ABSTRACT
Theories of perception in the seventeenth century reflected both the epistemology and ontology of early science. The Scientific Revolution was an intellectual and social change in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Hypothesis testing as practiced by G. Galileo, J. Kepler, and Isaac Newton represents an intellectual reconciliation of empiricist and rationalist epistemologies and provided a social forum for ideas to be compared and evaluated. Kepler’s retinal optics became the accepted treatment of light in later centuries and was incorporated into Bishop Berkeley’s psychology of vision. James J. Gibson’s direct realist theory clashed with the psychology-epistemology beginning with 17th century philosophy and extending into later psychological theories of perceptual knowledge, for example Berkeleian views. What Rene Descartes provided for the history of perception was a dualistic psychophysiology consistent with Kepler’s optics. Newtonian science, strictly speaking, involved both an ontological and epistemological dualism, but the effect of his success within physics gave rise to a movement toward a universal monistic materialism.
