Abstract
Abstract The paper presents and discusses phenomenological facts about perceptual spaces and percepts, but ends with a few thoughts about possible causal explanations of such spaces. The overarching double-sided hypothesis claims that - from a phenomenological point of view - each individual animal has at each consciously perceived moment of time a sense-modality-neutral perceptual space, and that these perceptual spaces are so-called container spaces. This means, to be concrete, that blind persons, deaf persons, and all perceptually non-handicapped persons have the same kind of phenomenological perceptual space, a sense-modality-neutral container space. The causal reflections bring in James J. Gibson’s work on such matters.
Highlights
The paper presents and discusses phenomenological facts about perceptual spaces and percepts, but ends with a few thoughts about possible causal explanations of such spaces
The overarching double-sided hypothesis claims that – from a phenomenological point of view – each individual animal has at each consciously perceived moment of time a sense-modality-neutral perceptual space, and that these perceptual spaces are so-called container spaces. This means, to be concrete, that blind persons, deaf persons, and all perceptually non-handicapped persons have the same kind of phenomenological perceptual space, a sense-modality-neutral container space
The expression ‘perceptual spaces’ is in the plural, since I take it for granted that perceptions of different persons are numerically different
Summary
This paper puts forward the idea and double-sided hypothesis that – from a phenomenological point of view – perceptual spaces are sense-modality-neutral and are container spaces. Space is regarded as a receptacle that might in principle have been empty, but as a matter of fact contains material entities First, it is homogeneous; all spatial regions are, numerically different, qualitatively exactly alike. The shapes b and d are necessarily two-dimensionally incongruent, but they are congruent in all spaces that have more than two dimensions This fact, by the way, eloquently shows that handedness cannot possibly be a brute intrinsic feature; such features stay the same independently of the space in which they exist. The handedness argument shows that where space is regarded as three-dimensional, and where handedness is possible, i.e., where three-dimensional shapes that lack a center-point, line of symmetry, and plane of symmetry are possible, the space in question must be a container space.
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