Gary Hatfield

This volume, originally published in 2002, assembles the historical sequence of writings that Kant published between 1783 and 1796 to popularize, summarize, amplify and defend the doctrines of his masterpiece, the Critique of Pure Reason of 1781. The best known of them, the Prolegomena, is often recommended to beginning students, but the other texts are also vintage Kant and are important sources for a fully rounded picture of Kant's intellectual development. As with other volumes in the series there are copious linguistic notes and a glossary of key terms. The editorial introductions and explanatory notes shed light on the critical reception accorded Kant by the metaphysicians of his day and on Kant's own efforts to derail his opponents.

The theory of knowledge in early twentieth-century Anglo American philosophy was oriented toward phenomenally described cognition There was a healthy respect for the mind body problem, which meant that phenomena in both the mental and physical domain were taken sinuously Bertrand Russell's developing position on sense-data and momentary particulars drew upon, and ultimately became like, the neutral monism of Ernst Mach and William James Due to a more recent behaviorist and physicalist inspired "fear of the mental", this development has been down played in historical work on early analytic philosophy Such neglect as sumes that the "linguistic turn" is a proper and permanent effect of twentieth century philosophy, an assumption that distorts early analytic historiography, and begs a substantive philosophical question about thought and cognition.

In _Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature_, Richard Rorty locates the perceived ills of modern philosophy in the “epistemological turn” of Descartes and Locke. Hatfield argues that Rorty’s accounts of Descartes’s and Locke’s philosophical work are seriously flawed. Rorty misunderstood the participation of early modern philosophers in the rise of modern science, and he misdescribed their examination of cognition as psychological rather than epistemological. His diagnostic efforts were thereby undermined, and he missed Descartes’s original conception of a general physics and Locke’s probabilist analysis of the grounds for rational belief.

This chapter moves away from discussion of Baumgarten’s relation to Pietism and the Leibnizian–Wolffian philosophy to examine its place, with particular attention to psychology, within the wider tradition initiated by Descartes. Hatfield focuses specifically on Descartes’ innovative development of a mechanical psychology to complement his rationalist doctrines, and argues that while Baumgarten fails to recognize the importance of the former, he nevertheless makes several important contributions to the latter, which had a significant impact on the future of the discipline.

This chapter discusses Decartes as a rationalist and an experimentalist, as a philosopher-metaphysicist who also relies on experiment and observation as an essential activity of knowledge. It explains deduction in terms of intuition, its connection between one proposition and another as the only way to knowledge and method, as some sets of rules, easy rules that should someone follow them, will lead to the truth. It further explains Descartes concept of the anaclastic which depends on the angle of incidence and the angle of refraction. This chapter also explains Decartes thought that intuition and deduction are the immediate grasping of the propositions and inferential connection between propositions. Finally this chapter explains how certain experiments are needed to arrived at certain knowledge through deduction.

A recent account (by Daston and Galison) defines the modern meaning of “objectivity” in relation to “subjectivity”: objectivity means, among other things, avoiding personal bias. Subjectivity denotes mental characteristics idiosyncratically peculiar to individuals. Without denying that these meanings are found in the modern period (albeit earlier than Daston and Galison suggest), this article maintains that a more profound modern meaning of “the subjective” concerns subjective conditions of perception and thought that need not or indeed cannot vary among individuals. Kant brought this more profound meaning into prominence, and it entered into scientific theories of perception of the nineteenth century. This meaning can describe an early modern “subjective turn” in philosophy and the theory of perception.

The spirit of the papers that follow, reflecting the title of the original symposium, is to treat the philosophy of psychology as a branch of the philosophy of science. As such, philosophy of psychology is to be conceived on a parallel with philosophy of physics and philosophy of biology, as an instance of the “philosophy of the special sciences.” The philosophy of the special sciences treats each of the sciences as potentially having its own explanatory structures, conceptual problems, and evidentiary relations, which may be more or less similar to those once discussed under “general philosophy of science,” with its typical reliance on examples from physics. In this connection, work in the philosophy of psychology over the past two decades has analyzed the structure of psychological explanations (Cummins 1983; Hardcastle 1992; Haugeland 1978), has examined the conceptual issues attending such notions as that of representation (Dretske 1981; Hatfield 1988b; Lloyd 1989; Shapiro 1993) or qualitative experiential content (Dennett 1991; Hardin 1988), and has examined the theoretical structure and explanatory possibilities of the new connectionism (Horgan and Tienson 1991; Ramsey et al. 1991).

It seems intuitively obvious that metameric matching of color samples entails a loss of information. Metamers are distributions of wavelength and intensity (or “spectral energy distributions“) that perceivers cannot discriminate. Consider two color samples that are presented under ordinary white light and that appear to normal observers to be of the same color. It is well-established that such color samples can have quite different surface-reflective properties; e.g., two samples that appear to be the same shade of green may in fact reflect strikingly different patterns of wavelengths within the visible spectrum (see Figure 1). In this case, sameness of appearance under similar conditions of illumination does not entail sameness of surface reflectance. Spectrophotometrically diverse materials appear the same. It would seem then that information has been lost, that the visual system has failed in its task of chromatic discrimination.

L’Homme presents what has been termed Descartes’ “physiological psychology”. It envisions and seeks to explain how the brain and nerves might yield situationally appropriate behavior through mechanical means. On occasion in the past 150 years, this aim has been recognized, described, and praised. Still, acknowledgement of this aspect of Descartes’ writing has been spotty in histories of neuroscience and histories of psychology. In recent years, there has been something of a resurgence. This chapter argues that, in seeking to explain psychological functions such as sense perception, attention, memory, and emotional response, Descartes ascribed a range of active functions to the brain acting on its own (independently of mind).

In _Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature_ (1979), Richard Rorty locates the perceived ills of modern philosophy in the "epistemological turn" of Descartes and Locke. Hatfield argues that Rorty's accounts of Descartes' and Locke's philosophical work are seriously flawed. Rorty misunderstood the participation of early modern philosophers in the rise of modern science, and he misdescribed their examination of cognition as psychological rather than epistemological. His diagnostic efforts were thereby undermined, and he missed Descartes' original conception of a general physics, and Locke's probabilist analysis of the grounds for rational belief.

This chapter discusses Decartes as a rationalist and an experimentalist, as a philosopher-metaphysicist who also relies on experiment and observation as an essential activity of knowledge. It explains deduction in terms of intuition, its connection between one proposition and another as the only way to knowledge and method, as some sets of rules, easy rules that should someone follow them, will lead to the truth. It further explains Descartes concept of the anaclastic which depends on the angle of incidence and the angle of refraction. This chapter also explains Decartes thought that intuition and deduction are the immediate grasping of the propositions and inferential connection between propositions. Finally this chapter explains how certain experiments are needed to arrived at certain knowledge through deduction.

This chapter reconsiders the notion of perceptual constancy from the ground up. It distinguishes the phenomenology of perceptual constancy and stability from a functional characterization of perception as aiming at full constancy. Drawing on this distinction, we can attend to the phenomenology of constancy itself, and ask to what extent human perceivers attain constancy, as usually defined. Within this phenomenology, I distinguish phenomenal presentations of spatial features and color properties from categorizations, conceptualizations, and judgments that underlie verbal or other responses to those presentations. Although phenomenal presentation and categorization commonly co-occur, they are distinct aspects of experience. After reviewing several standard descriptions of constancy, I present laboratory findings and my own phenomenological descriptions by way of confirming that, although perception "tends toward" constancy, human perceivers do not usually attain full constancy for either spatial or chromatic properties (as many investigators acknowledge). For spatial perception, I find that the phenomenology has been systematically misdescribed, and I offer a more adequate description of the phenomenology of everyday spatial perception. However, my greatest quarrel with previous theory concerns the functional aim of the constancies. I argue not only that perception does not achieve full constancy but that we should not characterize it as aiming for full constancy. Rather, perception seeks a stability of representation suitable for guiding our actions and which can also, as needed, enable us to classify and re-identify objects by phenomenally presented properties such as shape, size, or color. Further, I argue that theorists should not confuse these classifications with the qualitative character of phenomenal experience. My arguments underscore the need to distinguish phenomenal representation (better, "presentation") from conceptual categorization, and to distinguish perceptual presentations from subsequent processes that are involved in responding to them.

This chapter examines the development of a geometrical framework for understanding and explaining spatial aspects of visual perception, including perception of the sizes, shapes, and positions of things in the field of view. The structure of this framework is built on the fact that vision typically occurs in straight lines (rectilinearly). Within this framework, the chapter selectively focuses on size perception. This focus allows for a comparative examination of how a single problem was treated geometrically by various theorists, ancient, medieval, and modern. The theorists examined are Euclid and Ptolemy, who were extramissionists, and Ibn al-Haytham, Kepler, Descartes, and Berkeley, each of whom adopted, in one way or another, an intromissionist scheme. In comparing Descartes and Berkeley, notice is taken of Berkeley’s interpretive bent in treating Descartes’s account of distance perception in a way that requires mental calculation, where Descartes sometimes offered psychophysiological mechanisms (avoiding mental calculation).