Susanna Schellenberg Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science Rutgers University. Schellenberg's work focuses on a range of topics in philosophy of mind, epistemology, AI, and neuroscience, including perception, mental representation, consciousness, evidence, knowledge, capacities, imagination, perspectives, and self-representation.
Schellenberg's current research is focused on issues at the intersection of AI, neuroscience, and philosophy funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Mellon New Directions Fellowship, and a NEH Grant. She is working on a series of papers on the neural basis of perception and a book on subjective perspectives.
We always have a perspective on our environment in the trivial sense that we occupy a position in the spacetime manifold and in the more substantial sense of having a set of cognitive, emotional, perceptual, and behavioral tools with which we navigate the world. Our perspective is the lens through which we process, organize, interpret, and respond to information from our environment, thereby navigating situations and interacting with others.Orthodoxy has it that an individual’s perspective changes only slowly over time. This orthodoxy goes back to Wright (1973) who argued that a perspective is a fixed point in intellectual space. It lives on today.I will challenge this gradualist orthodoxy. Natural and artificial systems have limited processing resources. Consequently, they activate, represent, and select only information pertinent to the situation or task at hand, filtering out information they can safely ignore. Consider Sam. She is both an academic and a runner. When she navigates her environment as an academic, her perspective is different than when she does so as a runner. Her preferences in her two modes diverge, as does what evidence she pays attention to, what questions she asks, and which of her many beliefs are most relevant to her. As I argue, her perspective changes because of a shift in which of her many self-concepts is activated. More generally, I argue that an individual’s perspective is anchored, and that this perspectival anchor can shift from moment to moment as she navigates her environment. Any such change in anchor will yield a shift in perspective. If this is right, then—contra the gradualist orthodoxy—a perspective is more than a mere fixed point in intellectual space that evolves only slowly over time. To set the stage, I will first specify two desiderata for an account of perspectives. I will then develop a view of perspectives and their anchors that satisfy these two desiderata.
