The Neuroscientific Case for a Representative Theory of Perception
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It has been urged repeatedly over the last two decades that empirical findings in neuroscience and psychology provide compelling reasons for endorsing a representative theory of perception. Richard L. Gregory and John R. Smythies are perhaps the best-known advocates of this view. When it comes to vision, in particular, scientists of this persuasion think that the supposed alternative, ‘direct realism’, is hopelessly naïve, and they conclude that, as Francis Crick puts it, ‘What you see is not what is really there; it is what your brain believes is there’ (Crick, 1994, p. 31). We will take a critical look at some of these empirical findings, and discuss the extent to which they support the more sweeping philosophical claims scientists have drawn from them, in particular the advocacy of representative theories of perception. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.060 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".