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Author: Bill Brewer Publisher: Clarendon Press ISBN: 0191518964 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 300
Book Description
Bill Brewer sets out an original view of the role of conscious experience in the acquisition of empirical knowledge. Most epistemology of perception takes a person's possession of beliefs about the mind-independent world for granted and goes on to ask what further conditions these beliefs must meet if they are to be cases of knowledge. Brewer argues that this approach is completely mistaken. Perceptual experiences must provide reasons for empirical beliefs if there are to be any determinate beliefs at all about particular objects in the world. The crucial epistemological role of experience lies in its essential contribution to the subject's understanding of certain perceptual demonstrative contents, simply grasping which provides him with a reason to endorse them in belief. Brewer explains in detail how this is so, defends his position against a wide range of objections, and compares and contrasts it with a number of influential alternative views in the area. He brings out its connection with Russell's Principle of Acquaintance, and examines its conseqences for the compatibility of content externalism with an adequate account of self-knowledge. Perception and Reason offers a fresh approach to epistemology, turning away from the search for necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge and working instead from a theory of understanding in a particular area.
Author: Bill Brewer Publisher: Clarendon Press ISBN: 0191518964 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 300
Book Description
Bill Brewer sets out an original view of the role of conscious experience in the acquisition of empirical knowledge. Most epistemology of perception takes a person's possession of beliefs about the mind-independent world for granted and goes on to ask what further conditions these beliefs must meet if they are to be cases of knowledge. Brewer argues that this approach is completely mistaken. Perceptual experiences must provide reasons for empirical beliefs if there are to be any determinate beliefs at all about particular objects in the world. The crucial epistemological role of experience lies in its essential contribution to the subject's understanding of certain perceptual demonstrative contents, simply grasping which provides him with a reason to endorse them in belief. Brewer explains in detail how this is so, defends his position against a wide range of objections, and compares and contrasts it with a number of influential alternative views in the area. He brings out its connection with Russell's Principle of Acquaintance, and examines its conseqences for the compatibility of content externalism with an adequate account of self-knowledge. Perception and Reason offers a fresh approach to epistemology, turning away from the search for necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge and working instead from a theory of understanding in a particular area.
Author: Johan Gersel Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0198809638 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 295
Book Description
How does perception provide reasons for our empirical judgements? This volume offers a set of new essays which in different ways address this fundamental question, and investigate the implications for our understanding of perceptual experience.
Author: Kathleen A. Hull Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1315444631 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 232
Book Description
In this book, scholars examine the nature and significance of Peirce’s work on perception, iconicity, and diagrammatic thinking. Abjuring any strict dichotomy between presentational and representational mental activity, Peirce’s theories transform the Aristotelian, Humean, and Kantian paradigms that continue to hold sway today and forge a new path for understanding the centrality of visual thinking in science, education, art, and communication. This book is a key resource for scholars interested in Perice’s philosophy and its relation to contemporary issues in mathematics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of perception, semiotics, logic, visual thinking, and cognitive science.
Author: William P. Alston Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 1501720546 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 164
Book Description
Why suppose that sense perception is an accurate source of information about the physical environment? More generally, is it possible to demonstrate that our basic ways of forming beliefs are reliable? In this book, a leading analytic philosopher confronts this classic problem through detailed investigation of sense perception, the source of beliefs in which we place the most confidence. Carefully assessing the available arguments, William P. Alston concludes that it is not possible to show in any noncircular way that sense perception is a reliable source of beliefs. Alston thoroughly examines the main arguments that have been advanced for the reliability of sense perception, including arguments from the various kinds of success we achieve by relying on the sense perception, arguments that some features of our sense experience are best explained by supposing that it is an accurate guide, and arguments that there is something conceptually incoherent about the idea that sense perception is not reliable. He concludes that all of these arguments that are not disqualified in other ways are epistemically circular, for they use premises based upon the very source in question. Alston then suggest that the most appropriate response to the impossibility of showing that our basic sources of beliefs are reliable is an appeal to the practical rationality of engaging in certain socially established belief-forming practices. The Reliability of Sense Perception will be welcome by epistemologists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers of science.
Author: Walter Ott Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0192509454 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 256
Book Description
The seventeenth century witnesses the demise of two core doctrines in the theory of perception: naïve realism about color, sound, and other sensible qualities and the empirical theory, drawn from Alhacen and Roger Bacon, which underwrote it. This created a problem for seventeenth century philosophers: how is that we use qualities such as color, feel, and sound to locate objects in the world, even though these qualities are not real? Ejecting such sensible qualities from the mind-independent world at once makes for a cleaner ontology, since bodies can now be understood in purely geometrical terms, and spawns a variety of fascinating complications for the philosophy of perception. If sensible qualities are not part of the mind-independent world, just what are they, and what role, if any, do they play in our cognitive economy? We seemingly have to use color to visually experience objects. Do we do so by inferring size, shape, and motion from color? Or is it a purely automatic operation, accomplished by divine decree? This volume traces the debate over perceptual experience in early modern France, covering such figures as Antoine Arnauld, Robert Desgabets, and Pierre-Sylvain Régis alongside their better-known countrymen René Descartes and Nicolas Malebranche.
Author: Dr. Bill Brewer Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199260257 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 215
Book Description
Bill Brewer presents, motivates, and defends a bold new solution to a fundamental problem in the philosophy of perception. What is the correct theoretical conception of perceptual experience, and how should we best understand the most fundamental nature of our perceptual relation with the physical objects in the world around us? Most theorists today analyse perception in terms of its representational content, in large part in order to avoid fatal problems attending the early modern conception of perception as a relation with particular mind-dependent objects of experience. Having set up the underlying problem and explored the lessons to be learnt from the various difficulties faced by opposing early modern responses to it, Bill Brewer argues that this contemporary approach has serious problems of its own. Furthermore, the early modern insight that perception is most fundamentally to be construed as a relation of conscious acquaintance with certain direct objects of experience is, he claims, perfectly consistent with the commonsense identification of such direct objects with persisting mind-independent physical objects themselves. Brewer here provides a critical, historical account of the philosophy of perception, in order to present a defensible vindication of empirical realism.
Author: Anil Gomes Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0198724950 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 298
Book Description
The fourteen original essays in this volume explore Kant's writings on the mind, covering such topics as intuition, imagination, inner sense, self-consciousness, and the will. These are central to any understanding of Kant's critical philosophy and of continuing relevance to contemporary debates.
Author: Walter Hopp Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1139502794 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 259
Book Description
This book offers a provocative, clear and rigorously argued account of the nature of perception and its role in the production of knowledge. Walter Hopp argues that perceptual experiences do not have conceptual content, and that what makes them play a distinctive epistemic role is not the features which they share with beliefs, but something that in fact sets them radically apart. He explains that the reason-giving relation between experiences and beliefs is what Edmund Husserl called 'fulfilment' - in which we find something to be as we think it to be. His book covers a wide range of central topics in contemporary philosophy of mind, epistemology and traditional phenomenology. It is essential reading for contemporary analytic philosophers of mind and phenomenologists alike.
Author: John R. Searle Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0199385157 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 255
Book Description
This book provides a comprehensive account of the intentionality of perceptual experience. With special emphasis on vision Searle explains how the raw phenomenology of perception sets the content and the conditions of satisfaction of experience. The central question concerns the relation between the subjective conscious perceptual field and the objective perceptual field. Everything in the objective field is either perceived or can be perceived. Nothing in the subjective field is perceived nor can be perceived precisely because the events in the subjective field consist of the perceivings, whether veridical or not, of the events in the objective field. Searle begins by criticizing the classical theories of perception and identifies a single fallacy, what he calls the Bad Argument, as the source of nearly all of the confusions in the history of the philosophy of perception. He next justifies the claim that perceptual experiences have presentational intentionality and shows how this justifies the direct realism of his account. In the central theoretical chapters, he shows how it is possible that the raw phenomenology must necessarily determine certain form of intentionality. Searle introduces, in detail, the distinction between different levels of perception from the basic level to the higher levels and shows the internal relation between the features of the experience and the states of affairs presented by the experience. The account applies not just to language possessing human beings but to infants and conscious animals. He also discusses how the account relates to certain traditional puzzles about spectrum inversion, color and size constancy and the brain-in-the-vat thought experiments. In the final chapters he explains and refutes Disjunctivist theories of perception, explains the role of unconscious perception, and concludes by discussing traditional problems of perception such as skepticism.
Author: Sajahan Miah Publisher: A&C Black ISBN: 1847142842 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 257
Book Description
In Russell's Theory of Perception, Sajahan Miah re-examines and evaluates the development of Russell's concept of perception and the relation of perception to our knowledge of the external world. With the introduction of logical construction (in which physical objects are constructed from actual and possible sense-data) Russell's theory of perception seems to become a causal theory with phenomenalist overtones. The book argues that there is a consistency of purpose and direction which motivated Russell to introduce logical construction. The purpose was to strike a compromise between his empiricism and his realism and to establish a bridge between the objects of perception and the objects of physics and common sense.
Author: Bill Brewer
Author: Bill Brewer
Author: Johan Gersel
Author: Kathleen A. Hull
Author: William P. Alston
Author: Walter Ott
Author: Dr. Bill Brewer
Author: Anil Gomes
Author: Walter Hopp
Author: John R. Searle
Author: Sajahan Miah