Philosophy 250: Philosophy of Cognitive Science: Perceptual Interactions

Philosophy 250: Philosophy of Cognitive Science
Perceptual Interactions

Where: https://ucsd.zoom.us/j/861014721
When: Thursdays 1-4, spring quarter 2020

Instructors

Matthew Fulkerson
mfulkerson@ucsd.edu
Office hours: Wednesdays 2-3 and by appointment, at https://ucsd.zoom.us/j/491680692.

Jonathan Cohen
Last name, followed by the at sign, followed by the four letter abbreviation for the university, followed by '.', followed by 'edu'
Office hours: Tuesdays 2-3 and by appointment, at https://ucsd.zoom.us/j/814756443.

Overview

This graduate seminar will focus on a cluster of interactions involving perception, and the lessons they hold for philosophical thinking about perception and the mind. These include interactions within perceptual modalities (e.g., the combination of different cues to obtain a single visual depth estimate), between modalities (e.g., the McGurk Effect), slightly more recherche (pathological?) interactions such as we see in synesthesia, connections between perception and emotion, and more. We'll spend some time talking about the range of interactive phenomena, how we might best characterize them, similarities and differences between the cases, and what they have to teach us about perception, perceptual systems, modularity, and cognitive architecture.

This seminar counts toward the distribution requirement in the area of philosophy of mind and language; it also counts as a core seminar.

Requirements

The seminar requirements are of two main kinds: presentations, and a medium length (15 page) final paper.

Presentation: All attendees (including auditors) will be required to lead a seminar discussion. A presentation should be a critical discussion rather than a mere summary or book report (the presenter can assume that other participants have done the reading, and the other participants will make it the case that such an assumption is correct!), and should contain a thesis and arguments for that thesis. It can concern any topic connected with the week's reading that is of interest to the presenter. You must discuss your presentation with one of the instructors sometime before the session in which you present, just to make sure we're on the same page. Seminar presentations may be given using notes, a handout, or slides, but they may not be read aloud from a pre-written paper.
Final Paper: Students taking the course for credit will pass in a single 15 page paper by the end of the quarter, on a topic of their own choosing that relates to the subject matter of the course. All such papers must be pre-approved in conversation with the instructors. We mean it. Really.

Grading

We will determine your grade based on the following breakdown:
25% seminar presentations and participation
75% final paper

Further notes:

Below we list core readings for the seminar; we'll be adding secondary readings from the critical literature. Other changes may happen as well.
Most readings are linked below and obtainable (though in some cases only from a UCSD ip number, possibly through vpn). The ones not linked will be made available through canvas or dropbox.

Tentative Schedule

Week	Topic	Reading	Presenters
1-2	Classic perceptual interactions, the senses	Grice, "Some remarks about the senses" Keely, "Making sense of the senses: Individuating modalities in humans and other animals"; Nudds, "The significance of the senses" O'Callaghan, "The Multisensory Character of Perception"	Oisin, Andy, Samantha, Imani
3-4	Advanced multisensory interaction	Angelaki and DeAngelis, "Multisensory Integration: psychophysics, neurophysiology, and computation", Ernst and Bulthoff, "Merging the senses into a robust percept", Casey O'Callaghan, "Grades of Multisensory Awareness"	Michael, Zachary, Cameron
5-6	Perception and action	Susan Hurley, "Perception and Action: Alternative Views"; Briscoe and Grush, "Action-Based Theories of Perception,"; Noe, "Precis of Action in Perception"; De Vignemont, "A Mosquito Bite Against the Enactive Approach to Bodily Experiences"	Andy, Zack, Ruoro, Oisin
7-8	Multimodal individuals	O'Callaghan, "Intermodal Binding Awareness"; Green,"Binding and Differentiation in Multisensory Object Perception"; Nudds, "Is audio-visual perception 'amodal' or 'cross-modal'?"; Cohen, "Multimodal binding as mereological co-constituency"	Matt, Imani, Cameron, Jonathan
9-10	Epistemic interactions	Siegel, "Cognitive Penetrability and Perceptual Justification"; Fulkerson, "Sensory Interactions and the Epistemology of Haptic Touch"; Nanay, "Multimodal Mental Imagery and Perceptual Justification"	Samantha, Matt, Jonathan