[ programme | general abstract | outline | short biography ]
JEAN-NICOD LECTURES 2004
ZENON W. PYLYSHYN
THINGS AND PLACES
How the mind connects with the worldAbstract
The problem of how minds connect with the world has been one of those perennial questions in the philosophy of mind that has enjoyed a revival in recent decades, notably in connection with the puzzle of sentience and the question of how concepts and thoughts are grounded in sensory experience. The notions of nonconceptual representation and demonstrative reference have played a central role in this revival. In these lectures I will introduce this issue from a different perspective, based primarily on empirical studies of attentional selection, tracking, perceptual-motor coordination, and certain phenomena in cognitive development. I will describe some of these phenomena to motivate the need for a particular kind of nonconceptual mind-world relation and will introduce a proposal, called the FINST or Visual Index theory, which hypothesizes a limited capacity mechanism within the visual system for realizing such a nonconceptual connection. I begin by focusing on an experimental paradigm we have developed called Multiple Object Tracking (MOT), which provides a concrete illustration of the operation of FINST indexes, and which also demonstrates some surprising properties of this mechanism. I will describe the MOT experiments, together with some recent challenging findings, in order to illustrate how FINSTs provide an account of the visual system's capacity to keep track of individuals while apparently skirting certain deep philosophical problems of individuation and identity.
Indexes provide a different kind of connection between mind and world than that which characterizes conceptual representations. Conceptual representations are related to the world by the semantic relation of satisfaction, whereas indexes provide a direct, epistemically-unmediated and causally-initiated connection, not unlike that exhibited by demonstrative reference. I will suggest that such a mechanism also has important implications for other problems in the philosophy of mind, most notably the question of how we cognize space. I will provide a brief background to this problem, from the views of Henri Poincaré to those of certain contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists. I will examine the popular view that people easily imagine and think about spatial patterns because they have in some sense internalized space . I will argue that mental representations of spatial layouts do not derive their spatial character by being mapped onto an internal space. On the contrary, representations achieve their spatiality because their contents are projected onto the concurrently-perceived world, thereby allowing them to derive certain critical spatial properties and constraints from real space. Perceptual indexes prove essential to this approach because it is through them that mental representations can be anchored to things that occupy places in real space.
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