Perceptual Categories Derived from Reid’s “Common Sense” Philosophy

Perceptual Categories Derived from Reid’s “Common Sense” Philosophy

The 18th-century Scottish 'common sense' philosopher Thomas Reid argued that perception can be distinguished on several dimensions from other categories of experience, such as sensation, illusion, hallucination, mental images, and what he called 'fancy.' We extend his approach to eleven mental categories, and discuss how these distinctions, often ignored in the empirical literature, bear on cur...

Clipart Images as Common Sense Categories

Clipart is the visual representation of commonsense categories and stereotypes—of social representations, in the sense of Moscovici. As indexed and displayed on line for downloading on Microsoft's Design Gallery and Art Today's clipart.com, the clips exhibit strong threads of continuity with earlier popular illustration and rhetorical manuals of gesture. At the same time, they also register dif...

From Features to Perceptual Categories

First we review an analysis of conditions that should be met if features are to provide robust inferences about world properties. Features meeting these conditions provide indices into especially useful categories of visual properties. Then we show that for a given set of elemental concepts the categories associated with these properties have a natural hierarchical (specialization) structure. W...

Critical Realism: a Common Sense Philosophy for Environmental Education?

By and large, modern societies take it for granted that nature, or ‘the environment’, is apart from society. However, this separation promotes the view that the environment should be managed for profit or pleasure, or that it exists in exotic or wild places experienced only as a fantasy world. As a result, environmental problems are seen to arise ‘out there’ instead of inside our heads, which c...

Democratizing Taste: Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and Elizabeth Hamilton