Philosophy of Vision science

Philosophers and vision scientists have spent much time discussing object perception—paradigmatic cases of seeing solid, bounded material things, like tables and chairs. By contrast, there has been a relative neglect of perceptions of uncountable stuff like water, snow, mud, mist, smoke, sand, rubble, and metal. This talk will sketch a theory of stuff perception to complement our theories of object perception. First, drawing on the syntax and semantics of mass nouns, I isolate a characteristic ‘stuffy’ representational profile, which is also reflected in stuff perception. I propose that perception represents stuff under distinct mass-like attributives and pseudopartitive-like constructions, mirroring the profile of natural language mass nouns and pseudopartitives. Second, I propose that stuffs are perceptually represented by field-like structures that encode continuous distributions of material that admit many possible partitions—depending, for example, on patterns in density, flow, or accumulation—rather than discrete individuals with a canonical decomposition into parts. These stuff field representations explain the distinctive dynamics and organization of stuff perception, as contrasted with the object files standardly posited in theories of object perception.