56 found
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  1. (1 other version)Sensory Qualities.Austen Clark - 1992 - Oxford, GB: Clarendon Press.
    Drawing on work in psychophysics, psychometrics, and sensory neurophysiology, Clark analyzes the character and defends the integrity of psychophysical explanations of qualitative facts, arguing that the structure of such explanations is sound and potentially successful.
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  2. A Theory of Sentience.Austen Clark (ed.) - 2000 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Drawing on the findings of neuroscience, this text proposes and defends the hypothesis that the various modalities of sensation share a generic form that the author, Austen Clark, calls feature-placing.
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  3. (1 other version)A Theory of Sentience.Austen Clark - 2000 - Philosophy 77 (299):135-138.
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  4.  27
    Psychological Models and Neural Mechanisms: An Examination of Reductionism in Psychology.Austen Clark - 1980 - Oxford University Press.
    This book offers a systematic account of the reduction of psychological models of behavior to underlying neural mechanisms. "Clark has approached an extremely difficult and important issue in a systematic masnner and has done much to clarify concepts that are all too often mismanaged and confused in the psychological literature." --American Scientist.
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  5. Feature-placing and proto-objects.Austen Clark - 2004 - Philosophical Psychology 17 (4):443-469.
    This paper contrasts three different schemes of reference relevant to understanding systems of perceptual representation: a location-based system dubbed "feature-placing", a system of "visual indices" referring to things called "proto-objects", and the full sortal-based individuation allowed by a natural language. The first three sections summarize some of the key arguments (in Clark, 2000) to the effect that the early, parallel, and pre-attentive registration of sensory features itself constitutes a simple system of nonconceptual mental representation. In particular, feature integration--perceiving something as (...)
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  6. True theories, false colors.Austen Clark - 1996 - Philosophy of Science (Supplement) 63 (3):143-50.
    University of Connecticut Storrs, CT 06279-2054. Recent versions of objectivism can reply to the argument from metamers. The deeper rift between subjectivists and objectivists lies in the question of how to explain the structure of qualitative similarities among the colors. Subjectivism grounded in this fashion can answer the circularity objection raised by Dedrick. It endorses skepticism about the claim that there is some one property of objects that it is the function of color vision to detect. Color vision may enable (...)
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  7. Beliefs and desires incorporated.Austen Clark - 1994 - Journal of Philosophy 91 (8):404-25.
    Suppose we admit for the sake of argument that "folk" explanations of human behavior--explanations in terms of beliefs and desires--sometimes succeed. They sometimes enable us to understand and predict patterns of motion that otherwise would remain unintelligible and unanticipated. Is the only explanation for such success that folk psychology is a viable proto-scientific theory of human psychology? I shall describe an analysis which yields a negative answer to that question. It was suggested by an observation and an analogy, both of (...)
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  8. Painfulness is not a quale.Austen Clark - 2005 - In Murat Aydede (ed.), Pain: New Essays on its Nature and the Methodology of its Study. MIT Press.
    When you suffer a pain are you suffering a sensation? An emotion? An aversion? Pain typically has all three components, and others too. There is indeed a distinct sensory system devoted to pain, with its own nociceptors and pathways. As a species of somesthesis, pain has a distinctive sensory organization and its own special sensory qualities. I think it is fair to call it a distinct sensory modality, devoted to nociceptive somesthetic discrimination. But the typical pain kicks off other processes (...)
     
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  9. Three varieties of visual field.Austen Clark - 1996 - Philosophical Psychology 9 (4):477-95.
    The goal of this paper is to challenge the rather insouciant attitude that many investigators seem to adopt when they go about describing the items and events in their " visual fields". There are at least three distinct categories of interpretation of what these reports might mean, and only under one of those categories do those reports have anything resembling an observational character. The others demand substantive revisions in one's beliefs about what one sees. The ur-concept of a " visual (...)
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  10. The particulate instantiation of homogeneous pink.Austen Clark - 1989 - Synthese 80 (August):277-304.
    If one examines the sky at sunset on a clear night, one seems to see a continuum of colors from reds, oranges and yellows to a deep blue-black. Between any two colored points in the sky there seem to be other colored points. Furthermore, the changes in color across the sky appear to be continuous. Although the colors at the zenith and the horizon are obviously distinct, nowhere in the sky can one see any color borders, and every sufficiently small (...)
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  11.  59
    Color perception (in 3000 words).Austen Clark - 1998 - In George Graham & William Bechtel (eds.), A Companion to Cognitive Science. Blackwell.
    A neighbor who strikes it rich evokes both admiration and envy, and a similar mix of emotions must be aroused in many neighborhoods of cognitive science when the residents look at the results of research in color perception. It provides what is probably the most widely acknowledged success story of any domain of scientific psychology: the success, against all expectation, of the opponent process theory of color perception. Initially proposed by a Ewald Hering, a nineteenth century physiologist, it drew its (...)
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  12. Sensing, objects, and awareness: Reply to commentators.Austen Clark - 2004 - Philosophical Psychology 17 (4):553-79.
    I am very grateful to my commentators for their interest and their careful attention to A Theory of Sentience. It is particularly gratifying to find other philosophers attracted to the murky domain of pre-attentive sensory processing, an obscure place where exciting stuff happens. I can by no means answer all of their objections or counter-arguments, and some of the problems noted derive from failures in my original exposition. But a theory is a success if it helps spur the creation of (...)
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  13.  70
    Cross-modal cuing and selective attention.Austen Clark - 2011 - In Fiona Macpherson (ed.), The Senses: Classic and Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives. Oxford University Press USA. pp. 375.
  14. (1 other version)Spectrum inversion and the color solid.Austen Clark - 1985 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 23 (4):431-43.
    The possibility that what looks red to me may look green to you has traditionally been known as "spectrum inversion." This possibility is thought to create difficulties for any attempt to define mental states in terms of behavioral dispositions or functional roles. If spectrum inversion is possible, then it seems that two perceptual states may have identical functional antecedents and effects yet differ in their qualitative content. In that case the qualitative character of the states could not be functionally defined.
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  15. Attention and Inscrutability: A commentary on John Campbell, Reference and Consciousness.Austen Clark - 2006 - Philosophical Studies 127 (2):167-193.
    We assemble here in this time and place to discuss the thesis that conscious attention can provide knowledge of reference of perceptual demonstratives. I shall focus my commentary on what this claim means, and on the main argument for it found in the first five chapters of "Reference and Consciousness". The middle term of that argument is an account of what attention does: what its job or function is. There is much that is admirable in this account, and I am (...)
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  16. Qualia and the Psychophysiological Explanation of Color Perception.Austen Clark - 1985 - Synthese 65 (3):377-405.
    Can psychology explain the qualitative content of experience? A persistent philosophical objection to that discipline is that it cannot. Qualitative states or 'qualia' are argued to have characteristics which cannot be explained in terms of their relationships to other psychological states, stimuli, and behavior. Since psychology is confined to descriptions of such relationships, it seems that psychology cannot explain qualia. A paradigm case of qualia is provided by simultaneous color contrast effects, in which a neutral grey patch is made to (...)
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  17. Attention & Inscrutability.Austen Clark & Manchester Hall - unknown
    We assemble here in this time and place to discuss the thesis that conscious attention can provide knowledge of reference of perceptual demonstratives. I shall focus my commentary on what this claim means, and on the main argument for it found in the first five chapters of Reference and Consciousness. The middle term of that argument is an account of what attention does: what its job or function is. There is much that is admirable in this account, and I am (...)
     
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  18. Phenomenal properties: Some models from psychology and philosophy.Austen Clark - 2008 - Philosophical Issues 18 (1):406-425.
    Forthcoming in Philosophical Issues, vol 18, Interdisciplinary Core Philosophy: The Metaphysics and Perception of Qualities. Alex Byrne & David Hilbert, section editors.
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  19. Psychological Models and Neural Mechanisms.Austen Clark - 1982 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 33 (2):230-234.
     
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  20. A Physicalist Theory of Qualia.Austen Clark - 1985 - The Monist 68 (4):491-506.
    Although the capacity to discriminate between different qualia is typically admitted to have a definition in terms of functional role, the qualia thereby related are thought to elude functional definition. In this paper I argue that these views are inconsistent. Given a functional model of discrimination, one can construct from it a definition of qualia. The problem is similar in many ways to Goodman's definition of qualia in terms of 'matching', and I argue that many of his findings survive reinterpretation (...)
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  21.  70
    Vicissitudes of non-visual objects: Comments on Macpherson, O’Callaghan, and Batty.Austen Clark - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 153 (1):175 - 181.
    The papers by Macpherson, O'Callaghan, and Batty reveal some startling differences in the objects and properties represented by different modalities. They also reveal some tensions between different ways of understanding what it is for any one modality to represent objects and properties.
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  22. Some logical features of feature integration.Austen Clark - 2001 - In Werner Backhaus (ed.), Neuronal Coding of Perceptual Systems. World Scientific. pp. 3-20.
    One of the biggest challenges in understanding perception is to understand how the nervous system manages to integrate the multiple codes it uses to represent features in multiple sensory modalities. From different cortical areas, which might separately register the sight of something red and the touch of something smooth, one effortlessly generates the perception of one thing that is both red and smooth. This process has been variously called "feature integration", "binding", or "synthesis". Citing some current models and some historical (...)
     
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  23.  87
    Color, qualia, and attention : a non-standard interpretation.Austen Clark - 2010 - In Jonathan Cohen & Mohan Matthen (eds.), Color Ontology and Color Science. Bradford. pp. 203.
    A standard view in philosophy of mind is that qualia and phenomenal character require consciousness. This paper argues that various experimental and clinical phenomena can be better explained if we reject this assumption. States found in early visual processing can possess qualitative character even though they are not in any sense conscious mental states. This non-standard interpretation bears the burden of explaining what must be added to states that have qualitative character in order to yield states of sensory awareness or (...)
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  24. Location, location, location.Austen Clark - manuscript
    Forthcoming in Lana Trick & Don Dedrick , Cognition, Computation, and Pylyshyn. MIT Press. Presented at the Zenon Pylyshyn Conference , University of Guelph, 1 May 2005.
     
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  25. Mice, shrews, and misrepresentation.Austen Clark - 1993 - Journal of Philosophy 90 (6):290-310.
  26. Quality space.Austen Clark - 2000 - In A Theory of Sentience. New York: Oxford University Press.
     
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  27. Phenomenal consciousness so-called.Austen Clark - 2001 - In Werner Backhaus (ed.), Neuronal Coding of Perceptual Systems. World Scientific.
    "Consciousness" is a multiply ambiguous word, and if our goal is to explain perceptual consciousness we had better be clear about which of the many senses of the word we are endorsing when we sign on to the project. I describe some of the relatively standard distinctions made in the philosophical literature about different meanings of the word "conscious". Then I consider some of the arguments of David Chalmers and of Ned Block that states of "phenomenal consciousness" pose special and (...)
     
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  28. Sensory and perceptual consciousness.Austen Clark - 2007 - In Max Velmans & Susan Schneider (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness. New York: Wiley-Blackwell.
    Asked on the Dick Cavett show about her former Stalinist comrade Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy replied, "Every word she says is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'." The language used to describe sensory and perceptual consciousness is worthy of about the same level of trust. One must adapt oneself to the fact that every ordinary word used to describe this domain is ambiguous; that different theoreticians use the same words in very different ways; and that every speaker naturally thinks that (...)
     
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  29.  74
    Spatial Organization and the Appearances Thereof in Early Vision.Austen Clark - 2012 - In Gary Hatfield & Sarah Allred (eds.), Visual Experience: Sensation, Cognition, and Constancy. Oxford University Press. pp. 135.
    The perception of the lightness of surfaces has been shown to be affected by information about the spatial configuration of those surfaces and their illuminants. For example, two surfaces of equal luminance can appear to be of very different lightness if one of the two appears to lie in a shadow. How are we to understand the character of the processes that integrate such spatial configuration information so as to yield the eventual appearance of lightness? This paper makes some simple (...)
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  30. A subjectivist reply to spectrum inversion.Austen Clark - 1993
    Subjectivists hold that you cannot specify color kinds without implicitly or explicitly referring to the dispositions of observers. Even though "yellow" is ascribed to physical items, and presumably there is something physical in each such item causing it to be so characterized, the only physical similarity between all such items is that they all affect an observer in the same way. So the principles organizing the colors are all found within the skin.
     
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  31. Comments on Bill Lycan, "More Layers of Perceptual Content".Austen Clark - unknown
    I'm very happy here to be sandwiched between Lycan and Millikan, two of the living philosophers from whom I've probably learned the most, and to whom I am the most grateful. Plus the intermediary position is appropriate for someone commenting on intermediary representations in vision. There's much to like in Bill 's account of "layering" in visual representation. For one, it makes explicit and publicizes the notion that there are multiple layers of representation involved even in the seemingly simple achievement (...)
     
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  32. Contemporary problems in the philosophy of perception.Austen Clark - 1994 - American Journal of Psychology 107 (4):613-22.
    Imagine, if you will, that the entire community of investigators interested in the problems of perception all lived together in the same town. Some continual shuffling of neighbors would be inevitable, and there might be occasional episodes of mass relocation and energetic bulldozing, but after a while the residents would probably settle down and find themselves living in districts defined roughly by disciplinary boundaries. The experimental psychologists would occupy the newer part of town, laced with superhighways, workshops and factories, machines (...)
     
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  33. Functionalism and the definition of theoretical terms.Austen Clark - 1983 - Journal of Mind and Behavior 4 (3):339-352.
  34. Hypothetical Constructs, Circular Reasoning, and Criteria.Austen Clark - 1983 - Journal of Mind and Behavior 4 (1).
     
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  35. How do feature maps represent?Austen Clark - unknown
    Three different ways to understand the representational content of the feature maps employed in early vision are compared. First is Stephen Kosslyn's claim, entered as part of the debate over mental imagery, that such areas support "depictive" representation, and that visual perception uses them as depictive representations. Reasons are given to doubt this view. Second, an improved version of what I call "feature-placing" is described and advanced. Third, feature-placing is contrasted with the notion that the representational content of those feature (...)
     
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  36.  16
    How to establish a difference in function.Austen Clark - 1983 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 6 (3):451.
  37. How to respond to philosophers on raw feels.Austen Clark - 1997
    I address this talk to anyone who believes in the possibility of an informative empirical science about sensory qualities. Potentially this is a large audience. By "sensory quality" I mean those qualities manifest in various sensory experiences: color, taste, smell, touch, pain, and so on. We should include sensory modalities humans do not share, such as electro-reception in fish, echolocation in bats, or the skylight compass in birds. Those pursuing empirical science about this large domain might pursue it in the (...)
     
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  38. I am Joe's explanatory gap.Austen Clark - 1994
    _tableau_ can be given a full and satisfying explanation, while others cannot. We can explain in a full and satisfying way why the water in the mug is identical with H2O, why its liquidity is identical with a state of its molecular bonds, and why its heat is identical with its molecules being in motion. But we cannot explain in the same way why the neural processes which Joe undergoes when he looks at the mug are such as to make (...)
     
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  39. Inversions spectral and bright: Comments on Melinda Campbell.Austen Clark - 1996
    Spectrum inversion is a thought experiment, and I would wager that there is no better diagnostic test to the disciplinary affiliation of a randomly selected member of the audience than your reaction to a thought experiment. It is a litmus test. If you find that you are paying close attention, subvocalizing objections, and that your heart-rate and metabolism go up, you have turned pink: you are a philosopher. If on the other hand the thought experiment leaves you cold, and you (...)
     
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  40. Psychofunctionalism and chauvinism.Austen Clark - 1986 - Philosophy of Science 53 (December):535-59.
    The psychofunctionalist claim that psychological terms can be defined through the use of an experimental theory has been criticized on the grounds that it is "chauvinistic": that it denies mentality to any creature of which the selected theory is false. I analyze the "argument from science fiction" that is thought to establish this conclusion, and show that its plausibility rests on a scope ambiguity in formulations of functional definitions. One formulation is indeed chauvinistic, but an alternative rendering is not, and (...)
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  41.  14
    (1 other version)Perception: Color.Austen Clark - 1998 - In George Graham & William Bechtel (eds.), A Companion to Cognitive Science. Blackwell. pp. 282–288.
    A neighbor who strikes it rich evokes both admiration and envy, and a similar mix of emotions must be aroused in many neighborhoods of cognitive science when the residents look at the results of research on color perception. It provides what is probably the most widely acknowledged success story of any domain of scientific psychology: the success, against all expectation, of the opponent process theory of color perception. Initially proposed by a Ewald Hering, a nineteenth‐century physiologist, it drew its inspiration (...)
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  42. Philosophical issues about perception.Austen Clark - 2003 - In L. Nadel (ed.), Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. Nature Publishing Group.
    the philosophical regions. I will identify three: three obvious zones of The first and third of these kinds of problem are studied almost tectonic conflict within contemporary cognitive approaches to exclusively within departments of philosophy. Applied to perception.
     
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  43. Perception, philosophical issues about.Austen Clark - 2003 - In L. Nadel (ed.), Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. Nature Publishing Group.
    the philosophical regions. I will identify three: three obvious zones of The first and third of these kinds of problem are studied almost tectonic conflict within contemporary cognitive approaches to exclusively within departments of philosophy. Applied to perception.
     
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  44. Preattentive precursors to phenomenal properties.Austen Clark - manuscript
    What are the relations between preattentive feature-placing and states of perceptual awareness? For the purposes of this paper, states of "perceptual awareness" are confined to the simplest possible exemplars: states in which one is aware of some aspect of the appearance of something one perceives. Subjective contours are used as an example. Early visual processing seems to employ independent, high-bandwidth, preattentive feature "channels", followed by a selective process that directs selective attention. The mechanisms that yield subjective contours are found very (...)
     
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  45.  34
    Reductionism and subjectivism defined and defended.Austen Clark - 1992 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 15 (1):32-33.
  46. Reductionism & subjectivism defined & defended.Austen Clark - unknown
    As a reductionist and a subjectivist I find little to dispute, and much to cheer, in the use of the comparative argument against objectivism. The best available form of objectivism is anthropocentric realism, and at the very least the comparative argument dispels much of the..
     
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  47. Sensing and reference.Austen Clark - 2000
    When I was revising _Sensory Qualities_ there was a period of about a year when I set the manuscript aside and did other things. When I returned to it I found that certain portions of the argument had collapsed of their own weight, like an old New England barn, and could be carted off the premises without compunction. Other parts were wobbling on their foundation, while some had weathered well and seemed nice and solid. My revision strategy was simple: I (...)
     
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  48. Seeing and summing: Implications of computational theories of vision.Austen Clark - 1984 - Cognition and Brain Theory 7 (1):1-23.
    Marr's computational theory of stereopsis is shown to imply that human vision employs a system of representation which has all the properties of a number system. Claims for an internal number system and for neural computation should be taken literally. I show how these ideas withstand various skeptical attacks, and analyze the requirements for describing neural operations as computations. Neural encoding of numerals is shown to be distinct from our ability to measure visual physiology. The constructs in Marr's theory are (...)
     
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  49.  20
    The algorithm/implementation distinction.Austen Clark - 1987 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 10 (3):480-480.
  50.  19
    The logic of the comparative approach.Austen Clark - 1984 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 7 (3):437-438.
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