Hostname: page-component-6bf8c574d5-t27h7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-02-26T06:41:48.670Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Evolving Perceptual Categories

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Cailin O’Connor
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article uses sim-max games to model perceptual categorization with the goal of answering the following question: To what degree should we expect the perceptual categories of biological actors to track properties of the world around them? I argue that an analysis of these games suggests that the relationship between real-world structure and evolved perceptual categories is mediated by successful action in the sense that organisms evolve to categorize together states of nature for which similar actions lead to similar results. This conclusion indicates that both strongly realist and strongly antirealist views about perceptual categories are too simple.

Type
Signaling Theory in Biological and Cognitive Sciences
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 81 , Issue 5 , December 2014 , pp. 840 - 851
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

†

Many thanks to Brian Skyrms, Simon Huttegger, Jeffrey Barrett, Kyle Stanford, Michael McBride, James Weatherall, Louis Narens, Kimberly Jameson, Grant Ramsey, Katherine Brading, and Justin Bruner for comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank audiences at the PSA 2012, GIRL Lund 2013, the MCMP, the Notre Dame HPS colloquium series, and the UCI Social Dynamics seminar for wonderful feedback.

References

Barrett, Jeffrey A. 2007. “Dynamic Partioning and the Conventionality of Kinds.” Philosophy of Science 74:527–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crawford, Vincent P., and Sobel, Joel. 1982. “Strategic Information Transmission.” Econometrica. 50 (6): 1431–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cressman, R. 2003. Evolutionary Dynamics and Extensive Form Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gardenfors, Peter. 2000. Conceptual Spaces: On the Geometry of Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goodman, N. 1972. “Seven Strictures on Similarity.” In Problems and Projects, ed. Goodman, N.. New York: Bobbs-Merrill.Google Scholar
Hoffman, Donald. 2009. “The Interface Theory of Perception: Natural Selection Drives True Perception to Swift Extinction.” In Object Categorization: Computer and Human Vision Perspectives, ed. Dickinson, S., Tarr, M., Leonardis, A., and Schiele, B., 148–65. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Huttegger, Simon M. 2007. “Evolution and the Explanation of Meaning.” Philosophy of Science 74:1–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huttegger, Simon M., Skyrms, Brian, Smead, Rory, and Zollman, Kevin J. S.. 2010. “Evolutionary Dynamics of Lewis Signaling Games: Signaling Systems vs. Partial Pooling.” Synthese 172:177–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jäger, Gerhard. 2007. “The Evolution of Convex Categories.” Linguistics and Philosophy 30:551–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jäger, Gerhard, Metzger, Lars P., and Riedel, Frank. 2011. “Voronoi Languages: Equilibria in Cheap-Talk Games with High-Dimensional Types and Few Signals.” Games and Economic Behavior 73 (2): 517–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kruschke, John K. 2008. “Models of Categorization.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Computational Psychology, ed. Sun, R., 267–301. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lewis, David K. 1969. Convention. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Lipman, Barton. 2009. “Why Is Language Vague?” Working paper, Department of Economics, Boston University.Google Scholar
Mark, Justin T., Marion, Brian B., and Hoffman, Donald. 2010. “Natural Selection and Veridical Perceptions.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 266:504–15.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Marr, David. 1982. Vision: A Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information. New York: Freeman.Google Scholar
Mohlin, Erik. 2014. “Optimal Categorization.” Journal of Economic Theory 152:356–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murphy, G. L. 2002. The Big Book of Concepts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O’Connor, Cailin. 2013. “The Evolution of Vagueness.” Erkenntnis 79 (4): 707–27.Google Scholar
Pawlowitsch, Christina. 2008. “Why Evolution Does Not Always Lead to an Optimal Signaling System.” Games and Economic Behavior 63:203–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Purves, Dale, Wojtach, William T., and Lotto, R. Beau. 2011. “Understanding Vision in Wholly Empirical Terms.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 108 (3): 15588–95.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Skyrms, B. 1996. Evolution of the Social Contract. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Skyrms, B. 2000. “Stability and Explanatory Significance of Some Simple Evolutionary Models.” Philosophy of Science 67:94–113.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thompson, Evan. 1995. “Color Vision, Evolution, and Perceptual Content.” Synthese 104:1–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar