Perceptual Illusions, Philosophical and Psychological Essays (Innbundet (stive permer))

CLOTILDE CALABI Associate Professor of Theories of Mind and Language at the University of Milano, Italy. Her research focuses on philosophy of perception, emotions and attention. Her publications include The Choosing Mind and the Judging Will. An Analysis of Attention (1993); Passioni e Ragioni (1996) and Filosofia della Percezione (2009).

Things often go awry. Indeed, things can go awry in our beliefs, our actions, our emotions, and, of course, our perceptions. According to one popular philosophical theory, when things go wrong in perception, discrepancies between the world and its appearance occur. Although objects in the world have certain properties, they nevertheless appear to have other properties. For example, they seem to have shapes that they do not; their manifest colours, sizes, and weights are not their actual ones; and their perceived locations are at odds with their real ones. However, the claim that illusions are discrepancies between the objects in the world and their appearances can be questioned on two grounds. On the one hand, notions of apparent and real property are not quite clear. On the other, myriad examples have been put forward to show that a discrepancy between an appearance and reality is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for a perception to count as illusory. But the notion of perceptual illusion is something that the philosopher does not want to abandon.The authors contributing to this volume, while rejecting the idea that an illusion is a discrepancy of appearance and reality, think that illusions involve errors that produce some kind of inconsistency. And so, they argue, although the popular theory of perceptual illusions has gone awry, it can be amended.

IVANA BIANCHI Associate Professor of General Psychology at the University of Macerata, Department of Educational Sciences, Italy NICOLA BRUNO Full Professor of Psychology at the University of Parma, Italy ROBERTO CASATI Tenured senior researcher with the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientii-- que (CNRS-EHESS-ENS), Paris, France JEROME DOKIC Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and a member of Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris, France PHILIP GERRANS Reader in the Philosophy Department at the University of Adelaide, Australia MICHAEL KUBOVY Full Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia, USA BARRY MAUND Professor in the Philosophy Department at The University of Western Australia ELENA PASQUINELLI Researcher at the Departement d'etudes cognitives, Ecole normale superieure, Paris, France HELEN ROSS Honorary Reader in Psychology at the University of Stirling, Scotland, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the British Psychological Society UGO SAVARDI Full Professor of General Psychology at the University of Verona, Department of Philosophy, Education and Psychology, Italy ROBERT SCHWARTZ Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA PAOLO SPINICCI Full Professor of Philosophy at the University of Milan, Italy CHRISTINE TAPPOLET Canada Research Chair in Ethics and Meta-ethics and Full Professor in the Philosophy Department at the Universite de Montreal, Canada ALBERTO VOLTOLINI Philosopher of language and mind. He is currently Professor of Philosophy of Mind at the University of Turin, Italy

Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction; C.Calabi PART I: WHAT IS AN ILLUSION? The Illusion of Visual Illusions; R.Schwartz Illusions that We Should Have (but don't); N.Bruno The Awareness of Illusions; E.Pasquinelli The Genesis of the Awareness of Illusions; U.Savardi, M.Kubovy & I.Bianchi PART II: VERIDICAL PERCEPTIONS Perceptual Constancies: Illusions and Veridicality; B.Maund Is the Moon Illusion an Illusion?; H.Ross Cats! Michotte's New Enigma of Perception; C.Calabi PART III: DO PICTURES AND MIRRORS FOOL THE EYE? Trompe l'A'il and the Nature of Pictures; P.Spinicci Towards a Synchretist Theory of Depiction (How to Account for the Illusionistic Aspect of Pictorial Mirrors, Illusions and Epistemic Innocence; R.Casati PART IV: OTHER ERRORS: RECALCITRANT EMOTIONS AND MISIDENTIFICATIONS Emotions, Perceptions and Emotional Illusions; C.Tappolet Perceptual Misrecognition: A Kind Of Illusion?; J.Dokic Seeing Double: Illusions of Identity in Delusional Disorders; P.Gerrans Index