Purely physical explananda : Bistability in perception
Book chapter
Baron, Sam. (2020). Purely physical explananda : Bistability in perception. In In Falguera, José L. and Martinez Vidal, Concha (Ed.). Abstract objects : For and against pp. 17-34 Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38242-1_2
Authors | Baron, Sam |
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Editors | Falguera, José L. and Martinez Vidal, Concha |
Abstract | Call an explanation of an empirical fact that appeals indispensably to mathematical facts: an extra-mathematical explanation. There has been a recent rush of attempts to establish the existence of such explanations. One of the challenges in doing so, however, is to find a case of explanation in which the explanandum is genuinely free of mathematics. In this chapter I first outline this challenge before drawing attention to an important class of explanations that seem to meet the challenge head on. The explanations in question are explanations that appeal to bistability: a situation in which the differential equations modelling a system have two roots, and thus the physical system has two stable states, but is unstable between them. I focus, in particular, on the case of perceptual bistability in which an ambiguous image of a duck-rabbit seems to ‘switch’ back and forth between the two disambiguations (duck and rabbit). |
Page range | 17-34 |
Year | 2020 |
Book title | Abstract objects : For and against |
Publisher | Springer |
Place of publication | Cham |
ISBN | 9783030382414 |
9783030382421 | |
3030382427 | |
Digital Object Identifier (DOI) | https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38242-1_2 |
Publisher's version | License All rights reserved File Access Level Controlled |
Output status | Published |
Publication dates | |
09 May 2020 | |
Publication process dates | |
Deposited | 06 Oct 2021 |
https://acuresearchbank.acu.edu.au/item/8wwwq/purely-physical-explananda-bistability-in-perception
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