Perception and cognition
Subtitle: essays in the philosophy of psychology
By: Gary Hatfield.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2009
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 533
ISBN-13: 9780199228218; 9780199228201
Subjects: Perception (Philosophy); Experience; Neurosciences
Description: Synopsis: How do we see? This question has fascinated and perplexed philosophers and scientists for millennia. In visual perception, mind and world meet, when light reflected from objects enters the eyes and stimulates the nerves leading to activity in the brain near the back of the head. This neural activity yields conscious experiences of a world in three dimensions, clothed in colors, and immediately recognized as (say) ground, sky, grass, trees, and friends. The visual brain also produces nonconscious representations that interact with other brain systems for perception and cognition and that help to regulate our visually guided actions. But how does all of this really work? The answers concern the physiology, psychology, and philosophy of visual perception and cognition. Gary Hatfield's essays address fundamental questions concerning, in Part I, the psychological processes underlying spatial perception and perception of objects; in Part II, psychological theories and metaphysical controversies about color perception and qualia; and, in Part III, the history and philosophy of theories of vision, including methodological controversies surrounding introspection and involving the relations between psychology and the fields of neuroscience and cognitive science. An introductory chapter provides a unified overview; an extensive reference list rounds out the volume.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Representation and content in some (actual) theories of perception; title: Representation in perception and cognition : task analysis, psychological functions, and rule instantiation; title: Perception as unconscious inference; title: Representation and constraints : the inverse problem and the structure of visual space; title: On perceptual constancy; title: Getting objects for free (or not) : the philosophy and psychology of object perception; title: Color perception and neural encoding : does metameric matching entail a loss of information?; title: Objectivity and subjectivity revisited : color as a psychobiological property; title: Sense data and the mind body problem; title: The reality of qualia; title: The sensory core and the medieval foundations of early modern perceptual theory; title: Postscript (2008) on Ibn al-Haytham's (Alhacen's) theory of vision; title: Attention in early scientific psychology; title: Psychology, philosophy, and cognitive science : reflections on the history and philosophy of experimental psychology; title: What can the mind tell us about the brain? : psychology, neurophysiology, and constraint; title: Introspective evidence in psychology.