Abstract
In Origins of Objectivity Burge advances a theory of perception according to which perceptions are, themselves, objective representations. The possession of veridicality conditions by perceptual states—roughly, non-propositional analogues of truth-conditions—is central to Burge’s account of how perceptual states differ, empirically and metaphysically, from sensory states. Despite an impressive examination of the relevant empirical literatures, I argue here that Burge has not succeeded in securing a distinction between perception and “mere” sensation.
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Notes
Unless otherwise noted, parenthetical citations refer to Burge (2010a).
Discussion here is focused on the “lower border” of Burge’s account—the distinction between perception and sensation—for two reasons. The first is that the border between perception and higher-level representational systems such as perceptual memory and imagination is, as Burge acknowledges, “delicate” (p. 378). The second is that I find Burge’s critique of “Individual Representationalist” approaches generally convincing.
As Ganson et al. remark (2014, p. 564), Burge’s confidence in supposing that constancies are sufficient for perception is “somewhat puzzling” given that this is a “substantive empirical matter.”
In his “Disjunctivism and Perceptual Psychology” (2005) Burge refers to these norms as biasing principles. In Origins he adopts the term formation principles, for rhetorical reasons (p. 92 n41).
There are other impressive examples of kinesthetic constancies; see Butwill and Turvey (2002) for discussion and partial review.
Contributors to the literature have long taken seriously the possibility that some kinds of perception are not representationally mediated (Koffka 1935; Wallach 1939, 1948; Pitts and McCulloch 1947; Gibson 1950, 1966, 1979; Bridgeman et al. 1979; Turvey and Shaw 1979; Michaels and Carello 1981; Solomon 1988; Solomon and Turvey 1988; Warren et al. 1988; Goodale et al. 1991; Goodale and Milner 1992; Fitzpatrick et al. 1994; Amazeen and Turvey 1996; Goodale and Humphrey 1998; Pagano and Donahue 1999; O’Regan and Noë 2001; Wang and Simons 1999; Wang and Spelke 2002; see Epstein (1995) for discussion) and some philosophers endorse accounts of perception that appeal to proximal invariants in explanations of perceptual constancies across perceptual modalities (e.g. O’Regan and Noë 2001; Noë 2004; see Clark 2001 for discussion).
Experimental demonstrations of such constancies are complicated in part by the fact that it is difficult to design studies that vary stimulus properties and contextual features independently. The most powerful demonstrations from a theoretical perspective suggest that constancies can be mathematically assimilated to invariant properties of stimulation. For example, Foster and Nascimento (1994) have shown that the ratios of cone-excitation in the retina can in principle serve as the basis for perceptual color constancy, at least in the case of color relations. See section 5, below.
There are also many cases in which the proprioceptive system appears to adopt a principle of constancy, but constancies are not in fact achieved. For example, while there are conditions under which people appear to generate constant estimates of force, perceptions of force magnitude change as a function of the muscle group implicated in producing the force: muscle forces appear to be perceived veridically but are not in fact perceived veridically (Jones 2003).
On other readings, the theory is not concerned to assign contents to perceptual states at all (Chomsky 1995; Egan 1995). Chomsky (1995, p. 55) makes the plausibility of such interpretations clear where he writes that investigations into the nature and functioning of cognitive capacities would proceed unchanged even if it were discovered
...that our ancestors had been constructed in an extraterrestrial laboratory and sent to earth by space ship 30,000 years ago, so that natural selection played virtually no role in the formation of the kidney, visual system, arithmetical competence, or whatever. The technical sections of textbooks on the physiology of the kidney would not be modified, nor the actual theory of the functions computed by the retina or of other aspects of the human visual system and other systems.
Burge (2005 n20) dismisses these interpretations as “misinformed.”
Most computational theories of color constancy are based on some version of this hypothesis, though assumptions about the way in which the visual system generates illuminance estimates differ. Prominent theories include, for example, the assumption that the average reflectance of the whole scenes is gray (Buchsbaum 1980) and the assumption that the brightest surface in a scene is always white (Land and McCann 1971).
Burge is explicit about his view that “color is a property of physical entities, including some physical entities whose natures are in themselves often mind-dependent in the strongest sense” (p. 48).
Additional evidence for the view that color vision is not uniquely attuned to the reflectance properties of surfaces comes from the well-established fact that the presence of surrounding regions is necessary for perceptual experiences of black or brown, suggesting that color contrast is central to color vision (Gelb 1938; Kaiser and Boynton 1996; cf. Hardin 1988, 1992).
For other examples, see Chap. 9 of Origins.
Burge intimates that his dissatisfaction with deflationary notions of representation has more to do with commonsense intuitions than with their scientific value. For example, he writes that to individuate perceptual states without reference to environmental attributes is to abandon “anything like satisfying insight into the nature of perceptual states” (p. 100).
Even researchers committed to the view that the function of color vision is the detection of surface reflectance properties recognize that illuminance and intensity signals in the retinal array are not always “confounded” as traditional models have long presupposed, but rather “ambiguous” (Toscani et al. 2013; Hurlbert and Wolf 2004).
Wider ranges of stimuli designed to capture the conditions of “everyday vision” have only been used widely in the past 10 years. One prominent new line of research concerns color perception in actual three-dimensional environments, which are typically not coplanar and which typically involve geometrically complex patterns of illumination. A second concerns the perception of surface properties apart from color and lightness, such as texture and gloss.
There is evidence that variation in capacities for color vision confers biological advantages at the level of populations rather than at the level of individuals. For example, Osorio and Vorobyev (1996) have suggested that trichromatic color vision evolved in New World primates because it offers a selective advantage in terms of discriminating fruit from foliage: trichromat monkeys are 50 % more likely than dichromats to do so successfully in good light. However, they also found that dichromats are better at detecting fruit in the same environment in low lighting conditions; this suggests that the biological advantages of each phenotype are realized at the level of the community via sex-linked polymorphisms. This suggests a tension in Burge’s claim that an individual’s biological needs enter into the individuation of representational contents (p. 94), and a further tension in his claim that representational and biological conditions on accuracy can be cleanly divorced.
This thesis was adopted Luneburg (1947), Gibson (1950, 1966), Epstein and Park (1963), Epstein (1977), Hochberg (1971), Gregory (1973), Rock (1975, 1983), Cutting (1986), Ullman (1978), Marr (1982), and Hildreth (1984). It is perhaps most prominently associated with Gibson (1950), though he ultimately rejected his own arguments for the view (1979).
While these initial demonstrations involved simple stimuli, subsequent investigations have revealed comparable distortions in judgments of real 3D objects in fully illuminated natural environmental contexts (Norman et al. 1996; Todd and Norman 2003; Hecht et al. 1999; Koenderink et al. 2000, 2002; Loomis and Philbeck 1999). An intuitive demonstration is provided by close attention to the dashed lines separating lanes on a highway. As one approaches a dash while driving, it appears to expand from the length of about 1 m to a length of 3 m—to roughly the length of a car (Shaffer et al. 2008).
Traditional experimental paradigms have limited investigations of 3D shape. Until very recently, psychophysical measures have typically concerned judgments of the magnitude of an objects extension in depth, or estimations of depth-width ratios. Current advances in scientific understanding of shape perception—and its limitations—have been facilitated by the introduction of more complex stimuli and psychophysical methods. New tasks require that observers estimate some aspect or aspects of 3D structure at multiple different points on an objects surface, to judge the relative depth of particular points on a given 3D object, to identify the depth profiles of presented 3D objects, or to make judgments of local features of surface orientations. See Koenderink et al. (2001) and Todd (2004).
Even where experimental paradigms explicitly aim to isolate cues, they sometimes implicitly fail to do so. For example, as Domini et al. (2006) point out, in many studies claiming to demonstrate that the visual system fails to provide veridical 3D interpretations of 2D shape projections, the simultaneous presence of motion and disparity cues make such interpretations impossible. Similarly, in other studies the presence and/or absence of motion cues implicitly covary with the presence and/or absence of textural cues (Brenner and Landy 1999), and in cases where texture gradients are controlled, stereo displays are underestimated (Hibbard and Bradshaw 2002).
For example, researchers have begun examining the role of smooth occlusion contours (Koenderink 1984; Koenderink and van Doorn 1982; Malik 1987), gradients of shading (Horn and Brooks 1989; Stewart and Langer 1997), patterns of texture (Malik and Rosenholtz 1997), and specular highlights (Norman et al. 2004).
Still further evidence suggests that the information provided by occlusion contours can be utilized in the perceptual integration of information derived from shading and texture (Reichel and Todd 1990).
Neuroscientific research also suggests there is more going on at the level of the retina than existing computational analyses would suggest. For example, different regions of the retina, it is now known, have different spectral sensitivities across vertebrate species (Temple 2011). While little is known about why so many animals are sensitive to different wavelengths of light in different directions, the facts doubtless matter for determining what information is in fact available to visual systems, and for the development of successful theories about how that information is put to use in achieving visual percepts. Marr himself observes that there is no a priori reason to expect that multiple visual subsystems should be based on a single theory. “Indeed,” he insists, “one would a priori expect the opposite; as evolution progressed, new modules come into existence that can cope with yet more aspects of the data” (1976, p. 5).
Symmetry in this context refers to mirror symmetry, or translational symmetry: as when one half of an object is a mirror image of the other half, or when a graph representing an object is mirror symmetric.
In addition to the case of 3D shape, other perceptual biases exist in contexts where the cues thought necessary to facilitate veridical perception are available. These include distortions of distance and size (Wagner 1985; Bradshaw et al. 2000; Cuijpers et al. 2000; Koenderink et al. 2000, 2002; Loomis et al. 2002; see Todd and Norman 2003 for review). There is also evidence that space constancy—the appearance of a stable visual world in the face of substantial changes to retinal inputs as a result of eye movements—cannot be explained by reference to compensatory efference copy signals alone (O’Regan 1992; Bridgeman et al. 1994; Deubel et al. 2004; Wexler 2005; Combe and Wexler 2010; cf. Gibson 1966, p. 256).
The author of one recent review of neuroscientific investigations of 3D shape shares this expectation. Guy Orban writes that while as yet “little is known about the processing of 3D shape in the primate brain” research over the past 15 years has confirmed that “the brain extracts representations from the visual array that map directly onto a real world object property...3-D shape” (Orban 2011, p. 362).
Historically, visual constancies themselves have been interpreted to indicate that perceptions in one modality are in part the consequences of sensory input from other sensory modalities—this collateral proximal input was supposed to be utilized centrally by organisms to derive invariant responses to distal stimuli experienced across varied conditions (Brunswick 1944).
In several places Burge intimates familiarity with pressures on traditional assumptions regarding what cues are available to and exploited by the visual system and other perceptual systems. See, for example, his remarks at p. 100, n.52, p. 347, n.76 and p. 442, n.13, and in his 2005, n.21.
It bears remarking in this connection that prior to the publication of VisionMarr (1976) distinguished Type 1 and Type 2 theories. Type 1 theories properly apply to biological information processing systems in cases where one has antecedent knowledge of what problem a system is supposed to be solving, and a statement of the method for solving it (1976, p. 2). Type 2 theories, in contrast, apply when and only when a particular problem is “solved by the simultaneous action of a considerable number of processes, whose interaction is its own simplest description” (1976, p. 2). In drawing the distinction, Marr was primarily concerned to highlight the methodological dangers involved in pursuing a Type 2 theory too soon—as for example in cases where a Type 1 theory for some problem exists but hasn’t yet been articulated. Such danger is, in his words, “most acute in premature assaults on a high-level problem, for which few or none of the concepts that underlie its eventual Type 1 theory have yet been developed...the consequence is a complete failure to formulate correctly the problems that are in fact involved” (1976, p. 4). But, Marr continues, “the opposite danger exists lower down...For example...the notion of the primal sketch seems respectable enough, but one might have doubts about the grouping processes that decode it. There are many of them; their details are somewhat messy; and seemingly arbitrary preferences occur (e.g. for vertical or horizontal organizations (ibid)”.
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Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Philipp Koralus, Roy Sorensen, John Doris, Jacob Beck, John Heil, Mike Dacey, and two anonymous reviewers from Synthese for helpful comments on previous drafts. An early version of this paper was presented at the 2012 meeting of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology in Savannah, Georgia. Thanks to participants in that session for their thoughtful questions and suggestions, especially David Pereplyotchik and Jesse Prinz.
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Olin, L. Burge on perception and sensation. Synthese 193, 1479–1508 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0531-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0531-1