Vowel normalization as perceptual constancy

This chapter explores the broad thesis that most if not all perceptual experiences are infused or soaked with imaginings. To begin, the author articulates a sense of imagination useful for this discussion, avoids some pitfalls, and incorporates the result into a schematic guidance principle. The thought behind the principle is that imaginative contributions to perceptual experiences are self-generated ingredients to perception that have a reasonably direct, ampliative impact on the relevant perceptual experiences. This framework is then applied to three sets of case studies: object-kind and object-sameness experiences (Strawson 1970); colour (Macpherson 2012); and amodal completion (Nanay 2010) and perceptual constancy. Although the case studies have interesting differences, they all conform to the guidance principle. Since each has the potential to independently justify the thesis that perceptual experiences are infused with imaginings, they collectively provide sound motive to provisionally endorse it.

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Functions of Same-Tracking

10.1093/oso/9780198717195.003.0004 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Ruth Garrett Millikan

Keyword(s):

Relative Location ◽

Perceptual Constancy ◽

Object Constancy ◽

The Difference

There are non-uniceptual same-tracking mechanisms, mechanisms that same-track not in order to implement storage of information about their targets, but merely as an aid to the identification of further things. Examples are the various mechanisms of perceptual constancy, self-relative location trackers, object-constancy mechanisms, and same-trackers for real categories. There are also several kinds of unicepts, hence, of unitrackers, procedural, substantive, attributive. What begins as a non-uniceptual same-tracker might or might not be redeployed to serve also as a procedural unitracker, or a procedural unitracker might be redeployed to serve also as a substance unitracker or an attribute unitracker. This is possible because the difference between affordances, substances, and attributes is not a basic ontological distinction but is relative to cognitive use.

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Art and Ambiguity

10.1093/oso/9780199666416.003.0003 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

John O’Dea

Keyword(s):

Perceptual Experience ◽

Three Dimensional ◽

Empirical Work ◽

Visual Interpretation ◽

Perceptual Constancy ◽

Multistable Perception ◽

State Of Affairs

This chapter defends a solution to the problem of variable appearances that co-occur with perceptual constancy. In conditions which are non-ideal, yet within the range of perceptual constancy, we see things veridically despite a puzzling “appearance” which is suggestive of a non-veridical state of affairs. For example, a tilted coin is often taken to have an “elliptical appearance”. This chapter defends Gestalt-shift approach, according to which these appearances are in fact illusory, but not part of normal perceptual experience. The experience of ellipticality when viewing a tilted coin, it is argued, arises from something like a brief and unstable Gestalt shift to a different visual interpretation of the scene, of the kind that E. H. Gombrich argued artists invoke when painting a three-dimensional scene on a flat canvas. Recent empirical work on multistable perception is used to show how this might work.

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