Seeing and Visualizing: It's Not What You Think (Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology) - Softcover

Pylyshyn, Zenon W. W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0262661977 ISBN 13: 9780262661973

Publisher: MIT Press, 2006

Synopsis

In Seeing and Visualizing, Zenon Pylyshyn argues that seeing is different from thinking and that to see is not, as it may seem intuitively, to create an inner replica of the world. Pylyshyn examines how we see and how we visualize and why the scientific account does not align with the way these processes seem to us "from the inside." In doing so, he addresses issues in vision science, cognitive psychology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive neuroscience.

First, Pylyshyn argues that there is a core stage of vision independent from the influence of our prior beliefs and examines how vision can be intelligent and yet essentially knowledge-free. He then proposes that a mechanism within the vision module, called a visual index (or FINST), provides a direct preconceptual connection between parts of visual representations and things in the world, and he presents various experiments that illustrate the operation of this mechanism. He argues that such a deictic reference mechanism is needed to account for many properties of vision, including how mental images attain their apparent spatial character without themselves being laid out in space in our brains.

The final section of the book examines the "picture theory" of mental imagery, including recent neuroscience evidence, and asks whether any current evidence speaks to the issue of the format of mental images. This analysis of mental imagery brings together many of the themes raised throughout the book and provides a framework for considering such issues as the distinction between the form and the content of representations, the role of vision in thought, and the relation between behavioral, neuroscientific, and phenomenological evidence regarding mental representations.

About this title

About the Author

Zenon W. Pylyshyn is Board of Governors Professor of Cognitive Science at Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science. He is the author of Seeing and Visualizing: It's Not what You Think (2003), Things and Places: How the mind connects with the world (2007) and Computation and Cognition: Toward a Foundation for Cognitive Science (1984), all published by The MIT Press, as well as over a hundred scientific papers on perception, attention, and the computational theory of mind.

Review

Seeing and Visualizing offers a persuasive account of why visual perception and visual imagery do not depend on internal pictorial representations, and puts forward the deeply counterintuitive notion that the machinery of visual thinking does not use mental pictures at all. Pylyshyn's masterful defense of this idea is a 'must-read' not only for committed Fodorians but also for those who believe that mental representations resemble the things they depict. The book is challenging and provocative―and even occasionally infuriating―but always thoughtful and immensely readable. I recommend it to anyone who has ever wondered about how we see and visualize the world.

―Mel Goodale, Canada Research Professor in Visual Neuroscience, University of Western Ontario

Edition details

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0262661977
• ISBN 13: 9780262661973
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 582