This morning, I remembered some case studies of people who were
blind from early childhood and later recovered their sight.
Those studies cast doubt on Kant's claim that people have a
complete innate theory of space and time. The brain may have
innate structure that facilitates learning about space and time,
but a lot of experience is necessary to fill in the details.
For example, Sydney Bradford lost his sight at age 10 months,
went to a school for the blind, and had a successful career
as a machinist. He lived independently, could make his way
through traffic, and took public transportation to work.
Then at age 52, he had an operation that restored his sight.
Instead of being a confident, independent blind man, he became
a fearful, depressed man, who was terrified of crossing a street
in traffic, even with a friend holding his arm.
For a Wikipedia article about Sydney B. and others, see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovery_from_blindness
For a 44-page article with much more detail about SB, see
http://www.richardgregory.org/papers/recovery_blind/recovery-from-early-blindness.pdf
By the way, that site has links to other articles by Richard G.
For example, see the attached "impossible" figure. But it's
possible to construct an actual 3D object that looks like that.
See the article
http://www.richardgregory.org/papers/brainmodels/illusions-and-brain-models_all.htm
Peirce wrote a lot about illusions, and he would have loved to see
that object. It has implications about form, index, and percepts.
John
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