What's within? Can the internal structure of perception be derived from regularities of the external world?

Abstract

Shepard's approach is regarded as an attempt to rescue, within an evolutionary perspective, an empiricist theory of mind. Contrary to this, I argue that the structure of perceptual representations is essentially co-determined by internal aspects and cannot be understood if we confine our attention to the physical side of perception, however appropriately we have chosen our vocabulary for describing the external world. Furthermore, I argue that Kubovy and Epstein's “more modest interpretation” of Shepard's ideas on motion perception is based on unjustified assumptions. [Kubovy & Epstein; Shepard]