Perception First Form Of Mind

"In Perception: First Form of Mind, Tyler Burge develops an understanding of the most primitive type of representational mind: perception. Focusing on its form, function, and underlying capacities, as indicated in the sciences of perception, Burge provides an account of the representational content and formal representational structure of perceptual states, and develops a formal semantics for them. The account is elaborated by an explanation of how the representational form is embedded in an iconic format. These structures are then situated in current theoretical accounts of the processing of perceptual representations, with an emphasis on the formation of perceptual categorizations. An exploration of the relationship between perception and other primitive capacities-conation, attention, memory, anticipation, affect, learning, and imagining-clarifies the distinction between perceiving, with its associated capacities, and thinking, with its associated capacities. Drawing on a broad range of historical and contemporary research, rather than relying on introspection or ordinary talk about perception, Perception: First Form of Mind is a scientifically rigorous and agenda-setting work in the philosophy of perception and the philosophy of science"--

In Perception: First Form of Mind, Tyler Burge develops an understanding of the most primitive type of mental representational: perception. Focusing on the functions and capacities of perceptual states, Burge accounts for their representational content and structure, and develops a formal semantics for them. The discussion explains the role of iconic format in the structure. It also situates the accounts of content, structure, and semantics within scientific explanations of perceptual-state formation, emphasizing formation of perceptual categorization. In the book's second half, Burge discusses what a perceptual system is. Exploration of relations between perception and other primitive capacities-conation, attention, memory, anticipation, affect, learning, and imagining-helps distinguish perceiving, with its associated capacities, from thinking, with its associated capacities. Drawing mainly on vision science, not introspection, Perception: First Form of Mind is a rigorous, agenda-setting work in philosophy of perception and philosophy of science.

The aim of the present work is to show the roots of the conception of perception as an active process, tracing the history of its development from Plato to modern philosophy. The contributors inquire into what activity is taken to mean in different theories, challenging traditional historical accounts of perception that stress the passivity of percipients in coming to know the external world. Special attention is paid to the psychological and physiological mechanisms of perception, rational and non-rational perception and the role of awareness in the perceptual process. Perception has often been conceived as a process in which the passive aspects - such as the reception of sensory stimuli - were stressed and the active ones overlooked. However, during recent decades research in cognitive science and philosophy of mind has emphasized the activity of the subject in the process of sense perception, often associating this activity to the notions of attention and intentionality. Although it is recognized that there are ancient roots to the view that perception is fundamentally active, the history remains largely unexplored. The book is directed to all those interested in contemporary debates in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive psychology who would like to become acquainted with the historical background of active perception, but for historical reliability the aim is to make no compromises.

This book investigates how bodily information contributes to categorization processes for at least some conceptual classes and thus to the individual mastery of meanings for at least some word classes. The bodily information considered is mainly that provided by the so-called proprioceptive and interoceptive systems introduced by Sherrington. The authors reconsider this in a new Gibsonian fashion calling it more generally “proprioception”, which indicates the complex of all the bodily signals we are aware of and the qualitative experiences these give rise to. The book shows that proprioceptive information understood in this sense is essential for explaining (among others) how we develop broad categories such as animate vs. inanimate, concepts denoting bodily experiences such as hunger or pain as well as emotions and abstract concepts such as friendship and freedom and in accounting for how we master the meanings of the corresponding words in our language.

A groundbreaking popular psychology book that explores the deep connection between our body and our brain. Over decades of study, University of Virginia psychologist Dennis Proffitt has shown that we are each living our own personal version of Gulliver’s Travels, where the size and shape of the things we see are scaled to the size of our bodies, and our ability to interact with them. Stairs look less steep as dieters lose weight, baseballs grow bigger the better players hit, hills look less daunting if you’re standing next to a close friend, and learning happens faster when you can talk with your hands. Written with journalist Drake Baer, Perception marries academic rigor with mainstream accessibility. The research presented and the personalities profiled will show what it means to not only have, but be, your unique human body. The positive ramifications of viewing ourselves from this embodied perspective include greater athletic, academic, and professional achievement, more nourishing relationships, and greater personal well-being. The better we can understand what our bodies are—what they excel at, what they need, what they must avoid—the better we can live our lives.

There is an important division in the human mind between perception and reasoning. We reason from information that we have already, but perception is a means of taking in new information. Susanna Siegel argues that these two aspects of the mind become deeply intertwined when beliefs, fears, desires, or prejudice influence what we perceive.

Perception and intuition are our basic sources of knowledge. They are also capacities we deliberately improve in ways that draw on our knowledge. Elijah Chudnoff explores how this happens, developing an account of the epistemology of expert perception and expert intuition, and a rationalist view of the role of intuition in philosophy.