Evolving Perceptual Categories
The Department of Logic & Philosophy of Science Colloquium Series presents
"Evolving Perceptual Categories"
with Cailin O’Connor, Graduate Student, Department of Logic & Philosophy of Science,
UC Irvine
Friday, June 7, 2013
1:00 p.m.
Social Science Tower, Room 777
1:00 p.m.
Social Science Tower, Room 777
Do perceptual categories--green, cool, sweet--accurately track features of the real
world? If not, are there systematic ways in which perceptual categories fail to latch
onto real world structure? Attempts to answer these questions have persistently led
to a further question, one with a long philosophical history. Given that human beings
can only observe the world through the lens of our perceptual systems, how is it possible
to know whether and in what ways perceptual categories are veridical? In this talk,
O'Connor uses tools from evolutionary game theory to attempt to gain traction on this
problem. In particular, she employs signaling games to model perceptual signaling
and elucidate how and why perceptual categories may or may not track real world structure.
Jager (2007) introduced Sim-Max games, a variation of the standard signaling game
where the states of the world are modeled as bearing similarity relationships to one
another. This added structure is manifested in payoffs that reward approximate coordination
between the sender and receiver as well as perfect coordination. This altered payoff
structure appropriately models many situations in which perceptual signals evolve.
Jager (2007) showed that in the long run actors in Sim-Max games evolve strategies
that categorize similar states of the world together and dissimilar states of the
world separately. When applied to perception, these results would seem to indicate
that perceptual categories are natural or veridical in that similar real world objects
should be expected to evolve to be part of the same perceptual category. However,
this conclusion is not merited when one takes into account how similarity is built
into these models. Similarity is manifested in the payoff structure alone. What this
means, as she will argue, is that one should expect real world states where the same
actions are successful to be categorized together perceptually, and real world states
that cannot to be categorized separately. In other words, perceptual categories should
be expected to track real world structure inasmuch as payoff to organisms tracks real
world structure.
As she will argue, this conclusion should not lead to a strong anti-realist stance
with regard to perceptual categories. Whenever organism payoff is systematically related
to the natural structure of the world, perceptual categories should be systematically
related to this structure as well. What this means is that the relationship between
perceptual categories and real world structure may be subtle and complex.
For further information, please contact Patty Jones, patty.jones@uci.edu or 949-824-1520.
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