Abstract
As I began to read George Butterworth’s chapter, I thought that surely we were going to disagree. He begins by espousing Gibson’s ‘direct realism’ theory of perception, a theory that I have not found to be particularly helpful in my quest to understand the conceptual foundations of the mind. But as he elaborated his understanding of this view, and contrasted it with the more traditional constructivist view of Piaget, I came to realize that despite differences in terminology our views of the perceptual foundations of knowledge are very similar. We agree on the import of recent work on infant perception, and that perceptual functioning forms the initial basis for gaining knowledge about the world. However, we seem to disagree on the extent to which Gibson’s theory is apt to provide a sufficient basis for understanding conceptual growth. I will first summarize our points of agreement, and then discuss the problems to which our common belief in the perceptual foundations of knowledge lead us.
Preparation of this contribution was supported in part by NSF Research Grant BNS-8519218 and DBS-9221867.
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Mandler, J.M. (1994). From Perception to Conception. In: van Geert, P., Mos, L.P., Baker, W.J. (eds) Annals of Theoretical Psychology. Annals of Theoretical Psychology, vol 10. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-9194-5_3
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