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The Contents of Perceptual Experience: A Kantian Perspective

Author: Anna Tomaszewska

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2014-10-08

Total Pages: 165

ISBN-13: 3110372657

The book addresses the debate on whether the representational content of perceptual experience is conceptual or non-conceptual, by bringing out the points of comparison between Kant’s conception of intuition and the contemporary accounts of non-conceptual content, encountered in the writings of G. Evans, Ch. Peacocke, F. Dretske, T. Crane, M. G. F. Martin, and others. Following R. Aquila’s reading of Kant’s conception of representation, the author argues that intuition (Anschauung, intuitus) provides the most basic form of intentionality – pre-conceptual reference to objects, which underlies the acts of conceptualization and judgment. The book advances an interpretation of Kant’s theory of experience in the light of such questions as: Does conscious perceptual experience of objects require that subjects possess concepts of these objects? Do the contents of experience differ from the contents of beliefs or judgments? And if they do, what accounts for this difference? These questions take us to the most puzzling philosophical topic of the relation between mind and world. Anna Tomaszewska argues that this relation does not involve conceptual capacities alone but also, on the most basic level of perceptual experience, pre-cognitive “sensible intuition,” enabling relatedness to objects that remains uninformed by concepts. In a nutshell, on her interpretation, Kant can be taken to subscribe to the view that perceptual cognition does not have rational underpinnings.

The Ontology of Perceptual Experience

Author: Sebastián Sanhueza Rodríguez

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2022-09-15

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13: 9781793616852

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How should we think of perceptual experiences qua dynamic phenomena? Against an increasingly popular Heraclitean approach that frames them as irreducibly dynamic, the present book argues that perceptual experiences may be described in terms of non-dynamic categories, such as properties, relations, and states.

Towards a Theory of Epistemically Significant Perception

Author: Nadja El Kassar

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2015-09-25

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 311044562X

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How does perceptual experience make us knowledgeable about the world? In this book Nadja El Kassar argues that an informed answer requires a novel theory of perception: perceptual experience involves conceptual capacities and consists in a relation between a perceiver and the world. Contemporary theories of perception disagree about the role of content and conceptual capacities in perceptual experience. In her analysis El Kassar scrutinizes the arguments of conceptualist and relationist theories, thereby exposing their limitations for explaining the epistemic role of perceptual experience. Against this background she develops her novel theory of epistemically significant perception. Her theory improves on current accounts by encompassing both the epistemic role of perceptual experiences and its perceptual character. Central claims of her theory receive additional support from work in vision science, making this book an original contribution to the philosophy of perception.

The Informational Content of Perceptual Experience

Author: Alistair Maurice Isaac

Publisher:

Published: 2010

Total Pages:

ISBN-13:

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This dissertation develops a naturalistic theory of perceptual content based on the insight that our perceptual experience measures the world. This theory is motivated in detail by examples from color perception. The basic idea is that possible color experiences define a measurement scale, and the causal relationship between this scale and the world determines the contents of the measurements it performs. This content is informational content in the sense that it captures the complete information carried by the percept about the world. The biggest problem for a naturalistic theory of perceptual content is accounting for perceptual error. This dissertation provides an alternative to the current most popular strategy for analyzing representational error naturalistically, teleosemantics. I describe how information theory provides the apparatus for analyzing representational efficacy. This suggests that the intentional content of a percept may then be identified with the unique state of the world it represents most effectively. Once we have an analysis of intentional content, we can identify perceptual errors as situations in which a percept's content and the state of the world which caused it diverge.

Sellars and McDowell on Kant's Theory of Perceptual Synthesis

Author: Ageel Al-Fadli

Publisher:

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13:

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This dissertation explores Kant's theory of perceptual experience. A reconstruction of Kant's conception of perceptual synthesis is pursued through an examination of two interpretations given by Wilfrid Sellars and John McDowell. The two interpretations defended by Sellars and McDowell emphasize on the conceptual synthesis of the understanding in shaping the sensory consciousness. Also, the two interpretations seek to articulate a conception of external constraint in perceptual activity that is answerable to independent reality. The external constraint is necessary to explain the occurrence of perceptual experience. The manifold of sense is considered as an external constraint in perceptual synthesis. Sellars takes sheer receptivity as providing this constraining element in perceptual experience, whereas McDowell argues that sensations as informed by the understanding can sufficiently provide this constraining content. After examining both interpretations, I will argue that Sellars and McDowell incorrectly take external constraint as appropriated by the concepts of the understanding. To defend this claim, I will reconstruct Kant's conception of perceptual experience by demonstrating that Kant posits the manifold of sensations as independent of the operation of the understanding. The manifold of sensations constrains the conceptual content of experience through the synthesis of apprehension. In this synthesis, the manifold of sensations resists the figurative synthesis of imagination from being re-constituted through the extensive forms of space and time.

Perceptual Experience

Author: CHRISTOPHER. HILL

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-09

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0192867768

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This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Christopher S. Hill argues that perceptual experience constitutively involves representations of worldly items, and that the relevant form of representation can be explained in broadly biological terms. He then maintains that the representational contents of perceptual experiences are perceptual appearances, interpreted as relational, viewpoint-dependent properties of external objects. There is also a complementary explanation of how the objects that possess these properties are represented. Hill maintains that perceptual phenomenology can be explained reductively in terms of the representational contents of experiences, and uses this doctrine to undercut the traditional arguments for dualism. This treatment of perceptual phenomenology is expanded to encompass cognitive phenomenology, the phenomenology of moods and emotions, and the phenomenology of pain. Hill also offers accounts of the various forms of consciousness that perceptual experiences can possess. One aim is to argue that phenomenology is metaphysically independent of these forms of consciousness, and another is to de-mystify the form known as phenomenal consciousness. The book concludes by discussing the relations of various kinds that perceptual experiences bear to higher-level cognitive states, including relations of format, content, and justification or support.

Kant and Non-Conceptual Content

Author: Dietmar H. Heidemann

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-06-11

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1317981561

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Conceptualism is the view that cognizers can have mental representations of the world only if they possess the adequate concepts by means of which they can specify what they represent. By contrast, non-conceptualism is the view that mental representations of the world do not necessarily presuppose concepts by means of which the content of these representations can be specified, thus cognizers can have mental representations of the world that are non-conceptual. Consequently, if conceptualism is true then non-conceptualism must be false, and vice versa. This incompatibility makes the current debate over conceptualism and non-conceptualism a fundamental controversy since the range of conceptual capacities that cognizers have certainly has an impact on their mental representations of the world, on how sense perception is structured, and how external world beliefs are justified. Conceptualists and non-conceptualists alike refer to Kant as the major authoritative reference point from which they start and develop their arguments. The appeal to Kant attempts to pave the way for a robust answer to the question of whether or not there is non-conceptual content. Since the incompatibility of the conceptualist and non-conceptualist readings of Kant indicate a paradigm case, hopes have risen that the answer to the question of whether Kant is a conceptualist or a non-conceptualist might settle the contemporary controversy across the board. This volume searches for that answer. This book is based on a special issue of the International Journal of Philosophical Studies.

Possible Experience

Author: Arthur Collins

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1999-02-01

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 9780520921429

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Arthur Collins's succinct, revisionist exposition of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason brings a new clarity to this notoriously difficult text. Until recently most readers, ascribing broadly Cartesian assumptions to Kant, have concluded that the Critique advances an idealist philosophy, because Kant calls it "transcendental idealism" and because the work abounds in apparent confirmations of that interpretation. Collins maintains not only that this reading of Kant is false but also that it conceals Kant's real achievements. To counter it, he addresses the themes and passages in the Critique that seem to require an idealist thesis and shows how they may be better understood without ascribing any idealist philosophy to Kant. His account coheres with Kant's explicit "refutations" of idealism, it fits Kant's rejection of the imputation of idealism to him by early critics and readers, and it validates Kant's contention that the second edition of the Critique changes the expression but not the doctrine of the first.

Kant's Philosophy of the Unconscious

Author: Piero Giordanetti

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2012-04-26

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 3110265400

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The unconscious raises relevant problems in the theory of knowledge as regards non-conceptual contents and obscure representations. In the philosophy of mind, it bears on the topic of the unity of consciousness and the notion of the transcendental Self. It is a key-topic of logic with respect to the distinction between determinate-indeterminate judgments and prejudices, and in aesthetics it appears in connection with the problems of reflective judgments and of the genius. Finally, it is a relevant issue also in moral philosophy in defining the irrational aspects of the human being. The purpose of the present volume is to fill a substantial gap in Kant research while offering a comprehensive survey of the topic in different areas of research, such as history of philosophy, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, moral philosophy, and anthropology.

Seeing More

Author: Samantha Matherne

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-04-19

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13: 0198898290

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Samantha Matherne defends a systematic interpretation of the philosopher Immanuel Kant's theory of imagination. To this end, she offers an account of what kind of mental capacity Kant takes imagination to be in general, as well as an account of the way in which we use this capacity in theoretical, aesthetic, and practical contexts. In contrast with more traditional theories of imagination, as a kind of fantasy that we exercise only in relation to objects that are not real or not present, Matherne argues that Kant theorizes imagination as something that we exercise just as much in relation to objects that are real and present. Thus she attributes to Kant a view of imagining as something that pervades our lives. In order to bring out this pervasiveness, Matherne explores Kant's account of how we exercise our imagination in perception, ordinary experience, the appreciation of beauty and sublimity, the production of art, the pursuit of happiness, and the pursuit of morality. However, she also argues that Kant's analysis of this wide range of phenomena is underwritten by a unified theory of what imagination is, as a remarkably flexible cognitive capacity that we can exercise in constrained and creative, playful and serious ways.