The Unity of Perception: Content, Consciousness, Evidence

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Susanna Schellenberg (Professor of Philosophy, Professor of Philosophy, Rutgers University)

The Unity of Perception

Content, Consciousness, Evidence

Susanna Schellenberg (Professor of Philosophy, Professor of Philosophy, Rutgers University)

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English

Oxford University Press
13 September 2018

Philosophy: epistemology & theory of knowledge; Philosophy of mind; Perception

Perception is our key to the world. It plays at least three different roles in our lives. It justifies beliefs and provides us with knowledge of our environment. It brings about conscious mental states. It converts informational input, such as light and sound waves, into representations of invariant features in our environment. Corresponding to these three roles, there are at least three fundamental questions that have motivated the study of perception. How does perception justify beliefs and yield knowledge of our environment? How does perception bring about conscious mental states? How does a perceptual system accomplish the feat of converting varying informational input into mental representations of invariant features in our environment? This book presents a unified account of the phenomenological and epistemological role of perception that is informed by empirical research. So it develops an account of perception that provides an answer to the first two questions, while being sensitive to scientific accounts that address the third question. The key idea is that perception is constituted by employing perceptual capacities - for example the capacity to discriminate instances of red from instances of blue. Perceptual content, consciousness, and evidence are each analyzed in terms of this basic property of perception. Employing perceptual capacities constitutes phenomenal character as well as perceptual content. The primacy of employing perceptual capacities in perception over their derivative employment in hallucination and illusion grounds the epistemic force of perceptual experience. In this way, the book provides a unified account of perceptual content, consciousness, and evidence.

By: Susanna Schellenberg (Professor of Philosophy Professor of Philosophy Rutgers University)
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 241mm, Width: 164mm, Spine: 25mm
Weight: 572g
ISBN: 9780198827702
ISBN 10: 0198827709
Pages: 268
Publication Date: 13 September 2018
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Susanna Schellenberg is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, where she holds a secondary appointment at the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science. Before joining Rutgers, she was an Associate Professor (previously Assistant Professor and Postdoc) at the Australian National University's Research School of Social Sciences. Her work has been published widely in journals such as Nous, The Journal of Philosophy, Mind, and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. She is the 2016 recipient of the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award of the Humboldt Foundation.

Reviews for The Unity of Perception: Content, Consciousness, Evidence

The Unity of Perception offers a brilliantly original and comprehensive theory of perception, perceptual consciousness and perceptual knowledge. Philosophers of mind and epistemologists, in particular, will find Schellenbergs book a rich source of insight and provocation. * Alex Bryne, Massachusetts Institute of Technology * Schellenberg's excellent book will undoubtedly have a wide audience among philosophers of mind and epistemologists. Among other virtues, it offers (i) innovative and plausible arguments for the superiority of representationalist theories of perception over disjunctivist and naive realist theories, (ii) the first systematic attempt to develop the view that the contents of perceptual states are robustly particular, with entities like Hillary Clinton and that table serving as their constituents, and (iii) a sustained defense of the idea that our concepts of perceptual evidence are externalist in character. The book is unique in the current literature in seeking accounts of the metaphysical and epistemological dimensions of perception that are mutually reinforcing. * Christopher Hill, Brown University * One of the few books on perception that gives the reader a new theoretical approach, a critical overview of the state of the art, and an integration of the philosophy of perception with both epistemology and the empirical sciences. A significant resource for any course on perception. * Christopher Peacocke, Columbia University * Susanna Schellenberg gives us wonderfully informed and penetrating discussions of the live issues in the philosophy of perception in charting the path to her own position Capaciticism. We are all in her debt. * Frank Jackson, Australian National University and Princeton University * Philosophers and psychologists have studied perception for as long as theyve studied anything. But I cannot think of any earlier treatment of that topic that provides arguments that are as clear and explicit as the arguments in this important new book, or that situates its own commitments against the alternatives as usefully as Schellenberg does. Anyone developing an account of perception - its content, its epistemic force, its phenomenal quality - will now need to specify how their view differs from Schellenbergs. * Ram Neta, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill *