The informational content of perceptual experience
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation develops a naturalistic theory of perceptual content based on the insight that our perceptual experience measures the world. This theory is motivated in detail by examples from color perception. The basic idea is that possible color experiences define a measurement scale, and the causal relationship between this scale and the world determines the contents of the measurements it performs. This content is informational content in the sense that it captures the complete information carried by the percept about the world. The biggest problem for a naturalistic theory of perceptual content is accounting for perceptual error. This dissertation provides an alternative to the current most popular strategy for analyzing representational error naturalistically, teleosemantics. I describe how information theory provides the apparatus for analyzing representational efficacy. This suggests that the intentional content of a percept may then be identified with the unique state of the world it represents most effectively. Once we have an analysis of intentional content, we can identify perceptual errors as situations in which a percept's content and the state of the world which caused it diverge.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2010 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Isaac, Alistair Maurice |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Philosophy |
| Primary advisor | Suppes, Patrick, 1922-2014 |
| Primary advisor | Taylor, Kenneth Allen, 1954-2019 |
| Thesis advisor | Suppes, Patrick, 1922-2014 |
| Thesis advisor | Taylor, Kenneth Allen, 1954-2019 |
| Thesis advisor | Diaconis, Persi |
| Thesis advisor | Perry, John |
| Thesis advisor | Ryckman, Thomas |
| Advisor | Diaconis, Persi |
| Advisor | Perry, John |
| Advisor | Ryckman, Thomas |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Alistair Maurice Carter Isaac. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Philosophy. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2010. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2010 by Alistair Maurice Isaac
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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