Experience as Perception as ...?

Adam Pautz, a philosopher at Brown University, has written PERCEPTION, a new book from Routledge.

I gather from the review in NOTRE DAME PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEWS that Routledge takes it there are four distinct schools about perception, which he regards as roughly synonymous with human experience. He categorizes these schools as different answers to the following fill-in-the-blank question:

"To have an experience with a certain character (that is, to have an experience of a certain type) just is to ____________________."

First there is "naive realism." This holds that to have an experience of a certain character just is to experience the actual character of material things, e.g., the redness and roundness of the tomato.

Then there is "sense datum theory." To have an experience of a certain character just is to be aware of non-material objects, viz., sense data, generated by neural processes in the brain.

Thirdly, there is "internal physical state theory." To have an experience of a certain character just is to be in a certain neural activation state. This erases the distinction between seeing a tomato and having a hallucination of a tomato, which seems to be what Descartes was worrying about at the dawn of modern philosophy.

Finally, there is representationalism. To have an experience of a certain character just is to experientially represent a complex array of actual or possible perceptible properties. Pautz' own sympathies are surely here, and he spends much of the book distinguishing the different forms that representationalism can take.

SPOILER ALERT! His own view is what he calls internalist-nonreductive representationalism.

This contrasts with both response-dependent and response-independent representationalists.

Unless I misunderstand (and it is reasonably likely that I do) the response-independent representationalists are classical empiricists, in the manner of John Locke or Thomas Reid. The response-dependent representationalists are pragmatists, in the manner of Peirce or James. So the reader will know which side of THAT divide I am on. Look again to the title of this blog.

Internal-nonreductive representationalism is some sort of have-it-all-ways synthesis.

Comments

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

The Lyrics of "Live Like You Were Dying"

Back in 2004 Tim McGraw recorded the song "Live Like You were Dying." As a way of marking the one-decade anniversary of this song, I'd like to admit that a couple of the lines have confused me for years. I could use your help understanding them. In the first couple of verses, the song seems easy to follow. Two men are talking, and one tells the other about his diagnosis. The doctors have (recently? or a long time ago and mistakenly? that isn't clear) given him the news that he would die soon. "I spent most of the next days/Looking at the X-rays." Then we get a couple of lines about a man crossing items off of his bucket list. "I went sky diving, I went rocky mountain climbing, I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu." Then the speaker -- presumably still the old man -- shifts to the more characterological consequences of the news. As he was doing those things, he found he was loving deeper and speaking sweeter, and givin...

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave. First, Plato is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability. I only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable a...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog