Conjoint Representations and the Mental Capacity for Multiple Simultaneous Perspectives

Abstract

Mens videt, mens audit: Cetera surda et coeca.It is the mind that sees and the mind that hears; the rest are deaf and blind. Epicharmos 1Common-sense taxonomies were, inevitably, the origin from which the natural sciences, at their earliest stages of development, derived their categorizations of phenomena.This can be witnessed by the classical division of physics into e.g.optics, acoustics, theory of heat, and mechanics.During the process of its theoretical development, physics became increasingly divorced from these kinds of classifications and rather grouped phenomena in accordance with its own internal theoretical structure (the classical theory of heat, for instance, disintegrated into statistical mechanics, on the one hand, and electrodynamics, on the other hand).In perceptual psychology corresponding pretheoretical classifications of phenomena are mirrored in the standard textbook organization in terms of salient perceptual attributes, such as colour, depth, size, or form.In this field, it will likely prove to be more difficult than it was in physics to dispense with common-sense classifications of phenomena and to instead follow lines of theorizing that are traced out by the development of successful explanatory accounts.This difficulty is due to the power that the phenomenal appearance exercises over our way of theoretically grouping perceptual phenomena.Although we are well aware that common-sense taxonomies are an inapt guide for the endeavour to achieve, within the framework of the natural sciences, a theoretical understanding of the mind, we are held captive by the appearances.We are inclined to believe that perception works in the way it phenomenally appears to us and that a theoretically fruitful classification of phenomena basically follows our common-sense psychological intuitions.It were such pretheoretical common-sense taxonomies that in perceptual psychology brought forth subfields such as picture perception or colour perception.

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