Speaker: Tyler Burge (UCLA)
Tyler Burge is Flint Professor of Philosophy at UCLA. He is best known for his defense of anti-individualism (externalism), the view that the contents of many mental states depend partly on a person’s social and physical environment. His contributions span the philosophy of mind, language, and epistemology, as well as the history of philosophy (especially Frege and the rationalist tradition). This position has had a major impact on debates in the philosophy of mind, language, and cognitive science. Burge has written influentially on self-knowledge, perception, memory, reasoning, testimony, and entitlement, and has developed a detailed account of perceptual representation in his books Origins of Objectivity (2010) and Perception: First Form of Mind (2022).
Title
A Map of Lower Representational Mind
Abstract
Lower Representational Mind is roughly the system of psychological or mental representational capacities that are less complex, less sophisticated, and more widespread in the animal kingdom, than propositional attitudes. Lower representational mind centers in perception. I begin by discussing the border between perception and non-perceptual, non-representational sensing. Then I discuss some basic facts about perception–its iconic or map-like character and its representing at various levels of abstraction. I also touch on what is known about the fastest-formed perceptual states, because these probably tell us something about some of the earliest-evolved perceptual systems, which are the origins of representational mind. I discuss briefly relations between the perceptual system and another system that is also central to lower representational mind: the perceptual-conative system, or the perceptualmotor system. Then I sketch how these two inter-related systems are served by satellite capacities, also in lower representational mind: perceptual attention, perceptual memory, perceptual anticipation, perceptual affect, perceptual learning, perceptual imagining. Often such capacities are assumed to be cognitive, in a sense that would make them supra-perceptual–on the ground that they are less tied to the here-and-now than perception is. I explain why I think that such views are mistaken. The account that I discuss is firmly grounded in reflection on science–centrally vision science, but more generally the psycho-physics of perception–not primarily in intuitive reflection.
Everyone interested is welcome to attend.
The meeting will be held in English.
Participation is strongly recommended for students of the Doctoral School in Philosophy and Human Sciences and for students of the Doctoral School “The Human Mind and its Explanations: Language, Brain, and Reasoning”.
Where: Online
When: 21/01/2026 – 17:00 CET
Attendance: Attendance is free and open to all, but registration is needed by email [angelica.kaufmann@unimi.it]