Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Philosophy

Advisor

Eric Mandelbaum

Committee Members

Muhammad Ali Khalidi

Tatiana Emmanouil

Subject Categories

Cognition and Perception | Philosophy of Mind

Keywords

philosophy of perception, vision science, visual attention

Abstract

You are currently seeing many things, and, hopefully, you are currently about to see many other things. Many of the things that you are about to see will not be surprising, because you expect to see them. Sometimes, though, when you expect to see one thing and are faced with another, that thing will look like the thing you expected it to be, and not like the thing it actually is. This dissertation is an attempt to get a handle on what is happening in the visual system in these instances. In particular, I am trying to figure out what sort of mental state a perceptual expectation like this is, from the angle of both its content (noun-phrase, singular-when-filled, perceptual) and its functional profile (uses content from memory, contributes content to occurrent perception, dispositionally future-oriented). I examine what happens when these perceptual expectations run up against, or coincide with, what one is attempting to attend to. I argue that expecting can help us ignore otherwise surprising distractions which would grab our attention, and that it can help us visually locate things that would otherwise be quite hard to find even with focused attention, and vice versa in both instances. I also look at what this all means for a particular discussion about mental content: namely, which species of content are conceptual, and which are nonconceptual. I argue that the answers are probably none and none, respectively. I conclude with some thoughts about the foregoing’s relation to consciousness, and about the relationship between contemporary analytic philosophy of mind and the behavioral and brain sciences.

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