Things and Places: How the Mind Connects with the World (Jean Nicod Lectures) [Hardcover]

Zenon W. Pylyshyn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 21, 2007 | ISBN-10: 0262162458 | ISBN-13: 978-0262162456 | Edition: 1

Problems in linking representation and perceived things in the world are discussed in light of the role played by a preconceptual indexing mechanism that functions to identify, reidentify, and track objects.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"In this masterful book, Pylyshyn lays out his important research program on attentional indices. He draws out the theoretical significance of his (and others') empirical work on early vision and attention for foundational issues in cognitive science, including the problem how representations are grounded in the world as well as the distinction between conceptual and nonconceptual representations. The synthesis of his empirical research program is in itself sufficient reason to read the book, but the broad theoretical context in which he puts the work makes it a thrilling ride."--Susan Carey, Department of Psychology, Harvard University

In Things and Places, Zenon Pylyshyn argues that the process of incrementally constructing perceptual representations, solving the binding problem (determining which properties go together), and, more generally, grounding perceptual representations in experience arise from the nonconceptual capacity to pick out and keep track of a small number of sensory individuals. He proposes a mechanism in early vision that allows us to select a limited number of sensory objects, to reidentify each of them under certain conditions as the same individual seen before, and to keep track of their enduring individuality despite radical changes in their properties--all without the machinery of concepts, identity, and tenses. This mechanism, which he calls FINSTs (for "Fingers of Instantiation"), is responsible for our capacity to individuate and track several independently moving sensory objects--an ability that we exercise every waking minute, and one that can be understood as fundamental to the way we see and understand the world and to our sense of space. Pylyshyn examines certain empirical phenomena of early vision in light of the FINST mechanism, including tracking and attentional selection. He argues provocatively that the initial selection of perceptual individuals is our primary nonconceptual contact with the perceptual world (a contact that does not depend on prior encoding of any properties of the thing selected) and then draws upon a wide range of empirical data to support a radical externalist theory of spatial representation that grows out of his indexing theory.Zenon W. Pylyshyn is Board of Governors Professor of Cognitive Science at Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science. He is the author of Seeing and Visualizing: It's Not what You Think (2003) and Computation and Cognition: Toward a Foundation for Cognitive Science (1984), both published by The MIT Press, as well as over a hundred scientific papers on perception, attention, and the computational theory of mind.

About the Author

"Pylyshyn"s bold and provocative thesis, that primitive object tags in early vision constitute a form of basic intentional contact with the world, brings much-needed empirical illumination to such hot philosophical topics as nonconceptual content, conscious experience, and demonstrative thought. A must-read for any philosopher of mind."Joseph Levine , Professor of Philosophy, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press; 1 edition (September 21, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262162458
• ISBN-13: 978-0262162456
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,812,839 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

(From http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/faculty/pylyshyn.html)

Zenon Pylyshyn received a B.Eng. in Engineering-Physics from McGill University, an M.Sc. in Control Systems from the University of Saskatchewan, and a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Saskatchewan for research involving the application of information theory to studies of human short-term memory. Following his Ph.D. he spent two years as a Canada Council Senior fellow and then joined the faculty at the University of Western Ontario in London, where he remained until 1994 as Professor of Psychology and of Computer Science, as well as honorary professor in the departments of Philosophy and Electrical Engineering and Director of the UWO Center for Cognitive Science. In 1994 Pylyshyn joined the faculty of Rutgers University as Board of Governors Professor of Cognitive Science and Director of the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science.

Pylyshyn is recipient of numerous fellowships and awards. He was awarded the Donald O. Hebb Award from the Canadian Psychological Association in June 1990, "for distinguished contributions to psychology as a science". He is a fellow if the Canadian Psychological Association and the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. He has been a Killam Fellow, a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, a fellow at the MIT Center for Cognitive Science and a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIAR). In 1998 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2004 he was awarded the Jean Nicod Prize in Paris and delivered the Jean Nicod lectures. He is past president of two international societies: the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and the Cognitive Science Society. For 9 years (1985-1994) he was national director of the Program in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He is on the editorial boards of eight scientific journals and has been on several industrial or academic scientific advisory boards.

Pylyshyn has published well over 100 scientific articles and book chapters, including a paper designated as a Science Citation Classic ("What the Mind's Eye Tells the Mind's Brain", Psychological Bulletin, 1973) and has given over 200 talks and keynote addresses. He is author of Things and Places: How the Mind Connects with the World (Jean Nicod Lectures Series, MIT Press, 2007), Seeing and Visualizing: It's not what you think (MIT Press, 2004) [Winner of the Association of American Publishers Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division Annual Awards competition], Computation and Cognition: Toward a Foundation for Cognitive Science (MIT Press, 1984), as well as contributor/editor of five books, including: Perspectives on the Computer Revolution (1988); Computational Processes in Human Vision: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (1988), The Robot's Dilemma: The Frame Problem in Artificial Intelligence (1987), Meaning and Cognitive Structure: Issues in the Computational Theory of Mind (1986), and The Robot's Dilemma Revisited (1996). As chairman of an NSF-sponsored panel on artificial intelligence, Pylyshyn also helped to produce a major survey of the state-of-the-art in artificial intelligence which appeared as part of the book What Can be Automated? (1980).

For the past fifteen years, Pylyshyn's personal research has dealt with two general areas. One is the theoretical analysis of the nature of the human cognitive system that enables humans to perceive the world, as well as to reason and imagine. This has led to a number of theoretical investigations of the "architecture of the mind". On the experimental side Pylyshyn has been concerned with exploring his Visual Indexing Theory (sometimes called the FINST theory), dealing with how human visual attention is allocated and how humans cognize objects and space. This theory hypothesizes a preconceptual mechanism by which objects in a visual scene can be individuated, tracked, and directly (or demonstratively) referred to by cognitive processes prior to their properties being encoded. Over a dozen papers have been published on this theory and its experimental investigation, as well as its implications for understanding how vision is connected with the world, making perceptual-motor coordination possible. The theory has implications for philosophical issues concerning the semantics of visual perception as well as practical applications for the design of human-computer interfaces.