Work in Progress Seminar: E.J. Green

Abstract: Perception is not a passive receptacle for impressions made by the world upon the mind; it involves constructive processes that supplement the information available in sensory input. To recover an object’s 3D shape, for instance, our visual system must supplement the 2D image it projects to the retina. A recent movement within philosophy and cognitive science holds that the constructive character of perception depends integrally on mental imagery (i.e., the same sort of capacity you exercise when you visualize your childhood bedroom, or imagine the brassy sound of a trumpet). On this constitutive view of imagery’s role in perception, perceptual representations routinely have imagistic elements. I will challenge this view. First, I raise problems for the expansive conception of imagery on which the constitutive view relies. Roughly, this conception takes imagery to encompass any form of perceptual processing that is not directly caused by sensory inputs. I argue that this conception is ill-defined and fails to capture a unified psychological kind. I then consider perceptual completion, a constructive perceptual process that figures centrally in recent arguments for the constitutive view. I argue that there is little explanatory utility in construing perceptual completion as a form of imagery. More broadly, the constructive character of perception is best understood on its own terms, rather than by reference to imagery.

(Based on joint work with Kevin Lande, York University)