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Beyond Inference in Perception

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Stephen P. Stich
Stephen P. Stich*
Affiliation:
University of Maryland
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Extract

The controversy over inference in perception turns on the nature of the processes that intervene between the stimulus.and the perceptual experience or percept. For those who find it useful to conceptualize such matters in boxological shorthand, the dispute can be viewed as focusing on the contents of the box in Figure 1. (Figures will be found at the end of the paper.)

Gibsonians have stressed the informational richness of the stimulus and have argued that in virtue of that informational richness no complex inferential processes must be postulated in the box. Rather, the perceptual mechanism can be thought of as “picking up” or “resonating to” the information in the stimulus. But, of course, the suggestion that the perceptual system can pick up information “directly” from the stimulus does not really speak to the issue of what is in the box.

Type
Part XI. Inference in Perception
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1982 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1982 , 1982 , pp. 553 - 560
Copyright
Copyright © 1983 Philosophy of Science Association

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