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    Phenomenal tense : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Fine Art at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2018) Carleton, Chora Luz
    This exegesis attends to the conceptual and practical enquiries adjoining the perceptual and phenomenological concerns of colour, space, moment, language and light. By dwelling in the interface of experience as a spatial, temporal, sensory experience, my creative practice aims to create a dialogue between the intuitive knowing of sensation and the constructions of these qualities as descriptions within the language of watercolour painting and the language of the written word. In this exchange of ideas, my practical methodology moves between using material in two dimensions to render a description, rendering the space as a moment of its own description, and pulling forth the intangible description of language into describing itself within space. Enacting a moment held in reflection by a simple shift in tense. The possibilities of colour, materiality, language, duration, dimension and tense unveil through affordances how these elements might come forth to a viewer to attending to a live exchange of phenomenal occurrences.
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    Perceptual experiences, concepts and the reasons behind our beliefs : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Philosophy at Massey University
    (Massey University, 2007) Tappenden, Kate E
    How does perception tell us about the world around us? Do our perceptual experiences represent the world to us? If so, how are they representational? Moreover, how do our perceptual experiences provide the basis for our empirical beliefs? 1 The way in which one characterises perceptual experience shapes one's subsequent account of how perceptual experiences cause empirical beliefs. Therefore the answer to the question 'what is a perceptual experience?' will largely affect the response to 'how can perceptual experiences cause beliefs?' (Why this is the case will be shown in the following discussion.) These questions are among those that are central to the philosophy of perception. Let us look at the first one: How does perception tell us about our environment? Many philosophers agree that perception tells us about the way the world is by being representational of the world. This theory of perception is one of many amongst the philosophy of mind that fall under the umbrella of Intentionalism, or representationalism.--From Introduction
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    The problem of misrepresentation meets connectionist representations : a thesis submitted for the degree of Master of Philosophy
    (Massey University, 1995) Cash, Mason
    Theories of semantics try to explain the relationship between a mental representation and the thing it represents; to explain, for instance, how my coffee representation represents coffee. (Here and in the rest of this thesis, I use the convention of writing the label for a representation in bold type.) In many traditional theories of semantics, the relationship between my coffee representation and coffee is usually explained by recourse to causal relations between coffee and this representation. But attempts at explanations along these lines have many problems, among them the problem that it is difficult to find a plausible way of accounting for the fact that representations are able to misrepresent-or have false content. Sometimes I can think "that's coffee" when what's actually in the cup being handed to me is tea. Getting this fact to sit happily with accounts of the relation between my coffee representation and coffee hasn't been an easy task. Traditional approaches to this problem haven't had a lot of success so far in explaining how a representation can misrepresent. In this thesis I aim to avoid the problems with these traditional approaches, and find a causally-based, biologically realistic way to explain semantic relations between mental representations and objects in the world, which is also capable of explaining misrepresentation. The best place to start such an endeavour is to examine what the problem of representation and misrepresentation is, and the general tactics used in traditional attempts to solve this problem. This will illustrate why misrepresentation appears to be so intractable. Through such an examination we can get a close look at the traditional approaches, and their assumptions about what representations are, what sorts of things they represent, and how they can represent what they represent. We can also get a good view of the unquestioned assumptions these traditional theories are based on. This will give us a good place to start. I'm going to argue that if we want to achieve our aim of a biologically realistic theory of semantics which shows how representations can misrepresent, we'll need an approach to the problem which does not take these assumptions as foundations. In this thesis I aim to construct an account which isn't based on these assumptions.[FROM INTRODUCTION]