Workshop: How perception makes things available for thought

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The Senses Project at Rice will be running a workshop, How perception makes things available for thought, Nov. 9th from 10am until 6pm. There will be a pre-workshop meeting of the Mind and Perception Reading Group at 4pm, Nov. 8th.

Main speakers & Schedule:

Imogen Dickie (10a-12p)
University of Toronto
“How attentional links with objects enable ‘that’ thoughts”

Adam Pautz (1:30p-3:30p)
University of Texas, Austin
“How does consciousness ground thought?”

Jeff Speaks (4p-6p)
University of Notre Dame
“Perceptual content and the explanatory role of experience”

Pre-workshop Meeting:

Note that there will be a pre-workshop meeting of the Mind and Perception Reading Group on Friday, October 8:

Indrek Reiland (4p-6p)
University of Southern California
“Experiences, Sensings, and Seemings”

Sponsor(s):

  • Mind & Perception Workshop, Humanities Research Center
  • Philosophy Department

Event Poster: download
For additional information, see philevents.

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Upcoming Reading Group Meetings

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Here is the schedule for the next two weeks of readings. Please note the schedule change.

  • Oct 9: Berit Brogaard (2012) “Vision for Action and the Contents of Perception” Journal of Philosophy 569–587
  • Oct 16: Alva Noe (2009) “Conscious Reference” Philosophical Quarterly 470-482

Update 10/17: For our next meeting, October 23, we’ll be reading the prelude and chapter 1 of:

  • Oct 23: Mohan Matthen (2005) Seeing, Doing, and Knowing: A Philosophical Theory of Sense Perception, Oxford University Press
  • Oct 30: off, no reading
  • Nov 6: week of the The Senses workshop.

As the list indicates, after that we’ll have a week off before the week of the The Senses workshop. We won’t have any reading group meeting that week either.

Upcoming Mind and Perception Reading Group Meetings

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The reading group has agreed on the following schedule for the next few meetings:

  • Sept. 18: Bennett and Hacker (2003) Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, chapter 3.
  • Sept. 25: Andy Clark (2013) “Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science”, BBS. pp. 181–204
  • Oct 2: Berit Brogaard (2011) “Conscious Vision for Action Vs. Unconscious Vision for Action” Cognitive Science 1076–1104
  • Oct 9: Alva Noe (2009) “Conscious Reference” Philosophical Quarterly 470-482
  • Oct 16: Alva Noe (2012) Varieties of Presence (selections)

We need to workout the details on some of the later readings, but this is a pretty good idea of what’s coming up. As always, we will be meeting 12:00–1:30pm in the philosophy department lounge.

Start of the Fall 2013 Mind and Perception Reading Group

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We will be starting up the Mind and Perception Reading Group again this fall. The group will meet on Wednesdays, 12:00–1:30 in the philosophy lounge. Our first meeting will be on September 4, and we’ll aim to meet weekly. Hopefully we will have 10–12 meetings during the semester. The group will focus on recent philosophy and philosophically informed cognitive science articles on the following topics:

  • Multimodal perceptual experiences
  • The Naive Realist/Representationalist debate and externalism about phenomenology
  • Philosophy of perception informed epistemology
  • Concepts and demonstrative thoughts
  • Empirically-informed philosophy of mind/perception

For the first meeting we’ll be reading

Heather Logue (2012), “What Should the Naive Realist Say about Total Hallucinations?” Philosophical Perspectives 26 (1):173–199 (link)

After that there is no set schedule. I’ve attached a short list of some preliminary reading suggestions, but I hope that members of the group will make other suggestions. Suggestions and readings need not be limited to the topics listed above. Since we’ll be meeting weekly, we will try to avoid very long papers. Information about upcoming meetings will be posted up here as the readings are set.

New Site!

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The Mind and Perception Workshop has a new page. Most of the posts here will be announcements about upcoming talks and reading group meetings. I’ve tried my best to put up posts for all the Workshop activity from the last few years, for those who would like to browse and see. Hopefully the comment feature will be useful, e.g. for questions about workshop talks and suggestions for reading group readings.

best!

Summer 2013: Mind and Perception Reading Group

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The Mind and Perception reading group will be meeting again next Wednesday on July 3, from 10:30 to 12:00 in the lounge. We’ll be reading James Genone’s paper “Appearance and Illusion”, which is forthcoming in Mind. A manuscript version can be got from philpapers: http://philpapers.org/rec/GENAAI
Abstract: Recent debates between representational and relational theories of perceptual experience sometimes fail to clarify in what respect the two views differ. In this essay, I explain that the relational view rejects two related claims endorsed by most representationalists: the claim that perceptual experiences can be erroneous, and the claim that having the same representational content is what explains the indiscriminability of veridical perceptions and phenomenally matching illusions or hallucinations. I then show how the relational view can claim that errors associated with perception should be explained in terms of false judgments, and develop a theory of illusions based on the idea that appearances are properties of objects in the surrounding environment. I provide an account of why appearances are sometimes misleading, and conclude by showing how the availability of this view undermines one of the most common ways of motivating representationalist theories of perception.