WORKSHOPS, SEMinars and talks

Workshop: Perceiving High-Level Properties

Date: December 12-13, 2024

Venue: Palazzo Donatello, UniSR Campus Milano 2, Segrate (MI) and online via this Microsoft Teams link 

Program

Day 1: December 12, 2024 -- Room 204, Palazzo Donatello

9:45-10:00 || Welcome and opening remarks

Chair: Francesca De Vecchi

10:00-11:15 || Francesca Forlè (San Raffaele University), Tertiary Qualities as Global Qualities of Gestalts: A Phenomenological Account

11:15-11:45 || Coffee Break

11:45-13:00 || Anna Donise (University of Naples), Higher-Order Level Properties and Values. Elements for a Stratified Theory

13:00-14:30 || Lunch

Chair: Elisabetta Sacchi

14:30-15:45 || Joulia Smortchkova (Grenoble Alpes University), Can Empirical Data Help Us Establish High-Level Perception?

15:45-17:00 || Alberto Voltolini (University of Turin), The Necessary and Jointly Sufficient Conditions for a Higher-Level Property to Be Perceivable

17:00-17:30 || Coffee Break

Chair: Alfredo Tomasetta

17:30-18:45 || Giulia Martina (Dortmund University), Smelling What It Is

20:00 || Social Dinner

Day 2: December 13, 2024 -- Room 204, Palazzo Donatello

Chair: Alberto Barbieri

9:00-10:15 || Elisabetta Sacchi (San Raffaele University), The Conceptualist Argument Against Sensory Liberalism

10:15-11:30 || Thomas Raleigh (University of Luxembourg), Property Perception and Indeterminacy

11:30-12:00 || Coffee Break

Chair: Davide Bordini

12:00-13:15 || Błażej Skrzypulec (Jagiellonian University), Structural Experiential Properties

13:15 || End of the Workshop and Lunch

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Attendance information

Attendance is free, but seats are limited. Please kindly inform us of your in-person attendance by emailing barbieri.alberto[at]unisr.it.

You may experience some issues enjoying Teams meetings through Google Chrome. Please consider downloading the Microsoft Teams app or using a different web browser.

Funding

The event is co-funded by CRESA – Centro di Ricerca in Epistemologia Sperimentale e Applicata.

Scientific and Organising Committee

Alberto Barbieri

Francesca De Vecchi

Elisabetta Sacchi

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Abstracts

Anna Donise (University of Naples), Higher-order Level Properties and Values. Elements for a Stratified Theory

TBA

Francesca Forlè (Vita-Salute San Raffaele University), Tertiary Qualities as Global Qualities of Gestalts: A Phenomenological Account

Gloomy atmospheres, cheerful pieces of music, melancholic landscapes. It seems that we can aptly describe inanimate objects by means of psychological terms. However, how can this be justified if we are dealing with non-psychological phenomena? What kind of qualities – if any – are we grasping when we say that an atmosphere is gloomy or that a piece of music is cheerful?

In this talk I will briefly present some of the main theoretical options that have been proposed to answer these questions, such as projective theories (Wollheim), persona theories (Levinson, Cochrane), contour theories (Kivy, Davies), and arousal theories (Matravers, Ridley). I will argue, however, that all of them have troubles in explaining how the same expressive qualities (such as gloominess, cheerfulness, sadness, serenity) can be ascribed to very different things such as an atmosphere, a piece of music, a personal feeling, or a bodily expression.

As a way out of this issue, I will propose to conceive expressive – and more generally – tertiary qualities as a kind of qualities that are not reducible to the factual properties of their bearers, even though they can be argued to be founded on such properties. I will rather maintain that expressive and tertiary qualities are global qualities of Gestalts (De Monticelli and Forlè 2024): as such, they do not pertain to specific components but to specific structures of components, the single components being variable in their factual properties. I will also maintain that, being global qualities of gestalts, tertiary qualities are not produced by the mere addition of the components’ qualities. Rather, they are able to re-define the qualities of the components themselves.

On this background, I will argue that a tertiary quality is such that it regulates the ways in which the single components of a Gestalt can co-vary, defining therefore the limits to the possible co-variations of such components, limits beyond which that tertiary quality can no longer be obtained (De Monticelli 2018, 2021).

Giulia Martina (University of Dortmund), Smelling What It Is

Even though our noses are very sensitive, we are generally pretty bad at recognising what we are smelling. Western subjects can name only 30-50% of common smells, and often report having no idea what they are smelling, even if the smell feels familiar. However, when given labels to choose from or visual cues (e.g. a picture of an object with that smell), the same subjects will very quickly recognise whether it is fitting or not. One might sniff a sample and claim they have no clue what it is; but when one is told ‘It’s thyme’, a ‘ah-ah!’ moment follows: ‘Yes, of course it’s thyme! I can smell it now. How could I not get it?’. This recognition seems to have an experiential dimension: one’s experience seems to change in coming to smell what it is. How should we understand this change? In this talk, I discuss whether these experiences are examples of high-level property perception, specifically olfactory perception of natural and artificial kinds. The hypothesis is especially interesting to test in olfactory cases as, unlike in vision, we seem to have a change from an almost complete absence of recognition – at first, one cannot say anything at all about the smell, not even in terms of low-level features – to an experience with recognition. Moreover, the hypothesis has some plausibility. First, the hedonic dimension and ‘epistemic emotions’ such as a feeling of surprise or confirmation cannot fully explain the change in experience. Second, how one conceptualises the smell can make a difference to the phenomenal structure of the experience – the same smell can be experienced as a composite of different, equally appropriate, smells. Third, we cannot simply appeal to one’s attending to, or noticing, a certain olfactory quality – one can be very focused on the smell when one has no idea what it is. Still, I argue that there are less costly and superior explanations of the phenomenon that do not appeal to natural and artificial kind perception.

Thomas Raleigh (University of Luxembourg), Property Perception and Indeterminacy

TBA

Elisabetta Sacchi (Vita-Salute San Raffaele University), The Conceptualist Argument against Sensory Liberalism

TBA

Błażej Skrzypulec (Jagiellonian University), Structural Experiential Properties

An important distinction made by philosophers in analyzing perceptual experiences is between experiential content and experiential structures. Content is described as a changeable aspect of experiences that characterizes what is presented by an experience. On the other hand, experiential structures are relatively invariant ways of organizing experiential content. Some experiential structures are 'structural experential properties' that one can be phenomenally aware of when having a perceptual experience. The most popular example of a structural property discussed in the philosophical literature is the boundedness of the visual field, which determines the spatial organization of visual content. In the talk, I explicate the notion of structural properties and explore relations between this notion and the notion of high-level perceptual properties. In particular, I consider the relation between structural properties and low-level perceptual properties to determine whether structural properties are somehow dependent on other types of perceptual properties. I also consider the epistemic role of structural properties and their relation to the transparency thesis.

Joulia Smortchkova (Grenoble Alpes University), Can Empirical Data Help Us Establish High-Level Perception?

In the debate about the reach of perceptual content philosophers have often appealed to empirical results, such as data from gist perception (Bayne and McClelland, 2019), perceptual adaptation (Fish, 2013; Block, 2014), unilateral neglect (Nanay, 2012), or from perceptual learning (Ransom, 2020), to give just a few examples. The appeal to empirical data can be split in two broad groups: appeals that do not question the traditional way of distinguishing between perception and cognition, and appeals that challenge some of the features traditionally associated with perception, such as informational encapsulation or stimulus-dependence. In my talk I will examine a few empirical results which purport to establish high-level perception, and discuss the possibility of appealing to such empirical data to make the case for high-level perception without already presupposing a substantial theory of perception.

Alberto Voltolini (University of Turin), The Necessary and Jointly Sufficient Conditions for a Higher-Level Property to Be Perceivable

Higher-level properties are the properties that depend, possibly generically, on low-level properties (colors, shapes, sounds, textures …) for their instantiation. In this talk, I maintain that there are two necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for a higher-level property to be a perceivable property. First, i): the property is given immediately. Immediacy (Fish 2013, Nes 2016) has to do with all the factors that show that a perceivable property is grasped passively, not spontaneously: e.g. automaticity (Toribio 2018), adaptation-sensitivity (Block 2022), non-inferentiality (Raftopoulos 2009). Second, ii): the property is given via a grouping operation (Jagnow 2015, Calzavarini-Voltolini 2022,2023, Landers 2021, Martina-Voltolini 2017, Voltolini 2015,2020,2023) that involves a perceptual form of attention (Stokes 2018). ii) is relevant on this concern, for it allows for a form of both non-conceptual and perceptual form of recognition, compatible only with a kind of cognitive penetration that is both weak (it only affects phenomenal character) and lite (it applies contingently to tokens of perceptual experiences of the same kind) (Macpherson 2012,2015). In the light of i)-ii), I also claim that other major candidates for being higher-level perceivable properties – namely, kind properties and meaning properties (Siegel 2011) – are not such. For they do not satisfy ii).