Structure of perceptual objects: introduction to the Synthese topical collection
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Structure of perceptual objects: introduction to the Synthese topical collection Alfredo Vernazzani1
· Bła˙zej Skrzypulec2
· Tobias Schlicht1
Received: 1 September 2020 / Accepted: 4 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
1 Introduction Much of the current debate in philosophy of perception centers on the nature of our perceptual commerce with the world. Recently, the debate has been fueled by the reemergence of naïve realist and relationalist perspectives that reject, on the whole, a mediated access to the objects of perception (e.g. Brewer 2011; Campbell 2002; Fish 2009; Martin 1997). Call this the “mainstream” debate in philosophy of perception. To a large extent, the mainstream debate has almost exclusively focused on vision, and neglected other sense modalities. This “visuocentrism” is often coupled with the tacit assumption that what is true about vision may be simply transferrable to other sense-modalities as well. (For recent exceptions, see Fulkerson 2013; O’Callaghan 2018). Taken together, the mainstream interest in the nature of perception and visuocentrism have led philosophers to neglect an equally important topic of investigation, the structure of perceptual objects, obscuring significant structural differences among the sense-modalities, and the fact that perceptual experiences are frequently multimodal (e.g. Kubovy and von Valkenburg 2001; O’Callaghan 2012, 2015). We think that the project of clarifying the structure of perceptual objects is of paramount importance for perception studies in at least three different senses. First, clarifying the nature and structure of visual objects’ structure will shed light not only on the way we experience objects through our sense modality, but also provide a “benchmark” that can be useful for thinking about the differences between visual objects and objects of other sense modalities. In other words, a clarification of the structure of visual objects will be instrumental also to break with the rampant visuocentrism of much of current philosophy of perception. Second, clarifying the structure of perceptual objects, more generally, will shed light on the distinctive manner of composition of different kinds of objects of perception, and how interaction with other sense modal-
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Bła˙zej Skrzypulec [email protected]
1
Institut für Philosophie II, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Universitätsstr. 150, 44780 Bochum, Deutschland
2
Institute of Philosophy, Jagiellonian University, Grodzka 52, 31-044 Krakow, Poland
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Synthese
ities, cognition, or action may contribute to shaping our perceptual commerce with the world. Third, and more obviously, shedding light on the structure of perceptual objects means clarifying the structure of perceptually subjective appearances. In the remainder of this Introduction to the Topical Collection “The Structure of Perceptual Objects” we will first (Sect. 2) provide some background about studies on the structure of perceptual objects and then (Sect. 3) present an overview of the papers, clustering them into two groups.
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