Perception, Representation and the World: The FINST that binds

Abstract

I recently discovered that work I was doing in the laboratory and in theoretical writings was implicitly taking a position on a set of questions that philosophers had been worrying about for much of the past 30 or more years. My clandestine involvement in philosophical issues began when a computer science colleague and I were trying to build a model of geometrical reasoning that would draw a diagram and notice things in the diagram as it drew it (Pylyshyn, Elcock, Marmor, & Sander, 1978). One problem we found we had to face was that if the system discovered a right angle it had no way to tell whether this was the intersection of certain lines it had drawn earlier while constructing a certain figure, and if so which particular lines they were. Moreover, the model had no way of telling whether this particular right angle was identical to some bit of drawing it had earlier encountered and represented as, say, the base of a particular triangle. There was, in other words, no way to determined the identity of an element (I use the term “element” when referring to a graphical unit such as used in experiments. Otherwise when speaking informally I use the term “thing” on the grounds that nobody would mistake that term for a technical theoretical construct. Eventually I end up calling them “Visual Objects” to conform to usage in psychology) at two different times if it was represented differently at those times. This led to some speculation about the need for what we called a “finger” that could be placed at a particular element of interest and that could be used to identify it as particular token thing (the way you might identify a particular feature on paper by labeling it). In general we needed something like a finger that would stay attached to a particular element and could be used to maintain a correspondence between the individual element that was just noticed now and one that had been represented in some fashion at an earlier time. The idea of such fingers (which....

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,616

External links

  • This entry has no external links. Add one.
Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

  • Only published works are available at libraries.

Similar books and articles

Scene Perception.Ronald A. Rensink - 2000 - In A. E. Kazdin (ed.), Encyclopedia of Psychology. Oxford University Press. pp. 151-155.
Visual Demonstratives.Mohan Matthen - 2012 - In Athanasios Raftopoulos & Peter Machamer (eds.), Perception, Realism and the Problem of Reference. Cambridge University Press.
Perception, generality, and reasons.Hannah Ginsborg - 2011 - In Andrew Evan Reisner & Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen (eds.), Reasons for Belief. Cambridge University Press. pp. 131--57.
Feature-placing and proto-objects.Austen Clark - 2004 - Philosophical Psychology 17 (4):443-469.
Representing the impossible.Jennifer Matey - 2013 - Philosophical Psychology 26 (2):188 - 206.
Same, Models and Representation.Peter Lasersohn - 2000 - In Brendan Jackson & Tanya Matthews (eds.), Proceedings from SALT X. CLC Publications. pp. 83-97.

Analytics

Added to PP
2010-12-22

Downloads
53 (#268,501)

6 months
1 (#1,042,085)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Zenon Pylyshyn
Rutgers University - New Brunswick

References found in this work

Vision.David Marr - 1982 - W. H. Freeman.
Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics.Peter Strawson - 1959 - London, England: Routledge. Edited by Wenfang Wang.
Reference and Consciousness.John Campbell - 2002 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics.Peter Frederick Strawson - 1959 - London, England: Routledge. Edited by Wenfang Wang.

View all 49 references / Add more references