Classifying is a fundamental operation in the acquisition of knowledge. Taxonomic theory can help students of cognition, evolutionary psychology, ethology, anatomy, and sociobiology to avoid serious mistakes, both practical and theoretical. More positively, it helps in generating hypotheses useful to a wide range of disciplines. Composite wholes, such as species and societies, are “individuals” in the logical sense, and should not be treated as if they were classes. A group of analogous features is a natural kind, but a group of (...) homologous features is not. Imposing hypotheses justified only on the basis of nominalist, realist, phenomenalist, or conceptualist metaphysics upon the neurophysiology of organisms or upon the causes of behavior exemplifies the “psychologist's fallacy” of William James. Levels should be distinguished from their members and from classes of levels, and the ontological status of entities ranked at levels should be made clear. It is important not to confuse such categories as substance and process with one another. Several genetical terms, such as “gene” and chromosome,” are even more equivocal than has been realized. Discussions about units of selection, behavior, and thinking suffer from the ambiguity of a “unit of” an entity. An important source of misunderstanding about natural selection is the habit of treating it as an “agent”: in an important sense, natural selection does not “act” at all. (shrink)

This article is about a sidebar in James Gibson's last book, The ecological approach to visual perception. In this sidebar, Gibson, the founder of the ecological perspective of perception and action, argued that to perceive an affordance is not to classify an object. Although this sidebar has received scant attention, it is of great significance both historically and for recent discussions about specificity, direct perception, and the functions of the dorsal and ventral streams. It is argued that Gibson's acknowledgment of (...) Wittgenstein's ideas of classification suggests a limited scope of his theory of direct perception?it cannot account for the classification of objects. The implications for both the specification debate and theorizing about the brain's dorsal and ventral pathways are explored. Based on a recent ecological conception of information and direct perception, we ultimately argue that both affordance perception and classification are direct. (shrink)

This article considers Helmholtz’s relation to philosophy, including Fichte’s philosophy. Recent interpreters find Fichtean influence on Helmholtz, especially concerning the role of voluntary movement in distinguishing subject from object, or “I” from “not-I.” After examining Helmholtz’s statements about Fichte, the article describes Fichte’s ego-doctrine and asks whether Helmholtz could accept it into his sensory psychology. He could not accept Fichte’s core position, that an intrinsically active I intellectually intuits its own activity and posits the not-I as limiting and determining that (...) activity, because that account requires cognitive abilities that conflict with Helmholtz’s claim that the development of spatial perception relies primarily on associative memory and involves no direct awareness of the ego’s activity as such. Helmholtz would have known various accounts of the distinction between subject and object, or self and world, from sensory physiology, including associative accounts invoking voluntary motor movements and accounts describing checks on the perceiver’s activity. Some of the accounts cite Fichte on the I and not-I, but most do not, and none adopt Fichte’s Idealism. Finally, the article examines Helmholtz’s relation to metaphysics, finding that in all periods he rejected Fichtean Idealism and that the modest metaphysics of his mature period is a version of structural realism. (shrink)

A conscious being is characterized by its ability to cope with the environment--to perceive it, sometimes change it, and perhaps reflect on it. Surprisingly, most studies of the mind's place in nature show little interest in such interaction. It is often implicitly assumed that the main questions about consciousness just concern the status of various entities, levels, etc., within the individual. The intertwined notions of " experience" and " consciousness" are considered. The predominant use of these notions in cognitive science (...) can be traced back to Cartesianism. What is important is the survival of the central methodological commitments despite seemingly profound changes of metaphysical outlook. The author argues that cognitive scientists typically assimilate perception to sensation, thereby ignoring ways in which descriptions of perception and descriptions of the environment are logically intertwined; that this involves methodological solipsism and an unacknowledged sceptical position that was originally part of Descartes' Dream argument; and that it is impossible to identify the object supposedly to be studied by a science of the phenomenal consciousness. A somewhat parallel argument is identified in Kant's critique of rationalist psychology. (shrink)