2013, No. 1 (4), On Representation

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Michał Rydlewski
Let Us Not Lose the Cultural Dimension of Human Perception. Visual Perception in Social Constructivism Against the Background of Post-Constructivism and Conceptualism

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Keywords: human perception, visual perception, social constructivism.

Abstract:
The article is a part of my PhD thesis entitled “To see is to know. The cultural dimension of human perception” written at the Humanities Department of Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. It presents remarks on the differences between social constructivism, conceptualism and postconstructivism in understanding and describing visual perception. The main idea is to show the cultural dimension of visual perception, so social constructivism is a way of thinking I accept. I create my own, very Polish, model of social constructivism that is complex with the theory of thought styles and thought collectives by Ludwik Fleck and the theory of culture of the Poznań school. of, mainly thesis of Anna Pałubicka and Andrzej P. Kowalski. I accept most conceptualists’ remarks on perception formulated for example by J. McDowell in his “World and Mind”. The problem is that conceptualism believes our knowledge is ex deffinicione conceptional. It is false from the perspective of the anthropology of history (A.P. Kowalski) and the philosophy of culture (E. Cassirer) which focused on archaic cultures. On the other hand, I do not accept the postconstructivism (B. Olsen, T. Ingold) model of perception. My article also remarks on the dispute between many models of constructivism. I believe we should not remove “social” from constructivism.

About Author:
RYDLEWSKI MICHAŁ – PhD, anthropologist and philosopher, graduate of University of Warsaw and Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń