PERCEPTION UNDER CONSTRUCTION

PROVISIONAL SCHEDULE

Thursdays

7:30 am Pacific Coast time, 10:30am Eastern Coast time, and 4:30pm Central European time 

September 24              

            Mohan Matthen, The Individuation of the Senses  

Perception is best regarded as a single modular system spread out over much of the cortex, with the exception of some parts of the (especially human) forebrain, and devoted to the creation, in real time, of a single cognitive map of the subject’s surroundings. However, philosophers, starting from Aristotle and right down to mid-century icons of analytic philosophy such as H. P. (Paul) Grice, contentiously treat the external sense-modalities as entirely separate and self-contained systems, with multisensory cognitive maps assembled from their unimodal components.  They are operating, no doubt, under the influence of phenomenal appearance—Grice explicitly so—which does indeed present the modalities separately. However, this evidence is highly contentious, since phenomenal appearance is an effect of some delimited stage of sensory processing and cannot properly be used as direct evidence of global facts concerning sensory processing as a whole. In this entry, I probe these ways of separating the senses. One diagnostic tool that I will use prominently is Molyneux’s Question, which has long been thought to give strong but defeasible evidence of separate senses. I shall show that in fact there are many Molyneux Questions and that these don’t all go in the same direction when closely examined. In the end, I will argue, evidence for the separation of the senses remains inconclusive. At best, it establishes only that they are separate in some phase of processing. But we know antecedently that they are separate at least to some limited degree because they correspond to distinct input-transducers. The open question, then, is what significance this evidence has and whether separation at this level implies a significant distinction. My aim is to show that the distinction, though real, has limited significance for the proper understanding of perception.

            Casey O’Callaghan, Multi-modal perception

Human perception occurs in several sensory modalities. In this respect, sense perception is multi-modal. Nevertheless, theorizing about perception and perceptual consciousness in science and in philosophy prior to recent decades has been predominantly unisensory. Unisensory approaches treat each sense in isolation or in abstraction from each other. Such approaches investigate capacities, processes, and mechanisms associated with one sense, ignoring or controlling for contributions from others. Unisensory approaches rely on two implicit assumptions: Independence: each sense is explanatorily independent from the others. Completeness Assembling accounts of individual senses yields an explanatorily exhaustive account of perception and perceptual consciousness. However, recent psychophysics and neuroscience demonstrate that senses interact extensively. Perceptual processes associated with one sense can impact and reshape those associated with another. Some novel perceptual capacities rely on the coordinated use of multiple senses. Each can reshape perceptual consciousness at a time and over time. This challenges the explanatory independence and the explanatory completeness of individual senses. Sense perception thus cannot fully be understood by treating the senses wholly in isolation or in abstraction from each other. On the positive side, the coordinated use of several senses enhances the coherence and the reliability of sense perception, extends its reach, and makes possible novel varieties of perceptual consciousness. This chapter presents the case that, in human beings, perceptual processes and functions, perceptual capacities, and two facets of perceptual consciousness -- awareness and experience (or phenomenality) are richly or deeply multi-sensory. However, this need not challenge the distinctness of our senses. Human perception and perceptual consciousness can occur in distinct, if overlapping, sensory modalities. The key is that our senses are not mutually exclusive perceptual modalities.

October 8                     

            Christopher Peacocke, Identifiers: Their Scope, Nature and Significance 

Identifiers are modes of presentation of subjective states with this striking feature: when in the content of a mental event, the event conveys to its owner what it is like to be in the state that they present. Identifiers of mental states occur in imagination, in autobiographical memory, in the perception of expressive action, and in the perception of music when a mental state is heard in the music. Identifiers are not demonstratives. It is crucial to distinguish the event that contains the identifier – the delivering state – from what it delivers, which is a content containing the identifier. Identifiers form a category of phenomenal concepts distinct from those widely acknowledged in the philosophical literature. Identifiers are crucial both for knowledge and reflection on our detailed conscious lives, and for our interpersonal relations. Various failures of good relations to a grasp of identifiers can contribute to the explanation of a variety of pathologies, including the amusias, alexithymia, and aphantasia.   

            Jonathan Mitchell, Peripersonal Space and Peripersonal Experience     

We traditionally think of there as being a sharp division between external space and our bodies. External space is ‘out there’, separated from our body, with the skin serving as the boundary between ourselves and the external world. The notion of peripersonal space overturns this traditional picture. A significant body of evidence from cognitive neuroscience suggests that our perceptual systems process external objects in the space in close proximity to our bodies (up to 30-50cm) in a distinctive way, and critically as different from far space. Philosophers of cognitive science and perception have increasingly taken an interest in peripersonal space, principally with a view to detailing the computational principles characteristic of peripersonal processing, and specifying kinds of representational contents that figure in non-conscious peripersonal perception. However, a vexed question concerns whether we enjoy some form of awareness of peripersonal space as special, as a distinctive form of peripersonal spatial awareness. In this chapter, I provide an overview of various options for characterising peripersonal spatial awareness, including in terms of visual appearance properties, felt mandates, and an increased ‘sense of perceptual presence’. I suggest that we do best, in the end, to think of such awareness in relation to tactile expectations and tactile possibilities. I close with some thoughts on further avenues for philosophical research on peripersonal experience.  

October 22                   

            Fall break

November 5                 

           Gabriel Siegel, Vestibular Sense

Matt Fulkerson, Interoception     

November 19               

            Angelica Kaufmann, Animal Perception and Temporal Representation

            Sabrina Coninx & Laurenz Casser, Is Pain Perception?

December 3                 

            Alberto Voltolini, The role of Imagination for Perception

December 17               

            Błażej Skrzypulec, Touch          

            Giulia Martina, Smell     

Winter Break

January 14                   

            Jacob Beck, Do Convolutional Neural Networks Undermine Marr’s Framework for Explaining Vision?

            Carlota Serrahima, Tactile field

January 28                   

            Nick Young, Audition

Guilano Torrengo, The present in perception: content or attitude? 

February 11                 

            Assaf Weksler & Gabriel Rabin, Iconic perception          

            Jonna Vance, Feature Binding and Hedonic Valence in Perception        

February 25                 

            Joulia Smortchkova, Are feelings of déjà vu and jamais vu part of perceptual experience?

            Kevin Lande, Perspective as Representational Form

March 11                     

            Gerardo Viera, Extended present: the role of memory for perception      

            Jack Shardlow, Extended present: the role of anticipation for perception

March 25                     

            Arina Pismenny & Benjamin Young, Smell and the emotions      

            John Morrison, Perceptual confidence   

April 8              

            Dan Burnston, Analog perception

Madeleine Ransom, Perceptual learning