El contenido cognitivo de la percepción: Avicena y McDowell

Uno de los problemas más discutidos en filosofía de la mente es si la percepción tiene contenido cognoscitivo, tanto en animales como en seres humanos. El objetivo de este trabajo es argumentar que sí. Nuestra intención es ponderar la postura de algunos fOne of the most discussed issues in philosophy of mind is whether perception has a cognitive content, both in animals and in humans. The purpose of this paper is to defend an affirmative answer. Our intention is to weigh up the stances of some contempora

Una crítica al argumento Kantiano de McDowell en contra de la percepción animal

John McDowell claims that perception is always filtered by concepts or, to say it with the traditional Kantian term, by spontaneity. Without concepts that support perception, it would turn out impossible to have intelligible and ordered perceptions of the external world to justify beliefs. A possible consequence of this kind of argumentation is that non-human animals, unable to generate structured concepts as required by McDowell, are also unable to have ordered perceptions of the outer world. In this paper, I will reconstruct McDowell�s arguments against non-conceptual perception. In second place, I will show the difficulties that arise regarding animal behavior when holding these arguments. I will support my conclusions on Ruth Millikan�s remarks about concepts. In order to do so, I will try to show the possibility of having perceptions, or even concepts, which do not necessarily involve the Kantian spontaneity required by McDowell, but a practical encounter with the world, as suggested by Millikan

Razonamiento animal: Negación y representaciones de ausencia

In this paper I reject the possibility that animal reasoning, negation in particular, necessarily involves the representation of Absence, as suggested by Jose Luis Bermudez, since this would still work as a logical negation (unavailable for non-linguistic creatures). False belief, pretense, and communication experiments show that non-human animals (at least some primates) have difficulties representing absent entities or properties. I offer an alternative account resorting to the sub-symbolic similarity judgments proposed by Vigo & Allen and I introduce the notion of expectation: animal proto-negation takes place through the incompatibility between an expected and the actual representation. Finally, I propose that the paradigm of expectations can be extrapolated to other experiments in cognitive psychology (both with pre-linguistic children and animals) in order to design �\fair. experiments which test other minds considering their true abilities.En este trabajo rechazo la posibilidad de que el razonamiento animal, en particular la negacion, involucre necesariamente la representacion de Ausencia, como sugiere Jose Luis Bermudez, pues esta operaria como una negacion logica (no disponible para criaturas no linguisticas). Experimentos de creencias falsas, fingimiento y comunicacion muestran que animales no humanos (al menos ciertos primates) tienen dificultades para representar entidades o propiedades ausentes. Ofrezco una explicacion alternativa recurriendo a los juicios sub-simbolicos de semejanza propuestos por Vigo & Allen e introduzco la nocion de expectativa: la negacion se da a traves de la incompatibilidad entre una representacion esperada y la actual. Finalmente, sostengo que el paradigma de expectativas puede ser extrapolado a otros experimentos en psicologia cognitiva (tanto con ninos prelinguisticos como con animales) para disenar experimentos �\justos. que examinen otras mentes considerando sus habilidades reales