COUDRAY Quentin

As High as Eyes Can See : A Moderate Liberalism for the Admissible Contents of Perception

Etablissement d’inscription au doctorat

EHESS

Directeurs

Jérôme Dokic et Corrado Sinigaglia

Equipe

PERCEPTION, MEMOIRE, REPRESENTATIONS

CONTACT

A philosophically crucial question within contemporary philosophy of perception is to determine what things we can perceive, as opposed to things we can only think about. In this thesis, I defend a “liberal” view of perception which accepts that we can perceive some kinds of high-level contents. I propose an original argument based on describing a relevant psychological mechanism that grants such representational capacity that I call schematization. Schematization describes a process by which perceptual systems (I focus on vision) representationally structure their sensory inputs, prioritizing certain feature dimensions, and implicitly activate (or prime) similar representations stored in perceptual memory. Schematization is a purely perceptual process that allows us to represent contents that are not reducible to low-level contents : aspects. Aspects represent some high-level kind properties of particulars. They represent particulars as having some physical body form that makes them belong to a superficial kind, such as the superficial kind of cat-form or chair-form. Crucially, I argue that aspects cannot represent natural or functional kind properties like cat-hood or chair-hood, since such properties depend on below-surface, non-visible characteristics of objects. I thus argue that careful empirical considerations about the representational capacities of perception vindicate a moderate Liberalism that only admits aspects representing superficial kind properties as the higher-level contents of perception. Aspects are as high as eyes can see.