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- Austen Clark (2004). Feature-Placing and Proto-Objects. Philosophical Psychology 17 (4):443-469.This paper contrasts three different schemes of reference relevant to understanding systems of perceptual representation: a location-based system dubbed "feature-placing", a system of "visual indices" referring to things called "proto-objects", and the full sortal-based individuation allowed by a natural language. The first three sections summarize some of the key arguments (in Clark, 2000) to the effect that the early, parallel, and pre-attentive registration of sensory features itself constitutes a simple system of nonconceptual mental representation. In particular, feature integration--perceiving something as being both F and G, where F and G are sensible properties registered in distinct parallel streams--requires a referential apparatus. Section V. reviews some grounds for thinking that at these earliest levels this apparatus is location-based: that it has a direct and nonconceptual means of picking out places. Feature-placing is contrasted with a somewhat more sophisticated system that can identify and track four or five "perceptual objects" or "proto-objects", independently of their location, for as long as they remain perceptible. Such a system is found in Zenon Pylyshyn's fascinating work on "visual indices", in Dana Ballard's notion of deictic codes, and in Kahneman, Treisman, and Wolfe's accounts of systems of evanescent representations they call "object files". Perceptual representation is a layered affair, and I argue that it probably includes both feature-placing and proto-objects. Finally, both nonconceptual systems are contrasted with the full-blooded individuation allowed in a natural language.Reading list | Discuss | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
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One of the biggest challenges in understanding perception is to understand how the nervous system manages to integrate the multiple codes it uses to represent features in multiple sensory modalities. From different cortical areas, which might separately register the sight of something red and the touch of something smooth, one effortlessly generates the perception of one thing that is both red and smooth. This process has been variously called "feature integration", "binding", or "synthesis". Citing some current models and some historical precursors, this paper makes some simple observations about the logic of feature integration. I suggest that "feature conjunction" is not strictly speaking conjunction at all, but rather joint predication; and that the critical task in "binding" is not simply grouping scattered representations together, or providing them a common label, but rather identifying those that have a common subject matter-those that are.
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| | Other links: selfpace.uconn.edu | Scholar | At my library | More options ... What are the relations between preattentive feature-placing and states of perceptual awareness? For the purposes of this paper, states of "perceptual awareness" are confined to the simplest possible exemplars: states in which one is aware of some aspect of the appearance of something one perceives. Subjective contours are used as an example. Early visual processing seems to employ independent, high-bandwidth, preattentive feature "channels", followed by a selective process that directs selective attention. The mechanisms that yield subjective contours are found very early in this processing. An experiment by Greg Davis and Jon Driver is described; it seems to show that multiple subjective figures can be coded in these preattentive, parallel stages of visual processing. I propose that some of these preattentive states might register the very same differences that, were one aware of them, would be phenomenal differences. Some arguments pro and con on this possibility are assessed.
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| | Scholar | More options ... Does feature evolution stop once we have acquired sufficient features to perform a recognition task? With extended practice, novices may develop a more sophisticated feature space that allows them to perform more accurately or quickly. Our work on perceptual expertise indicates that feature learning and reorganization can continue even after an initial set of features is available to represent a novel class of objects.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Arguments for feature creation receive support from studies of young infants forming category representations from perceptual experience. A challenge for Schyns et al. will be to determine how a feature creation system might interface with a perceptual system that appears constrained to follow organizational principles that specify how edge segments should be grouped into functional units of coherent object representations.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Schyns, Goldstone & Thibaut oppose the notion of fixed feature analysis, suggesting the possibility of flexible feature creation in object recognition and categorisation. Such proposals cannot be assessed until clear definitions of the objects in question and their decompositions are formulated. Flexibility may come from the decompositions of objects rather than from feature creation.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... In his book A Theory of Sentience, Austen Clark argues that the content of sensory representations can be expressed as sentences constructed from a language of sentience. Such sentences specify that a determinate feature obtains in a particular space-time region, but the language's limited vocabulary prohibits the sentences from referring or attributing features to objects. In this paper, I show that this view is flawed in at least two ways. First, if sensation has the capacities that Clark and others attribute to it, then the vocabulary of sense extends further than he supposes, and a limited language of sentience cannot justify a prohibition of object representation within sentience. Second, even if the language of sentience is as impoverished as he claims, and thus even if the representational capacity of sentience is correspondingly limited, object individuation can plausibly occur at the level of sensation. In the course of defusing Clark's major argument for an “object-less” theory of sentience, I offer reasons to believe both that sensory representations can be impressively sophisticated in what they say about the world, and that object representations can be surprisingly basic.
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| | Other links: informaworld.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... What is it for a predicate or a general term to be a rigid designator? Two strategies for answering this question can be found in the literature, but both run into severe difficulties. In this paper, it is suggested that proper names and the usual examples of rigid predicates share a semantic feature which does the theoretical work usually attributed to rigidity. This feature cannot be equated with rigidity, but in the case of singular terms this feature entails their rigidity, as understood in the standard characterisation. Hence, it is appropriate to call this feature proto-rigidity.
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| | Other links: springerlink.com jstor.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... First, what it is for a sentient being to sense is for it to employ two distinct capacities: one for representing places-at-times; the other for representing "features" (60, cf. 70). Exercised together, the result is akin to feature-placing, which brings us to the second thesis: what sensory systems represent is that features are instantiated at place-times. Accordingly, sensory systems do not, for instance, attribute properties to objects, such as trees, tables, bodies, or persons (163).
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Concerns of ontological parsimony have driven some philosophers to defend the view that there are absolutely no things at all (or, at most one—the World). I examine these (given their counterintuitiveness) surprisingly well-motivated views and diagnose their errors. Both Spinoza’s ‘field metaphysic’ (attributed to him by Bennett), and Cortens and Hawthorne’s feature-placing based ‘ontological nihilism’ surreptitiously re-introduce ‘things’ or ‘substances’ into their systems. Alan Sidelle’s stuff-ontological object nihilism either has to re-admit objects back into his system, or, perhaps incoherently, and certainly counterintuitively, hold that we create objects ex nihilo by a process of conceptualization.
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| | Scholar | More options ... Three different ways to understand the representational content of the feature maps employed in early vision are compared. First is Stephen Kosslyn's claim, entered as part of the debate over mental imagery, that such areas support "depictive" representation, and that visual perception uses them as depictive representations. Reasons are given to doubt this view. Second, an improved version of what I call "feature-placing" is described and advanced. Third, feature-placing is contrasted with the notion that the representational content of those feature maps could be conveyed in a list of sentences about visual objects. Some problems with this last alternative are described.
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| | Other links: selfpace.uconn.edu | Scholar | More options ... Discussion of Austen Clark, Feature-placing and proto-objects
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