Perception

Abstract

Chapter 2 explains perception as a sensory capacity controlled by present stimulation. The capacity’s distinguishing conditions include representation with accuracy conditions as an aspects of the capacity’s nature. An objectifying process marks the capacity in perception-formation. The objectification process distinguishes cues relevant to the environment from cues relevant primarily to proximal stimulation. Representation with accuracy conditions is distinct from non-perceptual sensing, a form of information registration. Science postulates perceptual states with accuracy conditions in its causal explanations. Pre-representational sensory states register information whose fulfillment of biological functions constitutes an environmental success. But causal explanations of such states do not, and need not, take them to have accuracy conditions. Perceptual states have representational contents as aspects of their natures—what, as indicated in causal explanation—they fundamentally are. Representational contents have three central aspects. They set accuracy conditions. They function as modes of presentation of represented entities. And they are finest-grained, fundamental psychological kinds. Perceptual representational contents have three representational constituents: referential applications, referential schemas, and perceptual attributives. The basic representational form of perceptual states is nominal or noun-phrase-like. The form is that of various contextual, referential determiners, scope dominating attributives that function to be applied by the determiners. Perceptual states differ from non-representational sensory states in being formed by a process of objectification that embeds perceptual states in one or more perceptual constancies. Perceptual constancies mark emergence of representational mind.