Philosophy of Vision science

There is something irresistible about the idea that we visually perceive the world by means of images. Images represent information holistically, as when a single region of a picture encodes hue, saturation, brightness, two or three dimensions of spatial position, and perhaps other features like orientation and size. These features are represented as a package, without discrete constituents for each property. However, standard models of visual perception in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience deny that visual perception is imagistic in this sense. Instead, vision is often thought of as an assembly line: each feature is detected separately in parallel and stitched together in a final binding operation before being shipped out to “consumers” like cognition, action, and conscious awareness. This talk argues that this assembly-line picture captures only one form of feature composition: binding features into object files, which make feature conjunctions available for explicit decision and verbal report. The visual system also separately constructs icons, imagistic representations that compose features holistically. There is no one visual “percept”, but rather a variety of outputs of visual processing that obey distinct compositional principles and perform distinct functions. Vision—like the mind more generally—is redundant and pluralistic.

Some social kinds are both socially constructed and perceptible, such as MONEY, GENDER and – as I will focus on here – RACE. However, this gives rise to a puzzle: how does culture shape and bias what we perceive? I argue that perceptual learning is the best explanation of our ability to perceive social kinds. Drawing upon known factors that influence perceptual learning, I propose four ways in which culture can shape and bias perception. This account makes clear that the process of enculturation can begin at a very early age, and does not in most cases require background knowledge on the part of the learner: the causal pathways by which perceptual learning occur suffice. In addition – and crucial for understanding the persistence of racism despite a decline in racist attitudes – it can help explain how certain cultural practices become entrenched in a society: by ‘anchoring’ the social kind in perception.