Evolving Perceptual Categories

This paper uses sim-max games to model perceptual categorization with the goal of answering the following question: to what degree should we expect the perceptual categories of biological actors to track properties of the world around them? I will argue that an analysis of these games suggests that the relationship between real-world structure and evolved perceptual categories is mediated by successful action in the sense that organisms evolve to categorize together states of nature for which similar actions lead to similar results. This conclusion indicates that both strongly realist and strongly anti-realist views about perceptual categories are too simple. Copyright Philosophy of Science 2014 Preprint (not copyedited or formatted) Please use DOI when citing or quoting Evolving Perceptual Categories Cailin O’Connor Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science University of California, Irvine, CA 92697 [email protected]