Knowing What I See
Name
Byrne_Knowing What I See.pdf
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264.05 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
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Author(s)
Byrne, Alex
Date Issued
June 2012
Journal
Introspection and Consciousness (book)
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Citation
Byrne, Alex. "Knowing What I See." Chapter 7 in Introspection and Consciousness, Edited by Declan Smithies and Daniel Stoljar, Oxford: Oxford University Press, June 2012.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
If I descry a hawk, I find the hawk but I do not find my seeing of the hawk. My
seeing of the hawk seems to be a queerly transparent sort of process, transparent
in that while a hawk is detected, nothing else is detected answering to the verb in
‘see a hawk’.
Ryle, The Concept of Mind
1. Introduction
By using my eyes, I can come to know that there is a hawk perching on the fence post.
Cognitive science has made enormous progress in understanding how we have this sort of
perceptual knowledge. Any textbook on perception will go into detail about the receptors
in the eye, the detection of low-level features such as edges, the recovery of 3D shape,
and theories of object recognition. Much is controversial, and much is unknown, but the
broad shape of a satisfying account, together with some of the intricate small parts, is
clear enough.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
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DOI of Published Version
http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Philosophy/Mind/?view=usa&ci=9780199744794
