Abstract
Teleological accounts of sensory normativity treat normal functioning for a species as a standard: sensory error involves departure from normal functioning for the species, i.e. sensory malfunction. Straightforward reflection on sensory trade-offs reveals that normal functioning for a species can exhibit failures of accuracy. Acknowledging these failures of accuracy is central to understanding the adaptations of a species. To make room for these errors we have to go beyond the teleological framework and invoke the notion of an ideal observer from vision science. The notion of an ideal observer also sheds light on the important distinction between sensory malfunction and sensory limitation.
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Notes
For my purposes it is important to emphasize the species-relative character of normal functioning. For discussion see Gauker (2011, p. 199).
For a helpful illustration, see Neander’s (2013, p. 33) discussion of neurologically damaged toads.
Dretske (1988, p. 68) calls these unnatural circumstances. He has in mind conditions which divorce “a sensitive biological detector” from “the habitat in which it developed, flourished, and faithfully serviced its possessor’s biological needs.” Matthen (1988, p. 12) refers to these as cases of maladaptation: “if a system is exposed to environmental circumstances to which it is not adapted, circumstances manufactured by a laboratory worker for example, then it may be ‘fooled”’.
Rogers is talking about the perception of a match between the shape of an Ames room and the shape of the corresponding rectangular-shaped room. He is not talking about the familiar size distortions generated by Ames rooms.
For example, in a two-choice detection task requiring subjects to determine whether a stimulus is present, the perceiver’s goal might be either to maximize accuracy or to minimize expected costs (relative to a specific cost function).
See also Gauker (2011, pp. 204–5). Gauker suggests that, in taking legitimate task errors to be errors, we may well be importing a standard derived from human judgment. Gauker makes this proposal in the context of accounting for what he calls persistent illusions, illusions like the Müller-Lyer which do not involve any functional abnormality. I think Gauker’s approach to persistent illusions is a powerful way to address legitimate errors. I depart from Gauker on the issue of how to understand what he calls “mere misperception” (194–200), i.e. error at the sensory level. Gauker takes errors of this sort to involve departures from what is normal for a species (199). I argue against this general approach in §4 below.
Mendelovici (2013) brings up the interesting possibility that color vision might always and everywhere misrepresent the world because there are in fact no colors in the world. The teleological framework does not have any obvious way of acknowledging such errors as errors. They are not due to abnormality and they are not normal misperceptions as Matthen understands them. I myself do not share Mendelovici’s worry because I am inclined to acknowledge sensory error only when doing so will help to explain deficient performance on perceptual tasks. This response to Mendelovici concedes that there may be error at the level of thought. Descartes famously denies that color experience is systematically in error while maintaining that everyday thinking about color involves a mistake. See Ganson and Ganson (2010). For discussion of a different set of objections to Mendelovici, see Artiga (2013) and Mendelovivi (2016).
For other potential examples of sensory limitation due to impoverished information, see the literature suggesting that standard illusions are byproducts of optimal solutions to ambiguous stimuli: Weiss et al. (2002), Geisler and Kersten (2002), Corney and Lotto (2007), Brown and Friston (2012), and Lupyan (2015).
No doubt some readers will prefer to think of facsimiles as giving rise to sensory errors. I set this issue aside because it does not affect my central thesis thesis that teleological theories are inadequate.
Of course, we are likely to gain greater insight into the accuracy costs of the species’ adaptations when our models are biologically more realistic (i.e. when the models include biological constraints).
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Acknowledgements
This paper has been significantly improved thanks to expert feedback from two anonymous referees. I greatly appreciate their advice and patience. I also wish to thank Marc Artiga and Ben Bronner for valuable written comments on an earlier version of this paper. Finally, thanks to Dorit Ganson for encouragement and discussion of the issues.
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Ganson, T. Sensory malfunctions, limitations, and trade-offs. Synthese 195, 1705–1713 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1298-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1298-3