Color subjectivism is the view that color properties are mental properties of our visual sensations, perhaps identical with properties of neural states, and that nothing except visual sensations and other mental states exhibits color properties. Color phys- icalism, by contrast, holds that colors are exclusively properties of visible physical objects and processes.

What do we see? We are visually conscious of colors and shapes, but are we also visually conscious of complex properties such as being John Malkovich? In this book, Susanna Siegel develops a framework for understanding the contents of visual experience, and argues that these contents involve all sorts of complex properties. Siegel starts by analyzing the notion of the contents of experience, and by arguing that theorists of all stripes should accept that experiences have contents. She then (...) introduces a method for discovering the contents of experience: the method of phenomenal contrast. This method relies only minimally on introspection, and allows rigorous support for claims about experience. She then applies the method to make the case that we are conscious of many kinds of properties, of all sorts of causal properties, and of many other complex properties. She goes on to use the method to help analyze difficult questions about our consciousness of objects and their role in the contents of experience, and to reconceptualize the distinction between perception and sensation. Siegel's results are important for many areas of philosophy, including the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and the philosophy of science. They are also important for the psychology and cognitive neuroscience of vision. (shrink)

Philosophers long have noted that some sensations (particularly those of color) seem to be ineffable, or refractory to verbal description. Some proposed neurophysiological explanations of this ineffability deny the intuitive view that sensations have inherently indescribable content. The present paper suggests a new explanation of ineffability that does not have this deflationary consequence. According to the hypothesis presented here, feedback modulation of information flow in the cortex interferes with the production of narratives about sensations, thereby causing the (...) subject to assess as inadequate his or her own verbal descriptions of sensations. (shrink)

The environmental quality and subjective environmental evaluations in urban open spaces are essential. In this study, the effects of building, green, and water landscapes, which are typical visual landscapes, on the subjective environmental evaluations in different seasons were analyzed by conducting questionnaire surveys and field measurements in a severely cold city. It was found that the visual landscapes significantly affected subjective environmental evaluations in winter and summer, but there were no effects in the transitional season. In summer, compared (...) with the building and green landscape, the thermal sensation vote in the water landscape was the lowest at 0.4, and the differences were 0.3∼1.0. However, the thermal comfort vote in the water landscape was found to be 0.6 times higher. In winter, the thermal sensation and comfort votes in the water landscape were the lowest, the average evaluation under different UTCI was –2.2, and the results were similar for the overall comfort evaluation. In addition, the subjects believed that green and water landscapes improved thermal comfort and had more significant effects on improving the environmental temperature in the three seasons. Additionally, visual landscape evaluations significantly affect subjective environmental evaluations in summer than in the winter and transitional season; the higher the visual landscape evaluation, the better the thermal and overall comfort. (shrink)

1. Clark’s book is a detailed study of the nature of sensory representation. It is highly informed by empirical results in the psychology of perception, and philosophically rich and significant. I admire the book and learned a great deal from reading it. As it covers a wide range of topics, and as I have no overarching critique to present, in this commentary I will briefly address three issues that come up in the book: Clark’s relational type-identity thesis for sensory qualities, (...) his theory that sensory representations involve proto-singular terms referring to spatio-temporal regions in the subject’s environment, and his interesting proposal concerning color to treat it as “difference coding”. Some of my remarks will be critical, but others will just explore some of the implications of his view. 2. Clark distinguishes “phenomenal properties” from “qualitative properties”, the former being appearance properties of things in the world (their colors, shapes, tastes, odors, etc.) and the latter being the properties of sensations by virtue of which they are sensations of their corresponding phenomenal properties. So when I see a red ball I am “directly” aware of the ball’s redness and roundness - it appears red and round to me. This awareness of the ball’s redness and roundness is accomplished, however, by my having a visual experience with certain qualitative properties; those that are of the sort one has when seeing something as red and round. It is these latter qualitative properties that are the subject of his relational type-identity thesis. Before addressing that thesis, however, I want to quickly note and respond to another point Clark makes concerning the qualitative properties of sensory states. He.. (shrink)

Recent research on synesthesia has focused on how the condition may depend on selective attention, but there is a lack of consensus on whether selective attention is required to bind colors to their grapheme inducers. In the present study, we used a novel change detection paradigm to examine whether synesthetic colors guide the subject’s attention to the location of the inducer or whether selective attention is required to act as a unique feature during visual search. If synesthetic (...) experiences are elicited by inducers without selective attention, then a target that is distinct from the distractors by virtue of its unique synesthetic color should capture attention. This should lead to efficiency in the search that is analogous to the efficiency in searches involving unique display colors. If, however, an inducer does not elicit a synesthetic color until the subject selectively attends to it, then the search should be as inefficient as for control subjects. We found that, not only does synesthesia not provide an advantage in complicated visual search tasks, it offers a slight disadvantage, supporting the re-entrant processing hypothesis about the mechanism underlying synesthesia. (shrink)

Human vision raises a number of puzzles. Among them are the puzzles of visual experience: how to provide a scientific understanding of the phenomenal character of the visual experiences of the shapes, textures, colors, orientations and motion of perceived objects? How can a purely subjective visual experience be the basis of so much objective knowledge of the world? Visually guided actions raise a different puzzle: how can actions directed towards a target be so accurate in the (...) absence of the agent’s awareness of many of the target’s visual attributes? Ways of Seeing has three related goals, the first of which is to make the case for a broadly representational approach to the above set of puzzles. The second goal of WoS is to argue that the version of the ‘two-visual systems’ model of human vision best supported by the current empirical evidence has the resources to solve the puzzle of visually guided actions, which has been at the center of much recent work in the cognitive neuroscience of vision and action. The third goal of WoS is to draw attention to some of the tensions between acceptance of the two-visual systems model of human vision and some influential views about the nature and function of the content of visual experience espoused by philosophers in response to the puzzles raised by visual experience. (shrink)

With the continuous development of society, the role of the visual guidance system in animation design has also evolved and evolved in its long history, leading to the changes in the values of modern beauty. In the field of modern social and cultural design, the visual guidance system in animation design has unique regional nature and cultural influence. The visual language should correspond to the visual environment and easy to understand and be known by people. It (...) combines animation conception and design technology to capture the cultural charm and beauty, values, and behavioral norms of people in different fields. This article studies and analyzes the visual orientation of graphic language in the design of animation visual guidance system, and injects the graphic language with orientation into its animation design, so that the animation design is more in line with the characteristics of the times. It can be more adapted to the emerging media and better convey the information transfer between the enterprise and the audience. To further understand the audience’s tendency toward elements of graphic expression, this article analyzes the subjective perceptions of the respondents on the importance of color selection, calligraphy fonts, graphic expression, and modeling meaning. The results of the study showed that the respondents aged 21–35 paid more attention to the choice of graphic colors, and the highest number was 69. (shrink)

Recent social theory that stresses the ‘nonrepresentational’, the ‘more-than visual’, and the relationship between affect and sensation have tended to assume some kind of break or rupture from historical antecedents. Especially since the contributions of Crary and Jay in the 1990s, when it comes to perceiving the built environment the complexities of sensation have been partially obscured by the dominance of a static model of vision as the principal organizing modality. This article returns to some prior historical articulations of (...) the significance of motility in perception, retracing pathways across art history, architectural theory and the history of neuroscience to argue for an alternative model based on the movement of the eye. Along with subsystems that deal with balance and orientation, I offer parallels between spatial motifs of the interior spaces of the body – labyrinths, vestibules, chambers – and those in artefacts and the built environment that contribute to the heightened physicality of the oculomotor subject. (shrink)

Humans have been exploring colors since ancient times, but relatively complete color systems appeared one after another in the twentieth century. Even without language and other information exchanges, colors can still convey information and stimulate emotions. Therefore, color can have both physical and psychological effects on people. In this context, this paper studies the visual representation of painting colors based on psychological factors. The article studies the theory of personality traits and introduces the related content of (...) visual psychology. To explore the relationship between each variable and color psychology and the visual representation of painting colors, a binary logistic regression analysis is performed. The colors in the post-impressionist paintings of Van Gogh and Gauguin is contrasted, and experiments on psychological factors and color research is conducted. The factors that affect the color tone of the picture and the influence of psychological factors on the judgment of color brightness are investigated. Finally, the correlation analysis of personality trait dimension and irrational behavior is carried out. The experimental results of the article show that after the analysis of variance, the significance levels of regression model 1 and model 2 both reach 0.000, and the adjusted R squares are 0.319 and 0.356, respectively. In this study, regression model 2 was selected as the final model. According to Model 2, the standardized regression coefficients of agreeableness and neuroticism are 0.438 and -0.251, respectively, and the significance of the regression coefficients are 0.000 and 0.021, respectively. The research on the visual performance of painting colors based on psychological factors has been well completed. (shrink)

The authors favor a “color realism” theory that considers colors to be physical properties residing in objects that reflect, emit, or transmit light. It is opposed to the theory that colors are sensations or visual experiences. This commentary suggests that both theories are correct, and that context usually indicates which of these dual aspects is being considered.

The traditional distinction between visual sensation and visual perception is reconceptualised. It is argued in this chapter using the method of phenomenal contrast that certain perceptual relations between perceivers and the objects they see are represented in experience.

During the second half of the 19th century, in the field of physiological optics, there was a strong controversy between Hermann von Helmholtz and Ewald Hering. This controversy has been usually characterized as “empiricism” vs. “nativism”. In the field of physiology of visual perception, several subjects demanded attention, among them, color vision. Helmholtz and Hering suggested different theories for the physiological correlate of color sensation and different color spaces to give an account of the relationships between colors. In (...) this article, I will argue that the controversy between the two authors could be understood as differences between styles of reasoning, and these different styles express different presuppositions. More specifically, I want to suggest that the disagreements could be linked to the discussions on how vital phenomena should be studied. (shrink)

The Hurvich-Jameson (H-J) opponent-process network offers a familiar account of the empirical structure of the phenomenological color space for humans, an account with a number of predictive and explanatory virtues. Its successes form the bulk of the existing reasons for suggesting a strict identity between our various color sensations on the one hand, and our various coding vectors across the color-opponent neurons in our primary visual pathways on the other. But anti-reductionists standardly complain that the systematic parallels discovered (...) by the H-J network are just empirical correspondences, constructed post facto, with no predictive or explanatory purchase on the intrinsic characters of qualia proper. The present paper disputes that complaint, by illustrating that the H-J model yields some novel and unappreciated predictions, and some novel and unappreciated explanations, concerning the qualitative characters of a considerable variety of color sensations possible for human experience, color sensations that normal people have almost certainly never had before, color sensations whose accurate descriptions in ordinary language appear semantically ill-formed or even self-contradictory. Specifically, these "impossible" color sensations are activation-vectors (across our opponent-process neurons) that lie inside the space of neuronally possible activation-vectors, but outside the central 'color spindle' that confines the familiar range of sensations for possible objective colors. These extra-spindle chimerical-color sensations correspond to no reflective color that you will ever see objectively displayed on a physical object. But the H-J model both predicts their existence and explains their highly anomalous qualitative characters in some detail. It also suggests how to produce these rogue sensations by a simple procedure made available in the latter half of this paper. The relevant color plates will allow you to savor these sensations for yourself. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Spectral Productances and Color PrimitivismCallie McGrathViews about the metaphysics of color can be divided broadly into realist and antirealist positions. In the realist camp are views that regard colors as instantiated; the pretheoretic appearance of the world as really being colored is correct. In the antirealist camp are views that regard this appearance as illusory.Realist views can be divided into reductionism and primitivism. The former has it that (...) for each color there is a reductive analysis: a true biconditional of the form "There is an F such that for all x, x is red (or blue, yellow) just in case x is F," where F is some predicate that explains what it is for x without making reference to color.1 To put the matter another way, suppose that one were to describe the world as accurately and exhaustively as possible, except that no explicit reference is ever made to color. According to reductionism, somewhere in such a description colors have nevertheless been attributed, only not using the usual color terms.There are two common varieties of reductionism, which we can call "subjective" and "objective reductionism." According to subjective reductionism, the right-hand side of each biconditional of the above sort makes reference to some effect x has on a perceiving subject.2 For instance, Peacocke gives the following analysis of red: "x is red just in case x is disposed to produce a red* sensation in normal perceivers under standard viewing conditions," where "red*" is a term referring to [End Page 509] a sensation in one's visual field.3 Other such color reductionists attempt to provide an analysis of sensations, such as a particular state of one's brain.Objective reductionism attempts to analyze colors without making reference to a perceiving subject. Some varieties of objective reductionism regard colors as microphysical properties of objects.4 Others propose that colors are reflectance properties of surfaces or, more generally, spectral productance properties of visibilia.5Primitivism is the rejection of reductionism; it is the view that no color is a property that can be described or understood purely in nonchromatic terms. Any biconditional of the sort mentioned above must make mention of color. Or, alternatively, the best one can hope to do to explain what any color is as such is to point to one of its bearers: "redness is that [demonstrating a fire truck, or a ripe beefsteak tomato, and so on]."6 Thus, if the world is described without explicitly using color terminology, something has been left out; there are further facts that must be included to give a complete description of the world.In what follows I outline some views that have been previously advanced to elaborate upon color primitivism. I show how one research program in perceptual psychology entails certain constraints on what colors must be like, and how they motivate one form of objective reductionism, which identifies colors as spectral productance profiles.7 However, productance physicalism is seemingly undermined by the fact that there is a pervasive many–one relationship between spectral productance and each color. I defend a variety of realist primitivism that regards colors as properties constitutively related to spectral productance. This view incorporates the advantages of the productance [End Page 510] view, while providing straightforward answers to the problems primitivism is alleged to face.IWhile primitivists agree about what colors are not, they do not agree about what colors are. Gert rejects the possibility of any metaphysical analysis of colors that goes much beyond ordinary, nonphilosophical discourse about color.8 Most primitivists do not go so far as this quietist sort of primitivism. One can reject reductive analysis of colors without altogether rejecting metaphysical theorizing about color.Most primitivists regard colors as categorical properties.9 This is to say that they reject the idea that colors are any sort of disposition. Benbaji is an exception, arguing that, for instance, red is a disposition to appear red to normal perceivers in standard conditions.10 Since, unlike subjective reductionists, Benjabi does not regard the phrase "appears red" and its cognates as amenable to reductive analysis, his position is a form of primitivism. Broackes suggests that surface colors are certain... (shrink)

Evolution and geometry generate complexity in similar ways. Evolution drives natural selection while geometry may capture the logic of this selection and express it visually, in terms of specific generic properties representing some kind of advantage. Geometry is ideally suited for expressing the logic of evolutionary selection for symmetry, which is found in the shape curves of vein systems and other natural objects such as leaves, cell membranes, or tunnel systems built by ants. The topology and geometry of symmetry is (...) controlled by numerical parameters, which act in analogy with a biological organism’s DNA. The introductory part of this paper reviews findings from experiments illustrating the critical role of two-dimensional (2D) design parameters, affine geometry and shape symmetry for visual or tactile shape sensation and perception-based decision making in populations of experts and non-experts. It will be shown that 2D fractal symmetry, referred to herein as the “symmetry of things in a thing”, results from principles very similar to those of affine projection. Results from experiments on aesthetic and visual preference judgments in response to 2D fractal trees with varying degrees of asymmetry are presented. In a first experiment (psychophysical scaling procedure), non-expert observers had to rate (on a scale from 0 to 10) the perceived beauty of a random series of 2D fractal trees with varying degrees of fractal symmetry. In a second experiment (two-alternative forced choice procedure), they had to express their preference for one of two shapes from the series. The shape pairs were presented successively in random order. Results show that the smallest possible fractal deviation from “symmetry of things in a thing” significantly reduces the perceived attractiveness of such shapes. The potential of future studies where different levels of complexity of fractal patterns are weighed against different degrees of symmetry is pointed out in the conclusion. (shrink)

What sort of property did Locke take colors to be? He is sometimes portrayed as holding that colors are wholly subjective. More often he is thought to identify colors with dispositions—powers that bodies have to produce certain ideas in us. Many interpreters find two or more incompatible strands in his account of color, and so are led to distinguish an “official,” prevailing view from the conflicting remarks into which he occasionally lapses. Many who see him as officially (...) holding that colors are dispositions concede that some of his remarks imply that colors are in us rather than in objects. After raising some difficulties for these readings, I offer an alternative. I will argue that Locke takes colors to be relational, but not dispositional, properties of the objects around us. On his view, an object is red if and only if it is actually causing a certain sensation in some observer. (shrink)

Every perceptual experience has an objective and a subjective side. We see object size, independent of distance, but we also see that distant objects project smaller images. Early modern conceptions focused on local stimulation and thus on the subjective aspect. Helmholtz and Hering emphasized the objective aspect. Helmholtz split visual experience into two stages, with sensation representing the subjective side and perception, through cognitive processes, the objective side. Gestalt theory denied this dualism, rejecting both sensory and cognitive stages. Despite (...) contrary evidence, the sensation/perception dualism persists, in brightness models and past experience theories. That we can detect visual angle and luminance does not mean that these are raw sensations out of which perception of size and lightness is built. Size and color constancy are truly visual, not cognitive. Instructions to subjects in vision experiments must avoid the proximal mode on the one hand and cognitive judgments on the other. (shrink)

The sensory colors that figure in visual perceptual experience are either properties of the object of consciousness (naïve realism, sense-data theory), or properties of the subject of consciousness (adverbialism) (Section 1). I consider an argument suggested by the work of A. D. Smith that the existence of certain kinds of perceptual constancies shows that adverbialism is correct, for only adverbialism can account for such constancies (Section 3). I respond on behalf of the naïve realist that naïve realism is (...) compatible with the existence of such constancies, so long as naïve realism adopts the view that sensory colors are relational properties of physical objects, not intrinsic properties (Section 4). In other words, the naïve realist should adopt the theory of appearing (Section 5). (shrink)

Early psychophysical methods as codified by Fechner motivate the development of quantitative theories of subjective experience. The basic insight is that just noticeable differences between experiences can serve as units for measuring a sensory domain. However, the methods described by Fechner tacitly assume that the experiences being investigated can be linearly ordered. This assumption is not true for all sensory domains; for example, there is no trivial linear order over all possible color sensations. This paper discusses key developments in (...) the history of psychophysical methods for measuring color experience. In particular, a clear distinction between topological and metrical structure allowed Helmholtz to use opponent colors as a standard for measuring the gross structure of color space. Once this gross structure had been determined, lines through color space could be defined and Fechner-style methods employed for determining local structure. Extensions of these methods due to Wright, MacAdam, and others provide detailed evidence for the degree of agreement in the qualities of color experience across individuals. This allows a precise statement of the evidential support for the claim that your experience of color and mine are the same. (shrink)

Under what conditions does 'sensation' become 'sensational'? In the early nineteenth century murder was a staple of the sensationalizing popular press and gruesome descriptions were deployed to make a direct impact on the sensations of the reader. By the end of the century, public concern with the thrills, spills, and shocks of modern life was increasingly articulated in the language of sensation. Media sensationalism contributed to this process and magnified its impact, just as sensation was, in turn, taken up (...) by literature, art and film. In the contemporary world the dramatization of these experiences in an era of media panics over terrorism and paedophilia has taken an overtly melodramatic form, in which battles of good and evil play out across the landscapes of our lives. Sensational Subjects develops an innovative, interdisciplinary approach to exploring these themes, their impact and their implications for understanding the modern world. A companion volume, Sympathetic Sentiments: Affect, Emotion and Spectacle in the Modern World is published simultaneously by Bloomsbury. (shrink)

In this article we present a new experimental paradigm: comparative visual search. Each half of a display contains simple geometrical objects of three different colors and forms. The two display halves are identical except for one object mismatched in either color or form. The subject's task is to find this mismatch. We illustrate the potential of this paradigm for investigating the underlying complex processes of perception and cognition by means of an eye‐tracking study. Three possible search strategies are (...) outlined, discussed, and reexamined on the basis of experimental results. Each strategy is characterized by the way it partitions the field of objects into “chunks.” These strategies are: (i) Stimulus‐wise scanning with minimization of total scan path length (a “traveling salesman” strategy), (ii) scanning of the objects in fixed‐size areas (a “searchlight” strategy), and (iii) scanning of object sets based on variably sized clusters defined by object density and heterogeneity (a “clustering” strategy). To elucidate the processes underlying comparative visual search, we introduce besides object density a new entropy‐based measure for object heterogeneity. The effects of local density and entropy on several basic and derived eye‐movement variables clearly rule out the traveling salesman strategy, but are most compatible with the clustering strategy. (shrink)

Understanding how activity in the brain leads to a subjective percept is of great interest to philosophers and neuroscientists alike. In the last years, neurophysiological experiments have approached this problem directly by measuring neural signals in animals as they experience well-defined visual percepts. Stimuli in these studies are often inherently ambiguous, and thus rely upon the subjective report, generally from trained monkeys, to provide a measure of perception. By correlating activity levels in the brain to this report, one can (...) speculate on the role of individual neurons and groups of neurons in the formation and maintenance of a particular percept. However, in order to draw valid conclusions from such experiments, it is critical that the responses accurately and reliably reflect what is perceived. For this reason, a number of behavioural paradigms have been developed to control and evaluate the truthfulness of responses from behaving animals. Here we describe several approaches to optimizing the reliability of a monkey's perceptual report, and argue that their combination provides an invaluable approach in the study of subjective visual perception. (shrink)

The difficulty about the naive realism which most people take for granted and which some empirical philosophers try to defend is that its proponents, in seeking to preserve the objective world of common sense, virtually read out of the picture the contribution of the perceiving subject and all that is involved in the relatedness of sense experience. The visual phenomena of perspective, distortion and hallucination, and the dependence of all other sense experience upon varying physiological factors in the percipient (...) make it well nigh impossible to believe that everything is just what we observe it to be; and the physicist's account of a world of electrical charges symbolized by mathematical formulae deals in conceptual terms which transcend sensual imagery. The resort to the sense-datum theory was but a desperate attempt on the part of philosophers to preserve the plain man's view of reality, though it left wholly obscure the relationship between the world of common sense experience and that of physical science, as well as positing a fantastic multiplication of entities corresponding to everything that could be observed under any circumstances. (shrink)

Perception is a first-person internal sensation induced within the nervous system at the time of arrival of sensory stimuli from objects in the environment. Lack of access to the first-person properties has limited viewing perception as an emergent property and it is currently being studied using third-person observed findings from various levels. One feasible approach to understand its mechanism is to build a hypothesis for the specific conditions and required circuit features of the nodal points where the mechanistic operation of (...) perception take place for one type of sensation in one species and to verify it for the presence of comparable circuit properties for perceiving a different sensation in a different species. The present work explains visual perception in mammalian nervous system from a first-person frame of reference and provides explanations for the homogeneity of perception of visual stimuli above flicker fusion frequency, the perception of objects at locations different from their actual position, the smooth pursuit and saccadic eye movements, the perception of object borders, and perception of pressure phosphenes. Using results from temporal resolution studies and the known details of visual cortical circuitry, explanations are provided for (a) the perception of rapidly changing visual stimuli, (b) how the perception of objects occurs in the correct orientation even though, according to the third-person view, activity from the visual stimulus reaches the cortices in an inverted manner and (c) the functional significance of well-conserved columnar organization of the visual cortex. A comparable circuitry detected in a different nervous system in a remote species-the olfactory circuitry of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster-provides an opportunity to explore circuit functions using genetic manipulations, which, along with high-resolution microscopic techniques and lipid membrane interaction studies, will be able to verify the structure-function details of the presented mechanism of perception. (shrink)

It is standard to suppose that, whether or not they are actually instantiated in our environment, colors are properties. Presumably those who are convinced of this thesis are convinced because they think that’s how we see colors--how visual experience represents them. I argue, in contrast, that there are cases of illusory color perception in which it is more plausible to suppose colors are represented as kinds of stuff or substance rather than as properties. I then show (...) how to extend this result to support the conclusion that colors are always represented in vision as kinds of stuff rather than as properties. In a concluding section, I consider further ways to explore and test the “stuff theory” of visual color representation. I also extract a moral from this investigation about our ability to draw accurate conclusions about our conscious visual experience. (shrink)

In Altered Sensations: Rudolph Koenig’s Acoustical Workshop in Nineteenth-Century Paris, David Pantalony achieves the difficult goal of balancing technical detail and historical narrative in his account of Rudolph Koenig and the nineteenth-century Parisian scientific instrument trade. The Parisian instrument making trade, particularly that of acoustical instruments, was at a high point in the mid-nineteenth century. Chief among scientific instrument makers was Rudolph Koenig (1832-1901), whose atelier at 30 Hautefeuille was at once an artisanal studio, a laboratory, a workshop and (...) a showroom. The negotiations necessary for one building, and one person, to channel such different activities is one of the main themes of Pantalony’s book. Pantalony shows that Koenig’s atelier was central to disputes surrounding the creation of the “modern soundscape” (p. 170). Debates regarding analytic versus holistic conceptions of sound, “objective” visual versus “subjective” by-ear modes of perception and measurement, and experimental versus theoretical results are all prominent in the text, and all framed by the different, but not disparate, functions of Koenig’s atelier; the building acts as a multi-faceted lens through which Pantalony considers Koenig and his instruments in their artistic, intellectual, commercial and social contexts. (shrink)

Recent interpreters portray Aristotle as a Protagorean antirealist, who thinks that colors and other perceptibles do not actually exist apart from being perceived. Against this, I defend a more traditional interpretation: colors exist independently of perception, to which they are explanatorily prior, as causal powers that produce perceptions of themselves. They are not to be identified with mere dispositions to affect perceivers, or with grounds distinct from these qualities, picked out by their subjective effect on perceivers (so-called “secondary (...) qualities”). Rather, they are intrinsic qualities of objects, which are in reality just as they appear to be. At the same time, Aristotle rejects any “simple theory of color” according to which the essence and nature of colors is fully revealed in experience. Although the character of perceptibles as they are experienced is “better known to us,” their essence and nature only comes to be known through a correct theory. (shrink)

Regarding Husserl’s analysis of perception, the validity of concepts like visual sensation and ‘raw’, viz. ‘unapprehended’ sensation has been questioned. In this paper I discuss the issue with two American interpreters of Husserlian phenomenology: William McKenna and Quentin Smith, who respectively defend and criticize Husserl’s account. My aim is to show that their attempts remain controversial. Moreover, I will mention a textual source in which Husserl indirectly justifies the existence of visual sensations.

I defend a view of the structure of visual property-awareness by considering the phenomenon of perceptual constancy. I argue that visual property-awareness is a three-place relation between a subject, a property, and a manner of presentation. Manners of presentation mediate our visual awareness of properties without being objects of visual awareness themselves. I provide criteria of identity for manners ofpresentation, and I argue that our ignorance of their intrinsic nature does not compromise the viability of a (...) theory that employs them. In closing, I argue that the proposed manners of presentation are consistent with key direct-realist claims about the structure of visual awareness. (shrink)

At any given time, a subject has a multiplicity of conscious experiences. A subject might simultaneously have visual experiences of a red book and a green tree, auditory experiences of birds singing, bodily sensations of a faint hunger and a sharp pain in the shoulder, the emotional experience of a certain melancholy, while having a stream of conscious thoughts about the nature of reality. These experiences are distinct from each other: a subject could experience the red book without (...) the singing birds, and could experience the singing birds without the red book. But at the same time, the experiences seem to be tied together in a deep way. They seem to be unified, by being aspects of a single encompassing state of consciousness. (shrink)

In order to study whether there exist a period of activity in the human early visual cortex that contributes exclusively to visual awareness, we applied transcranial magnetic stimulation over the early visual cortex and measured subjective visual awareness during visual forced-choice symbol or orientation discrimination tasks. TMS produced one dip in awareness 60–120 ms after stimulus onset, while forced-choice orientation discrimination was suppressed between 60 and 90 ms and symbol discrimination between 60 and 120 ms. (...) Thus, a time window specific to visual awareness was found only in the orientation condition at 120 ms. The results imply that both conscious and unconscious perception depend on activity in early visual areas. On the basis of previous estimates of neural processing speed, we suggest that the late part of the activity period most likely involve local extrastriate–striate interactions which provide the contents for visual awareness but are not themselves sufficient for awareness to arise. (shrink)

Confucius became a subject for visual representation after the Han court formally endorsed his teachings, and his earliest images appeared in schools and offering shrines. As his official cult evolved, and until the 1530 ritual reform, iconic portraits of Confucius and his disciples received offerings in temples throughout China. During the Song period, his portrayals became more diverse, and some reproduced pictures kept by his Kong descendants in Qufu曲阜and Quzhou衢州. Attributions to the Tang painter Wu Daozi 吳道子became customary and (...) persistent, despite tenuous connections. Until the 20th century, images of Confucius primarily concerned the literate elite, for whom he was an exemplar of moral cultivation. Pictorial biographies of Confucius, made in considerable numbers from the middle Ming onward, brought him more vividly to life and to a wider range of society. In recent decades, new images of Confucius have evolved to serve a range of contemporary purposes. (shrink)

Let me begin by indicating where I think Harman and I are in agreement. We both think that "subjective reactions" must come into an account of color, although we have different views about how they do. We both think that perceptual experience has a "presentational or representational character," and that color is represented by our visual experiences as a feature of external objects, not as a feature of our experience. Moreover, we agree that, as Harman puts it, "color is (...) experienced as a simple basic quality, rather than a disposition or complex of causal properties." As Harman emphasized in an earlier paper, 1 what we are introspectively aware of in our experience is its presentational or representational content, not any "mental paint" which bestows this content. I shall refer to all of this as Harman's "phenomenological point." Because we agree on this, we also agree that if his characters George and Mary were spectrum inverted relative to each other, supposing that to be possible, this would have to involve their perceiving the same objects as having different properties, this despite the fact that as normal perceivers they would perceive these objects as having the same colors. And I think we agree that in this case the properties would have to be relational ones, defined or constituted by their relations to the experiences of the subject perceiving them. (shrink)

The culture of traditional clothing and jewelry is an integral part of the ancient Chinese civilization. Chinese traditional costume is distinguished by its rich content, relevance at any time, as well as its unique features. Traditional clothing was influenced by successive millennial dynasties that brought the chaos of war. Traditional Chinese clothing has not only become the embodiment of the Chinese concepts of "the unity of Heaven and man", "the ritual of respect for nature and harmonious coexistence with nature", but (...) also a visual representation of the cultural characteristics of different dynasties and the level of development of production. Chinese traditional costume carries the thinking of many Chinese philosophical teachings and schools, reflects the clash and synthesis of agrarian and nomadic cultures of different regions of China. The value of culture carried by the Chinese traditional costume goes beyond the costume itself, it reflects both the social hierarchy, and the peculiarities of society management, and the national spirit. In this article, based on the objective and subjective conditions of the formation of the culture of Chinese costume and accessories, on the basis of ornaments, patterns, colors of garments, as well as on the example of the Shenyi robe that violated previous traditions, the features of the embodiment of Chinese traditional cultural values in clothing are considered. (shrink)

Sensation is the reflection of the brain on the individual attributes of objective things that directly act on the sense organs. Feeling is the most elementary cognitive process and the simplest psychological phenomenon. Vision is a kind of sense, and sense is produced by objective things acting on the sense organs. But at present, it is rare to analyze interior design exhibition from the perspective of visual psychology, an emerging science, as an interdisciplinary attempt, only in interior design research. (...) Therefore, the study of sensory process should start from its external stimuli, in order to first understand how it acts on the sensory organs to produce sensory phenomena. This paper mainly studies the visual performance of psychological factors in interior design under the background of artificial intelligence. This paper proposes a K-means clustering algorithm and a localization algorithm fused with visual and inertial navigation. The distance thresholds corresponding to the SIFT feature descriptors of threshold T1, 128D, 96D, 64D, and 32D are 170, 160, 150, and 90, respectively. This verifies that the candidate image with the highest number of matching points is considered the best matching image. (shrink)

red and round. According to common sense, the red, round thing we see is the tomato itself. When we have a hallucinatory vision of a tomato, however, there may be present to us no red and round phys- ical object. Still, we use the words 'red' and 'round' to describe that situation as well, this time applying them to the visual experience itself. We say that we have a red, round visual image, or a visual experience of (...) a red disk, or some such. Because we see physical objects far more often than we hallucinate, we apply terms for color and shape to physical objects far more often than to visual experiences. Moreover, different theories of perception explain in different ways the applications such terms have to physical objects and to visual experiences. But whatever their frequency and explanation, it seems clear that both sorts of application occur. (shrink)