What is a "perceptually well-defined individual"? Hintikka's views on perception
pp. 215-232
in: Jaakko Hintikka, Berlin, Springer, 1987Abstract
Hintikka's Presentation to the 1967 Oberlin Colloquium, "On the Logic of Perception",1 seemed an exciting and important paper. Time has supported that impression. The paper itself has affected the form of a number of more recent essays on perception. More than most, this paper has effected a change in the way a major area of philosophy has come to be discussed. Looking back, the thing that now stands out is how very different Hintikka's discussion of perception was from what standarly appeared then. Hintikka had remarkably little to say about things like "visual constancy", or Gestalt phenomena, or illusion and hallucination, or of the relation of sense experience to perception, or of how much is directly seen and how much is inferred in perception. Yet these sorts of topics seemed essential to getting at the nature and content of perception. Discussion of topics like these tended to dominate the academic, philosophical literature on perception.
