Problems of explanations and theories of visual perception

Abstract

For millennia it has been one of the main problems within philosophy to find satisfactory answers to the questions of whether our knowledge about reality is true or in accordance with reality “itself”—and if so, how it comes about that we acquire this knowledge. Ever since the development of sensory physiology from which perception psychology evolved during the last half of the 19th century, psychology has considered these questions a matter to be explained by empirical investigations. In current psychological research on visual perception this task is often formulated as the problem of explaining how the “visual system” detects and processes the information emitted from the physical world.