Can perception itself, grounded in vision science, explain how the mind represents the world and still gets things wrong?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Tyler Burge is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at UCLA. His work has spread a wide range of topics, especially mind, language, and epistemology.
Check out his book, "Perception: First Form of Mind"!
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0198871015/
2. Book Summary
In Perception: First Form of Mind, Tyler Burge argues that to understand perception properly we need a systematic account of perceptual representation: what its representational contents are, how they present the world, and how those contents figure in explanation. He stresses that (as with thought) there can be different “modes of presentation” even when the perceived object and property are the same—for example, a rectangular surface perceived straight-on versus at an angle yields different perceptual contents, because the perceptual perspective and proximal stimulation differ. These differences matter not just for phenomenology but for explaining action and epistemic success or failure, since perceptual psychology and action-explanations advert to how the world is presented to the subject. The book’s core framework treats perception as built from “perceptual attributives”: repeatable representational abilities to characterize particulars as instantiating properties and relations.
Burge’s positive picture is that perceptual contents are fundamentally iconic and highly structured: an array-like, matrix format that represents particulars and their properties/relations in a perspective-dependent way, and any neat “linear” specification of perceptual content is an abstraction from this richer iconic format. The iconic format helps explain how perception can be massively complex yet computationally manageable, and why perceptual representation is not well-modeled as merely a string of symbols. A central explanatory target is perceptual psychology’s focus on how perceivers reliably represent the same repeatable environmental types across varying stimulus conditions; Burge treats perceptual attributives as precisely these repeatable competencies, and he emphasizes that studying how such attributives are formed is “the central occupation” of perceptual psychology. He also highlights how perceptual contents both encode a specific vantage point and nevertheless track stable attributes, with law-like linkages among different perspective-bound “presentations” of the same attribute (a hallmark phenomenon behind perceptual constancies).
The later parts broaden the view into an “architecture” story: perception is not an isolated module but anchors a wider family of perceptual-level capacities—attention, conation, affect, memory, learning, anticipation, and imagining—each with a perceptual-level species that uses only perceptual attributives and operations not more advanced than those in perception-formation. Burge uses contemporary vision science to sketch how the visual and visuo-motor systems operate as large, integrated complexes unified by their function, contents, and computational processing, rather than by being easily characterized as “early vision” plus something categorically different. Along the way he pushes back on much of the philosophical debate about “cognitive penetration” and modularity (associated with Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn), arguing that both sides have often relied on dated science and muddled notions of “cognition,” and he develops a more careful way of talking about whether perceptual-level computations need to invoke supra-perceptual representation.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
01:10 - Audience
04:29 - Perception: First Form of Mind
16:45 - Empirical work
26:37 - Consciousness and representation
32:21 - Language of thought
39:10 - Information-registration
46:47 - Which things are representational?
49:35 - Elimination and reduction
57:49 - David Papineau
1:00:03 - Perceptual states without consciousness
1:01:03 - Physicalism
1:05:20 - Vagueness
1:09:40 - Causation
1:14:36 - Lawlike correlations
1:16:26 - Tropes
1:22:42 - Perceptual constancy
1:29:36 - Value of philosophy
1:35:50 - Conclusion
