The Situation-Dependency of Perception

Schellenberg, Susanna

doi:10.5840/jphil200810525

Cited by 106 publications

(69 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Thirdly, among the topics significantly advanced by Jackson's Perception: a representative theory (1977), Australasian philosophers took a particular interest in colour perception, a topic which integrated developments in metaphysics and philosophy of mind (Bigelow, Collins, and Pargetter 1990;Maund 1995Maund , 2006Gold 1999;Menzies 2009). Fourth, questions about the nature of perceptual content have been freshly treated in Schellenberg's account of the essential situation-dependence of perceptual experience, which on her view is both representational and relational (Schellenberg 2008(Schellenberg , 2010. Finally, standard issues about direct or naïve realism have continued to be debated since Jackson's staunch defence of the representative theory of perception.…”

Section: Other Psychological Processesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science since 1980

Schier¹,

Sutton²

2014

History of Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Section: Other Psychological Processesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science since 1980

Schier¹,

Sutton²

2014

History of Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…This acceptance of multiple (dual) property representations by perception (some version of which is accepted by Tye (1996Tye ( , 2002; Byrne (2002);Noë (2004); Schellenberg (2008), among others) has a lot to recommend it. 5 For one thing, because it explicitly recognizes distinct contents, the dual property view contains resources that allow it to account for the bimodal behavior of subjects in our puzzle cases, and in this way is superior to views recognizing only a single content, which are consequently unable to account for the full range of observed behavior in such cases.…”

Section: A Computational Accountmentioning

confidence: 99%

Computation and the Ambiguity of Perception

Cohen¹

2012

Visual Experience

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Sometimes towers which had looked round from a distance appeared square from close up; and enormous statues standing on their pediments did not seem large when observed from the ground.-Descartes, Meditation VI, CSM:II, 53.There is a class of phenomena that suggests strongly that perception is, in some sense to be explained, ambiguous in what it tells us about the world. In the cases at issue, the perceptual system is capable of responding to a single stimulus -say, as manifested in the ways in which subjects sort that stimulus -in different ways. Indeed, in many cases, subjects can be made to switch at will between these different modes of response. This paper is about that ambiguity, and about how it should be characterized and accounted for within a general theory of perception. The Puzzle Cases: The Ambiguity of PerceptionLet me begin, then, by bringing to mind some (I hope) familiar cases in which our perceptual systems generate multiple reactions to one stimulus. 1 (As usual in such discussions, I'll be focusing below mostly on visual perception; but I suspect that much of what I say can be generalized to at least some other perceptual modalities as well.)A first classic example is that of the non-uniformly illuminated but uniformly painted wall (e.g., as in figure 1). Consider two contiguous and samesized, same-shaped regions of the wall in figure 1 that are each (roughly) illuminated uniformly, but such that there is a difference in the illumination between the two -one is in shadow and one is in direct sunlight. Here is a fact. Subjects perceiving this stimulus condition can indicate about the differently illuminated regions (say, by their sorting behavior) that they are, in one way, alike in their color appearance and that they are, in another way, not alike in their color appearance. It seems that visual systems can pick up both the constancy/similarity or the inconstancy/dissimilarity between the regions, and subjects can respond (say, in the ways that they sort, report, or make matches) to either one. Moreover, famously, ordinary subjects can 1 be made to switch between these different modes of response simply by manipulating the task instructions (Arend and Reeves, 1986;Blackwell and Buchsbaum, 1988;Valberg and Lange-Malecki, 1990;Arend et al., 1991;Troost and deWeert, 1991;Cornelissen and Brenner, 1995;Bäuml, 1999). These familiar results give us powerful reason for believing that, in the kind of case at issue, perception is representing distinct things about the single distal stimulus. Assuming (standardly, though not uncontroversially) that perceptual states have representational contents, we can put this point by saying that the perceptual states caused by such stimuli have (at least) two different contents -one representing the aspect of similarity driving one kind of subject response, and one representing the aspect of dissimilarity driving the other kind of subject response. Here is another familiar example of the same sort of phenomenon. Viewing two telephone poles at different distances, s...

show abstract

“…and, second, unlike the case of the stick in water, once the light reflected by the circular object has passed through the 20. The role such properties play in perception is discussed, for instance, by noë (2004: Chapter 3), Schellenberg (2008), andHill (2009: Chapter 5).…”

Section: The Nature Of Looksmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It's also worth noting that because we don't see such properties, illusions that are due entirely to changes occurring within the perceiver constitute a particularly difficult challenge to an account of illusion that appeals to looks: see Byrne (2009: 446-47) and Smith (2010: 392, Footnote 12). appeal to the extrinsic properties an object instantiates that change with changes to viewing conditions: the direction and quality of the light hitting the object, the orientation of the object relative to the perceiver's vantage point, the visual angle the object subtends, and so on. 20 Modifying some terminology from Schellenberg (2008), I'll call such properties of objects situational properties. So, for instance, one might claim that when you view the circular object through the lens you are acquainted with a certain specific situational property it instantiates that is characteristically instantiated by elliptical objects viewed under standard conditions.…”

Section: The Nature Of Looksmentioning

confidence: 99%

Naïve Realism and Illusion

Millar¹

2015

Ergo, an Open Access Journal of Philosophy

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The Situation-Dependency of Perception

Cited by 106 publications

References 0 publications

Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science since 1980

Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science since 1980

Computation and the Ambiguity of Perception

Naïve Realism and Illusion

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About

The Situation-Dependency of Perception

Cited by 106 publications

References 0 publications

Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science since 1980

Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science since 1980

Computation and the Ambiguity of Perception

Na&#x00EF;ve Realism and Illusion

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About

Naïve Realism and Illusion