Colloquium: Tyler Burge (UCLA)

Department: Philosophy

Date and Time: May 7, 2021 | 3:00 PM-5:00 PM

Event Location: Zoom

Event Details


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Talk based on paper: "Four Inheritances from Classical Empiricism Re Perception" 

I discuss four inheritances from Classical Empiricism.  All these inheritances bear on the nature and psychological functions of perception, not its role in obtaining knowledge.  The four inheritances are: the method of introspection in understanding perception; the view that perceptual states are image-like; the idea that in perception the mind is presented only with perspective-dependent entities; and the idea that perception and intellection are to be distinguished on a scale that runs from the concrete to the abstract, where sense perception is concrete, and intellection is abstract.   I devote unequal time to these themes.  I discuss the first three rather cursorily and summarily.  I do so not because they are less important, but because they have received more attention.  I discuss the fourth–the association of perception with concretion and intellection with abstraction –in somewhat more detail.  I evaluate these inheritances against some of what is known from computational perceptual psychology, especially vision science.