Reconstruction of the History of Medieval and (Post-) Cartesian Theories of Perception in Terms of the Negative Heuristics of their Respective Research Programs. Basic Epistemological Contrasts

Abstract

The central concern of medieval epistemologists in so far as they dealt with problems of perception was to construct an adequate theory of vision. And the overriding problem within the theory of vision was to explain (rather than to justify¹) the transmission of information from the seen object to the seeing eye. That is, if the full scope of the problem of perception is seen, in modern terms, to stretch all the way from distal and proximal to peripheral and central variables, then what the Arab and medieval scholars found particularly intriguing and problematic was the link between distal focus and peripheral response. The need for distinguishing a proximal variable in perception was not felt. Nor, consequently, were questions raised concerning the ‘ecological validity’ or the potential cue value of the proximal characteristics relative to the distal events. Furthermore, the intraorganismic processing of the given in perception was not felt to be of crucial relevance to the theory of perceptual knowledge. To be sure, according to the Scholastics the sensible imprints of nature upon our senses are further refined by operations of abstraction whereby sensible forms (species sensibiles) give rise to intelligible ones (species intelligibiles)—which explains, or attempts to explain, how we arrive at universals and how they are related to sense experience.