"Its publication should be a major event for cognitive linguistics and should pose a major challenge for cognitive science. In addition, it should have repercussions in a variety of disciplines, ranging from anthropology and psychology to epistemology and the philosophy of science.... Lakoff asks: What do categories of language and thought reveal about the human mind? Offering both general theory and minute details, Lakoff shows that categories reveal a great deal."—David E. Leary, American Scientist.

A scholarly edition of a work by David Hume. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

The theory of visual perception that Irvin Rock develops and supports in this book with numerous original experiments, views perception as the outcome of a process of unconscious inference, problem solving, and the building of structural descriptions of the external world.

THE LOGIC OF SEMANTIC DIFFERENTIATION Apart from the studies to be reported here, there have been few, if any, systematic attempts to subject meaning to..

The heart of this book is the reciprocal relationship between philosophical theories of mind and empirical studies of animal cognition.

The primary difference between direct and inferential theories of perception concerns the location of perceptual content, the meaning of our perceptions. In inferential theories of perception, these meanings arise inside animals, based upon their interactions with the physical environment. Light, for example, bumps into receptors causing a sensation. The animal (or its brain) performs inferences on the sensation, yielding a meaningful perception. In direct theories of perception, on the other hand, meaning is in the environment, and perception does not depend (...) upon meaning- conferring inferences. Instead the animal simply gathers information from a meaning- laden environment. But if the environment contains meanings, then it cannot be merely physical. This places a heavy theoretical burden on direct theories of perception, a burden so severe that it may outweigh all the advantages to conceiving perception as. (shrink)

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Recent research has suggested that not all grapheme-colour synaesthetes are alike. One suggestion is that they can be divided, phenomenologically, in terms of whether the colours are experienced in external or internal space. Another suggestion is that they can be divided according to whether it is the perceptual or conceptual attributes of a stimulus that is critical. This study compares the behavioural performance of 7 projector and 7 associator synaesthetes. We demonstrate that this distinction does not map on to behavioural (...) traits expected from the higher–lower distinction. We replicate previous research showing that projectors are faster at naming their synaesthetic colours than veridical colours, and that associators show the reverse profile. Synaesthetes who project colours into external space but not on to the surface of the grapheme behave like associators on this task. In a second task, graphemes presented briefly in the periphery are more likely to elicit reports of colour in projectors than associators, but the colours only tend to be accurate when the grapheme itself is also accurately identified. We propose an alternative model of individual differences in grapheme-colour synaesthesia that emphasises the role of different spatial reference frames in synaesthetic perception. In doing so, we attempt to bring the synaesthesia literature closer to current models of non-synaesthetic perception, attention and binding. (shrink)

The first English translation of a classic work in vision science from 1936 by a leading figure in the Gestalt movement, covering topics that continue to be major issues in vision research today. This classic work in vision science, written by a leading figure in Germany's Gestalt movement in psychology and first published in 1936, addresses topics that remain of major interest to vision researchers today. Wolfgang Metzger's main argument, drawn from Gestalt theory, is that the objects we perceive in (...) visual experience are not the objects themselves but perceptual effigies of those objects constructed by our brain according to natural rules. Gestalt concepts are currently being increasingly integrated into mainstream neuroscience by researchers proposing network processing beyond the classical receptive field. Metzger's discussion of such topics as ambiguous figures, hidden forms, camouflage, shadows and depth, and three-dimensional representations in paintings will interest anyone working in the field of vision and perception, including psychologists, biologists, neurophysiologists, and researchers in computational vision—and artists, designers, and philosophers. Each chapter is accompanied by compelling visual demonstrations of the phenomena described; the book includes 194 illustrations, drawn from visual science, art, and everyday experience, that invite readers to verify Metzger's observations for themselves. Today's researchers may find themselves pondering the intriguing question of what effect Metzger's theories might have had on vision research if Laws of Seeing and its treasure trove of perceptual observations had been available to the English-speaking world at the time of its writing. (shrink)

The chapter outlines an abstract theoretical framework that is currently (re-)emerging in the course of a theoretical convergence of several disciplines. In the first section, the fundamental problem of perception theory is formulated, namely, the generation, by the perceptual system, of meaningful categories from physicogeometric energy patterns. In the second section, it deals with basic intuitions and assumptions underlying what can be regarded as the current Standard Model of Perceptual Psychology and points out why this model is profoundly inadequate for (...) dealing with the fundamental problem of perception theory. In the third section, it discusses a level of analysis that promises to be fruitful for dealing, in conformity with established procedures of the natural sciences, with the problem of perceptual “meaning” and the problem of what constitutes a “perceptual object.” In the fourth section, it outlines a theoretical perspective on basic principles of the perceptual system which centers on the notions of complex data types and conceptual forms, and draws an entirely different theoretical picture of the role of the sensory input than traditional accounts. The final section focusses on the issue of material qualities and discusses, within the general theoretical framework outlined, some observations and results on the perception of certain material properties, namely, lustrous and glassy appearances. (shrink)

The chapter deals with the notion of phenomenal realness, which was first systematically explored by Albert Michotte. Phenomenal realness refers to the impression that a perceptual object is perceived to have an autonomous existence in our mind-independent world. Perceptual psychology provides an abundance of phenomena, ranging from amodal completion to picture perception, that indicate that phenomenal realness is an independent perceptual attribute that can be conferred to perceptual objects in different degrees. The chapter outlines a theoretical framework that appears particularly (...) well-suited for dealing with corresponding phenomena. According to this framework, perception can be understood as a triggering of conceptual forms by sensor inputs. It is argued that the attribute of phenomenal realness is based on specific types of internal evaluation functions which deal with the segregation of causes conceived as ‘external’ from those conceived as ‘internal’. These evaluation functions integrate different internal sources of ‘knowledge’ about the potential causes for the activation of conceptual forms and provide markers by which conceptual forms can be tagged as ‘external world objects’. (shrink)

Un enjeu majeur pour les recherches actuelles dans les sciences de la vision consiste à mettre au point une approche dépendante de l’observateur – une science des apparences visuelles située au-delà de leur véridicité. L’espace dont nous faisons l’expérience subjective est en réalité hautement « illusoire», et les éléments de base du champ visuel sont des structures qualitatives, contextuelles et relationnelles, et non des indices métriques et dépendants du stimulus. Sur la base de nombreux résultats disponibles dans la littérature traitant (...) de la manière dont fonctionnent les divers constituants de l’espace (formes, surfaces, etc.), l’article décrit les éléments qualitatifs de base d’un tel espace et pose la question de la « géométrie» des apparences visuelles. Il formule enfin un ensemble de propositions pour d’éventuelles recherches poursuivant l’examen de l’espace visuel d’un point de vue expérimental. (shrink)

The paper presents color as a case study for the analysis of phenomena that pertain to several levels of reality and are typically framed by different sciences and disciplines. Color, in fact, is studied by physics, biology, phenomenology, and esthetics, among others. Our thesis is that color is a different entity for each level of reality, and that for this reason color generates different observables in the epistemologies of the different sciences. By analyzing color as a paradigmatic case of an (...) entity naturally spreading over different levels of reality, the paper raises the question as to whether making explicit the usually implicit ontological assumptions embedded within the different observables exploited by the different sciences may eventually clarify some of the difficulties of developing a comprehensive theory of color. (shrink)

First Published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

It is difficult to find agreement on what constitutes perceiving.at Rovereto, Italy. The term is used in a wide array of domains ranging from psychology to physiology to aesthetics, and over time it has also acquired diverse connotations within various disciplines. Current perceptual science, however, even when it deals with qualitative aspects of experience, for example phenomena of lightness and colour, almost exclusively explains them in terms of primary qualities or stimuli quantitatively understood. The fact that science treats qualitative experiences (...) in terms of stimuli is important, because almost nothing of phenomenal perception as such is quantitative in nature. The paper argues for a qualitative science of perceiving, its methodology, its laws, and its possible developments. (shrink)

Computational theories of vision typically rely on the analysis of two aspects of human visual function: (1) object and shape recognition (2) co-calibration of sensory measurements. Both these approaches are usually based on an inverse-optics model, where visual perception is viewed as a process of inference from a 2D retinal projection to a 3D percept within a Euclidean space schema. This paradigm has had great success in certain areas of vision science, but has been relatively less successful in understanding perceptual (...) representation, namely, the nature of the perceptual encoding. One of the drawbacks of inverse-optics approaches has been the difficulty in defining the constraints needed to make the inference computationally tractable (e.g. regularity assumptions, Bayesian priors, etc.). These constraints, thought to be learned assumptions about the nature of the physical and optical structures of the external world, have to be incorporated into any workable computational model in the inverse-optics paradigm. But inference models that employ an inverse optics plus structural assumptions approach inevitably result in a na. (shrink)

In Fechner's psychophysics, the 'mental' and the 'physical' were conceived as two phenomenal domains, connected by functional relations, not as two ontologically different realms. We follow the path from Fechner's foundational ideas and Mach's radical programme of a unitary science to later approaches to primary, psychophysically neutral experience (phenomenology, protophysics). We propose an 'integral psychophysics' as a mathematical study of law-like, invariant structures of primary experience. This approach is illustrated by a reinterpretation of psychophysical experiments in terms of perceptual situations (...) involving a constructed apparatus and an instructed subject. The problematic notion of 'measurement of sensation' is thus eliminated: 'sensations' are merely indices for classes of perceptually equivalent configurations (states of the apparatus) specified by the instruction. The locus of the measured is in the inter-subjectively shared, communicable world—not inside the subject's mind. Finally we discuss the role of integral psychophysics as a scientia prima , logically and methodically preceding physics and psychology. (shrink)