Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Implicit background enables explicit directedness

Professor Potrc started rereading Gibson's book on ecological approach to visual perception http://books.google.com/books?id=BJGCuje64FcC&lpg=PP1&ots=67ztzg0cH7&dq=gibson%20ecological%20perception%20visual&pg=PR4#v=onepage&q=&f=false The idea is that whatever is explicitly targeted in visual perception is enabled to be so targeted by the implicit background environment, different to the physical and geometrical space, say. Professor Potrc started to expose the structure of the occurrent total cognitive state, which consists of an explicitly targeted intentional content/object, and of the background of rich aspectual nature enabling the concentration upon and the very functioning of intentional directedness. Justification is in this implicit phenomenological background environment. (A student immediately saw that this distinction between the occurrent on the one side and explicit/implicit that may both be found in the occurrent may offer a solution to the Gettier cases. We look forward to the promised analysis.) A similar structure may be spotted in the case of visual perception, for both ecological Gibsonian and Husserl's accounts (forthcoming in his Thing and Space lectures, and slowly moving to a kinesthetic account of visual perception). The insight into an occurrent whole phenomenon with the structure of the explicit target and of the implicit background, this last one nevertheless being present in the occurrent state may have several other applications that merit to be researched. Well, professor Potrc ended up reading Chalmers on Edenic perception http://consc.net/papers/eden.pdf and Charles Siewert on intentionality and consciousness http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-intentionality/.

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