Born in 1932, Fred Dretske received his PhD from the University of Minnesota. He is emeritus professor of philosophy at Stanford University and professor of philosophy at Duke University. Since the early 1970s Dretske's work has been at the center of a number of key disputes in epistemology and the philosophies of perception, mind, and consciousness. Despite their range, two basic motivations unify Dretske's writings: the need to understand the mind in relation to its environment and a steadfast naturalistic outlook on the mind and its operations.

In Seeing and Knowing (1969), Dretske emphasized a form of perception that he labeled "nonepistemic seeing." This is an direct relation between perceiver and object not involving any particular conceptualization of the perceived object nor requiring any particular beliefs about it. Dretske argued that the concept of nonepistemic seeing is fundamental to understanding perception and the place of the...