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Is The Visual System As Smart As It Looks?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Patricia Smith Churchland
Patricia Smith Churchland*
Affiliation:
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N.J. and University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba
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Extract

Here is one way to portray the history of research on the visual system. It consists of a rivalry between those who discern the benchmarks of intelligence in visual perception, and those who seek to show how the appearance of intelligence can be stripped away to reveal the reality of essential stupidity. In the main the rivalry has been exciting and productive, as the two egg each other on to ever more extreme exertions; that is to exhibit demonstrations of ever more cunning ways in which stupid elements can be wired and assembled to yield smart looking results, and by reply, to exhibit demonstrations of ever more subtle and striking performances of the visual system which betoken intelligence and defy reduction by existing reductive hypotheses. The demonstrations of intelligence have typically come from behavioral experiments concerning, for example, illusory contours, and constancy in such things as size.perception and orientation perception.

Type
Part XI. Inference in Perception
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1982 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1982 , 1982 , pp. 541 - 552
Copyright
Copyright © 1983 Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

*

I gratefully acknowledge support for this research by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, grant no. 410-81-0182.

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