Philosophy of Biology and Cognitive Sciences

What are the limits of perception in the mind? This debated question has been the object of renewed
interest in recent philosophy of mind literature thanks to results in neuro-psychology. For example, Phillips recently defined perception as the ensemble of processes which have “the function of producing representations of environment entities by being causally controlled by those proximal stimuli that these entities produce.” (Phillips, 2017, p. 7). This characterization in philosophy of mind traces back to Fechner's theory of psychophysics (Fechner, 1966) and recent characterizations in experimental psychology. For example, visual perception has been defined as “strongly and directly controlled [...] by specific and subtle features of the visual input itself” (Strickland & Scholl, 2015).

 

However, it looks like experimental psychology alone cannot give an answer, without some pre-theoretical notions of what kind of thing perception is. Science requires a minimal characterization of the phenomenon of perception, in order to guide its research. The question addressed by this talk is: what is (or should be) the pre-theoretical scientific concept of perception? In other words, what characterization of perception, if any, does science of perception require to take as given pre- theoretically, as a starting point?

 

I first present the notion of pre-theoretical scientific concept of perception. This characterization should be contrasted with the ordinary concept of perception on one hand (or folk-psychology concept) and scientific concept(s) of perception on the other hand. The former is the notion used in our ordinary life, when I say “I can perceive a piano through vision, audition and touch” or “my perception of the world changed after I gave birth to my first child”. The latter are the different concepts of perception proposed by different theories or practices in Cognitive Science.

 

An intuitive thesis is that the precursor of the scientific concept of perception indeed coincides to the folk-psychological concept of perception. However, I argue that such intuitive thesis is misguided. Roughly, my argument hinges on the idea that the pre-theoretical scientific concept of perception does not require the definition of an intension or of an extension but is only constituted by epistemic goal(s). the bulk of the talk is devoted to developing this argument.

 

I formulate two objections against the intuitive thesis that the pre-theoretical scientific concept of perception is the folk-psychological concept of perception. This thesis assumes that a folk-psychological concept is defined either by an intension and/or an extension, and that these components of the concept will be updated by results in Cognitive Science. The first objection pertains to the continuity between ordinary and scientific categories: a folk-psychological concept can be updated only if there is continuity between ordinary and scientific categories. However, there is no reason that this continuity exists (see Dupré's criticism (1981) of Putnam and Kripke). The second problem is the impossibility to draw a distinction between negative results which should generate an update of the concept and negative results tout court.

 

Despite these difficulties, this strategy is still largely applied in philosophy of mind. In the second part of the talk, I offer an alternative, namely that the pre-theoretical scientific concept of perception is only constituted by epistemic goal(s).

 

I propose the following analysis of the difference between scientific and ordinary concepts. Scientific concepts consist of three components of content. The first two are common to ordinary concepts: its reference and definition (extension and intension). The third component is the epistemic goal(s) pursued by the concept’s use, or in other words, the kind of problem in need of explanation, for which this concept is used (Brigandt, 2012). In the absence of any alternative source of extension and intension except folk-psychology, I conclude that the pre-theoretical scientific concept of perception is only constituted by epistemic goals.

 

I will conclude with a few comments on the notion of epistemic goal and a tentative formulation of one epistemic goal of the pre-scientific concept of perception.

 

References
Brigandt, I. (2012). The Dynamics of Scientific Concepts: The Relevance of Epistemic Aims and Values. In U. Feest & F. Steinle (Eds.), Scientific Concepts and Investigative Practice. Berlin, Boston: DE GRUYTER.
Dupré, J. (1981). Natural Kinds and Biological Taxa. The Philosophical Review, 90(1), 66–90.
Fechner, G. (1966). Elements of psychophysics. Vol. I. Holt, Rinehart and Winston: New York.
Phillips, B. (2017). The Shifting Border Between Perception and Cognition. Noûs.
Strickland, B., & Scholl, B. J. (2015). Visual perception involves event-type representations: The case of containment versus occlusion. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144(3), 570–580.