The Department of Philosophy cordially invites you to the Public Defense of the PhD Dissertation by
Yavuz Basoglu
on
Essays on High-Level Perception
Supervisor: Katalin Farkas
External examiner: Susanna Siegel (Harvard University)
External examiner: Tom McClelland (University of Cambridge)
Chair: Michael V. Griffin
The defense will be held on 6 September from 3.00 PM in A-419
Abstract:
Traditionally, we take ourselves to be able to perceive only certain properties, such as colors, shapes, orientation, depth, etc., in vision. High-levelism holds that humans can perceive more properties such as natural kind properties, mental state properties, meaning properties, etc. This dissertation consists of five self-standing essays on high-levelism. Chapter One defends high-levelism against one of its alternatives, namely, the Gestalt proposal, which argues that we do not perceive high-level properties just listed but can perceive “gestalt properties” instead. Chapters Two, Three, and Four argue against a specific kind of high-levelism, namely high-levelism about meaning properties. Chapters Two and Three aim to show that the argument from evidence insensitivity of meaning illusion and the argument from semantic satiation fail to provide any support for high-levelism about meaning properties. After rejecting their arguments in these two chapters, I develop my own argument against high-levelism about meaning properties in Chapter Four. I argue that their position depends on heavy and ubiquitous cognitive penetration. Lastly, in Chapter Five, I argue that naïve realism’s strategies to account for (low-level) illusions are not sufficient to explain high-level illusions. Hence, if high-levelism is true, then naïve realism needs to give an account of (certain) high-level illusions.