(w/apologies to Aldous Huxley) OK, I continue to read a ton of books, as I've done for decades. These days, while my interests remain eclectic, I am particularly keen on anything that helps factually and logically clarify my thinking and postings on so-called “deliberation science” on this blog.
I get most of my book recommendations from Science Magazine, followed by The Atlantic, The New Yorker, NY Times Review of Books, Scientific American, various random online resources (e.g., The Neurologica Blog, Science-Based Medicine, WIRED)—and, increasingly, pitches coming in from Amazon's "We thought you'd like this" emails (apropos of the above title). Amazon’s AI “algorithms” think they know me. Well enough to be profitable for them in the aggregate, I suppose. But…
Charitably, permit the author:
…[This] book is resolutely a work in philosophy of science—specifically philosophy of psychology. Perceptual psychology, centrally the psychophysics of vision, has become a mature science in the last fifty years. It gives philosophy an opportunity to understand important features of psychological capacities at a level of depth, rigor, and empirical groundedness that has never before been attainable. Philosophy should leap at the opportunity to make use of such a powerful and rapidly advancing science, as a basis for philosophical understanding. Some philosophy of perception makes no use at all of perceptual psychology. Much philosophy of perception makes at best decorative use. I think that it is no longer intellectually responsible to philosophize about perception without knowing and seriously engaging with that science. I believe that the practice of centering philosophical reflection about perception on phenomenology, or on analysis of ordinary talk about perception, without closely connecting the reflection with what is known from science (a centering that is a residue of the early empiricist model of perception), and the practice of allowing epistemology to guide reflection on what perception must be like, will all soon become museum pieces of past, misdirected philosophy.OK, then. "Understanding anything well requires effort and patience. Genuine philosophical and scientific understanding cannot be grabbed off the shelf." No pick with that.
Most of [this] book’s claims are, of course, supported only empirically, by interpreting the empirical results of the science. Some of the claims are, however, supported apriori. One should not confuse apriority with innateness, certainty, obviousness, infallibility, dogmatism, unrevisability, or immunity from revision based on empirical considerations. To be apriori supported, or apriori warranted, is to have support or warrant that does not depend for its force on perception or on sensing. Most apriori warranted judgments in this book are warranted by reflection that yields understanding of key concepts or principles used or presupposed in the science. All the relevant apriori judgments are synthetic, certainly in the sense of being non-vacuous and the sense of not being truths of logic. I think that the judgments are also synthetic in the sense of not being the products of analysis of conceptual complexes into concepts contained in the complexes. I think that most concepts that are central to our discussion are not complexes. They are simple. They are, however, necessarily and apriori embedded in networks with other concepts. Reasoning through such networks sometimes yields synthetic apriori understanding of foundations of mind.
Apriori supported judgments can be further supported empirically, by the science. But insofar as they are apriori warranted, they have sufficient warrant to support belief; and the warrant derives from reasoning or understanding, independently of support from perception, perceptual experience, or sensory registration. An example of an apriori warranted judgment, I think, is that perceptual states can be accurate or inaccurate. Another example is that perceptual states have a representational function—to accurately pick out and characterize particulars via causal relations to them: perceptual states fail in some way (representationally) if they are not accurate. I doubt that one can know apriori that any individual has perceptual capacities. Our empirical knowledge that we do have such capacities is, however, firm. It is more certain than some things that we know apriori about perception. As noted, being apriori does not imply some super-strong type of support. Apriori warrant for belief in simple arithmetical truths is super-strong. But much apriori support is not stronger, often less strong, than strong empirical support.
Our firm empirical knowledge that individuals have perceptual states does not require a detailed, reflective, philosophical understanding of what perception is. Knowing that individuals have perceptual states requires only a minimal understanding. One must be able to distinguish perception, at least by some cases, from just any sensing. And one must be able to recognize various examples of perception. Detailed philosophical understanding requires reflection, articulation, and elaboration of a minimal understanding of the concept perception and of relations between perception and other matters—semantical, functional, biological, causal, and so on. Elaboration is mainly empirical, but partly apriori. Given an elaborated understanding of what perception is, it is possible to draw, apriori, some further conclusions about the form, semantics, and functions of perceptual states. Such conclusions are abstract and limited. They are important in being basic to understanding.
Again, most of the book’s claims are empirical. For example, the accounts of how perceptual and perceptual-motor systems work in Parts III and IV, and the accounts of what these systems are in Part IV, are warranted partly by appeal to explanations in the science. Those accounts and those explanations are certainly empirically, not apriori, warranted.
I became interested in perception partly because it promises insight into basic types of representation of the world, and partly because it is a key factor that must be understood if one is to understand empirical knowledge. This book shows some fruits of the first motivation. In investigating the structure and semantics of perceptual representation, one investigates primitive and basic types of reference and attribution. My interest in the role of perception in empirical knowledge remains. But I take understanding perception to owe almost nothing to epistemology, whereas understanding epistemology absolutely requires understanding perception. Epistemology investigates epistemic norms for capacities that can contribute to obtaining knowledge. One cannot understand the norms without understanding the capacities. One understands perceptual capacities by reflecting on empirical science and its basic commitments, not by reflecting on epistemology. Understanding perception is the task of this book. Epistemic use of an understanding of perception is posterior. For epistemic work in this direction, see my ‘Perceptual Entitlement’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 67 (2003), 503–548; and ‘Entitlement: The Basis for Empirical Warrant’, in P. Graham and N. Pedersen eds., Epistemic Entitlement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
I have some slight hope, even in this specialized world, that this book will interest not only philosophers, but at least some scientists in perceptual psychology and other areas of psychology. The best science is informed by a breadth and depth of perspective that is philosophical. This point is particularly relevant to perceptual psychology. A central, often stated, aim of the science is to understand conditions in which accurate perception occurs, and conditions under which illusions occur. (See Chapter 1, note 25.) Accuracy is a semantical concept.
So the science is committed at its very core to there being a semantics for perception—a systematic account of relations between perceptual representation and its subject matters. The account must explain what it is for perception to be accurate or inaccurate. Of course, the science is mainly concerned with causal patterns and mechanisms. Much of it, indeed probably most of it to date, focuses on pre-representational, pre-perceptual states that register the proximal stimulus. But the point of this scientific work is partly to build toward understanding perception of the physical environment. Part of understanding perception scientifically is to understand not only the causal patterns that lead to accurate and inaccurate perception, but also to understand the form and content of perceptual states, and what it is for them to be accurate or inaccurate.
Yet the science has paid no serious attention to these issues—specifically to semantics. It has not developed a vocabulary or set of principles that enable it to discuss accuracy and inaccuracy of perception with the precision and clarity of its accounts of causal, formational aspects of psychological states and processes. It provides no answers to questions like ‘What is it for a perceptual state to be accurate or inaccurate?’, ‘What sorts of representational competencies are involved in forming a state that is accurate or inaccurate?’; ‘In what ways can a perception be partly accurate and partly inaccurate?’; ‘What is the representational form or structure of perceptual states?’. Such questions are addressed in Parts I and II of the book.
Scientific understanding of perception is incomplete if it does not incorporate a systematic semantical understanding of perceptual states into its understanding of principles according to which perceptual states are causally generated. Semantical understanding is understanding of the representational contents, their forms, and their accuracy conditions—the conditions for representational success. Perceptual psychology would benefit from mastering the vocabulary necessary to think systematically about the semantics of perception.
Philosophy is the source of modern work in semantics—first the semantics of mathematics and logic, later the semantics of natural language. The basic semantical concepts, in something like their modern form, come from Gottlob Frege, about 130 years ago. In the last section of Chapter 1, I explain some of Frege’s basic concepts. I think that these concepts, with some modification, are valuable in understanding perception, even though they were first developed for understanding much higher-level representation—representation in mathematics.
I think that parts of the science need not only a deeper grip on semantics, but a much more rigorous terminology. Uses of terms like ‘representation’, ‘knowledge’, ‘cognition’, ‘recognition’, ‘judgment’, ‘belief’, ‘concept’, ‘prediction’, ‘intention’, ‘voluntary’ are far from reflective, much less standardized, in the science. Assimilating the whys and wherefores of terminology, is often the beginning of better, more fruitful empirical inquiry. Centrally, in Chapter 19, the section Uses and Misuses of the Term ‘Cognition’, but also throughout the book, there is a concerted effort to emphasize sharper uses of key mentalistic terms so as to respect basic differences in representational level. Such differences correspond to important differences in representational kinds—that is, representational capacities.
This is a long, complex book. Understanding anything well requires effort and patience. Genuine philosophical and scientific understanding cannot be grabbed off the shelf. The time and effort required to understand this book will be considerable. One cannot get there in a few sittings. The key point is to read and reread carefully and slowly, noting and reflecting on nuances and qualifications, mastering terminology, reading in context, connecting different contexts together, reading the footnotes, going back to earlier passages—all the while, reflecting. Few readers outside philosophy ever read this way. Most philosophers have, I think, lost the art. Iris Murdoch, in harmony with the marvelous quote that heads Chapter 1, wrote: ‘In philosophy, the race is to the slow’. Too many race at high speeds. The psychological and sociological pressures to form opinions and publish them quickly, and often, are very strong. Academic pressures and computer fluency have yielded much more writing, with no more time to master the increasingly complex topics written about. Careless reading, misdirected criticism, uninformed opinions, simplistic proposals abound. Perhaps it was always so. However, as knowledge grows—and grows more complex—lack of patience in pursuing understanding is an increasingly debilitating vice. Given that philosophical understanding of this book’s topics has become harder—because more is known and what is known is more complex—patience is more required than ever…
Burge, Tyler (2022-05-12T23:58:59.000). Perception: First Form of Mind OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.
I typically first surf through some Amazon reviews (always on the lookout for sensible naysayers to help mitigate false positives, especially pricey ones). This rant was a doozy.
The death knell of armchair philosophy
Reviewed in the United States on December 13, 2022 Akiko Yano
Verified Purchase
A watershed moment in the history of philosophy. Here is one of the field's most pedantic authors, a Phil Review regular no less, a man who often cannot resist piling four adjectives on top of a single noun, basically vindicating Fodor's prophecy, from the 1960s onward, that philosophy - especially epistemology - would necessarily turn into psychology, due to the advent of the cognitive revolution, and Chomsky's work in particular. Even that old grey-beard Frege - who was massively influential precisely in separating epistemology from psychology - is brought down to earth and reinterpreted as elucidating perceptual psychology, where unconscious computational 'referential applications' (Bedeutungen) and 'characterizing attributives' (Sinne) abound. Burge's simply Herculean knowledge of the scientific literature is so overwhelming that any philosopher trying to hold on to epistemic-norm talk divorced from information processing - or 'what perception-must-be-like' independent of empirical research - is bound to feel very cowed indeed. And although Burge does not seem to realize his differences with Fodor are largely terminological - in particular, it was Fodor in 1983 who argued against MARR no less that the perceptual system has to be able to recognize poodle-shape attributives (a subject Burge lingers on here) and that such shape-based attributives ('concepts' of the perceptual module) must be systematically distinguished from concepts which figure in propositional knowledge, a point Burge likes to make ad nauseam - Burge's views here are unique enough to merit seminars devoted to Perception alone. The reason why this won't happen anytime soon is, budding philosophers would then have to ask, for whom do these bells toll? But of course, these bells toll for thee, O norm-loving philosophers.
Stay tuned. Just getting underway. Havin' some WTAF? Moments with this stuff at first blush...
UPDATE
"Most of [this] book’s claims are, of course, supported only empirically, by interpreting the empirical results of the science. Some of the claims are, however, supported apriori. One should not confuse apriority with innateness, certainty, obviousness, infallibility, dogmatism, unrevisability, or immunity from revision based on empirical considerations. To be apriori supported, or apriori warranted, is to have support or warrant that does not depend for its force on perception or on sensing. Most apriori warranted judgments in this book are warranted by reflection that yields understanding of key concepts or principles used or presupposed in the science...""apriori?" Really just IMO a hifalutin' synonym for "assuming to be" (though some might more narrowly construe it to infer "deductive"). Beyond that nitpick, my reading comprehension skills are fairly sharp and I can sling $50 words with the best of them, but the above call-out (not to mention the entire foregoing longer excerpt) leaves me shaking my aching head. As my early 90s industrial engineering boss would say “if I have to read something more than once, I don’t like it.“
“What does a priori mean? A priori is a term applied to knowledge considered to be true without being based on previous experience or observation. In this sense, a priori describes knowledge that requires no evidence. A priori comes from Latin and literally translates as “from the previous” or “from the one before.”
i.e., “Assuming.”
This book runs to nearly 900 pages. To Amazon's credit, the downloadable Kindle sample notes "6 hours, 34 minutes remaining" at the outset (ending in the 5th of its 20 chapters). Kindle edition price is $38.00. I will likely read more of this comp download, though I'm dubious at this point that I'd get my 38 bucks worth out of the entire volume in light of the "scholarly" obtuseness evident thus far. And, Amazon reviewer "Akiko Yano" (a nom de guerre?) ain't helping much.
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FOUR ADDITIONAL NEW READS
Got onto the new Alan Lightman book via Science Magazine. I bought "The Liars of Nature..." to compare to my prior engagement with "If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal."
UPDATE
Alan Lightman is kickin’ my butt. His PBS stuff is riveting. Well worth your time.
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