The Unity of Perception: Content, Consciousness, Evidence - Hardcover

Schellenberg, Susanna

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198827709 ISBN 13: 9780198827702

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2018

Synopsis

Perception is our key to the world. It plays at least three different roles in our lives. It justifies beliefs and provides us with knowledge of our environment. It brings about conscious mental states. It converts informational input, such as light and sound waves, into representations of invariant features in our environment. Corresponding to these three roles, there are at least three fundamental questions that have motivated the study of perception. How does perception justify beliefs and yield knowledge of our environment? How does perception bring about conscious mental states? How does a perceptual system accomplish the feat of converting varying informational input into mental representations of invariant features in our environment?

This book presents a unified account of the phenomenological and epistemological role of perception that is informed by empirical research. So it develops an account of perception that provides an answer to the first two questions, while being sensitive to scientific accounts that address the third question. The key idea is that perception is constituted by employing perceptual capacities - for example the capacity to discriminate instances of red from instances of blue. Perceptual content, consciousness, and evidence are each analyzed in terms of this basic property of perception. Employing perceptual capacities constitutes phenomenal character as well as perceptual content. The primacy of employing perceptual capacities in perception over their derivative employment in hallucination and illusion grounds the epistemic force of perceptual experience. In this way, the book provides a unified account of perceptual content, consciousness, and evidence.

About this title

About the Author

Susanna Schellenberg is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University. She is currently working on a book on subjective perspectives and a project on AI and the neural basis of perception funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship and a NEH fellowship. More information can be found here:

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0198827709
• ISBN 13: 9780198827702
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 268