12th Annual University of Kentucky Philosophy Graduate Student Conference

 

Perception and Human Experience

         

   

Keynote Speaker

 Susanna Siegel, Harvard University

"Cognitive Penetrability and Perceptual Justification"

4:30 PM  Young Library Auditorium

 



Schedule of Student Presentations

 

11:00 am     Erin Vallicelli                        University of Kentucky, KY

Considering the Existentially Quantified View of Perception for Multiple Perceptual Modalities   

Young Library Auditorium

In this paper, I consider whether or not the existentially quantified view of perceptual experience put forth by Colin McGinn can account for the perceptual experience of multiple modalities. I argue that when considering the perceptual experience of both vision and touch, it fails. I make this argument by first laying out McGinn’s view, I continue to show that this conception of vision fails to adequately account for the phenomenological experience of both visual and tactile perception. As a result, McGinn’s view also cannot account for the multiple modalities. I do not reject these views outright, but point to ways they would need to be modified to account for the perceptual experience of multiple modalities. After considering an objection to the argument put forth, I further conclude that if perceptual theories are supposed to accurately account for our perceptual experiences, then they need to consider the experience of perceiving with multiple modalities.  

 

 

12:oo PM     Julia Krause                     Johns Hopkins University, MD

 An Animal Argument for the Non-Conceptual Content of Human Perception

Young Library Auditorium

 In The Varieties of Reference (VOR), Gareth Evans famously introduced a level of non-conceptual (“informational”) content of perception. The main challenge for contemporary non-conceptualism is to maintain that non-conceptual states represent the world, i.e. have correctness conditions, while describing these states in a way that clearly distinguishes them from conceptual states. Typical arguments for non-conceptual content do not pass this test—they do not supply an interesting notion of the non-conceptual. Evans' interest in a primitive stage of human cognitive development points to a more promising argument, which would proceed from the premise that we share non-conceptual perceptual abilities with certain animals. However, such a strategy would be at odds with another central aspect of Evans' position: he does not present a unitary account of the non-conceptual for both conceptual and non-conceptual creatures. This problem becomes clear in his claims that egocentric space depends on objective space, and that non-conceptual content owes its representationality to being input to a conceptual system.

 

 

3:00 PM       Mark Green                       Stony Brook University, NY

What does One Second Sound Like?: how durations become objects of perception   

Young Library Auditorium

Though the experience of perceiving durations saturates human life, the discipline of philosophy still struggles to account for how such perceptions are possible and what specific modes of temporal data exist.  This paper demonstrates that the inherited schema of form/content, where time lies as an empty form to be ‘filled’ by properly sensory content, fails to account for our performance of such elementary epistemological claims as “that clicking sound in my car is getting faster.”  Following the failure of the form/content schema to account for direct awareness of durational values themselves, we take up the possibility that durations are perceived in the same manner as quantities.  Some problems with this view are discussed before looking at the final, most uncomfortable yet convincing option: durations are perceived qualitatively.  We end with looking at the implications that follow from the possibility of something roughly analogous to sense-data, or qualia, of durations themselves.

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

   

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