). The pattern of optic flow in the retinal image produced by forward locomotion, for example, contains information about the direction in which you are heading, while motion parallax is a “cue” used by the visual system to estimate the relative distances of objects in your field of view. In these uncontroversial ways and others, perception is instrumentally dependent on action. According to an explanatory framework that Susan Hurley (1998) dubs the “Input-Output Picture”, the dependence of perception on action is purely instrumental:
Movement can alter sensory inputs and so result in different perceptions… changes in output are merely a means to changes in input, on which perception depends directly. (1998: 342)
The action-based theories of perception, reviewed in this entry, challenge the Input-Output Picture. They maintain that perception can also depend in a noninstrumental or constitutive way on action (or, more generally, on capacities for object-directed motor control). This position has taken many different forms in the history of philosophy and psychology. Most action-based theories of perception in the last 300 years, however, have looked to action in order to explain how vision, in particular, acquires either all or some of its spatial representational content. Accordingly, these are the theories on which we shall focus here.
We begin in Section 1 by discussing George Berkeley’s Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709), the historical locus classicus of action-based theories of perception, and one of the most influential texts on vision ever written. Berkeley argues that the basic or “proper” deliverance of vision is not an arrangement of voluminous objects in three-dimensional space, but rather a two-dimensional manifold of light and color. We then turn to a discussion of Lotze, Helmholtz, and the local sign doctrine. The “local signs” were felt cues for the mind to know what sort of spatial content to imbue visual experience with. For Lotze, these cues were “inflowing” kinaesthetic feelings that result from actually moving the eyes, while, for Helmholtz, they were “outflowing” motor commands sent to move the eyes.
In Section 2, we discuss sensorimotor contingency theories, which became prominent in the 20thcentury. These views maintain that an ability to predict the sensory consequences of self-initiated actions is necessary for perception. Among the motivations for this family of theories is the problem of visual direction constancy—why do objects appear to be stationary even though the locations on the retina to which they reflect light change with every eye movement?—as well as experiments on adaptation to optical rearrangement devices (ORDs) and sensory substitution.
Section 3 examines two other important 20th century theories. According to what we shall call the motor component theory, efference copies generated in the oculomotor system and/or proprioceptive feedback from eye-movements are used together with incoming sensory inputs to determine the spatial attributes of perceived objects. Efferent readiness theories, by contrast, look to the particular ways in which perceptual states prepare the observer to move and act in relation to the environment. The modest readiness theory, as we shall call it, claims that the way an object’s spatial attributes are represented in visual experience can be modulated by one or another form of covert action planning. The bold readiness theory argues for the stronger claim that perception just is covert readiness for action.
In Section 4, we move to the disposition theory, most influentially articulated by Gareth Evans (1982, 1985), but more recently defended by Rick Grush (2000, 2007). Evans’ theory is, at its core, very similar to the bold efferent readiness theory. There are some notable differences, though. Evans’ account is more finely articulated in some philosophical respects. It also does not posit a reduction of perception to behavioral dispositions, but rather posits that certain complicated relations between perceptual input and behavioral provide spatial content. Grush proposes a very specific theory that is like Evans’ in that it does not posit a reduction, but unlike Evans’ view, does not put behavioral dispositions and sensory input on an undifferentiated footing.
Human beings have the ability to 'augment' reality by superimposing mental imagery on the visuall... more Human beings have the ability to 'augment' reality by superimposing mental imagery on the visually perceived scene. For example, when deciding how to arrange furniture in a new home, one might project the image of an armchair into an empty corner or the image of a painting onto a wall. The experience of noticing a constellation in the sky at night is also perceptual-imaginative amalgam: it involves both seeing the stars in the constellation and imagining the lines that connect them at the same time. I here refer to such hybrid experiences – involving both a bottom-up, externally generated component and a top-down, internally generated component – as make-perceive (Briscoe 2008, 2011). My discussion in this paper has two parts. In the first part, I show that make-perceive enables human beings to solve certain problems and pursue certain projects more effectively than bottom-up perceiving or top-down visualization alone. To this end, the skillful use of projected mental imagery is surveyed in a variety of contexts, including action planning, the interpretation of static mechanical diagrams, and non-instrumental navigation. In the second part, I address the question of whether make-perceive may help to account for the " phenomenal presence " of occluded or otherwise hidden features of perceived objects. I argue that phenomenal presence is not well explained by the hypothesis that hidden features are represented using projected mental images. In defending this position, I point to important phenomenological and functional differences between the way hidden object features are represented respectively in mental imagery and amodal completion.
Forthcoming in Derek Brown & Fiona Macpherson (eds.), Routledge Handbook on the Philosophy of Col... more Forthcoming in Derek Brown & Fiona Macpherson (eds.), Routledge Handbook on the Philosophy of Colour. Routledge (forthcoming)
