Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 New work for a theory of universals
- 2 Putnam's paradox
- 3 Against structural universals
- 4 A Comment on Armstrong and Forrest
- 5 Extrinsic properties
- 6 Defining ‘intrinsic’ (with Rae Langton)
- 7 Finkish dispositions
- 8 Noneism or allism?
- 9 Many, but almost one
- 10 Casati and Varzi on holes (with Stephanie Lewis)
- 11 Rearrangement of particles: Reply to Lowe
- 12 Armstrong on combinatorial possibility
- 13 A world of truthmakers?
- 14 Maudlin and modal mystery
- 15 Humean Supervenience debugged
- 16 Psychophysical and theoretical identifications
- 17 What experience teaches
- 18 Reduction of mind
- 19 Should a materialist believe in qualia?
- 20 Naming the colours
- 21 Percepts and color mosaics in visual experience
- 22 Individuation by acquaintance and by stipulation
- 23 Why conditionalize?
- 24 What puzzling Pierre does not believe
- 25 Elusive knowledge
- Index
21 - Percepts and color mosaics in visual experience
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 February 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 New work for a theory of universals
- 2 Putnam's paradox
- 3 Against structural universals
- 4 A Comment on Armstrong and Forrest
- 5 Extrinsic properties
- 6 Defining ‘intrinsic’ (with Rae Langton)
- 7 Finkish dispositions
- 8 Noneism or allism?
- 9 Many, but almost one
- 10 Casati and Varzi on holes (with Stephanie Lewis)
- 11 Rearrangement of particles: Reply to Lowe
- 12 Armstrong on combinatorial possibility
- 13 A world of truthmakers?
- 14 Maudlin and modal mystery
- 15 Humean Supervenience debugged
- 16 Psychophysical and theoretical identifications
- 17 What experience teaches
- 18 Reduction of mind
- 19 Should a materialist believe in qualia?
- 20 Naming the colours
- 21 Percepts and color mosaics in visual experience
- 22 Individuation by acquaintance and by stipulation
- 23 Why conditionalize?
- 24 What puzzling Pierre does not believe
- 25 Elusive knowledge
- Index
Summary
Professors Firth's “Sense–Data and the Percept Theory” examines a disagreement over the nature of visual experience. Those in the traditions of British empiricism and introspectionist psychology hold that the content of visual experience is a sensuously given mosaic of color spots, together with a mass of interpretive judgments injected by the subject. Firth calls this the Sense–Datum Theory, but I shall call it the Color–Mosaic Theory (since the opposing theory also accepts something we might call a sense datum). Those in the newer traditions of linguistic phenomenology, Husserlian phenomenology, and Gestalt psychology agree that visual experience consists rather of sensuously given percepts - presentations of ostensible constituents of the external world. Firth calls this the Percept Theory, as shall I. He himself is one of a growing number of epistemologists who accept it.
As we shall see in the next section, Firth shows how the difference between the two theories may be stated as a disagreement over a certain thesis: the Exposure Hypothesis. Color-mosaic theorists implicitly accept the Exposure Hypothesis; percept theorists such as Firth reject it.
I claim that the Exposure Hypothesis, properly understood, does not conflict with Firth's Percept Theory. I shall propose an interpretation of the Exposure Hypothesis and the central thesis of the Color–Mosaic Theory within the terms of the Percept Theory itself. If I am right, disagreement over the Exposure Hypothesis is not disagreement over the nature of visual experience, but only over the value of a certain way of speaking.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology , pp. 359 - 372Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999