The Reconstruction of the Qualitative Theory of Perception

2017 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 15K01980
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Philosophy/Ethics
• Research Institution: Tohoku University
• Principal Investigator: SATO Toru 東北大学, 国際文化研究科, 教授 (60222014)
• Project Period (FY): 2015-10-21 – 2018-03-31
• Keywords: 知覚論 / 感覚的性質 / クオリア / 知覚因果説

Outline of Final Research Achievements

The new perspective on nature in the 17th century attributed only physical properties to the external world and located sensory properties such as color, sound, etc. in the inside of the observer. But this perceptual schema not only goes against common sense, but also has a serious difficulty in that the objects existing in the outer world would become unknowable.
Then we attempted to reconstruct the qualitative theory of perception which respects the scientific explanation about the causal process of perception and guarantees the outer world to have qualitative properties at the same time. Our main point is that we can construct such theory by basing on our subjective description of the outer world and taking in it the objective description of causal process, but not vice versa.

Free Research Field

哲学