Seeing things in the right way
how social interaction shapes perception
pp. 117-127
in: Maxime Doyon, Thiemo Breyer (eds), Normativity in perception, Berlin, Springer, 2015Abstract
As the story goes, God recognized the importance of human interaction at the very beginning, and thus created Eve as a second person. Moreover, at the very beginning there was no right or wrong, and everything was open for human experience. As the plot develops, however, interaction changes all of that. The same seems true for ontogenesis. For the newborn there is no right or wrong — including no right or wrong way to perceive the world. But interaction changes all of that. My aim is to make this point about perception generally, and then show how it applies to social perception in particular.