Huckabay Fellowships--Ali Hasan

Applicant: Ali M. Hasan
Mentors: Dr. Andrea Woody (Philosophy, UW); Dr. John Palmer and Dr. Scott Murray (Psychology, UW)

Philosophy and psychology have made significant advances in the study of perception and its relation to knowledge in the last few decades, making it possible for a fascinating and intellectually rich conversation to take place between the two fields. If awarded, the Huckabay Fellowship will be used to develop and teach a 300-level course on the main problems regarding (primarily visual) perception, on philosophical attempts to solve them, and on the relevance of work in psychology to these problems. The project aims to encourage the student to take part in an interdisciplinary conversation about perception, while also contributing to a richer learning experience within the student’s own primary discipline, after completion of the course.

(a) A brief introduction to the physiology of perception, i.e., to the eye and to parts of the nervous system relevant to perception.

(b) An examination of the main “metaphysical problems of perception,” i.e., problems and puzzles regarding the nature of perception and its components, and recent attempts to address them.

(c) An examination of the main “epistemological problems of perception,” i.e., problems regarding the relation between perception and knowledge, and recent attempts to address them. More specifically, we shall examine how perception gives rise to new knowledge, as well as how it may depend upon background knowledge already acquired.

(d) Recent psychological research, primarily from Gestalt psychology and behavioral psychology, relevant to the nature of perception and its relation to knowledge.

Helping students get more out of their philosophy classes. There is no undergraduate philosophy course offered at UW devoted primarily to perception. Many regularly-taught philosophy courses devote some time to the topic, though these courses usually focus on a particular historical period and/or some particular aspect or issue regarding perception.[1] The proposed course will help philosophy students integrate what they have already learned from past courses, and prepare them for the integration of what they may yet discover on the topic. In this way, the students learn more about the role and place of perception in the tradition of analytic philosophy.

Making connections between philosophy and psychology. Many philosophy students tend to downplay the significance, and even question the methods, of empirical psychology. On the other hand, many students with backgrounds in science feel that philosophical discussions are very difficult to understand, and even too abstract and speculative to be taken seriously. The proposed course will force students to confront their own reactions to these other disciplines in a more reflective and informed way. This will help students appreciate the benefits that philosophers and psychologists each stand to gain from being acquainted with some of the relevant advances in the other discipline.

Helping students learn about perception. The serious student will develop a deeper understanding of perception; an understanding informed by multiple perspectives, or points of view, on the topic. (An explanation of what is meant here by “perspectives” is given below.)

There are at least three fundamental “perspectives” on perception. These perspectives may agree in certain ways; but they also appear to be in tension with each other in certain ways. Are these apparent tensions genuine ones? And if so, how are these tensions to be resolved, given that each of the perspectives seems to get something right, and be legitimate, in its own way? A brief discussion of these perspectives may help convey the force and significance of these questions.

From the “subjective”, first-person perspective of ordinary contexts in our everyday lives, what we might call the perspective of common sense or common opinion, we simply take for granted that we perceive a world of physical objects, and that this perception involves some kind of direct awareness of the objects themselves. The world seems simply “open” to us, something we are directly aware of, as opposed to merely dreamed, imagined, or remembered.

However, as judged from the more reflective and critical perspectives essential to embarking on any philosophical or psychological study of perception, perception turns out in fact to be very complex. Even from within the first-person perspective, you can easily question common sense, and imagine, even though it does not normally seem this way to you, that you are the victim of an illusion, or that you are in a vivid dream. As philosophers have long argued and psychologists have more recently been able to make very vivid by presenting us with surprising visual illusions, we can and often do perceive our surroundings incorrectly. From this critical, first-person perspective, it thus seems that what we perceive directly are models or representations of objects, our own (mind or brain’s) “construction.” We perceive the world itself indirectly, through these representations.

The third-person perspective characterizes things always in the third person, “from the outside” (as the physical sciences generally strive to do). From this perspective, we have come to discover that perception involves complex causal relations between the perceiver’s behavior, her sense organs, and her environment, and even more complex cognitive processes in the brain. Again, with all that goes on between the objects and us that lead to our recognition of them, perception of the world seems anything but simple and direct. There’s much more to seeing than meets the eye!

The (critical) first-person perspective and the third-person perspective also seem to be in tension with each other. A simple example may help make this clear: From the first-person perspective, the experience of color has its own peculiar character; there is a distinct way it is like to experience red things. Moreover, it doesn’t seem like knowledge of what such experiences are like could be acquired by a blind or colorblind person. In third-person terms, color is determined by the wave-length of light rays emitted by objects, perhaps together with detailed descriptions of what goes on in the eye and brain. But such descriptions don’t seem to capture how it feels to experience red things.

Two large challenges in the implementation of this project are challenges of motivation and integration: How can we motivate students to engage seriously with the abstract arguments and technical details of the perception debate? And how can we integrate the philosophical and psychological elements most effectively? My mentors and I will work together on these challenges.

Dr. Murray, Dr. Palmer and I will work on gathering suitable materials from the psychological literature, and designing the course in this and other respects so that it complements the psychology courses covering perception. The materials will include a selection of in-class exercises and activities, in which the students are themselves subjects of visual illusions and other simple experimental demos. This will help capture the students’ interest and attention, and provide some concrete examples as a point of departure for a more general discussion.

Dr. Woody and I will work on various aspects of course design, including: (a) selecting literature suitable for an introduction to the philosophical problems of perception; (b) identifying areas of contact between philosophical problems and psychological results; (c) discussing how to structure assignments and present psychological results so as to make the connection with the relevant philosophical issues perspicuous.

The course will be assessed on the basis of the following: (a) A record of the exercises and demos involving the subjection of students to simple psychological experiments and visual illusions, and a record of the results and student reactions. (This will help in evaluating how effective these activities are). (b) Short in-class questions designed to test basic student comprehension of the materials presented. (c) Essay assignments designed to test for deeper comprehension and critical thinking. (d) Three student questionnaires administered at different points during the quarter. (e) Teaching observations by Dr. Woody and one other faculty or fellow graduate student.

My fascination with perception began at an early stage during my undergraduate studies, when I was struck by the fact that although we normally do not question the reliability of our perceptions, we are hard-put to explain how perception works, and what makes it a reliable source of information about the physical world. I quickly became convinced that there were important lessons to learn from a critical examination of perception, about the objectivity of observation and experimentation in the sciences, as well as the trustworthiness of our everyday judgments.

I have also benefited from a number of graduate-level courses and seminars in the history of philosophy, the philosophy of science, and epistemology (the study of knowledge). Material covered in epistemology and philosophy of science served to highlight the complexity of the process of observation and experimentation in scientific practice, and provide some concrete instances in which questions of objectivity and bias arise in scientific and practical contexts. Courses on the history of philosophy helped me to situate contemporary debates on perception within the larger context of the great artistic, intellectual, and scientific movements of the last few centuries.

As a teaching assistant at the philosophy department, I have had the opportunity to assist in teaching a wide variety of philosophy courses since fall of 2001, including a number of courses covering material on perception, such as phil100 (introduction to philosophy), phil160 (introduction to philosophy of science), and phil322 (history of modern philosophy. I have taught my own introductory philosophy courses this past summer and fall, with substantial sections devoted to competing accounts of how knowledge of the physical world is gained through visual perception.

I have also learnt a great deal about teaching and interacting with undergraduates in other contexts. Working in collaboration with a fellow graduate student, I coached an undergraduate debate team to a 1^st-place victory in a national debate competition known as the Ethics Bowl. Coaching on ethics requires providing constructive criticism to the students, while leaving it up to the students to decide exactly where to stand and how to defend their position at the end of the day. Providing such constructive criticism can be tricky business in teaching philosophy, even outside the domain of ethics, for it is often tempting to simply tell the students what you want them to say, or force your views onto them, which is against the very spirit of philosophy. I believe that it is this kind of attention to and interest in the subtleties of undergraduate education that helped earn me a nomination for excellence in teaching at UW (2003-4), a departmental teaching award (2004-5), and the Lead TA position in the department (2005-6). As Lead TA, I had the opportunity to organize materials for, and lead discussion in, two graduate seminar courses focused on some of the main challenges in teaching philosophy effectively (fall 2005; winter 2006).

My own dissertation work revolves around a number of issues regarding the relation between perception and knowledge. My current research is focused on two issues: (a) whether there is a component of perception that can be isolated as sensation or sensory experience, as distinct from an interpretation of that sensory experience; (b) whether perceptions of objects can be reconstructed as three-dimensional models or interpretations of two-dimensional images, and if so, what rules we implicitly follow in constructing these interpretations. These issues lie at the cross-section of philosophical and psychological investigations of perception.

The tasks I shall perform in the proposed project include the following: (a) selecting and organizing (with the help of my mentors) reading and instructional materials suitable for the course; (b) creating assignments and activities designed to motivate student participation and aid in comprehension; (c) finding points and areas of contact between philosophy and psychology, and ways of making these connections and their significance explicit to the students; and of course (d) teaching the course itself.

[1] History of Modern Philosophy (17^th to 19^th century), History of Recent Philosophy (20^th century), and a number of courses on the Philosophy of Science, Epistemology (Theory of Knowledge), and Philosophy of Mind.

Project Background and Overview