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.