Austen Clark - Böcker
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3 produkter
842 kr
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Many philosophers doubt that one can provide any successful explanation of sensory qualities - of how things look, feel, or seem to a perceiving subject. To provide such an explanation, one would need to explain qualitative facts in non-qualitative terms. Attempts to construct such explanations have seemed, in principle, doomed.Austen Clark examines the strategy used in psychophysics, psychometrics, and sensory neurophysiology to explain qualitative facts. He argues that this strategy could succeed: its structure is sound, and it can answer the various philosophical objections lodged against it. On this basis Professor Clark presents an analysis of senosry qualities that offers the possibility of explaining at least some qualia, and he sketches how this scheme might eventually reduce to neurophysiology. If he is correct, we are not doomed to an eternity of mere acquaintance with our qualia.
2 258 kr
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Austen Clark offers a general account of the forms of mental representation that we call `sensory'. To sense something, one must have some capacity to discriminate among sensory qualities; but there are other requirements. What are they, and how can they be put together to yield full-blown sensing?Drawing on the findings of current neuroscience, Clark proposes and defends the hypothesis that the various modalities of sensation share a generic form that he calls 'feature-placing'. Sensing proceeds by picking out place-times in or around the body of the sentient organism, and characterizing qualities (features) that appear at those place-times. Such feature-placing is a primitive kind--probably the most primitive kind--of mental representation. Once its peculiarities have been described, many of the puzzles about the intentionality of sensation, and the phenomena that lead some to label it 'pseudo-intentional', can be resolved. The hypothesis casts light on many other troublesome phenomena, including the varieties of illusion, the problem of projection, the notion of a visual field, the location of after-images, the existence of sense-data, and the role of perceptual demonstratives. A Theory of Sentience will interest anyone interested in the topics of sensation, representation, or phenomenal consciousness.
1 164 kr
Skickas inom 3-6 vardagar
Many philosophers doubt that one can provide any successful explanation of sensory qualities - of how things look, feel or seem to a perceiving subject. To do so one would need to be able to explain qualitative facts in non-qualitative terms, and attempts to construct such an explanation seem doomed to failure.Austen Clark presents an analysis of sensory qualities that refutes such scepticism and offers the possibility of a solution to the problem of qualia. Drawing on work in psychophysics, psychometrics, and sensory neurophysiology, he analyses the character and defends the integrity of psychophysical explanations of qualitative facts, arguing that the structure of such explanations is sound and potentially successful. Clark gives a compact picture of that unified scheme that emerges from this project and sketches its potential reduction to neurophysiology. He does not claim to have a full explanation or a complete reduction of qualitative facts; rather, he shows that a solution to the problem of sensory qualities is possible, and outlines the structures within which it may yet be found.