Drawing on the findings of neuroscience, this text proposes and defends the hypothesis that the various modalities of sensation share a generic form that the author, Austen Clark, calls feature-placing.

A central question, if not the central question, of philosophy of perception is whether sensory states have a nature similar to thoughts about the world, whether they are essentially representational. According to the content view, at least some of our sensory states are, at their core, representations with contents that are either accurate or inaccurate. Tyler Burge’s Origins of Objectivity is the most sustained and sophisticated defense of the content view to date. His defense of the view is problematic in (...) several ways. The most significant problem is that his approach does not sit well with mainstream perceptual psychology. (shrink)

Fechner's conception of psychophysics included both “outer psychophysics” the relation between stimulus intensity and the response reflecting sensation strength, and “inner psychophysics” the relation between neurelectric responses and sensation strength. In his own time outer psychophysics focussed on the form of the psychophysical law, with Fechner espousing a logarithmic law, Delboeuf a variant of the logarithmic law incorporating a resting level of neural activity, and Plateau a power law. One of the issues on which the dispute was focussed concerned the (...) appearance of contrasts if the overall illumination was increased or decreased; another issue was the question of whether a sensation of a “just noticeable difference” established for one value of a sensory dimension appeared the same for a value elsewhere on the dimension. The development of “inner psychophysics” led through the works of Delboeuf, Solomons, Jastrow, and Thurstone to modern signal detection theory. A third line of research, devoted to the question of what was meant by the “measurement” of sensation strength, stemmed from the criticism of Fechner's work by von Kries (1882) and others. Although a valid body of science could be built up without the intervening variable called “sensation strength,” such a science might be a cumbersome representation of reality. When an optical contrast is set up, and its overall illumination is increased or decreased, subjective contrasts involving medium levels of lightness vary little as illumination varies (as a power law based on sensation ratios or a logarithmic law based on sensation differences predict), but subjective contrasts involving extreme levels of lightness might be subject to the effects of other variables. (shrink)

We present select examples of how visual phenomena can serve as tools to uncoverbrain mechanisms. Specifically, receptive field organization is proposed as a Gestalt-like neural mechanism of perceptual organization. Appropriate phenomena, such as brightness and orientation contrast, subjective contours, filling-in, and aperture-viewed motion, allow for a quantitative comparison between receptive fields and their psychophysical counterparts, perceptive fields. Phenomenology might thus be extended from the study of perceptual qualities to their transphenomenal substrates, including memory functions. In conclusion, classic issues of Gestalt (...) psychology can now be related to modern. (shrink)

In Origins of Objectivity Burge advances a theory of perception according to which perceptions are, themselves, objective representations. The possession of veridicality conditions by perceptual states—roughly, non-propositional analogues of truth-conditions—is central to Burge’s account of how perceptual states differ, empirically and metaphysically, from sensory states. Despite an impressive examination of the relevant empirical literatures, I argue here that Burge has not succeeded in securing a distinction between perception and “mere” sensation.

It is a common assumption among philosophers of perception that phenomenal colors are exhaustively characterized by the three phenomenal dimensions of the color solid: hue, saturation and lightness. The hue of a color is its redness, blueness or yellowness, etc. The saturation of a color refers to the strength of its hue in relation to gray. The lightness of a color determines its relation to black and white. In this paper, I argue that the phenomenology of shadows forces us to (...) consider illumination as an additional dimension of phenomenal colors. For this purpose, I will first introduce two different interpretations of shadow-experiences, which Chalmers has called the simple and the complex interpretations, and show that they both fail to account for important phenomenal facts about shadow-experiences. I will then introduce my own alternative interpretation based on the idea that illumination is a dimension of phenomenal colors and explain how it can account for these facts. (shrink)

The dominant view among philosophers of perception is that color experiences, like color judgments, are essentially representational: as part of their very nature color experiences possess representational contents which are either accurate or inaccurate. My starting point in assessing this view is Sydney Shoemaker’s familiar account of color perception. After providing a sympathetic reconstruction of his account, I show how plausible assumptions at the heart of Shoemaker’s theory make trouble for his claim that color experiences represent the colors of things. (...) I consider various ways of trying to avoid the objection, and find all of the responses wanting. My conclusion is that we have reason to be skeptical of the orthodox view that color experiences are constitutively representational. (shrink)

Despite a wealth of data we still have no clear idea what color experiences represent. In fact, color experiences vary with so many factors that it has been claimed that they do not represent anything at all. The primary challenge for any representational account of color experience is to accommodate the various psychophysical results that demonstrate that color appearance depends not only on the spectral nature of the target but also on the spectral, spatial and figural nature of the surround. (...) A number of theorists have proposed that this dependence is an aspect of the visual system's constancy mechanism. However this does not in and of itself tell us what, if anything, is represented in color experience. Ultimately the answer to this question will be informed by one's theory of representational content. I will argue that adopting a molecular scheme of representation enables the development of an account of the represented object of color experience that can do justice to the psychophysical data. (shrink)