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Oct 2007
ISBN 0262162458
280 pp.
26 illus.
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Things and Places
Zenon W. Pylyshyn

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.

Table of Contents
 Contents
 Foreward
 Preface
1 Introduction to the Problem: Connecting Perception and the World
2 Indexing and Tracking Individuals
3 Selection: The Key to Linking Representations and Things
4 Conscious Contents and Nonconceptual Representation
5 How We Represent Space: Internal versus External Constraints
 Conclusions
 References
 Index
 
 


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