Anti-Individualism and Perceptual Representation: Interview With Tyler Burge

Tyler Burge,Carlos Muñoz-Suárez

doi:10.5964/ejop.v10i4.767

Abstract

Tyler Burge's anti-individualism – the view that individuating many of a creature's mental kinds is necessarily dependent on relations that the creature bears to the physical, or in some cases social, environment – backs his theory of perceptual representation, i.e. perceptual anti-individualism. Perceptual anti-individualism articulates a framework that, according to Burge, perceptual psychology assumed without articulation. In this interview, Burge talks about the main tenets and underpinnings of perceptual anti-individualism in relation to classic representational theories of perceptual experience, reductive theories of mental content, theories of phenomenal consciousness, and other associated topics.

Highlights

I hope that my work on perceptual representation will come to have co-equal status with the work on anti-individualism, in transforming the way philosophy thinks about the relevant subject matter
Anti-individualism is the view that the natures of most representational mental states depend constitutively on relations to a wider environment
Perceptual anti-individualism explains how perception is “embedded in nature” by showing that this general connection between properties that animals interact with pre-representationally figures in the very nature of perceptual representational contents – which are themselves perceptual kinds

Summary

Introduction

Anti-individualism is the view that the natures of most representational mental (or psychological) states depend constitutively on relations to a wider environment According to your perceptual anti-individualism the nature of all perceptual states depends constitutively on relations – including non-representational causal relations – between individuals in those states and features of the physical environment (including sometimes the individual’s own body).

Results

Conclusion