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2B. ORIENTATIONAL FIELD THEORY
(Or just: Field Theory)
(A subsection of 2. Double Content and Field Theory)
Recall that the interactive theory of perception (ITP) needs to be supplemented with a further theoretical structure involving two separable kinds of content--a Double Content theory of perceptual representation.
I provide a basic explanation of cognitive double content processing in terms of an original Orientational Field theory. A field is a basic kind of cognitive data structure, such as a color wheel. In double content processing, two or more instances of the same field are processed. A field has both an intrinsic orientation or top element--defined by its being correct perceptual content--and a field orientation relative to other copies of the same field. In perceptual constancy cases, a cognitive system achieves constancy by appropriate compensations for the differing field alignments of the input data field and correct data field respectively.
The publications below deal with various aspects of the orientational field theory. Specifically, Chs. 7-10 and Ch. 12 of my book The Double Content of Art provide a comprehensive development and survey of field theory as it applies to the arts. My article "The Twofold Orientational Structure of Perception" shows how the field theory naturally develops from a consideration of perceptual ambiguity and indeterminacy cases, while my essay "Depictive Seeing and Double Content" closely integrates field theory both with artistic and generic perceptual cases.
BOOKS
The Double Content of Art (New York: Prometheus Books, 2005). Information Amazon
The Double Content view is the first comprehensive theory of art that is able to
satisfactorily explain the nature of all kinds of artworks in a unified way — whether
paintings, novels, or musical and theatrical performances. The basic thesis is that all
such representational artworks involve two levels or kinds of representation: a first
stage in which a concrete artifact represents an artwork, and a second stage in which that
artwork in turn represents its subject matter.
ARTICLES (PDF links)
(Forthcoming)
"Depictive Seeing and Double Content," in (eds.) C. Abell and K. Bantinaki,
Philosophical Perspectives on Picturing, Oxford University Press.
A picture provides both configurational content concerning its design features,
and recognitional content about its external subject. But how is this possible,
since all that a viewer can actually see is the picture's own design? I argue
that the most plausible explanation is that a picture's design has a dual
function. It both encodes artistically relevant design content, and in turn that
design content encodes the subject content of the picture--producing overall a
double content structure. Also, it is highly desirable that a resulting double
content theory for pictures should be closely integrated with a related double
content account of perceptual content generally, so as to avoid suspicions of ad
hoc theorizing that would apply only to pictorial content.
The resulting theory should also be able to explain the inevitable ambiguities
involved in abstracting two levels of visual content from a single visible
surface, as well as explaining the systematic relations between the two kinds of
content. I provide an orientational theory--based on a recently developed
spatial logic of orientational concepts--for this purpose, and show how
depictive and perceptual content in general can be usefully explained in these
orientational terms. This account of picturing also integrates well with a
previously developed, more generic double content theory of art, and it is also
plausible in cognitive science terms.
"The Twofold Orientational
Structure of Perception,"
Philosophical Psychology 18, no. 2 (April 2005), pp. 187–203.
I argue that perceptual content involves representations both of aspects of
objects, and of objects themselves, whether at the level of conscious perception, or of
low level perceptual processing--a double content structure. I present an 'orientational'
theory of the relations of the two kinds of perceptual content, which can accommodate both
the general semantic possibility of perceptual misrepresentation, and also species of it
involving characteristic perceptual confusions of aspectual and intrinsic content. The
resulting theoretical structure is argued to be a broadly methodological or logical one,
rather than a substantive theory that is open to empirical refutation.
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April 19, 2010