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Mental imagery and the epistemic cachet of perception| old_uid | 10427 |
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| title | Mental imagery and the epistemic cachet of perception |
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| start_date | 2015/12/15 |
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| schedule | 15h30-17h30 |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | salle Langevin |
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| summary | There is a famous slogan in machine vision, attributed (wrongly, it seems) to Max Clowes: ‘vision is controlled hallucination’. The aim of my paper is to argue that perception is controlled mental imagery. What I mean by mental imagery, following Kosslyn and Jeannerod, is ‘quasi-perceptual processes that are not triggered by corresponding sensory stimulation in the relevant sense modality’. Mental imagery can be conscious or unconscious, voluntary or involuntary and accompanied or not accompanied by the feeling of presence. Perception is mental imagery inasmuch as (almost) all perception involves the exercise of mental imagery: of quasi-perceptual processes that are not triggered by corresponding sensory stimulation in the relevant sense modality. But it is controlled mental imagery inasmuch as these quasi-perceptual processes are most often combined with and tweaked by sensory-stimulation-driven perceptual processes. The main claim of this paper is that perception, as we know it, is the combination of the two: it is controlled mental imagery. But if this is so, then perception does not have the epistemic cachet it is often assumed to have. |
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| responsibles | Proust, Égré |
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