Friday,
27 January 2006
Defending Realism on the Proper Ground
Athanassios Raftopoulos, Dept. of Psychology, U. of Cyprus
12:05 pm, 817R Cathedral of Learning
Abstract: Epistemological constructivism holds that
vision is mediated by background preconceptions and is theory-laden.
In this paper, I claim that the cognitive sciences suggest that
a part of vision may be only indirectly penetrated by cognition
in a way that does not threaten retrieval of information from a
visual scene in a bottom-up way. I elaborate on the role of spatial
attention and argue that it does influence vision in a top-down
manner, but it does so only in an indirect way, and that this indirect
cognitive penetrability undermines the epistemological conclusions
of constructivism.
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