The Tokyo Forum for Analytic Philosophy (TFAP) is a forum for research in analytic philosophy broadly conceived---including research in the empirical/formal sciences that is of philosophical interest. We are inviting speakers from Japan and abroad. Meetings are held in English. Anybody who is interested is welcome.

Title: Person Perception and Predictive Processing
Speaker: Ryoji Sato (The University of Tokyo)
URL: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ryoji_Sato

Abstract: We encounter many people in daily life—family, friends, colleagues, shop staff, random pedestrians, etc. When it comes to familiar people, it seems that we can directly perceive their identity. When you see your close friend at a bar, your recognition of him or her is instant and has a perceptual feel (e.g., “I saw Joe”). Most of the time, you don’t need to consciously infer who the person is based on their physical properties; you just know. This aspect is more dramatically highlighted by the existence of disorders of person identification: misidentification syndromes. For example, patients with Capgras delusion, a version of misidentification, typically insist that a close friend or family member has been replaced by an imposter, despite that person not having changed in appearance. Capgras patients admit the similarity of the alleged imposter, yet they insist that the person before them is a different person from the familiar person. The duual pathway account of person recognition has been popular in the field, but the informational aspect of emotional pathway is rather unexplored. When it is working properly, what kind of information is obtained through the pathway, in other words, what information is lost when the emotional pathway is disrupted? I first discuss William Hirstein’s mindreading account, which argues misidentification syndrome is due to disruption in the mechanism of assigning affective mental representations to other persons. As a response to Hirstein’s view, Elisabeth Pacherie proposed and briefly discussed a view according to which disruption in temporal aspects of person perception plays a significant role in misidentification syndrome. This paper attempts to develop her view in further details and proposes a hierarchical model of a person that can integrate perspective of Hirstein’s and Pacherie’s based on predictive processing framework. I will also argue for perceptual nature of person identification. Identification of a person is thought to be a sophisticated cognitive act-- it seems to require a subject to have the concept of the particular person and integrate relevant information about his/her appearance and how he or she behaves etc. under the concept. Despite its sophistication, person identification is, at least in some familiar cases, phenomenologically direct. This paper supports perceptual account of person identification from a functional point of view.

Hosted by the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, the University of Tokyo

For details, please see http://tf-ap.com/program/