Perceptual Relation Research Articles

The Place of Naïve Realism in Russell’s Changing Accounts of Perception

In this paper I describe the place of naive realism in Russell’s changing accounts of perception. I argue ‎for the following conclusions: (1) The early period, 1898-1910: I am inclined to think that the naïve ‎realism that Russell embraced so enthusiastically early on may not have been intended as a naïve ‎realism about perception, but as a metaphysical or semantical thesis. (2) The Problems of Philosophy ‎‎(1912): Russell abandons naïve realism (if, in fact, he ever held it) and presents a sense-datum version ‎of representative realism. (3) “On Matter” (1912): here we see Russell’s best attempt to defend ‎something very close to the standard doctrine of naïve realism. The objects of perception—the ‎‎“everyday material objects such as caterpillars and Cadillacs”—have, of course, undergone severe ‎reconstruction. But the resulting picture does capture the spirit of the doctrine. (4) The period from ‎‎1914 to 1927: though Russell’s thinking about perception underwent some significant changes during ‎this period—the sense datum theory is replaced by neutral monism—I try to show that the ‎distinction between the matter of physics and the thing of common sense is a constant feature of ‎Russell’s changing views. And I suggest that our perceptual relation the thing of common ‎sense (as logically reconstructed by Russell) can usefully be viewed as a limited sort of naïve realism. ‎‎(5) The period after 1927: the thing of common sense no longer features in Russell’s account of our ‎perceptual access to the world. The things we perceive are percepts, located in our private spaces. The ‎only material objects of which these percepts are parts are our brains. All other material objects are ‎beyond our perceptual reach and are accessible only via inference. This is the end of anything ‎resembling the traditional view of naïve realism in Russell’s account of perception. ‎

Hill on perceptual relativity and perceptual error

Christopher Hill's Perceptual experience is a must‐read for philosophers of mind and cognitive science. Here I consider Hill's representationalist account of spatial perception. I distinguish two theses defended in the book. The first is that perceptual experience does not represent the enduring, intrinsic properties of objects, such as intrinsic shape or size. The second is that perceptual experience does represent certain viewpoint‐dependent properties of objects—namely, Thouless properties. I argue that Hill's arguments do not establish the first thesis, and then I raise questions about the Thouless‐property view and its role in Hill's defense of representationalism.

Points of Anchorage: Exo-Centric Images and the Perceptual Relativity of Camera Movement

This essay analyzes a unique filmmaking technique to highlight the fact that camera movement is fundamentally an optical illusion based on a misinterpretation of visual cues. The unique technique in question is what I have called the ‘exo-centric image’, namely an image produced by a camera attached to the body of an actor which, paradoxically, generates the impression of an immobile body in a moving world. Through an analysis of this peculiar technique, I make claims about the illusory nature of camera movement in general. In so doing, this essay concludes that the vocabulary we use to describe camera movement keeps us from seeing some of the more eccentric aspects of the effect we call camera movement.

Perceptual Relations in Digital Environments

The aim of the paper is to develop the concept of perceptual relation and to apply it to digital environments. First, the meaning of perceptual relation is phenomenologically analyzed and defined as the interaction between the whole and its parts, which is theorized by the founders of Gestalt psychology. However, this relation is not considered as an intrinsic, but as an extended one, implying also the relation with the surrounding world (Umwelt). Subsequently, this concept of extended relation is applied to a chosen object (a ball) as it is perceived in four different kinds of digital dimensions (on-screen, virtual, augmented, and hybrid). Through a phenomenological analysis, I argue that, whereas the whole-part configuration remains the same, some modes of appearance of the object (multisensoriality, figure-ground interaction, affordances, and persistence) are different. In order to define this dynamic, I have coined the concept of transdimensional analogy.

Sensorimotor Relationalism and Conscious Vision

AbstractI argue that the phenomenal properties of conscious visual experiences are properties of the mind-independent objects to which the subject is perceptually related, mediated by the subject's practical understanding of their sensorimotor relation to those properties. This position conjoins two existing strategies for explaining the phenomenal character of perceptual experiences: accounts appealing to perceivers’ limited, non-inferential access to the details of their sensory relation to the environment, and the relationalist conception of phenomenal properties. Bringing these two positions together by emphasizing their sensorimotor common ground allows each one to respond to damaging objections using the resources of the other. The resulting ‘sensorimotor relationalism’ about conscious vision provides a promising schema for explaining phenomenal properties of perceptual states, replacing ‘Hard’ questions with tractable ones about the perceptual relation and its sensorimotor underpinnings.

Amodal completion and relationalism

Amodal completion is usually characterized as the representation of those parts of the perceived object that we get no sensory stimulation from. In the case of the visual sense modality, for example, amodal completion is the representation of occluded parts of objects we see. I argue that relationalism about perception, the view that perceptual experience is constituted by the relation to the perceived object, cannot give a coherent account of amodal completion. The relationalist has two options: construe the perceptual relation as the relation to the entire perceived object or as the relation to the unoccluded parts of the perceived object. I argue that neither of these options are viable.

Naïve Realism Face to Face with the Time Lag Argument

Naïve realists traditionally reject the time lag argument by replying that we can be in a direct visual perceptual relation to temporally distant facts or objects. I first show that this answer entails that some visual perceptions—i.e., those that are direct relation between us and an external material object that has visually changed, or ceased to exist, during the time lag—should also count as illusions and hallucinations, respectively. I then examine the possible attempts by the naïve realist to tell such perceptions apart from illusions and hallucinations, and after showing the inadequacy of the answers relying on a mere counterfactual or causal criterion, I explain why the problem is solved by introducing a view of visual perception as temporally extended into the past of objects and, in particular, as consisting in the whole causal chain of events or states of affairs going from external material object x to subject S. But this solution is not immune from defects for the naïve realist. I show that this view of perception raises a number of significant concerns, hence leaving the issue of the time lag problem still open for naïve realism.

Review: Molecular Capture: The Animation of Biology, by Adam Nocek

Review: <i>Molecular Capture: The Animation of Biology</i>, by Adam Nocek

Social Interactions, Aristotelian Powers, and the Ontology of the I–You Relation

Social Interactions, Aristotelian Powers, and the Ontology of the I–You Relation James Kintz I A second-person relation is often understood to obtain whenever one interacts with another such that she can address the other as “you,” and there has been much work in recent years regarding how we should understand this relation. A central feature of this discussion concerns whether we can explain the second-person perspective—that is, the perspective I take on another when I think of her as “you”—in terms of the self-sufficient cognitive mechanisms of individuals, or whether it involves a sui generis, intrinsically reciprocal form of thought such that a person can achieve a “you thought” only if another is thinking of her second-personally. Many scholars have come to adopt this latter position, suggesting that a second-person thought is always a thought for two. Yet others have argued that we can make sense of the second-person without positing any unique form of thought; on this view, a person can have a you thought about another even if the other fails to think about her second-personally. While there is much to be said regarding the character of second-person thought, the ontology of the second-person relation has been largely overlooked, yet I wish to suggest that we can make progress concerning what makes the second-person unique by focusing on the underlying nature of this relation. After briefly outlining competing positions regarding the character of second-person thought, I make use of an Aristotelian powers ontology to suggest that the powers at work when one thinks of another as “you” reveal a serious challenge to the claim that second-person thoughts are intrinsically reciprocal. However, I then employ this ontological framework to uncover distinctive features of the second-person relation, which, unlike non-second-person relations, is bidirectional and dynamic. I argue that these features are what make the second-person interaction truly unique, and they reveal that, regardless of our position on the character of second-person [End Page 91] thought, there is an important form of interdependence operative within the I–you relation. This ontological analysis therefore offers a novel method by which to advance the claim that the second-person cannot be captured in terms of the self-sufficient activity of individuals, and will likewise elucidate the nature of the I–you relation. II Second-Person Thought: Self-Sufficient, or Intrinsically Reciprocal? Recent work has seen an increased focus on the character of the second-person perspective,1 which is the view I take on another whenever I can appropriately think of her as “you.” For example, suppose I am hiking through the woods with a friend and I call her attention to an old, gnarled tree just off the trail. In order to perceive this tree, I must stand in some relation to it, in this case a perceptual [End Page 92] relation. Yet when I call my friend’s attention to the same tree so that she can experience it with me, it would seem that there is something different between the relation that I bear to her and the relation I bear to the tree. For one thing, my friend can respond to me—she is set up to engage me in reciprocal communication, and she is also able to be mutually aware of that tree with me. The reciprocity and mutuality that can arise between two persons in the sort of relation that obtains between my friend and me is not the same as the perceptual relation that I bear to the tree, for, among other things, in this new relation each person is thinking of the other as “you.” Given that such I–you interactions seem to involve a unique mode of thought, the discussion of the nature of the second-person has focused largely on what makes “you thoughts” distinct. There are a number of important differences between the theories advanced to explain this form of thought, but we can divide them into two broad camps: those that claim that second-person thoughts are intrinsically reciprocal, and those that claim that such thoughts can be achieved without reciprocation...

The time-lag argument and simultaneity

The time-lag argument seems to put some pressure on naïve realism to agree that seeing must happen simultaneously with what is seen; meanwhile, a wide-accepted empirical fact suggests that light takes time to transmit from objects at a distance to perceivers—which implies what is seen happened before seeing, and, accordingly, naïve realism must be false. In this paper, I will, first of all, show that the time-lag argument has in fact involves a misunderstanding concept of simultaneity: according to Special Relativity, simultaneity is a matter of convention rather than a matter of fact, so, in principle, we can stipulate a perceptual conception of simultaneity, according to which what is seen is simultaneous with seeing. Secondly, the generalized time-lag argument has a mistaken view on the perceived events and perceiving; it has a doubtful assumption that these events are momentary in the mathematical sense. Such idealization is the main reason why we have the intuition that the time-lag effect of perceiving is in conflict with our ordinary perceptual experiences. Finally, I argue that the naïve realist account of the perceptual relation is a nontemporal constitutive relation; and hence naïve realism is compatible with the claim that we can perceive things as they were, and it should not be weakened by the time-lag argument.

Stability by degrees: conceptions of constancy from the history of perceptual psychology.

Do the physical facts of the viewed environment account for the ordinary experiences we have of that environment? According to standard philosophical views, distal facts do account for our experiences, a phenomenon explained by appeal to perceptual constancy, the phenomenal stability of objects and environmental properties notwithstanding physical changes in proximal stimulation. This essay reviews a significant but neglected research tradition in experimental psychology according to which percepts systematically do not correspond to mind-independent distal facts. Instead, stability of percept values comes in degrees, and physical facts about the viewed environment alone do not account for our ordinary experiences of the world. I conclude that more attention to descriptive research in psychophysics is warranted if what is sought is a philosophical theory of the nature of our perceptual relation with the world.

Considerações sobre a natureza da experiência perceptiva

On this paper I will present and I will discuss the sense data theory, the intentionalism and the disjunctivism on their pure versions, that is, according to which the nature of perceptual experiences is fundamentally a matter of sense data, intentional content and of the perceptual relation, respectively. For that, I will deal with some of the main arguments used to support these theories and of some criticism against them. Considering the problems that challenge them, it seems that none of them offer a satisfactory account to the nature of perceptual experiences.

Qualitative relationism about subject and object of perception and experience

In this paper, I compare various theories of perception in relation to the question of the epistemological and ontological status of the qualities that appear in perceptual experience. I group these theories into two main views: quality externalism and quality internalism, and I highlight their contrasting problems in accounting for phenomena such as perceptual relativity, illusions and hallucinations (the “problem of perception”). Then, I propose an alternative view, which I call qualitative relationism and which conceives of the subject and the object of perceptual experience as essentially related to one another (hence relationism) in a process of co-constitution out of fundamental qualities (hence qualitative relationism). I lend support to this view by drawing on Husserl’s genetic phenomenology, which I complement with a form of neutral monism. I argue that the investigation of the temporal structure of perceptual experience leads us to find at its heart a qualitative process that is more fundamental than the two relata of perception and that gives rise to them. Then, I extend this account of perception into a general theory of intentionality and experience and I develop its implications into a neutral monist metaphysics.

The Subject-Dependency of Perceptual Objects

Entities that are, in ordinary perceptual situations, veridically presented as objects can be called ‘perceptual objects’. In the philosophical literature, one can find various approaches to the crucial features that distinguish the class of perceptual objects. While these positions differ in many respects, they share an important general feature: they all characterize perceptual objects as largely subject-independent. More specifically, they do not attribute a significant constitutive role to the perceptual relation connecting a fragment of the environment with a perceiving subject. Fragments of the environment are perceptual objects no matter whether they stand in a perceptual relation to any subject, mainly by virtue of having a certain physical structure. I question this common assumption, relying on Green’s (2019) definition of perceptual objects, arguing that a proper theory of perceptual objects should accommodate the constitutive role of perceptual relations. This is because there exist fragments of the environment that are perceptual objects only when they stand in a perceptual relation to a subject.

Non‐epistemic perception as technology

AbstractSome epistemologists and philosophers of mind hold that the non‐epistemic perceptual relation of which feature‐seeing and object‐seeing are special cases is the foundation of perceptual knowledge. This paper argues that such relations are best understood as having only a technological role in explaining perceptual knowledge. After introducing the opposing view in §1, §2 considers why its defenders deny that some cases in which one has perceptual knowledge without the relevant acquaintance relations are counterexamples, detailing their case for lurking inferential epistemology. §§3–4 suggest that this strategy fails in many other cases. While there is a computational tale that might be deemed ‘inferential’ in these cases, there is no corresponding tale in epistemic structure, not even if one rejects what Siegel (2017) calls the ‘Reckoning Model’ of inference. §5 offers a more fundamental dilemma. §6 concludes that there is only a technological role for non‐epistemic perception in grounding perceptual knowledge, but allows that it might play a more‐than‐technological role elsewhere.

Appearance and reality

AbstractThere is tension between the appealing idea that visual experience puts us in touch with objective reality and the doctrine of perceptual relativity, the claim that experience varies with such factors as distance, lighting, and angle of view. In this paper I present arguments for relativity, and then go on to propose that in view of relativity, we should believe that the properties presented to us in perception are relational and viewpoint‐dependent. I conclude by sketching a theory of how we nonetheless manage to achieve contact with objective properties. According to the theory, such contact is best explained in terms of perceptual representations acting in concert with cognitive and motoric representations, not in terms of perceptual representations alone.

HUME ON THE DEFEASIBLE JUSTIFICATION OF THE VULGAR BELIEF IN BODY

AbstractI argue that the vulgar belief in continued and distinct existences, as Hume describes it in Treatise 1.4.2, “Of Scepticism with Regard to the Senses,” is defeasibly justified. Prior to and apart from the rebutting defeater that Hume brings forward as an argument from perceptual relativity in paragraphs 44 and 45, the vulgar belief is perfectly in order, philosophically speaking. For Hume, a belief is defeasibly justified if and only if it is produced by permanent, irresistible, and universal principles of the imagination. The vulgar belief meets these conditions and thus is defeasibly justified—even though it suffers eventual defeat.

Must naive realists be relationalists?

AbstractRelationalism maintains that perceptual experience involves, as part of its nature, a distinctive kind of conscious perceptual relation between a subject of experience and an object of experience. Together with the claim that perceptual experience is presentational, relationalism is widely believed to be a core aspect of the naive realist outlook on perception. This is a mistake. I argue that naive realism about perception can be upheld without a commitment to relationalism.

Particularity of Content and Illusions of Identity

This paper argues that the accuracy of perceptual experiences cannot be properly characterized by using the particular notion of content without breaking one of the three plausible assumptions. On the other hand, the general notion of content is not threatened by this problem. The first assumption is that all elements of content determine the accuracy conditions of an experience. The second states that objects needed for the accuracy of experiences are physical entities that stand in a perceptual relation to a subject. According to the third assumption, common experiences do not have accuracy conditions that are impossible to satisfy. The above point is demonstrated by analysing illusions of identity in which the number of objects is represented incorrectly. In the concluding parts of the paper, I investigate how an alternative account of particular content can be developed by rejecting the first assumption.

On the automaticity of relational stimulus processing: The (extrinsic) relational Simon task.

We introduce the (extrinsic) relational Simon task as a tool for capturing automatic relational stimulus processing. In three experiments, participants responded to a perceptual relation between two stimuli. Results showed that participants were faster and more accurate to respond when the (task-irrelevant) conceptual relation between these stimuli was compatible (rather than incompatible) with the (extrinsic) relational meaning of the required responses. This effect was replicated irrespective of the type of stimulus materials used, irrespective of the similarity between the relational information that was task-relevant and the relational information that was task-irrelevant, and irrespective of the complexity of the task-irrelevant relational information. Our findings add to a growing body of evidence showing that relational stimulus processing can occur under conditions of automaticity.