PSYC 212 Lecture 1: Why study perception?

• School: McGill University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 212
• Professor: Mathieu Roy

Document Summary

Rationalism: we can"t trust our senses at all, what matters is the realm of "ideal forms" that we can only know using our reason. Nativism/innatism: we are born already knowing the world. Anamnesis: greek for recollection our immortal souls are made of left-overs of a greater "cosmos-soul" that had universal knowledge. We lost this knowledge when our souls were incarnated in our imperfect bodies. We must recover this knowledge by trying to "remember" what we "forgot" Knowledge is the addition or subtraction of ideas. Knowledge takes the form of a judgement, or proposition. Cause-and-effect argument that the external reality is objective: you get to reality through causation, i. e. the external world is causing my ideas. But our immediate awareness is only of our ideas. Mind --> ideas