Eric Schwitzgebel

speaker

445 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2011 last heard Jun 2011

Eric Schwitzgebel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

No recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

New Books in Philosophy · Eric Schwitzgebel, “Perplexities of Consciousness” (MIT Press, 2011) · 15 Jun 2011 podcast

So if you look at Aristotle and Epicurus and Sextus, these guys use the signet analogy for perception.

And they also don't attribute projective distortion to experience.

And so for Sextus, I mean, sorry, Epicurus is a nice case of this.

So he thinks that the way you see is that miniature copies of the object are always being fused by that object and then travel through space into your eye.

And as they travel through space, the edges will get worn off.

And that's why you get certain kinds of distortions.

But these objects themselves are three-dimensional and have that same three-dimensional figure as the object that it's effused from.

So he does not attribute projective distortions.

So that's the ancient Greek case.

And if you look at cases where ancient Greek and actually...

in ancient Rome, too, where they attribute distortions to experience.

They don't follow the pattern at all of attributing the types of distortions that you would expect were visual experience flat, like flat media.

Yeah, so this was a big issue for the early introspective psychologists.

What is our mental imagery like?

In fact, probably the very first questionnaire in all of psychology, at least I found none earlier, and I found at least one author who claimed that, a historian who claimed that it was the first questionnaire, was on visual imagery capacities.

So Francis Galton sent around questionnaires to colleagues in science, to

various high-profile people, and then also systematically presented them to schoolboys, asking people to describe the character of their imagery experiences.

For example, how vividly do they imagine things?

And in this questionnaire, he found vast differences in people's self-reports of their imagery ability.

People will go all the way

Showing 181–200 of 445 · page 10 of 23