Perception

I argue that conscious visual experience is essentially a non-representational demonstration of a skill. The explication and defense of this position depends on both phenomenological and empirical considerations. The central phenomenological claim is this: as a matter of human psychology, it is impossible to produce a conscious visual experience of a mind-independent object that is sufficiently like typical cases, without including concomitant proprioceptive sensations of the sort of extra-neural behavior that allows us to there and then competently detect such objects. (...) I then argue that this view, which is a version of enactivism, best explains the temporality of conscious experience—what is often called the specious present. (shrink)

In artificial intelligence, recent research has demonstrated the remarkable potential of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs), which seem to exceed state-of-the-art performance in new domains weekly, especially on the sorts of very difficult perceptual discrimination tasks that skeptics thought would remain beyond the reach of artificial intelligence. However, it has proven difficult to explain why DCNNs perform so well. In philosophy of mind, empiricists have long suggested that complex cognition is based on information derived from sensory experience, often appealing to (...) a faculty of abstraction. Rationalists have frequently complained, however, that empiricists never adequately explained how this faculty of abstraction actually works. In this paper, I tie these two questions together, to the mutual benefit of both disciplines. I argue that the architectural features that distinguish DCNNs from earlier neural networks allow them to implement a form of hierarchical processing that I call “transformational abstraction”. Transformational abstraction iteratively converts sensory-based representations of category exemplars into new formats that are increasingly tolerant to “nuisance variation” in input. Reflecting upon the way that DCNNs leverage a combination of linear and non-linear processing to efficiently accomplish this feat allows us to understand how the brain is capable of bi-directional travel between exemplars and abstractions, addressing longstanding problems in empiricist philosophy of mind. I end by considering the prospects for future research on DCNNs, arguing that rather than simply implementing 80s connectionism with more brute-force computation, transformational abstraction counts as a qualitatively distinct form of processing ripe with philosophical and psychological significance, because it is significantly better suited to depict the generic mechanism responsible for this important kind of psychological processing in the brain. (shrink)

This paper argues that various phenomenological considerations support a non-representational causal account of visual experience. This position claims that visual experiences serve as a non-representational causally efficacious medium for the production of beliefs concerning the external world. The arguments are centered on defending a non-representational causal account’s understanding of the cognitive significance of visual experience. Among other things, such an account can easily explain the inextricable role that background beliefs and conceptual capacities play in perceptually-based external world belief-formation processes, the (...) fact that visual mental states constrain beliefs because of their presentational phenomenology, and the phenomenon known as the transparency of visual experience. (shrink)

Objective: Evidence suggests people experience an oral size illusion and commonly perceive oral size inaccurately; however, the nature of the illusion remains unclear. The objectives of the present study were to confirm the presence of an oral size illusion, determine the magnitude (amount) and direction (underestimation or overestimation) of the illusion, and determine whether immediately prior crossmodal perceptual experiences affected the magnitude and direction. Design: Participants (N = 27) orally assessed 9 sizes of stainless steel spheres (1/16 in to 1/2 (...) in) categorized as small, medium, or big, and matched them with digital and visual reference sets. Each participant completed 20 matching tasks in 3 assessments. For control assessments, 6 oral spheres were matched with reference sets of same-sized spheres. For primer-control assessments, similar to control, 6 matching tasks were preceded by cross-modal experiences of the same-sized sphere. For experimental assessments, 8 matching tasks were preceded by a cross-modal experience of a differently sized sphere. Results: For control assessments, small and medium spheres were consistently underestimated, and big spheres were consistently overestimated. For experimental assessments, magnitude and direction of the oral size illusion varied according to the size of the sphere used in the cross-modal experience. Conclusion: Results seemed to confirm an oral size illusion, but direction of the illusion depended on the size of the object. Immediately prior cross-modal experiences influenced magnitude and direction of the illusion, suggesting that aspects of oral perceptual experience are dependent upon factors outside of oral perceptual anatomy and the properties of the oral stimulus. (shrink)

There are two fundamental models to understanding the phenomenon of natural life. One is thecomputational model, which is based on the symbolic thinking paradigm. The other is the biologicalorganism model. The common difficulty attributed to these paradigms is that their reductive tools allowthe phenomenological aspects of experience to remain hidden behind yes/no responses (behavioraltests), or brain ‘pictures’ (neuroimaging). Hence, one of the problems regards how to overcome meth-odological difficulties towards a non-reductive investigation of conscious experience. It is our aim in (...) thispaper to show how cooperation between Eastern and Western traditions may shed light for a non-reductive study of mind and life. This study focuses on the first-person experience associated withcognitive and mental events. We studied phenomenal data as a crucial fact for the domain of livingbeings, which, we expect, can provide the ground for a subsequent third-person study. The interventionwith Jhana meditation, and its qualitative assessment, provided us with experiential profiles based uponsubjects' evaluations of their own conscious experiences. The overall results should move towards anintegrated or global perspective on mind where neither experience nor external mechanisms have thefinal word. (shrink)

Philosophers and psychologists often assume that mirror reflections are optical illusions. According to many authors, what we see in a mirror appears to be behind it. I discuss two strategies to resist this piece of dogma. As I will show, the conviction that mirror reflections are illusions is rooted in a confused conception of the relations between location, direction, and visibility. This conception is unacceptable to those who take seriously the way in which mirrors contribute to our experience of the (...) world. My argument may be read as an advertisement of the neglected field of philosophical catoptrics, the philosophical study of the optical properties of mirrors. It enables us to recast familiar issues in the philosophy of perception. (shrink)

With neurons emergence, life alters itself in a remarkable way. This embodied neurons become carriers of signals, and processing devices: it begins an inexorable progression of functional complexity, from increasingly drawn behaviors to the mind and eventually to consciousness [Damasio, 2010]. In which moment has awareness arisen in the history of life? The emergence of human consciousness is associated with evolutionary developments in brain, behavior and mind, which ultimately lead to the creation of culture, a radical novelty in natural history. (...) It is in this context of biological evolution of conscious brains that we raise the question: how conscious brains connect with each other? In order to answer it, I will explore how brain states and conscious states each participate in dynamic interactive processes involving the whole organism. I will argue that a possible way to overcome the hard problem of consciousness might be based on the notion of embodiment as a process of embedding the mental in the living organism relating dynamically with the environment through the sensorymotor experience. In order to do so, I will provide an assembly between an anthropologic perspective of consciousness with contemporary Philosophy of Mind, Interaction Theory [Gallagher 2001, 2008; Zahavi 2001, 2008; Fuchs and De Jaegher 2009]. (shrink)

It will be obvious to anyone with a slight knowledge of twentieth-century analytic philosophy that one of the central themes of this kind of philosophy is the nature of perception: the awareness of the world through the five senses of sight, touch, smell, taste, and hearing. Yet it can seem puzzling, from our twenty-first-century perspective, why there is a distinctively philosophical problem of perception at all. For when philosophers ask ‘what is the nature of perception?’, the question can be confused (...) with other, purely empirical, questions. For example: how do our sense-organs actually work? What are the mechanisms of smell and taste? How do vision and touch actually provide us with information about the world around us? There is much general agreement, in its broad outlines, about how to answer such questions empirically; but it is not clear what role, if any, philosophy has to play in answering these empirical questions. So if these were the only questions about the nature of perception, then it would not be clear exactly what the philosophy of perception is supposed to be about. (shrink)

Many philosophers and psychologists have sought to explain experiences of auditory verbal hallucinations and “inserted thoughts” in schizophrenia in terms of a failure on the part of patients to appropriately monitor their own inner speech. These self-monitoring accounts have recently been challenged by some who argue that AVHs are better explained in terms of the spontaneous activation of auditory-verbal representations. This paper defends two kinds of self-monitoring approach against the spontaneous activation account. The defense requires first making some important clarifications (...) concerning what is at issue in the dispute between the two forms of theory. A popular but problematic self-monitoring theory is then contrasted with two more plausible conceptions of what the relevant self-monitoring deficits involve. The first appeals to deficits in the neural mechanisms that normally filter or attenuate sensory signals that are the result of one’s own actions. The second, less familiar, form of self-monitoring approach draws an important analogy between Wernicke’s aphasia and AVHs in schizophrenia. This style of self-monitoring theory pursues possible connections among AVHs, inserted thoughts, and the disorganized speech characteristic formal thought disorder. (shrink)

Two meta-analyses were conducted to examine two potential sources of spatial orientation biases in human profile drawings by brain-intact individuals. The first examined profile facing direction as function of hand used to draw. The second examined profile facing direction in relation to directional scanning biases related to reading/writing habits. Results of the first meta-analysis, based on 27 study samples with 4171 participants, showed that leftward facing of profiles (from the viewer's perspective) was significantly associated with using the right hand to (...) draw. The reading/writing direction meta-analysis, based on 10 study samples with 1552 participants, suggested a modest relationship between leftward profile facing and primary use of a left-to-right reading/writing direction. These findings suggest that biomechanical and cultural factors jointly influence hand movement preferences and in turn the direction of facing of human profile drawings. -/- . (shrink)

This paper considers the relevance of the theory of the cogitative power in Aquinas, as highlighted by Cornelio Fabro during his early research in the fourth decade of the past century, in contemporary neuropsychological studies, and particularly as a specific way of overcoming a dualistic approach in the psychology of perception. The thesis is coherent with an anthropological view based on the substantial unity between soul and body. As a consequence, the capacities of the cogitative faculty (estimative in animals) involve (...) a special account of perception, irreducible to pure thought and to sensations as well, an account that is present in the psychological view of M. Merleau-Ponty and J. J. Gibson. (shrink)

Putting forward an original analysis of perceiving as a cognitive attitude, as it contrasts with judging, believing and knowing, the author approaches several issues in the philosophy of perception, such as differences between presentation and representation, the natures of concepts and categorization, the justification of perceptual beliefs and their role in the justification of knowledge. His approach is influenced by phenomenology and by psychology and neuroscience of vision.

We recently conducted an experiment to show that a lot of the empirically measured disagreement cited to support the premise that there is mass perceptual disagreement about the colors, a premise often cited by philosophers, is due to conceptual factors. Kuehni and Hardin object to how we measured disagreement and to various aspects of our experimental design. In this reply, we defend our study.

I am going to argue for a robust realism about magnitudes, as irreducible elements in our ontology. This realistic attitude, I will argue, gives a better metaphysics than the alternatives. It suggests some new options in the philosophy of science. It also provides the materials for a better account of the mind’s relation to the world, in particular its perceptual relations.

I argue for three main claims about Leibniz. (1) He views representation as a kind of structural correspondence between the representing thing and its target. (2) The primary sense in which he considers a perception or representation distinct, as opposed to confused, concerns the degree to which its structure is explicit or consciously accessible. (3) This is also the sense in which he takes concepts or ideas to be distinct.

Much mainstream analytic epistemology is built around a sceptical treatment of modality which descends from Hume. The roots of this scepticism are argued to lie in Hume’s (nominalist) theory of perception, which is excavated, studied and compared with the very different (realist) theory of perception developed by Peirce. It is argued that Peirce’s theory not only enables a considerably more nuanced and effective epistemology, it also (unlike Hume’s theory) does justice to what happens when we appreciate a proof in mathematics.

This paper defends the view that knowledge about one's own intentions can be gained in part through perception, although not through introspection. The various kinds of misperception of one's intentions are discussed. The latter distinction is applied to the analysis of schizophrenic patients' delusion of control.

This paper comments on an article by V.S. Ramachandran and William Hirstein (JCS,1999) in which they purport to be identifying the neurological principles of beauty. I draw attention to the way the problem of beauty is construed in the philosophical literature by Mary Mothersill (1984) and Immanuel Kant (Critique of Judgment). I argue that Ramachandran and Hirsteins' principles do not address the problem of beauty because they do not differentiate between the experience of beauty and other closely related phenomena. I (...) then show how one might address the problem of beauty within the framework that they have adopted. (shrink)

The essay compares Peirce's pragmatist approach to the problem of perceptual experience as a fallible foundation of knowledge to a sophisticated empiricist take on the issue. The comparison suggests that, while empiricism can accommodate the idea of perception as fallible, theoretically laden, and containing conjectural elements, the cardinal difference between pragmatism and empiricism consists in the pragmatist insistence on the intrinsic intelligibility of experience, which also serves as the ultimate source of all forms of intelligibility; whereas empiricism retains a penchant (...) for fitting experiences into abstract conceptual schemes. (shrink)

On various occasions, Kendall Walton has put forward a theory of depiction based on the notion of make-believe: P depicts something only if in virtue of having a perception of P, one makes believe that that very experience is the perception of P’s subject. As a consequence, if an individual is not able to make believe, whatever they face in their perception does not count as a depiction for her. Yet there are many evidences from developmental psychology that show that (...) very little children still unable to make believe can grasp a picture’s figurative value. As a result, Walton’s theory of depiction seems to be inadequate from an empirical point of view. Moreover, it also appears to be inadequate from a conceptual point of view. Walton’s ambition is to account in pretence-theoretical terms of what the twofold experience of seeing-in, which Wollheim took to be a necessary condition of depiction, amounts to. Yet relying on make-believe, hence on imagination, does not account for the genuinely perceptual character of the “seeing-in” experience. No treatment of imagination in terms of visualization seems to achieve such a purpose. (shrink)

This is an excerpt from a report on the Temporal Experience Workshop at the University of Toronto in May of 2013. This portion of the report explores the question: Do we have one central clock for time, or different clocks for each sense modality?

This is an excerpt from a report on the Temporal Experience Workshop at the University of Toronto in May of 2013. This portion of the report explores the question: What sorts of mechanisms underlie the perceived duration of external events?

This is an excerpt from a report on the Temporal Experience Workshop at the University of Toronto in May of 2013. This portion of the report explores the question: What is the relationship between time as represented in experience, the timing of the experiential act, and the timing of the neural realizer of the experience?

This is an excerpt from a report on the Temporal Experience Workshop at the University of Toronto in May of 2013. This portion of the report explores the question: What can we learn about the nature of time from the nature of ordinary experience?

This report highlights and explores four questions that arose from the workshop on temporal experience at the University of Toronto, May 20th and 21st, 2013.

This is an excerpt from a report on the Sensory Substitution and Augmentation Conference at the British Academy in March of 2013. This portion of the report explores the question: Can normal non-sensory feelings be generated through sensory substitution?

Mark Eli Kalderon presents an original study of perception, taking as its starting point a puzzle in Empedocles' theory of vision: if perception is a mode of material assimilation, how can we perceive colors at a distance? Kalderon argues that the theory of perception offered by Aristotle in answer to the puzzle is both attractive and defensible.

What is the biological function of perception? I hold perception, especially visual perception in humans, has the biological function of accurately representing the environment. Tyler Burge argues this cannot be so in Origins of Objectivity (Oxford, 2010), for accuracy is a semantical relationship and not, as such, a practical matter. Burge also provides a supporting example. I rebut the argument and the example. Accuracy is sometimes also a practical matter if accuracy partly explains how perception contributes to survival and reproduction.

This dissertation explores several illuminating points of intersection between the philosophy of perception and the philosophy of vagueness. Among other things, I argue: (i) that it is entirely unhelpful to theorize about perception or consciousness using Nagelian "what it's like" talk; (ii) that a popular recent account of perceptual phenomenology (representationalism) conflicts with our best theory of vagueness (supervaluationism); (iii) that there are no vague properties, for Evans-esque reasons; (iv) that it is impossible to insert "determinacy" operators into representationalism in (...) a truth-preserving manner; and (v) that strong versions of dualism are unable to accommodate the possibility of borderline consciousness. (shrink)

We briefly present Jocelyn Benoist’s (2011) Wittgensteinian contextualist approach to perception as we understand it and make some comments.

This is an excerpt from a report that highlights and explores five questions which arose from the workshop on perceptual learning and perceptual recognition at the University of Toronto, Mississauga on May 10th and 11th, 2012. This excerpt explores the question: How can philosophers and psychologists most fruitfully collaborate?

This is an excerpt from a report that highlights and explores five questions which arose from the workshop on perceptual learning and perceptual recognition at the University of Toronto, Mississauga on May 10th and 11th, 2012. This excerpt explores the question: What counts as cognitive penetration?

This is an excerpt from a report that highlights and explores five questions which arose from the workshop on perceptual learning and perceptual recognition at the University of Toronto, Mississauga on May 10th and 11th, 2012. This excerpt explores the question: Does our representation of time provide and amodal framework for multi-sensory integration?

This is an excerpt from a report that highlights and explores five questions which arose from the workshop on perceptual learning and perceptual recognition at the University of Toronto, Mississauga on May 10th and 11th, 2012. This excerpt explores the question: What are the origins of multimodal associations?

This is an excerpt from a report that highlights and explores five questions which arose from the workshop on perceptual learning and perceptual recognition at the University of Toronto, Mississauga on May 10th and 11th, 2012. This excerpt explores the question: How should we demarcate perceptual learning from perceptual development?

This report highlights and explores five questions which arose from the workshop on perceptual learning and perceptual recognition at the University of Toronto, Mississauga on May 10th and 11th, 2012: 1. How should we demarcate perceptual learning from perceptual development? 2. What are the origins of multimodal associations? 3. Does our representation of time provide an amodal framework for multi-sensory integration? 4. What counts as cognitive penetration? 5. How can philosophers and psychologists most fruitfully collaborate?

This is an excerpt of a report that highlights and explores five questions that arose from the Network for Sensory Research workshop on perceptual learning and perceptual recognition at the University of York in March, 2012. This portion of the report explores the question: How does perceptual learning alter the contents of perception?

Perception, Action, and Consciousness: Sensorimotor Dynamics and Two Visual Systems is a state-of-the-art collection whose main goal is to explore, from an interdisciplinary perspective, the relationship between action and perception. A second goal of the volume is to investigate how perception and action interact specifically in the production of phenomenal awareness. In presenting and contrasting the major perspectives on the field, this volume marks a good sign of the progress being made on the nature of phenomenally conscious visual experience. By (...) combining theoretical and empirical approaches it also contributes to the debate in key domains of the cognitive sciences .The book contains a useful editorial introduction written by the Editors and six sections further divided into fifteen chapters. In the first part of this review I briefly summarize the content of each section. Having offered an outline of the volume, I then turn my attention to the main theme of the collection, which is the dichotomy between action-oriented theories of perception and the two visual systems hypothesis and look at the dialectic underlying this debate. (shrink)

This report highlights and explores five questions which arose from The Unity of Consciousness and Sensory Integration conference at Brown University in November of 2011: 1. What is the relationship between the unity of consciousness and sensory integration? 2. Are some of the basic units of consciousness multimodal? 3. How should we model the unity of consciousness? 4. Is the mechanism of sensory integration spatio-temporal? 5. How Should We Study Experience, Given Unity Relations?

This paper addresses a number of closely related questions concerning Kant's model of intentionality, and his conceptions of unity and of magnitude [Gröβe]. These questions are important because they shed light on three issues which are central to the Critical system, and which connect directly to the recent analytic literature on perception: the issues are conceptualism, the status of the imagination, and perceptual atomism. In Section 1, I provide a sketch of the exegetical and philosophical problems raised by Kant's views (...) on these issues. I then develop, in Section 2, a detailed analysis of Kant's theory of perception as elaborated in both the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Judgment; I show how this analysis provides a preliminary framework for resolving the difficulties raised in Section 1. In Section 3, I extend my analysis of Kant's position by considering a specific test case: the Axioms of Intuition. I contend that one way to make sense of Kant's argument is by juxtaposing it with Russell's response to Bradley's regress; I focus in particular on the concept of ‘unity’. Finally, I offer, in Section 4, a philosophical assessment of the position attributed to Kant in Sections 2 and 3. I argue that, while Kant's account has significant strengths, a number of key areas remain underdeveloped; I suggest that the phenomenological tradition may be read as attempting to fill precisely those gaps. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophical debates about causation are dominated by two approaches, which are often referred to as difference-making and causal process approaches to causation, respectively. I provide a characterization of the dialectic between these two approaches, on which that dialectic turns crucially on the question as to whether our common sense concept of causation involves a commitment to locality – i.e., to the claim that causal relations are always subject to spatial constraints. I then argue that we can extract from existing (...) work on perceptual judgement (specifically work that invokes the notion of a simple theory of perception) materials for an argument in favour of a positive answer to that question, and that this work can also help to bring out a distinctive kind of role that a commitment to locality plays in our reasoning about causal relationships. (shrink)

Ein Homunkulus im philosophischen Sprachgebrauch ist eine postulierte menschenähnliche Instanz, die ausdrücklich oder unausdrücklich zur Erklärung der Arbeitsweise des menschlichen Geistes herangezogen wird. Als Homunkulus-Fehlschluß wird die Praxis bezeichnet, Prädikate, die auf kognitive oder perzeptive Leistungen einer ganzen Person zutreffen, auch auf Teile von Personen oder auf subpersonale Vorgänge anzuwenden, was typischerweise zu einem Regreß führt. Der vorliegende Beitrag erörtert den Homunkulus-Fehlschluß zunächst in argumentationstheoretischer Hinsicht und stellt dabei ein Diagnoseschema auf. Dann werden zwei Anwendungsfelder erörtert: Instanzenmodelle der Psyche (Platon, (...) Freud) sind ihrer Natur nach homunkulusgefährdet, denn es ist aufgrund der holistischen Zuschreibungsbedingungen mentaler Fähigkeiten schwer plausibel zu machen, wie eine innerpsychische Instanz den ihr zugedachten Beitrag leisten soll, ohne über eine eigene Psyche zu verfügen. Der zweite Anwendungsfall ist das Problem des invertierten Netzhautbildes in der Philosophie der Wahrnehmung, das wissenschafts- und philosophiegeschichtlich eingebettet und unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Descartes diskutiert wird. Schließlich werden offensive Rechtfertigungen homunkularer Redeweisen erörtert und größtenteils zurückgewiesen. -- The homunculus fallacy is committed when someone tries to explain how the human mind works by postulating a little man within the mind or the brain. Homunculi are rarely posited with one’s eyes open. Rather, the fallacy occurs when predicates that properly apply to cognitive or perceptual achievements of persons get applied to subpersonal processes or to parts of persons (e.g., brains). The paper suggests a pattern for diagnosing homunculus fallacies. After taking a look at Freud’s and Platon’s homuncular metapsychologies, a case study is discussed in detail: the problem of the inverted retinal image which plagued the philosophy of perception since Kepler formulated it in 1604. It is argued that the irradiation patterns on the retina are not images, on pain of committing the homunculus fallacy. The paper closes with the repudiation of some frank apologies of homuncular explanations. (shrink)

Abstract: I defend the intuition that the phenomenology of our experience is right in attributing the colors we see to objects; but although colors are properties of objects, they are constitutively dependent on the perceiver’s experiences. I offer a metaphysical account for this primitivist intuition, in response to David Chalmers’ arguments against it, drawing inspiration from Aristotle’s theory of causation.

The essay is critically examines the conceptual problems with the influential modularity model of mind. We shall see that one of the essential characters of modules, namely informational encapsulation, is not only inessential, it ties a knot at a crucial place blocking the solution to the problem of understanding the formation of concepts from percepts (nodes of procedural knowledge). Subsequently I propose that concept formation takes place by modulation of modules leading to cross-representations, which were otherwise prevented by encapsulation. It (...) must be noted that the argument is not against modular architecture, but a variety of an architecture that prevents interaction among modules. This is followed by a brief argument demonstrating that module without modularization, i.e. without developmental history, is impossible. Finally the emerging picture of cognitive development is drawn in the form of the layers in the fabric of mind, with a brief statement of the possible implications. (shrink)

Do we perceptually experience moral properties like rightness and wrongness? For example, as in Gilbert Harman’s classic case, when we see a group of young hoodlums pour gasoline on a cat and ignite it, can we, in the same robust sense, see the action’s wrongness?. Many philosophers have recently discussed this question, argued for a positive answer and/or discussed its epistemological implications. This paper presents a new case for a negative answer by, first, getting much clearer on how such experience (...) could be possible at all; second, responding the only argument for a positive answer; and, finally, arguing that postulation of such experience is explanatorily redundant. (shrink)

Väitetään, että nykypäivän populismi vetoaa tosiasioiden sijasta ”kokemukseen”. Mutta mitä on kokemus? Se ei ole vain ennakkoluuloihin nojautuvaa mutua eikä myöskään pelkkää empiirisen datan rekisteröintiä mutta liittyy molempiin. Artikkelin luoma tiivis katsaus kokemuksen käsitehistorian pääpiirteisiin osoittaa, että länsimaisen filosofian perinteessä kokemus on ymmärretty ohittamattomana vaiheena tiedon hankkimisessa ja koettelemisessa. Toisaalta kokemukseen on liitetty tiettyjä tiedollisia heikkouksia – kontingenssi, tilannesidonnaisuus ja ennakoimattomuus – jotka tieteellinen metodi on eri tavoin pyrkinyt voittamaan. Artikkeli esittää, että 1900-luvun filosofinen hermeneutiikka irrottautuu tästä perinteisestä kokemuksen välineellistämisestä (...) ja alistamisesta korkeammille päämäärille ja keskittyy uudella ja hedelmällisellä tavalla juuri mainittuihin kokemuksen ”vaaroihin”. Hermeneuttisesti ymmärretty kokemus muodostuu äärellisen ihmisen ainutkertaisista kohtaamisista todellisuuden muuttuvan ja ehtymättömän mielekkyyden kanssa – omalle ymmärrykselle vieraan toiseuden ja samalla oman ymmärryksen äärellisyyden ja inhimillisen äärellisyyden kohtaamisesta. (shrink)