SP18 PHIL493/593

Professor: Wayne Wright

 

This course will address the connection between the mind and the world around us from various perspectives. Much of our focus will be on visual perception, but cognition and (to a lesser extent) other perceptual modalities will receive attention. Familiar philosophical issues such as the appearance/reality distinction and the status of the so-called ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ qualities will provide a useful place to start and will be returned to throughout the semester. We will be interested in how the notion of veridicality is to be understood and what role it might play in scientific theorizing about perception. Content externalism—roughly, the thesis that the type-classification of mental state contents is metaphysically dependent on a special kind of relation the thinker/perceiver bears to the environment—will also be addressed. The biological basis of our capacities for finding out about and navigating the world will receive a good bit of attention at various points throughout the semester, especially the limitations that biological basis might entail for our perceptual and cognitive capacities. The cognitive penetrability of perception and the role of features of visual processing in shaping cognitive and linguistic phenomena will be touched on, and we might venture into the literature that deals with human judgment and decision-making. Much of our discussion will focus on a more-or-less physical characterization of the environment, but the social environment—especially critical for creatures like humans—will not be ignored. An issue that will be lurking throughout the semester is whether a number of philosophical projects that deal with the mind/environment relation have the sort of consequences for scientific theorizing that is routinely claimed for them. No books are required—all course readings will be available as PDFs through the course’s Beachboard page. Our readings will be drawn from both philosophy and science. Authors likely to be included in the course reading list include Tyler Burge, Alex Byrne, Mazviita Chirimuuta, Patricia Churchland, Noam Chomsky, Andy Clark, Daniel Dennett, Frances Egan, Gary Hatfield, David R. Hilbert, Donald Hoffman, Anya Hurlbert, Kimberly Jameson, Jan Koenderink, Rainer Mausfeld, Kevin O’Regan, Kim Sterelny, and Davida Teller.